Verrazano-Narrows Bridge drivers pay $15 toll…to see graffiti!
For a $15 toll you’d think they’d clean the graffiti! That’s the sentiment expressed by a Bay Ridge City Council candidate who said he thinks it’s terrible that motorists traveling on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge pay a $15 toll going to Staten Island and then have to see ugly graffiti at the exit ramp on their way back to Brooklyn.
Republican John Quaglione, who is running for the City Council seat in the 43rd District (Bay Ridge-Dyker Heights-Bensonhurst) against incumbent Democrat Vincent Gentile, said graffiti “decorates” the base of the exit ramp leading onto the Belt Parkway at Fourth Avenue. “You certainly pay enough to drive on the bridge. The $15 toll should also cover the cost of cleaning the graffiti,” he told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority should do something about it, according to Quaglione, who said he reached out to MTA Bridges and Tunnels, which oversees operations on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
In a letter to the agency, Quaglione wrote that the “tremendous amount” of graffiti greeting drivers at Fourth Avenue and 100th Street, serves “as nothing more than a very bad ‘Welcome’ sign to many.”