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Improve Transit Before Congestion Pricing


There are 24 transportation proposals in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plaNYC, but one is getting all the attention: a pilot program to test congestion pricing.

The political battle is heating up over whether to impose a charge on motorists both to discourage driving in car-clogged Manhattan and to yield the money needed for big-ticket investments like the Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access. The plan's transportation list also features smaller, less expensive improvements that could and should be implemented now, without waiting for congestion pricing.

We Have The Technology, But…

According to his own plans, the mayor has about two years to put congestion pricing in place. In all likelihood, it will take even longer - for technological reasons as well as political ones. The mayor's plan is modeled on London's geographic system: Vehicles entering the central zone during designated business hours must pay a flat fee. The proposal sounds simple: Charge every car $8 and every truck $21 for coming into Manhattan south of 86th Street between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on weekdays. But first, all river crossings, including those that are now free, and all southbound avenues at 86th Street, will have to be equipped with EZ-Pass readers. Cameras will have to be installed to find and fine violators, as in London.

And a number of details, while sensible, will complicate implementation:

-- Drivers will be credited for tolls paid at bridges and tunnels to and from Manhattan, requiring a new, system to reconcile fees collected by various charging entities, including the Port Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

--Since moving a vehicle already within the zone will incur only half the fee, sensors and cameras will have to be installed throughout the business district, not just at the boundaries.

--Because cars moved for alternate-side-of-the-street parking will not be subject to the charge, the system must be able to distinguish among types of vehicle movements and trips.

--Many vehicles, including emergency vehicles, buses, taxis and cars with handicapped license plates - will be exempt from the charge, meaning the system will need to be able to recognize them.

All of this is technologically feasible. But information technology projects nearly always exceed the time and money budgeted by proponents.

Money for Transit

The city needs $2.7 billion for the first two phases of the Second Avenue Subway, $2 billion to connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, and $175 million to reopen the defunct rail line along Staten Island's North Shore. Another $10 billion is needed to bring subway infrastructure and roads and bridges to a state of good repair.

The administration is anticipating state and federal contributions, but congestion pricing would be the most important local source of funds. Without congestion pricing, argues the mayor, the big projects cannot be built, nor is there money to complete repairs to existing transportation infrastructure anytime soon.

But Will It Reduce Traffic?

To get off the ground politically, congestion pricing cannot be seen as just a new source of revenue. New Yorkers have to believe that it will help reduce traffic.

The administration expects congestion pricing to decrease vehicles entering Manhattan by 6 percent and increase speeds within the charging zone by 7 percent. In other words, the traffic improvement in Manhattan would be modest.

However, the program will surely reduce congestion in neighborhoods like Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City that have long suffered from through-traffic. The different costs for the various East River crossings have demonstrated for decades that tolls do affect driver behavior. The free Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro bridges, as well as their feeder roads, are clogged, while traffic flows more smoothly to and through the tolled tunnels. The mayor's proposal would correct this pricing irrationality by crediting drivers for the cost of their tolls. The price for a round-trip using E-ZPass through a tolled East River crossing is $8-exactly the same as the automobile congestion charge proposed for the pilot.

Many New Yorkers will welcome the news that the administration plans to step up traffic enforcement. In addition, The administration's plan to install Muni-Meters (modern, credit-card-friendly parking meters) should ease traffic problems related to curbside parking in business districts outside Manhattan. There are projects to expand ferry service and promote cycling.

But one of the most important potential reforms has gone unmentioned-doing something about the excessive amount of free parking in the city, especially for government employees. Because they often get unlimited free parking at a wide range of designated areas, government employees drive to work in the Manhattan central business district at just about twice the rate (27 percent versus 14 percent) of private-sector employees. To demonstrate its commitment to reducing congestion, the Bloomberg administration should eliminate free parking privileges for city employees-and urge other employers to do the same.

Make The Improvements Now

But the single most important thing the mayor can do to convince New Yorkers to give his congestion-pricing pilot a shot is to implement transportation improvements first. London increased bus service before implementing congestion pricing - and that was one of the keys to London's success.

In his "A Greener, Greater New York" speech, the mayor announced that transportation upgrades for underserved areas would begin right away, and plaNYC features a chart of improvements for 22 neighborhoods with concentrations of Manhattan-bound drivers. These include adding bus routes (College Point, Jackson Heights and Woodside/Sunnyside), adjusting bus routes (Bay Ridge, Canarsie and Cambria Heights), improving connections between bus and subways (15 of the 22 neighborhoods, including Co-op City, Soundview and Flatlands), changing traffic signals to favor buses (Schuylerville, Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay), and improving access to subway and rail stations (Clinton Hill, Kensington and South Ozone Park).

Starting these improvements now-transportation services that should already exist - will correct a long-standing wrong and make Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious vision more achievable.

Hope Cohen is deputy director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Rethinking Development.

 

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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