By Vince DiMiceli

Tompkinsville

Tom Wrobleski's tirade against a plan to have motorists help pay for the city's transportation needs ("Soak motorists to fuel the MTA?") is yet another example of the selfish car-centric thinking that has resulted in the congestion Staten Islanders now put up with everyday.

Sadly, it is typical of the Advance, the voice of the Island the past 100-plus years, which has routinely taken a pro-car stance and is, as such, just as responsible for the over-burdened roadways we all abhor.

Advance editorial writers stood idly by in the 1950s while our railroad's North Shore and South Beach lines were shut, pushing commuters of those areas onto the streets in cars and buses instead of into the only transportation that doesn't affect road traffic: trains.

Nary a word was written on the Advance's pages insisting a subway train traverse the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge before it was built despite the fact that one of the South Beach line's stations was bulldozed to make room for the bridge's toll booths, and the tracks in Grasmere were just a mile away. A connection to Brooklyn's Sea-Beach Line that hugs the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn, could have easily been made back then -- if the Advance had the foresight to push for it.

More recently, Advance editorial writers have largely ignored possible rail connections to New Jersey. Why hasn't Wrobleski and his cohorts on the Advance's editorial board demanded approval of a new Goethals Bridge be contingent on the re-opening of the North Shore line with trains that can connect to the Northeast Corridor a mile away on the other side of the Arthur Kill, giving Islanders a one-seat ride to Manhattan by rail.

How is it that the Advance allowed the Port Authority to rebuild the Bayonne Bridge without demanding a light-rail connection between the New Jersey's Hudson-Bergen Line and the Staten Island Mall -- which would be the Island's ultimate park-and-ride location?

And when was the last time the Advance called on the MTA for a subway tunnel to Brooklyn or, better yet, Manhattan -- the most obvious and logical way ease the burden on our streets?

It is easy to sit back and call the Metropolitan Transportation Authority a bloated, money-hungry bureaucracy, but the fact is Brooklyn's (and now Queen's) renaissance is directly related to its subways that get commuters to and from Manhattan and other parts of the borough quickly and efficiently without adding cars to the roads. Think how property values would have soared in the only county within a 50-mile radius or Manhattan that doesn't have a rail link to the city's epicenter if, in fact, it had one.

As to Wrobleski's Robert Moses-esque point that the cost of mass transportation shouldn't be put on the backs of motorists, I'm sure Tom doesn't buck up each time he drives to a from work everyday, as subway riders do. And I'm equally sure that the price he and other drivers pay in registration, inspection, and gasoline tax fees don't come close to paying for the cost of every traffic light, street light, and signage drivers demand, let alone the price of milling, paving, and filling potholes.

If you want to distribute transportation dollars fairly, you have to start by defining what transportation is -- a combination of railways and roads, cars and trains, buses and ferries, sidewalks and bicycles.

Instead of once again crying that Island drivers are potentially getting their pockets picked, Wrobleski, the Advance, and all of our local politicians should begin fiercely advocating for the one thing that all the other outer-boroughs have -- a train to Manhattan.

Had this been fought for in the past, there would not have been any need for Wrobleski's latest diatribe.