My only disagreement is with BK’s pessimism. We think the plan can go the distance. Stay tuned (to Ted Kheel’s Web site, http://www.nnyn.org/kheelplan) as we develop strategies for bringing millions of New Yorkers on-board … with your help.

No one is banning the ownership of cars.

What is proposed is that the costs of driving in the city more accurately reflect the costs to society.

Driving a car is a privilege, not a right, a fact recognized by literally every court in the United States. It is both fair and appropriate that the costs to society of automobile traffic be born by those who choose to drive.

Similarly, the idea that cars are always useful for visiting relatives evaporated when a relative drove us to visit the in-laws on Thanksgiving, and we proceeded to sit in unmoving traffic on the Hutch for twenty minutes, then creep along the Merritt at a pace far inferior to that of the New Haven line.

I could go on about the beach and the bagels, but I think you get the point. Cars represent an “amenity” only because the government has sunk billions of dollars more into road infrastructure than into transit infrastructure. If it were the other way around, you’d probably be griping against anyone who wanted to defund a train line for decreasing people’s mobility. But you’d have a much better case.

And no, most poor New Yorkers don’t own cars. Why would they? The subway’s faster, and finding parking is difficult. All those cars you say you see may or may not be owned by residents; even if they are, there are many more residents than cars.

For example, on my Upper Manhattan block there are parked cars in most spaces, but there’s only enough room for maybe two hundred cars around a full block, compared with about one thousand residents. And many of those cars aren’t owned by residents; parking is only metered on avenues, so most parking spaces are free, making this area a good park and ride for Upstaters who don’t like getting stuck in the traffic jams further downtown.

One thing car-free areas are good at is accommodating density. In car-friendlier cities, it’s impossible to get far beyond 2,000 people per square kilometer, so the working class lives either in ghettos, or in far-flung exurbs with one-hour car commutes. In New York, accommodating five-figure densities is trivial. So the very poor tend to live in Harlem, Chinatown, the South Bronx, or Eastern Brooklyn, which are reasonably close to the center; the working class lives all over, sometimes in areas that are a spit’s distance from Midtown, like Hell’s Kitchen and Long Island City. Overall it’s a better scheme than what they have in Los Angeles or Washington.

Mobility is a beautiful thing, and car ownership brings it to, for lack of a better phrase, “the common man.” I have owned a car, though I don’t now, and I was like any other New Yorker, enjoying owning it for reasons that I think are very good ones: to visit relatives who may live in different parts of the tristate area, to help out other relatives who may be elderly and need the aid, to drive to the beach with friends in the summer, to get my bike to far Jersey for a daytrip, to pick up a few cabinets at Home Depot, do a bunch of errands, pick up bagels and a newspaper, make an impulse decision to try a new restaurant in a neighborhood I don’t know very well. In my case, I also just like cars. I don’t see why the most narrow minded type of pseudo-Utopian thinker should consider himself qualified to demand that living in New York means this world-enlarging mobility is forbidden. Don’t tell me that as a New Yorker I’m not American and have to live in my little box without one of the amenities and world-changing (for the better) inventions of modern life. Got a grudge against my hifi and vacuum cleaner? Do they have to go too, those noisy things that you can hear through the wall, and they use all that energy.

Or maybe that’s not what Kheel is saying, I don’t know him. Once a person has purchased a car and has shouldered all the hefty expenses that go with it, it often seems logical to use the car more. I mean, if it’s just sitting there parked all the time, what is the point? That’s how a lot of cars end up being used for daily commuters.

I am very, very angry over the tone and content of Mr. Kabek’s post. My “populist agenda” isn’t phony at all. Lower and middle income New Yorkers do own cars. I rode my bike through the central and north Bronx just a couple weeks ago, to see my old neighborhoods again. Those are low income neighborhoods, many of them, and cars are parked along every curb–same as they used to be when I was growing up. Some of them pretty nice cars, too. The tenants in those buildings own them for perfectly reasonable purposes.

If daily auto commuting is the congestion problem then play the game straight. Put the cards on the table in front of New Yorkers and see if you can bring them into the game with a solution, explaining exactly what the problem is, why it’s a problem, why they should be worried about it, and how in concrete terms your proposal’s drawbacks, including the intangible ones, will be outweighed by the benefits. But if your real agenda is an “auto free New York,” as I think it is, then I and several million other New Yorkers will simply instruct you to stick some heavy stones in your pockets and jump off the Staten Island ferry. Go away.

An auto free New York may be Mr. Kabak’s idea of an orderly paradise of primary colors and smiling happy people, like some 1950s technicolor travelog about Sweden. But for most it’s an idea that if implemented would strand them in the typically messy web of life tasks and responsibilities and the pursuit of a few simple quotidian pleasures. It will never happen, as Mr. Kabak says, but the reason is, the idea is a load of crap.