Ken Livingstone, the London mayor when congestion pricing began in 2003, has said it’s the only thing in his political career that “turned out better than I expected.”
London’s vehicle speeds would be 20 percent to 30 percent lower without the charge to enter central London, the urban expert Charles Komanoff has estimated, and a separate study found a significant decline in crashes.
The reason more cities haven’t adopted congestion pricing, Livingstone says, is “political cowardice.” People cling to the idea that driving should be free, even though it imposes big costs on others.
How to Get New York Moving Again, By David Leonhardt, NYTimes.com, 7 Jan 2018
Drivers wait in traffic during the morning rush hour in Midtown Manhattan. CreditMario Tama/Getty Images
The next time you’re in Midtown Manhattan on a weekday afternoon, I encourage you to try a little game: Take a brisk crosstown walk, and look around.
For starters, it’s a nice way to take in the city while getting some exercise. It will also give you a sense for one of New York’s pressing problems. If you watch the vehicles around you, you will probably notice that you are traveling faster than some of them.
Despite having internal combustion engines — which I’m pretty sure are more powerful than your body — the vehicles will crawl forward at a few miles an hour. Then they will stop and wait for a light to turn green or a gridlocked intersection to clear. Meanwhile, you will keep moving. When I’m walking across Manhattan, I often find that I can outrace a car.
The average vehicle speed in Midtown today is just 4.7 miles an hour. That’s 28 percent slower than five years ago. Given that most people can walk up to 4 miles an hour, the human body is sometimes Manhattan’s fastest mode of transportation.
Traffic has become an urban scourge, and not only in New York. Around the world, it is a drag on economic activity and the quality of life. People waste hours in it, all the while sending pollution into the air. No wonder both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo are promising a solution.
Unfortunately, there is a good chance they are going to bungle it.
Traffic is a classic “tragedy of the commons” problem. The phrase comes from the ecologist Garrett Hardin, based on work by the 19th-century economist William Forster Lloyd.
Lloyd described British villagers sharing a plot of land where their cattle could graze. Any individual benefited from using the land as much as possible. But if they all maximized use, they could destroy the grass.
The space on city streets is like the village common. When it’s overused, it becomes less valuable to everyone.
The good news is that modern societies have developed a solution to the tragedy: Charge money to use the commons. Doing so not only discourages overuse, it also raises funds that can solve the larger need — to grow another field where cows can graze, say, or to build a well-functioning subway system. And, yes, I realize that both grazing cows and well-functioning subways sound far-fetched to today’s New Yorkers.
The charge for using clogged roads is known as “congestion pricing,” and it works well where it has been tried, like London, Singapore and Stockholm. In New York, the daily charge to drive below 60th Street might be around $8, with additional charges for vehicles that linger all day.
Ken Livingstone, the London mayor when congestion pricing began in 2003, has said it’s the only thing in his political career that “turned out better than I expected.”
London’s vehicle speeds would be 20 percent to 30 percent lower without the charge to enter central London, the urban expert Charles Komanoff has estimated, and a separate study found a significant decline in crashes.
The reason more cities haven’t adopted congestion pricing, Livingstone says, is “political cowardice.” People cling to the idea that driving should be free, even though it imposes big costs on others.
In New York, de Blasio opposes congestion pricing. He instead favors a millionaires’ tax to pay for subway improvements. Higher taxes on the rich are a fine idea, but won’t unclog roads. For that, de Blasio has offered a series of small, complex measures, like banning deliveries during rush hour. Good luck enforcing that one.
Cuomo is more positive about congestion pricing, but has not filled in the details. He may ultimately support a charge only on taxis and companies like Lyft, Uber and Via. That’s a strangely anti-environment compromise, because it encourages people to own their own cars. The New York of the future should have fewer space-clogging cars, not more.
The most serious argument against congestion pricing is that it hurts lower-income workers. That argument also falls apart on inspection, though.
Only 3 percent of poor and near-poor outer-borough workers drive into Manhattan for their jobs, the Community Service Society of New York found. A whopping 61 percent take the subway or bus.
I understand why politicians are afraid to support congestion pricing. We all like the idea of a free lunch — or a free road. But political leadership is supposed to be just that: leadership. It involves making tough decisions for the common good and winning over citizens.
Both de Blasio and Cuomo would like to be national progressive leaders. New York’s packed roads and hobbled subways have given them a great opportunity. They can lead the way toward a pro-environment, pro-worker solution that would be a model for other cities.
I look forward to the day when I can no longer keep up with New York’s cars.
By Laura Bliss, City Lab, 16 August 2017
Here’s how a governor-backed plan could win this time around.
For the first time in years, congestion pricing might have real political traction in an American city.
Between 2007 and 2008, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a specially appointed state commission pushed to create an $8 fee for inbound car trips into the Manhattan core between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. It was projected to produce $491 million annually for transit improvements, cut driving time spent in standstill traffic by 30 percent, and slash emissions.
Crucially, the plan also included a transit build-out. Expanded local and express bus and subway service was called for, in order to prove transit as a viable alternative for an even greater share of commuters and show the congestion fees weren’t meant to be punitive. With the MTA, the city secured $354 million in federal funds for these improvements, contingent on the passage of the plan. But the plan got blocked in the state legislature—more on that in a moment—and the improvements didn’t come to fruition.
These days, it’s going to be harder to convince New York City car commuters who balk at congestion fees that great transit alternatives exist. On-time performance on the subways is tanking, and the buses are even worse.
But a congestion pricing system would be another motivation—and better yet, a means—to make swift, meaningful improvements to transit. Architected by the famed New York City traffic engineer Sam “Gridlock” Schwartz, a revised version of the Bloomberg congestion pricing plan called Move NY spotlights buses especially, calling to roll back service cuts made in 2010, add express bus options to affected outer boroughs, and speed up plans to run bus rapid transit lines across the city. Move NY projects the plan would generate $1.5 billion in net revenue, to help re-fill MTA’s dried-up coffers.
The Bloomberg-era plan thad the support of the mayor, a broad coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups, and a surprising share of suburban New Jersey and New York state lawmakers. It might have passed if not for a final political hurdle.
The biggest sticking point came from elected officials and their constituents in New York City boroughs outside Manhattan, particularly eastern Queens and southern Brooklyn. According to a 2010 post-mortem study by Bruce Schaller, a former NYC DOT official, residents had doubts as to whether the revenues would be spent effectively on transit service improvements, or if they’d even reach the MTA to begin in.
Only 5 percent of workers in those areas in particular were commuting into Manhattan by car at the time. But their voices were loud enough that their state assembly leaders blocked action on congestion pricing when it came through the New York legislature. Meanwhile, the governor who had originally supported the plan—Eliot Spitzer—had resigned in disgrace, giving way to David Paterson, who might not have had the political capital to sway those assembly members. “I think that Bloomberg plan would have been enacted if Spitzer had been in office,” says Orcutt. But he wasn’t, and the plan died.
Move NY has won the support of several New York city council members and attracted widespread media attention. Mayor Bill de Blasio has never warmed up to the idea, though, stating that it’s not part of his “vision” for congestion in New York. The congestion plan his administration has offered avoids driver fees entirely, focusing on increased police enforcement, ramping up prices for on-street parking, and encouraging off-peak deliveries.
Of congestion pricing, “I’ve never been in favor of those proposals because I haven’t seen one that I thought was fair, particularly to folks in the outer boroughs,” he said last week. But he’s also said he’s never supported a pricing scheme because he assumed state leadership would never let if fly. “I’m not putting time and energy into something that is not going to happen,” de Blasio said in June.
But Cuomo has now turned that political calculus upside down, and de Blasio could look bad if he doesn’t work with the governor on a plan that advocacy groups and civic leaders are bound to support. Tolling city-owned streets will require his participation. “The state can’t just show up and toll an entry way over Flatbush Avenue,” says Orcutt.
The governor and mayor are known for their political sparring, which isn’t a dynamic that’s particularly benefiting New Yorkers. If they worked together to make this idea idea, it could be great for New York City streets, great for New York City subways, and a vote of confidence for every other American city that’s eyed Stockholm and London streets with curiosity. Congestion pricing isn’t a cure-all for any city’s traffic ills—none really exist—but mixed in with transit investments, it’s the best treatment there is.
