well some small business owners in Manhattan are voicing their concerns about the financial toll that congestion pricing will take. They say that by forcing shoppers to pay more to drive in, is essentially going to shutter businesses that are already struggling. This is such a bad news for us. So it turns out the city's new planed attacks everyone on the road won't just eliminate vehicle traffic. New information's come out suggesting it's going to also eliminate all of the foot traffic many small businesses rely on to survive, closing some of them down permanently. A day of dueling demonstrations, what do we want after bu when do we want it now. We have been here almost 200 years but this congest pricing is going to kill us. The businesses depend on the tourist but with congestion pricing set to go into effect, things could get worse for these business owners. Everything will cost more, how dumb is that. Trucks that need to make multiple deliveries per day will be charged for each trip, how much money do you think you're going to be losing.

about like $10,000. Not I'm not. I should be retired by now. We're losing so much. I live here. I work here. I cry every day when I see the deterioration of these neighborhoods. It will deliver faster buses, cleaner air. The vast majority, vast, vast majority of people can take mass transit. An estimated $2 billion is essential to maintaining and expanding a sprawling mass transit system. If this is going to be the first in the country, we need to get it right. And this is not right. As for the small business owners, well, they say they are just trying to [Music] survive. So the powers that be want us to believe New York's new taxes will be good for us. But what nobody's talking about is that although it's definitely going to reduce the number of cars on the road, this city is totally unprepared for what happens next because our public transit is so terrible and crime-ridden. People are afraid to use it. It's also impossible to use to deliver things like

groceries to a grocery store, or clothing to a clothing store, which means those businesses are going to have to pay more for their inventory. And now we know that not only will it eliminate the cars on the road, it's going to eliminate the people on the street, which means less customers for all of these stores paying obnoxious New York City rents. And even though the city says they're going to improve the subway, the fact is the day congestion pricing starts, the subway will have National Guard troops in it because it's still experiencing six felonies a day. And if an unusable Subway wasn't bad enough, we already know that congestion pricing is going to do the opposite of what it claims to do here in other Burrows, creating more problems than it may solve. And once you realize that, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the endgame here is to roll congestion pricing out everywhere because it is both the Cure of and solution to all of New York City's

traffic problems, and the real reason small businesses are worried about this new tax is because although the city's got the perfect plan in place to make itself Rich, it's going to come at their expense, and there's no plan in place to keep them from shutting down. So here we are in Chinatown in the congestion Zone, and what we've been told about congestion pricing is it's supposed to be great for the Zone itself, but we're learning that's not the case because there are little neighborhoods like this all over Manhattan that have dynamics that don't make them compatible with a tax on driving. Chinatown is known for its history, food, unique retail, fish markets, and more. The businesses depend on the tourist, but with congestion pricing set to go into effect, things could get worse for these business owners. $15 for the people, so Chinatown has a unique problem when it comes to congestion pricing, and it's not the only neighborhood in this position, but the first thing is that it's very isolated down here. Yes, there's a lot of people.

look at this map. You've got subway service on the outskirts of the neighborhood, but as you travel into it, there are no public transportation options, which means that many of the folks that get here do so in a manner that does not require public transportation. And a lot of those people, those are customers of these local local businesses, and if they have to pay more to come here, the businesses like possibly this florist, they're afraid that they might decide not to. And if that happens, a lot of these businesses are not going to be able to afford to stay open. They're going to have to shut down. And this is a 200-year-old neighborhood, and since 2020, a lot of the businesses down here have been struggling. And now they're worried that there might be another tough time on the near horizon because of this driving tax. The past few years have been hard, and just as he's almost operating at 100%, he will be losing money again, not only because there will be less customers.

coming in but he will have to pay more for the cost of goods and services. So apparently having a business down here in the congestion Zone means that business is going to get taxed three different ways. And the first and most obvious problem is that if you're a business owner, you're going to need a car to get down here, especially if it's not near the subway. Plus, many small business owners will use their personal vehicle to help get things to the business itself, which is something they're just going to have to pay extra to do now that it costs more to drive around. And this doesn't just affect little businesses like this Bodega right here. Look, I've got a business. It doesn't sell anything physically, but it has a little office. There are things that need to go inside of it, and you can't move any of that stuff around printers, modems, computers, key racks without some sort of car vehicle. It's not possible. And what if your business doesn't just sell things on the street if there's any

online aspect to the business. You're going to have to ship stuff out, which means you're going to need packing materials, boxes, tape guns, and where do you think a tiny little souvenir stand is going to store all the stuff they sell? Most of that stuff is in a warehouse and it gets here on a truck like this one right here, which has its door open. Whatever this stuff is, it ain't riding the subway, that's for sure. In fact, nothing this company uses is going to fit on a place that is so crowded you can't even stand and hold a coffee without being worried about spilling it, which means the second way businesses get taxed is when their delivery trucks show up and drop things off. Trucks like this pay a higher congestion fee as well, and if you have five deliveries a week, you're looking at like $120 extra every single week, $6,200 in extra fees a year. And then the third and most obvious tax on top of these other two is that now none of the customers have bothered to show up because they don't want to pay.

the fees either or. If they do decide to pay the fees, they come way less frequently. You've got to go out of your way to get down here if you're not from here and test traffic. That's what keeps this type of neighborhood going, and that brings up an interesting question: how much traffic do these businesses get from random walk-ins, and how much traffic do they get from locally available sources like neighborhoods or apartments that are nearby? How much money do you think you can be losing? I would think about you about like $10,000 a month. Pretty much, right? So the owner of that business thinks he's going to lose $10,000 a month. That's ridiculous. There are plenty of businesses down here that cannot afford to lose $120,000 a year. If that happens, the owners might just decide to shut down completely. That might be their salary. They'll go broke. But luckily, residents of this neighborhood have filed a lawsuit to try and get the congestion pricing taxes to be reversed. Of course, this is lawsuit 7 or 8 at this point.

it's doubtful how much effect these are going to have, but while a lot of the other lawsuits are focused on the environmental impacts of this, the one for Chinatown and these local businesses specifically says the new fees are going to devastate this 200-year-old historic community in ways that the city never anticipated, which should be pretty obvious when these local grocery stores shut down. Where else are you going to go buy eggplant on the sidewalk? You can't, and I don't see another grocery store around here, which means residents down here are going to have to travel further for just about everything, and that's not cheap. And neither are the apartments people are living in, which means some people may have to leave the city once this kicks in. Everything here is going to cost more to operate, it's going to cost more to shop at all, while not saving us from all of the pollution congestion pricing is supposed to get rid of. That's why there are other lawsuits, because it's just going to take the pollution that was here and push it.

to other parts of the city, redistributing all of its own problems. The MTA, telling Fox 5, We are responding to their prot trffic lawsuit in court, where a 4,000-page environmental assessment will make the case that congestion relief delivers less traffic, safer streets, cleaner less traffic. Somebody should tell the people at the MTA that that's the problem - there's not enough traffic right now, and once there's even less, there's going to be more spray paint and less open stores. Now, yes, the MTA is ready to defend themselves with their 4,000-page Manifesto, but there are studies that contradict it by saying pollution will actually go up after congestion pricing kicks in elsewhere. And this article says that millions of dollars of profit that comes from congestion pricing have already been promised for asthma treatment programs in the Bronx, and that's why local businesses are so upset because this program isn't going to achieve its own stated goals. And again, there's no solution on the table for

these little businesses. They can't use the subway. It's not safe. It's not even accessible. There's barely any elevators. None of their inventory can fit on it. And customers are going to be afraid to use it to some extent. And what that means is there will not be one positive outcome from congestion pricing when it starts. And that's why local outrage is happening and [Music] growing. Now, although these new fees are really going to be hard on Chinatown specifically, it's not the only neighborhood that is at risk of having a lot of problems in just a couple of weeks. And that's why there are seven, is that seven or eight, there I think there's eight lawsuits right now, and citizens are throwing everything they can at the legal system to see if it sticks to try and reverse this. But this robust Coalition, which includes supporters from Little Italy, Upper Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island, hopes its class action lawsuit can put enough pressure on the MTA to produce a new environmental impact statement. We have

been here almost so part of the reason people are upset is because the mta's own 4,000-page Manifesto. It doesn't actually address the environmental concerns that exist from the standpoint of how congestion pricing will negatively affect the businesses in the environment, which is why people are so outraged. Congestion pricing has been on the table here for decades, and it finally got pushed through. The only way it happened was by the city coming up with a bunch of information to make it okay and to give itself the right to do something that everybody already knew was a bad idea. But the state of New Jersey is also engaged in a federal lawsuit against the state of New York for this, claiming that it is completely unconstitutional. I didn't know this, but apparently it is illegal for a state to impose a law that burdens Interstate Commerce in any way. And with so many businesses relying on deliveries that come from out of state, it should be pretty obvious that this is going to screw things up all over the place, not just in

chinatown not just in New York City but also in New Jersey. Yeah, congestion pricing June 1st. Crazy, you know, they say it's going to be really bad for local businesses. Yes, I driving car, my husband, me. Oh yeah, so you is that for your business to get down here? Yeah, I don't know what government thinking about it but regardless, all of these congestion pricing lawsuits have one thing in common, which is that they essentially accuse the MTA of trying to Ram this thing through before we can all figure out how it's going to work. And go figure, now that people know how it's going to work, they're suing. But the other reason people are upset is because this little highly hypocritical of the city and the way they're handling the congestion pricing roll out goes against the way they do anything else. We have been here almost 200 years but this congestion pricing is going to kill us. I live here, I work here, I cry every day when I see the deterioration of these.

neighborhoods. If they're forced to do an environmental impact statement, they have to mitigate, mitigate the damage they're doing. Now, if you're a private company in New York City, you can't do anything without riling up the historic preservation department. Their goal is to stop you from making money if it does even the smallest thing to the environment. But here we have congestion price, which is going to do a whole lot to the environment and all the businesses and all the people that live here. We keep hearing about how more needs to be done to protect New York City, to help it maintain its character, to make sure it doesn't disappear. Yet, that is exactly what many people think is about to happen in just a couple of weeks. And to make matters worse, it's all being done in the name of profit, in the name of greed. After all, do we really think the 20 billion hideous Subway we have today that looks like an absolute trained graveyard is going to improve when it's already so expensive to maintain in its

current condition no literally nothing about the way New York City operates. What our public transit is like none of that is going to change in any meaningful way and all of that non-change is going to happen at the expense of people who are already in a tough situation. It's very sad, but the hope now is that one of these lawsuits could trigger an environmental study from the MTA that goes further in depth about what's actually going to happen, and it would also require the MDA to undo the harms its plan causes financially, which would have a drastic impact on their decision to move forward with this plan. If this is going to be the first in the country, we need to get it right, and this is not right. We cannot keep going back to the drawing board once it's implemented the Chinatown ah so here we have the quiet part being said out loud and just like in the movie Terminator. Once you turn Skynet on, you can't turn it off. The city won't allow that to happen; they'll be making too

much money, which they will then use to hire lawyers and fight against further opposition to it. But the critics of congestion pricing aren't just complaining for no reason, and people are now saying that once congestion pricing starts, it could create a snowball of destruction for neighborhoods like this that is irreversible. And here's how that would work: Let's say you have a business like this that shuts down. Well, if it ended up shutting down because it lost all of its customers and it couldn't run itself and pay its own rent, how is another business going to take a chance on that empty space and succeed where this one failed? Think about it. If these are the businesses that are here now, what is going to come along and replace them if they were to disappear? Certainly not the same exact thing because that didn't work out. And if no one will open up the storefront that is closed because of these new fees, now the landlord has an unusable asset that can't generate income. And in order to get that income

back, he's going to have to raise fees on his other units that are active, possibly even the apartments upstairs where people are paying rent. Now, some of you were going to say, Oh, that's because landlords are greedy. But here's the thing: if they're not greedy, their property taxes still don't change, their utilities still don't change, they still have to pay the city's new water tax in order to run their building. All the apartments upstairs get free heat and hot water, so there are stuck costs, fixed costs that they have that aren't disappearing even after the tenants vanish for good. And one thing's for sure, if congestion pricing were sold as a job-killing rent increase, it absolutely never would have gotten as far as it has, with it about to be active in just a few weeks. And that's why, instead of selling it as something that's going to close businesses and destroy historic parts of town like this, we were instead told that it was going to save the environment and save the subway, neither of which it's

going to do, but fascinatingly, there are some businesses that we're expected to benefit in some way from having less cars on the road. But as it turns out, we're learning that even those businesses have a bone to pick with this plan, and go figure, it just might end up shutting them down. [Music] Too. Now, as an outside observer, I always figured that the one group of people who would benefit from having less cars on the road would be people like this who use their car to make a living in New York City. But as it turns out, that is not true. In fact, it's the opposite. What is your reaction to this plan now, knowing that the official start date is June 30th? It cannot come at a worst time for yellow cab drivers. You know, the summer is already really slow. Some months in August in Manhattan feels like a ghost town. The gripe here seems to be that congestion pricing is going to start this summer, and apparently that is the slow time for vehicles that are used in ride-sharing. These companies or these

individuals that do this, they're losing money during that time of year, and then this fee is going to kick in, and they think that is going to decrease the number of trips they make. Now I was always under the impression that yes, these companies, they're going to pay this extra fee, but isn't it way more convenient to take an Uber if you check the time and the time to destination is much, much less because there's no traffic. Isn't that going to help these companies? Apparently, it's not going to, and this is making people wonder who's actually in favor of this, who thinks it's going to be a good idea because anyone earning a living in this city seems to be downright opposed to it. The likely answer to that is you've got to be somebody who is able to fully rely on the public transportation that we have today. If the subway we have today is not a problem for you, you should be in favor of congestion pricing because even if it only improves a little bit, your life will get a little bit better.

but check this out. The president of the MTA, the guy who helped get congestion pricing all set up, he's actually expected to leave the MTA after just 2 years on the job. Now he's not saying that he's specifically leaving over congestion pricing, but it's just very interesting that one of the people most pivotal to congestion pricing won't be here to see how things actually turn out. It's also worth mentioning that I didn't think congestion pricing was a bad idea until I considered how this was going to affect all of the things I need to pay for. For example, businesses shutting down means I will have less businesses at which to shop at, and it means the businesses that survive are going to do so by jacking up their prices. Not to mention, I didn't realize how a closed storefront might cause my landlord to jack up my rent. And at first when I heard there was so much opposition to congestion pricing, I thought these were just people from out of town who had a

car and didn't want to take the train. And I think that most New Yorkers who are oblivious to the actual ramifications of this end up supporting it by accident. Those are going to be people who wake up one day in a city where everything is just more expensive than it was the day before, and they have no idea why. Is the city's plan to tax every car on the road with no discernible benefits whatsoever a good one? If you're in favor of congestion pricing, how long do you think it's going to take for them to fix the Western world's worst subway system, which has never been fixed? And how do you think the city's small business owners, who are already struggling with impossible unsustainable costs, are going to now function in an environment where everything they have to do costs more money, not just for them but also for their customers? Let me know. I appreciate you watching. I will see you in the next video.

NYC is Forcing Companies To Close… On Purpose

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