DORI MONSON

Dori: Jenny Durkan wants to punish families with congestion pricing

Sep 18, 2018, 6:00 AM | Updated: 6:19 am

seattle traffic, congestion pricing...

Seattle's infamous Mercer Mess. (MyNorthwest Photo)

(MyNorthwest Photo)

The phenomenon of congestion pricing has been one of the most perfect, prescient predictions that we have ever done in the history of the Dori Monson Show. It was 18 years ago when a tipster told me that there was an effort underway to toll every single road in the Puget Sound region over the next 20 years. I knew the credibility of my source, and I started seeing the documents — the Puget Sound Regional Council’s plan to turn every single road in the state into a toll road.

Want to drive into Seattle during morning rush hour? That’ll be $20 dollars. Want to drive to your kids’ elementary school to watch their performance in the school play? That’ll be 25 cents. We will get you for every inch you drive. That’s because they hate people in cars.

RELATED: Mayor Durkan uses climate change to take your money

Why do they hate people who have cars? The people who so desperately need cars, for whom public transit doesn’t work, are families with kids. If you’re a DINK, you can take an hour and 20 minutes of trains and buses to get to work every day. If you’re a parent who has kids playing sports or taking music lessons or doing a play, you’ve got to drive. So going back to my question of why local leaders have contempt for people who have to drive cars, the reason is, they don’t like families with kids. I mean this quite literally. Of the people who are in power in Seattle and King County, so many of them are childless for a variety of reasons, and their political philosophy is all about building this bicycle-only transportation utopia that becomes increasingly unfriendly for families with kids.

This all started back in 1978 when Seattle implemented busing for social justice reasons. Seattle decided to bus kids from Ballard to Cleveland High School in Beacon Hill. What used to be a five-minute ride to school became an hour-and-a-half. The kids stopped going to Tuesday night basketball games. The kids became disconnected from their schools. When you’re disconnected from your school, you lose one of the two focal points of a community (church being the other). The families said that this didn’t work for them and moved to the suburbs, which has left Seattle as the second-most childless city in the nation. And the city government wants to continue the battle against people who drive cars because those people tend to be family people.

Jenny Durkan was at a town hall this past weekend where she used the city’s euphemism for tolling every road — congestion pricing. Don’t be fooled by the euphemism — it’s all about getting you out of your vehicle. If you are a suburban parent who works in the city, they want to punish you because they despise what your family is all about. Communities become connected through schools and churches because those community events seem to galvanize people. When you don’t have connected communities, it is much easier for government to control you. Congestion pricing is very much a calculated strategy to destroy the ability of families to exist in Seattle. And they have succeeded — only San Francisco is more childless than Seattle; we are also the most un-churched city in the United States. That becomes a very easy population to control.

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, gave Seattle the American Cities Climate Challenge, a grant. Part one of that is congestion pricing. Then Jenny Durkan got into part two. I find it hard to believe that Jenny Durkan was a U.S. attorney. As a politician, she says stuff that is pure babble. She spews out nonsense with the perfect far-left buzzwords mixed in.

“If you look at our own city, where the people [who] are most poor live, they are dealing with environmental burdens.”

Wait, what? The people who are the poorest in Seattle have to disproportionately deal with climate problems? Do people in White Center have more extreme weather than people in Laurelhurst? I had no idea. I didn’t realize until Jenny Durkan started babbling along that our neighborhoods are so unequal.

The point is, none of these politicians believe that climate change caused by man is a real issue. They just know if they say enough social justicey phrases along the way, it will be a way to take money from a bunch of people and redistribute it to a bunch of others. It’s the social justice way — a massive expansion of government for zero benefit in return to the planet. Through the free market, we are moving dramatically toward electric cars. The free market has taken care of it. We don’t need the guiding hand of government. We don’t need Jenny Durkan to tell us that the people in White Center are suffering more than the people in Laurelhurst. What an absolute scam we are surrounded by every second of every day in this nuthouse.

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Dori: Jenny Durkan wants to punish families with congestion pricing