ORGS
NYC Government
NYS Government
US Government
Advocates
BIDs
Civics
Culture
Foundations
History
Labor
Public/Private
Think Tanks
BOROS
Bronx
Brooklyn
Manhattan
Queens
Staten Island
News Sites
Daily News
NY Times
Daily News
NY Post
Newsday
New York Sun
NYC Weeklies
Amsterdam News
City Limits Weekly
Crain's New York Business
Gay City News
New York Magazine
New York Observer
New Yorker, The
Time Out New York
Village Voice
Dailies, Weeklies, Monthlies, etc. »
Other-Language Press
NYC Blogs »
Advertisement:
Taking on the Traffic
by Brian Ketcham
May 7, 2007
There are powerful economic reasons for adopting Mayor Michael Bloomberg's congestion pricing policies. Thirty five years ago, I wrote a plan for the Lindsay administration that included tolls across the East and Harlem rivers. But to avoid the political heat of instituting tolls, our congressional leaders proposed to meet federal Clean Air Act's requirements to reduce auto use by making a serious commitment to capital financing for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. However, the investment of $40 billion in transit has demonstrated that transit improvements alone do not sufficiently curb auto use.
Now, 35 years later, we finally have a mayor with the insight and guts to take on the "elephant in the room" -- our failure to charge drivers more than a fraction of the costs they impose by using their cars. Motorists who gripe about raising their cost to drive don't appear to realize that car and truck travel create huge public costs-lost productivity from congestion, traffic accident costs not covered by insurance, environmental damage, air and water pollution and noise.
This is not trivial. In the New York metropolitan area, the costs related to
cars and trucks total more than $40 billion annually. Every time someone drives
into Manhattan it costs the rest of us $30.
The addition of the million more residents and 750,000 more workers envisioned
by plaNYC will increase car and truck use by 2 million trips a day in New York
City and add millions of daily riders to our subway system. Accommodating this
growth will take billions of dollars of investment. It will cost even more if
we are to meet the mayor's goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent.
At the same time, auto-centric mega-development like Gateway Center and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and the Bronx Terminal Market will further clog our roads and subways. New York can do better. The plan that I proposed 35 years ago recommended creating what we then called "urban activity centers." These were to be new communities within New York City where people could live, work, shop and play within walking distance without having to drive or even depending on transit. Cobble Hill in Brooklyn is such a community. Bloomberg's plaNYC overlooks this approach to real sustainability.
The other key to a successful plaNYC is congestion pricing. While the system the administration has proposed is unnecessarily complex and costly, those features are negotiable. What is important is that we finally have a mayor with the vision and persuasiveness to embolden timid elected officials to see the true equity of congestion pricing and give it a try. This took great courage.
Motorists cannot defend getting a free ride into Manhattan and imposing huge costs on everyone else, including other drivers stuck in traffic. Congestion pricing is the only fair way to level the playing field. It is also one of the few ways left to secure funding to expand and improve public transit.
Brian Ketcham is a traffic engineer who lives in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Other Related Articles:
React to this article on our Issue of the Week Message Board.
Visit the complete "Issue of the Week" Archives
Sites of Interest from Collegester:
Online Casino |
Wireless broadband |
Place
Your Link Here!





