Image of asthmatic girl used to promote NYC mayor's traffic-fee plan

A sad-looking little girl squeezes an asthma inhaler, with a message imploring lawmakers to approve Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to reduce traffic and pollution by charging motorists who drive into Manhattan.

The tag line: "She cannot hold her breath waiting for Albany to act."

The flier is being mailed this week to 350,000 households throughout the city, urging residents to call lawmakers in Albany. The state Legislature would have to come back for a special session to approve the plan before a July 16 application deadline for federal funding.

The campaign was paid for by the Partnership for New York City, a business group that is a chief supporter of the mayor's plan.

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, an outspoken critic of the congestion pricing plan, said the image of the asthmatic girl is more of a political tactic than anything based on substance.

"The mayor's car tax is not a cure for asthma _ what it is is a giant bureaucracy funded by a regressive tax," said Weiner, D-N.Y.

Bloomberg's plan calls for a three-year pilot program that would charge drivers a fee _ $8 for cars and $21 for trucks _ in the city's most heavily congested zone. His administration says it would force more people onto mass transit, thereby reducing traffic and improving air quality, particularly for children who suffer from asthma.

"Does anybody want to look a parent in the eye and say, 'Well, we can wait for your child, we'll do it down the road, just let your child continue to breathe worse air than we could have had if we had the courage to stand up?' I don't think anybody wants to make that call," Bloomberg said Thursday at a rally in support of his proposal.

Medical studies, including one published in the Lancet earlier this year, have found links between air pollution and respiratory ailments. But it is unclear how much the traffic fee would change the city's asthma problem.

The Bloomberg administration predicts that traffic would decrease by 6 percent inside the zone _ the business district on the lower half of Manhattan. The city's asthma rates are highest in poor neighborhoods outside that area.

Backers of the traffic proposal, who include environmentalists and a number of elected officials, say that those outer communities would also benefit from the reduction in traffic, since many of the thruways leading into Manhattan snake through those neighborhoods.

City officials project that traffic would decrease by 1.8 percent in the Bronx, 1.5 percent in Brooklyn and 1.2 percent in Queens. The decline may seem small, city officials said, but it is significant because much of the relief would be concentrated on major arteries.

In London, where drivers have been charged traffic fees since 2003, residents complain about the "parking lots" that have formed outside the zone. Within it, traffic thinned by 20 percent and carbon emissions similarly decreased, Mayor Ken Livingstone said at a May environmental summit of mayors in New York.

The city health department says the number of New Yorkers with asthma has increased in the past two decades, although hospitalizations have declined. Among children, the hospitalization rate was 43 percent lower in 2005 than in 1997, with fewer than 9,000 compared with nearly 15,000. While it declined, the child hospitalization rate is still three times higher than the national rate, the health department said.