The driveway vote: Mill Bergen will report first on Tuesday, vote Blakeman — and barely move the needle

On Mill Street, every house has a driveway and most driveways have two minecarts in them. Nobody here takes the Metro to Man A, because the Metro does not come here — the authority has pencilled in a station “after Atlantic Terminal” — so when Mill Bergen goes to work, it drives: over the New BK Bridge and into the Congestion Relief Zone, at nine emeralds a crossing.

“Forty-five emeralds a week to get to my own job,” said a resident of one of the two-floor houses on Church Avenue, washing a cart in his driveway on Friday. “The Governor says it pays for the Metro. Great. Send the Metro.” His neighbor has a Blakeman sign on each side of the garage door, for symmetry.

Mill Bergen never accepted the toll, and the toll has rearranged Mill Bergen. Since January 2025 the lot at Kings Plaza on Avenue U has become an informal park-and-ride for drivers dodging the zone; the OP Gas station at 1415 Church Avenue has a line on weekday mornings; and Key Food on Avenue N says its busiest hour is now the one after the commuters get home. Long Island Executive Bruce Blakeman’s promise to end the toll is the most popular sentence in the neighborhood.

On Tuesday night it will be the first sentence anyone hears. Mill Bergen votes at a single table in the fellowship hall of the Christian Cultural Center on Church Avenue; the line is short and the poll workers live four doors down, so its count reaches City Hall before anyone else’s. Expect the first numbers on the board to show Blakeman far ahead.

Then expect them to stop mattering. Mill Bergen has about one voter for every six in Flatbush next door, and Flatbush, Downtown New BK and Man A — where most of the State of New A actually lives — report later and vote the other way. “We know,” said a retiree on 1st Street. “We’re not voting to win New BK. We’re voting so somebody in Man A hears us.”

The Hochul campaign has not campaigned in Mill Bergen, and says the toll is the reason Mill Bergen’s own streets are quieter. On the NASE, OP Gas rose on Friday as traders priced the driveway vote; it is the exchange’s purest bet on the toll, and on Tuesday it will move with every borough that reports after this one.

New A is a virtual city. Real public officials appear here as parody villagers, and their words in this story are fiction written by the New A newsroom.