NY Third Party Candidate for Governor's Platform: Free Mass Transit

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation) New York's Governor's race has been roiled this year. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the erstwhile shoo-in, is getting criticism from his own party (and the New York Times) for not campaigning hard enough -- while Republican nominee Carl Paladino, the Tea Party-backed candidate, is promising to smash Albany "with a baseball bat." That's a promise that's getting some traction in an environment where one governor was caught with a prostitute, the next has been under investigation for improperly getting free Yankees tickets, and the State Senate Majority Leader is under multiple investigations for allegedly using funds designed for poor people's health projects for his own political benefit.

But now Cuomo is also getting challenged from the left -- the far left. Charles Barron, a city council member known for his radical political views, is running for Governor on the "Freedom Party" line. The key plank in his platform? Free mass transit.

"The Freedom Party today is saying to the state that we can do something about transportation. They say they don't believe in taxes, but when they raise the transit fare, that's a tax on poor working class families," Barron said at a press conference outside Brooklyn's Borough Hall, and then proceeded to lay out a plan to pay for transit (which by the way, is more than Andrew Cuomo has done.)

By raising taxes on people making more than $250,000, Barron says you could generate $8 billion, and dedicate $3 billion of that to lowering the transit fare.

Then Barron brought forward transit gadfly George Haikalis of the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility who advocated a congestion charging scheme to generate revenues to make the "subways free." Haikalis says charging rates comparable to London's 8 pounds (about $15) would pay for the subways. That amount, by the way, is about double what Mayor Michael Bloomberg advocated when he pushed congestion charging in 2007 and 2008.

Does Andrew Cuomo support congestion pricing? His issues "book" is silent on the issue.