Case file 10-31. Subject: a toll booth, a bus driver, and a love story that couldn't make it below 61st Street.
I've been in the tunnels a long time. I've seen rats cross three subway lines for half a bagel. I've seen a pigeon commute from Staten Island for a single dropped pretzel. Down here, love finds a way. Up there, love finds a $9 charge.
Mariama James is a Democratic district leader in Lower Manhattan, vice chair of the Manhattan Democratic Party, and a former state Assembly candidate. This week she went viral on X with a confession the New York Post later ran as an exclusive.
"We basically stopped seeing each other bc of Congestion Pricing," she wrote.
I put down my coffee. I picked up my magnifying glass. I put down the magnifying glass, because the case had already solved itself.
The facts, per the Post: James dated a city bus driver off and on for about six years. He was already paying tolls just to get to work, more than $100 a week by the Post's count. Then, on Jan. 5, 2025, Gov. Kathy Hochul's congestion pricing kicked in at $9 a trip below 61st Street.
Visiting his girlfriend became a line item. The weekend trips to Atlantic City became a budget meeting.
"We've only seen each other like two times since 2025," James told the Post.
Detectives, write this down. A Democratic governor passed a Democratic toll, backed by a Democratic legislature, and it reached into a Democratic party leader's apartment and repossessed her boyfriend.
Officials promised the toll would reduce traffic into Manhattan. On this one address, at least, it delivered 100 percent.
To her credit, James says she never liked it. "I don't like it. Not for my district," she told the Post. "All it's done is push pollution on our neighborhood." She also described the planning it took just to have dinner: "We had to figure out a master plan just to go out."
A master plan. Just to go out. In the city that never sleeps, which now apparently also never visits.
Here's the part the policy wonks will never print. The congestion toll was sold as a fee on "drivers," a faceless enemy idling in a Range Rover. The man who actually got squeezed was a guy who drives a city bus for a living and then had to pay the city to drive himself. The MTA got him coming and going. Mostly going.
That's the whole affordability debate in one breakup. You work. You pay the toll to get to work. You pay the bridge to get home. Then the government that promised to make life more affordable makes the one thing you do for fun a $9 luxury.
I asked a rat in the evidence locker whether he'd ever lost a girlfriend to a toll. He said no. He uses the tunnels. They're free, and so far nobody in Albany has noticed.
James says she isn't ruling out a reunion. "Maybe we'll start up again one day, who knows?" she told the Post.
Case remains open. I've filed a motion to have the toll gantry declared a third party in the relationship, since it's the only one who still sees him five days a week.
The Demorat is satire. This article is a parody based on real news reports and is not meant to be taken as literal fact.
The real story that inspired this
