The nation’s highest bridge tolls are about to get even higher in New York.
With a $13 round-trip cash toll, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge already costs more than just about any other bridge outside the city. And the MTA plans to hike that fee to $15 in March. The toll is collected in only one direction.
Tolls on the MTA’s other interborough crossings, like the Triborough Bridge and the Midtown Tunnel, are set to rise to $7.50 in each direction, for a $15 round trip.
In all, 13 of the highest tolls in the country are here, including the Port Authority’s bridges and tunnels, which cost $13 round trip (also collected on only one side).
The only other double-digit bridge toll in the nation is the $12 charged to drive Virginia’s 20-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel system. And you get to use two bridges, two tunnels, and multiple causeways for your money. If you make a return trip on that system within 24 hours, you pay an additional $5, for a total round-trip of $17 .
“You’re a hostage,” said Eileen Bobe, who lives in the shadow of the Verrazano on Staten Island and works just across the Narrows in Brooklyn. Her family of four spends more than $500 a month on tolls. “We base every day around who’s going over the bridge when.”
Local businesses, which can’t take advantage of resident discount programs, pay even more per trip. “For me, it’s $100,000 or more a year for tolls,” said Steve Margarella, whose Staten Island-based asphalt business does much of its work outside the borough. “If we were located anywhere else in the city we wouldn’t pay anywhere near that.”
Almost all of New York’s toll bridges are pricier than iconic spans like the $6 Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the $4 Tacoma Narrows Bridge near Seattle. Commuter crossings in Boston and New Orleans cost even less to use, and Washington D.C.’s Woodrow Wilson Bridge, now undergoing a $2.4 billion renovation, is free, thanks to piles of earmarked federal cash.
New York’s tolls aren’t the steepest in the world—engineering marvels like the world’s-longest Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge ($27.25 toll) and the under-the-Alps Mont Blanc Tunnel ($51.50) cost more. But commuter bridges elsewhere charge much less per crossing. The toll on Britain’s Humber Bridge was cut in half this year to just $2.44 and the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul—which links two continents—costs $2.
“This is definitely not where we want to be the world leader,” said MTA board member Allen Cappelli, who opposed the toll increase. “We’re impoverishing the middle class and poor people, and we’re discouraging business. We shouldn’t be mugging the same people over and over again.”
The MTA uses about 60 percent of its bridge tolls to subsidize mass transit, Cappelli said, a funding scheme that is “both inequitable and inadequate. We are a city of islands and we unfairly charge to go between some islands and not others.”
“To spend this kind of money is insane,” said Bobe. “I wish I had a boat.”