The chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the unelected quasi-government that rules over New York transit and bridges, has heard enough from critics opposed to his plan to impose up to $23 in tolls on drivers into lower Manhattan. He even compared them to backers of President Trump’s claims of voter fraud. “We have,” he said at a board meeting Wednesday, “climate deniers, election deniers,” and “we now have traffic deniers.” 

“In New York, we’re not in denial,” the chairman, Janno Lieber, concludes. Putting aside Mr. Lieber’s arrogance — the prerogative of officials appointed to posts beyond the reach of the ballot box — his comments are an attempt to distract from the real intention of congestion pricing: to extract $1 billion a year from drivers. “Gridlock is killing our economy,” he says. “It’s bad for the air.” He adds “People are being hit by cars and trucks in record numbers.”

Mr. Lieber’s word salad in defense of a prohibitive tolling regime reflects the growing panic at the MTA over the authority’s finances. Never particularly hale to begin with, the MTA was especially hard-hit by the pandemic, and has struggled since to regain its pre-Covid ridership levels. The authority was given some $14 billion in federal aid, courtesy of America’s taxpayers in such places as Idaho, yet it has failed to put its own fiscal house in order.

This is what makes Mr. Lieber’s mockery of his critics so galling. He is asking residents across the Tri-State area to cover the expenses that he and the MTA lack the ability to handle on their own. Where can the money be found? For starters, Mr. Lieber and New York Democrats might want to look at subway and bus fare evasion, estimated to be costing the MTA $500 million a year — half of the amount it seeks to extort from drivers via “congestion pricing.”

A no-brainer to fix, right? Think again. In August, Mr. Lieber announced the creation of a “fairness” panel to figure out how to avoid fare beating “while ensuring that particular groups are not disproportionately impacted” by “enforcement efforts.” This followed Attorney General Letitia James’ demand in 2020 for data on whether the NYPD “illegally targeted communities of color on NYC subways” by enforcing “fare evasion laws.”

In other words, fare evasion isn’t getting fixed any time soon. Nicole Gelinas of the free market-oriented Manhattan Institute has offered her own set of suggestions that she contends would save the MTA $10 billion over a decade, more or less matching the projected revenue from the congestion pricing tolls. These ideas include dropping subway conductors, whose job — opening and closing doors — could be performed by train drivers, or even automation.

That would offend labor unions, of course, so don’t count on it. Yet the MTA has another path to boost revenue-paying riders: fighting crime in the subways. Even the New York Times admits “riders could be staying away after several high-profile violent episodes.” Instead, the MTA is following the failed playbook of urban liberalism, trying to tax its way out of a crisis, and mocking those who balk. You might call the MTA’s management deniers of failure.