It isn’t. It wastes time for those stuck, it wastes fuel and increases pollution, and traps a substantial number of road users with every good reason to use the road behind those who could make alternative choices by route, mode or time of day.

The list of cities to have achieved positive benefits from congestion charging is growing. Singapore is the best example, but sadly too many people from North America or Europe patronisingly think that a highly developed Asian city state can teach them nothing. Since then, London and Stockholm are well known having achieved improved flows, reduced car traffic, better flowing bus and taxi traffic, and increases in cycling and walking. Oslo also effectively has a congestion charge as its toll ring has paid off the debt related to the major highway and public transport improvements it helped finance. Sydney recently introduced peak tolls on its Harbour Bridge and Tunnel improving peak flows, and resulting in some diversion to rail and bus.

The big mistake is for people to transplant schemes from other cities onto the city one is talking about. It wont work because cities have all got different urban form, different road and public transport patterns, commute periods and other interdependencies. A congestion charging option needs to be designed, bespoke. It needs to address questions of enforcement, what to do with the revenue, and whether the design can minimise unfairness to any groups of users (and whether the unfairness is real). Road users also need to get something in return, in New York I’d suggest that dealing with a massive backlog in deferred maintenance on the streets would be the obvious answer (which benefits pedestrians and cyclists as well as remaining road users).

For New York it should be a matter of when, and what sort of option to select, not if.

Secondly, once an automobile has paid the congestion charge, there’s no reason not to keep driving. Using the car to make secondary trips within the cordon (daycare, lunch, library, theater, dinner, etc.) could easily create more congestion within the zone.

I think you’re probably correct that “congestion charges can not produce a situation where there are more drivers than without the charge,” but that statement does not rule out the possibility that the fewer drivers are putting in more miles within the zone than previously.

Further, a maxed out 50-foot 35-ton (unpopulated) subway car carries 188 people still partially human powered since most people have to stand. So a 10-car subway train carries 1,880 people maxed in a 500-foot vehicle but likely requires something like one-quarter mile (5,280 feet divided by 4) between trains to maintain a safe stopping distance at any reasonable speed.

All this underground which lots of people have to enter and exit through relatively narrow stairways and again mostly providing their own human power.

Do the math. Let me know what you come up with. Try to explain to me how this makes good design sense, practicality, ease-of-use, convenience, cost, accessibility, etc., for “transit at a large scale” in a city where the public street space is supposedly freely available and greatly exceeds that of its subway’s tunnels.

Moreover, New York City is in it densest areas a highly tiered living, working and human-powered walking-about environment and transit can easily be same way if many extra tons of steel and glass do not have to be moved at the same time; potentially, greatly amplifying mobility densities.

gee again.

You may want to even consider more advanced forms like the proof-of-concept prototype human-powered monorail Shweeb in New Zealand:

” . . . currently reaching speeds of 90 kph (56 mph) in sprints.

. . . delivering 20,000+ people per hour in a 1×1 m2 airspace . . .”

http://www.shweeb.com/Shweeb/technology_IDL=1_IDT=2190_ID=13165_.html

The mechanism by which congestion pricing increases vehicle speeds is that it reduces the number of vehicles. A decrease in the number of vehicles will indeed allow greater speed, which may attract some additional drivers. However, each additional driver attracted by the convenience of increased speed will also increase the congestion, thereby decreasing vehicle speed.

If 100 current drivers stop driving because of a congestion charge, at the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM 99 new drivers will begin driving because of increased speedds. The 100th new driver would return speeds to exactly where they were pre-congestion charge, and therefore will not start driving.

Thus, congestion charges can not produce a situation where there are more drivers than without the charge.

It is possible that the new drivers would be making longer commutes than the drivers they replace. From the standpoint of reducing congestion and making more efficient use of roads, this does not matter. From the environmental standpoint, this may be a net positive or negative depending on many things like the relative efficiency of the vehicles driven, etc. However, it is entirely speculative and not at all germane to the assertion in Owen’s article.

Gecko, I disagree with many of your assumptions about the ability of bicycles to replace other forms of transit at a large scale, but we will leave that for another time.

It should be noted that if there are more cars driving into the city due to congestion pricing, you can also expect that there will be more cars driving out of the city. Number of cars actually in the city should decrease.

–Ian

To Ian Turner, you make the comparison of auto density and auto throughput. Ian correctly asserts that auto density is the cause of pollution.

Being honest, he have to recognize certain things about congestions pricing:
1) Pollution will decrease
2) Transit use will increase
3) Auto use will decrease
4) There will be more cars driving into the city, and their users will be wealthier

#3 and #4 seem to be mutually exclusive but they are not. The more cars there are, the fewer cars can move. If we decrease auto density, we will increase auto throughput. The only way to change #4 would be to lower the capacity for more cars. This can be done by converting lanes on the bridges and tunnels to bus only, or bike only, for example.

An interesting comparison is what Houston did with its highways. They built the most extensive HOV lane system in the world, beginning in the 80s when voters turned down rail transit. Because they were able to use their lanes so much more efficiently, they were able to squeeze many more people onto the highways. The number of cars didn’t really change, but people started carpooling or taking the bus, both of which use the lanes. In a lot of ways, this was great, but I wonder if Houston would implemented a Dallas-like light rail system sooner if they had not made their highways more efficient. Even though they now have light rail, there are no plans to extend it deep into the suburbs like they did in Dallas.

It is not possible for congestion pricing to increase auto density, though in some theoretically inelastic world (not this one), congestion pricing might raise money from drivers without decreasing auto density.

There are a lot more immediate damaging effects, too. Just reason # 100 that his “traffic jams – good for environment” is light years into insane-land.

Bear in mind that Owen in his article isn’t addressing these other important issues:

The question of drivers paying the cost of their using the roads;

The unequal distribution of street space among automobilists, mass transit, cyclists, and pedestrians;

The localized effects of congestion that fall more heavily on certain neighborhoods, like exhaust-pipe pollution;

The negative effects of automobilism on business formation and development, particularly in the suburbs;

The death toll and morbidity of automobile crashes.

But as to the subpoint that vnm brings up, in #28 above: “that traffic itself is more of a deterrent to further traffic than rational pricing of street space or rational pricing of the environmental damage caused by cars”: that seems incredibly obvious.

Back when I had a car, I would from time to time drive downtown in the evenings to pick up my roommate, because it was quicker than the train, but I wouldn’t drive in to drop her off in the morning, when it was slower than the subway. Traffic kept me from driving, like Owen says. If the driving trip was always quicker than the subway trip, but cost $20, I might have driven more often in the mornings, because it would have been more convenient than the subway and cheaper than a taxi.

It’s pretty important not to confuse the two issues, because doing so can lead to wacky things like calling traffic jams the “solution” to the environmental impacts of driving.

I agree with Katie that congestion pricing won’t bring huge benefits in conventional environmental terms like carbon or air emissions or even fewer crashes. In most of the scenarios that are pre-modeled in the BTA, these “enviro” benefits are eclipsed (slightly) by physical-activity benefits and dwarfed by time-saving benefits. (See graph in the Cost-Benefit worksheet.) As an inveterate contrarian, I kind of dig that. What’s maddening about Owen’s article is his insistence, at least some of the time, that congestion pricing won’t solve congestion, a position that is plain untrue and cried out for rebuttal.

Here’s an author who is very concerned that overuse of the automobile is killing our planet / nation, a sentiment most on this board would agree with. As a remedy, he proposes that much of the rest of the nation come to look and act more like the city those of us on this board call home and are seeking to improve further.

As a sub-point to his message that we need to reduce auto-dependence, he throws out an idea that traffic itself is more of a deterrent to further traffic than rational pricing of street space or rational pricing of the environmental damage caused by cars. This ill-informed and perhaps hastily arrived-at point is the one seized upon by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

I think we should not fixate too much on this one baffling excerpt, and instead look to the overall message that sustainability begins and ends with cities like New York. “In a world of nearly 7 billion people and counting, sustainability, if it can be achieved,” he writes, “will look a lot more like midtown Manhattan than like rural Vermont.”

Check it out – http://www.scribd.com/doc/19400824/Welfare-Economics-and-Congestion-Pricing

A street or road moves the most traffic when the cars are moving at 30 – 50 km/h or so. If the traffic slows down or comes to a standstill, that means throughput is falling. That means fewer cars.

If a congestion charge gets traffic moving again, letting traffic go faster, that means throughput is higher. That means more cars.

I know that’s not the result from London and Stockholm, where car traffic fell after putting in the congestion charge. That tells me they are charging more than what’s needed to keep traffic moving. Which is fine with me, because it makes the city more livable.

This explains why the “bizarre patterns of thinking on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages” appeared, “still more bizarrely,” in an op-ed whose “author was New Yorker writer David Owen, promoter of the commonsensical idea that urban density is energy-efficient, hence big cities are green.”

J Lai, yes, I noticed that we were making a similar point, and I assumed it was a crossed post.

the estimate for the summer streets ents was as much 200,000 (0.2 million) people which was essentially one street and not at capacity.