Mayor Bloomberg has received a good deal of well-deserved praise for his proposed congestion tax, in which the city would charge drivers a fee for entering Manhattan by car during certain hours of the day. Such a scheme has worked well in London, where it was implemented by Mayor Ken Livingstone (this pragmatic policy stands out in contrast to what the Mayor spends a great deal of time doing in his official capacity, shilling for Islamists). But what's been lost in the news over hizzoner's proposal is that a similar plan was hatched over 40 years ago by a New York City Mayoral candidate, William F. Buckley Jr. He ran for Mayor in 1965 against Democrat Abe Beame and Republican John Lindsey--in what might have been the most entertaining race in the history of American politics (this was during the New York newspaper strike, when the Post was liberal and someone like John Lindsey could win the endorsement of the state's Liberal Party). This whole experience was recounted in Buckley's highly enjoyable The Unmaking of a Mayor. This was also the race in which Buckley, asked what his first act as mayor would be, delivered the classic line, "Demand a recount." One of Buckley's more provocative proposals (next to drug legalization, cutting off nearly all welfare recipients, and a value-added tax) was to construct a series of elevated bike paths above the city's major roads to reduce congestion. With the construction of the elevated High-Line on the city's West Side almost finished, Buckley's idea--at the time poo-pooed as the ravings of an elitist dilettante--seems prophetic. Of course, not all of Buckley's ideas have been as visionary. The godfather of the modern conservative movement, Buckley has always been more adept (and entertaining) at critiquing supposed liberal folly than making prescriptions of his own. One of his more infamous forays into policy-making was his suggestion--in the middle of the 1980s when AIDS was ravaging the gay community--that HIV-positive men have their buttocks tattooed. Let's stick with elevated bike paths, WFB. --James Kirchick