It's nice to be able to pay for better facilities. It's even nicer if they are just better, without paying. Payment can create perverse incentives as well.
It’s impossible for free city streets to both be fast and scale to the density of NYC. Congestion pricing allows them to be fast by removing traffic. Thus allowing busses or people with significant need to travel quickly.
Where it fails is an Uber/taxi drivers add a lot more congestion than an average person and the fees don’t get adjusted for this issue.
So does banning people from driving. But obviously people are smart enough to realise that's dumb. I guess not smart enough to realise that pricing them out is the same thing and also incredibly dumb.
The thing about congestion is that you can't “make it better” (in a densely populated place like Manhattan's CBD) without removing cars somehow. The only other real approach to this is rationing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_space_rationing), which leads to economic inefficiencies and doesn't raise money that will be used to make transit better for everyone who choses not to drive.
