Chaka Fattah officially ends his run for mayor of Philadelphia...

www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/local/16692405.htm...

This is stupid and wrong for many reasons.

1) He'll never get it passed and he has essentially ended his chances of winning (which were pretty good before) by scaring many people in the city who rely on those outside the city for their income (business people, anyone who works at the companies owned by those business people, etc...)

2) Repeat after me: "Philadelphia is not London, America is not England". There, wasn't that nice?

Europeans are used to paying through the nose for transportation. They've been paying higher prices than we pay now for gas for decades. If we had the level of taxation on fuel that they have there would be riots.

London is also a very old city that was built long before anyone even imagined motor vehicular transportation. It's crowded and it's congested. The idea of the congestion tax in England was probably a good one but I don't believe Philly is at that point yet.

Also, London has a huge public transportation system unrivaled in this country. Even New York doesn't have the sheer number of subway routes that London has. It's quite possible for someone to get wherever they want to in London on the subway. Philly, with a whopping two subway lines and sporadic bus system that only runs at certain times, does not have anywhere near the transportation infrastructure to make this work. You can't even get to the Art Museum from New Jersey without a lot of trouble (I usually just walk the 20 or so blocks from the Patco station at 15th/16th and Locust to the Art Museum to save myself the trouble, not everyone can walk like that).

3) People will just stop coming into Philly from New Jersey and the Pennsylvania suburbs. It's not like there aren't places outside the city that you can go to have a good time. There are concert venues in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There are high class restaurants and entertainment. People will just start going to Camden and spending their money there. It will destroy many businesses in Philly that rely on out of towners for business.

Philly already has an absurd liquor tax (trust me, I did a double take when I got my bill) that no doubt causes plenty of people to either not order alcohol or go elsewhere. Instituting this tax will give people yet another reason to bypass Philly for towns that actually want their business.