Gotham Gazette

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Taking on the Traffic


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.

 

The High Costs of Driving - and Parking


(Robert) Mosesian in its ambitious bid to establish a new transit financing authority, and (Jane) Jacobsian in its attention to the pedestrian and transit taking majority, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's sweeping transportation plan represents a welcome full frontal attack on traffic congestion and all of its attendant ills. Unfortunately, much of it depends on the state legislature. And so the mayor should take a closer look at something he can control: where New Yorkers park and how much they pay to park there.

Traffic ills -- health, economic and environmental -- are poised to get much worse. In addition to the much publicized influx of population and tourists and their attendant travel needs, the city is facing an estimated 83 percent increase in truck traffic (by 2020 over 1998 levels) and a torrent of new traffic unleashed by a bevy of major development projects like Atlantic Yards.

Despite the resurrection of Robert Moses' ambition, neither the mayor nor anybody in their right mind is proposing that we solve the problem with new roadways. The human and financial costs are too great, and new roads, we have long understood, just invite more driving.

Leaving Cars Behind

The wiser approach is to make better use of the street space we already have by switching car trips to methods of travel that make better use of our limited space. This "mode shift" forms the bedrock of the mayor's 16 green transportation initiatives. To make alternatives to the private car more appealing, the mayor wants to improve and expand bus service, enhance pedestrian access to transit stations and promote cycling with more paths and bike parking.

But two of the 16 initiatives hold by far the most potential to solve New York City's transportation problem: a $50 billion transit expansion program and a London-style congestion pricing system to help pay for it.

Congestion pricing, in addition to raising $400 million per year for the transit expansion program, would yield immediate transit benefits just by clearing away many of the cars that currently slow city buses. And by forcing drivers- especially city employees who currently drive at twice the rate as everyone else- to switch to subways and buses, the plan would significantly strengthen the political constituency for further transit improvements.

Even for the 5 percent of outer borough workers who currently drive to Manhattan (the other 95 percent take transit or drive elsewhere), congestion pricing holds benefits. Their commutes will shorten markedly, and all New Yorkers will benefit from cleaner air and less health eroding traffic.

As much sense as congestion pricing makes, its success is far from secure. For congestion pricing, and the long list of transit projects it would fund, to become reality, it must first gain the approval of a gauntlet of state legislators who with a nudge from the powerful parking and automobile lobbies could easily block it.

The Lure Of The Parking Space

Unless Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff are content to leave their legacy in the hands of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority leader Joe Bruno, they should pursue three parking policy reforms that would, like congestion pricing, reduce traffic and generate millions for transportation and street improvements. Unlike congestion pricing, these reforms do not require the approval of the state legislature.

Most Manhattan-bound drivers (in pdf) drive out of choice, not necessity. A recent Schaller Consulting study uncovered the reason why: Most drivers do not pay for parking. As any transportation expert will tell you, the carrot of free parking is too irresistible for drivers to refuse, even when they have decent transit options.

Government workers have their coveted (and often counterfeit) placards, and all drivers have access to a bounty of free and $1.50 per hour spaces, even if they have to circle the block for 40 minutes to find one. Because under-priced spots along the curb are always full, cruising for parking accounts for up to 45 percent of all traffic on city streets.

Three steps, used in other big cities, would enable the mayor to redress root causes of traffic congestion while generating a windfall to fund street improvements:

--Increasing the price for metered parking to a level that frees up spaces and reduces cruising;

--Charging residents for permits that would give them preferences for parking on public streets;

--Cleaning up the rampant misuse and abuse of city issued parking permits.

With a new generation of transit improvements funded by congestion pricing, Bloomberg and Doctoroff are poised to move mountains, if only they can move Albany. As a hedge, they should tackle what they can clearly control: New York City's broken parking policy.

Paul Steely White is executive director of Transportation Alternatives.

 

Getting the Most from Congestion Pricing


Those who have labored a lifetime on the city's environmental fronts were blown away on Earth Day to hear our words articulated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg with more mastery and conviction than any of us have mustered. Brilliantly couching congestion pricing in the context of the city's survival, the mayor made it a moral imperative. To convince motorists there is a trade-off, the mayor shrewdly seeks to get tangible transit improvements in place before charging motorists for entering Manhattan.

But the Mayor and Governor Eliot Spitzer must act quickly if they are not to be hamstrung in their commitments to expand transit use. They must reverse New York City Transit's plan to junk 607 subway cars as new ones arrive this year and next. NYC Transit's reason for throwing away usable cars, which could also be rebuilt for one-third the cost of new ones, is that there is no yard space for overnight storage. Accepting that limit will leave NYC Transit with no spare cars, its smallest fleet ever, and unable to deliver the increase of subway service central to the mayor's plan.

The mayor cites bus rapid transit as a quick, high-visibility way to boost ridership, but even this will take too long if it relies on dedicated buslanes. What can be installed quickly is the high-tech component ofbus
Rapid transit -- a GPS tracking and radio communication system. This would eliminate much of the bus bunching that infuriates riders, and the monitors at each bus stop, posting wait times for each route, should help make waiting for a bus more tolerable, even seducing some drivers out of their cars.

Congestion pricing could be made simpler as well. A lot more funds would be available for transit users if the congestion fees were simply collected on the bridge spans and along 60th Street, rather than at dozens -- even hundreds -- of charging points south of 86th Street. Equalizing the charges on all crossings would provide a strong signal to motorists that it doesn't pay to drive out their way to avoid tolls. While the mayor's proposed adjustments in congestion charges levied in Manhattan may remove any advantage of untolled bridges, the complexity muddies the message.

Instead of capitalizing on Manhattan having just four untolled entries, the proposed multiple checkpoints, exceeding London's charging cordon, will be a lot more costly and may raise new objections to tracking motorists' movements.

Even the staunchest supporters of congestion charges in the boroughs see neighborhood parking permits as an essential element of any plan to reduce traffic. The permits would not guarantee a parking place, but would
Charge outsiders a hefty price for precious curb space. Fees and fines could be reinvested in streetscape improvements and effective traffic calming. Such measures would reinforce the quality-of-life benefits of tolls.

The old pre-E-ZPass image of bridge tolls of long spillback of traffic from toll plazas is dead. There is a growing concession in the boroughs that a seamless charging technology can unclog approach roads to free bridges from the lemming-like traffic that is drowning neighborhoods and delaying drivers. Armed with the mayor's powerful ability to change the political
equation, why not institute congestion fees in the fastest, most productive way?

Carolyn Konheim is chair of Community Consulting Services.

 



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