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For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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Yes, you are correct, I did mean to imply the use of something provided by the government in the definition of a user fee charged by the government. That's what makes the tax on the sale of a sandwich a tax; the government is a third party, not otherwise involved in the transaction.
I have to say that I reckon the congestion toll as quite specific. One does not need to pay it to enter lower Manhattan. It is immediately spatially and temporally connected with driving on certain city-provided streets, just like the other $54.28 in tolls that I found I'd have to pay to other governments to drive to NYC on their roads. In any case, tax or user fee, I think it's more justified and fair than the taxes used to construct those streets.
I don't think we disagree about anything that isn't a matter of opinion.
(But if making drivers pay for the streets is fair, wouldn't making the people who use mass transit pay for it also be fair? The MTA spends three or four times as much as it collects in fares.)
I'm not a big fan of those other tolls either, especially since there isn't any way to get across the Hudson River in a car without paying a toll unless you drive 160 miles each way to Albany. (In practice you would only need to drive 80 miles each way to pay a very low toll.) I'm currently considering some jobs in New Jersey and having to pay about $50 every time I visit my relative in NYC is definitely something I need to account for. It all makes me wish I was still living in New Hampshire.
You'd pay about $12 on mass transit ($2.90 PATH and $2.90 MTA in each direction), and the reasons for the government to incentivize one versus the other are numerous, not the least of which are safety, noise, air quality, and efficiency.
Indeed, it's fun to talk things over even if we don't disagree. My username is an old, nautical version of shooting the breeze, chewing the fat, etc. The tendency to see every interaction as verbal combat was slowly driving me off the red site even before the API fiasco, and Lemmy has been refreshing that way.