It's literally the opposite of this. It takes money from the relatively well off, namely people who have cars and can afford to park them in Manhattan where a p

It's literally the opposite of this. It takes money from the relatively well off, namely people who have cars and can afford to park them in Manhattan where a parking space costs ~$50+ a day on average, and sends it to the MTA who create rapid transit accessible to everyone and especially valuable to the poor. The arguments that this is a way to penalize poor people should be immediately seen for what they are, absolute bullshit and propaganda. The only real refinement to this is there's a large and vocal community of people in NYC who work for the city (mainly cops and firefighters) who aren't all that rich and get free parking, almost always via illegal or questionable means, through use of city placards and parking by police stations and so on. But there's literally no reason to reward those people for anything, they've been gaming the system for decades.