Photo: @10/Flickr

Worsened gridlock follows automatically from making curbside parking cheaper. The lessened likelihood of being served a parking ticket can be expected to draw more auto trips into Manhattan and around town as well. The added congestion isn’t huge; most car trips not made are on account of other factors, and only a tenth of all parking tickets are being assumed away. But the impact will be visible.

Most of the estimated 334,000 hours lost, around 85 percent, will come from drivers outside the Manhattan Central Business District, putting an ironic stamp on Council Member Tish James’ reminder to the mayor that his narrow re-election was “a call from average New Yorkers for relief.”

Note: Readers who want to check the analysis in the BTA should head to the Parking worksheet, a dozen tabs from the back.

Congestion pricing paired with a significant taxi surcharge would speed cab trips and boost Manhattan's transit funding contribution. Photo: Bill in STL/Flickr.

A side benefit is that the discouragement of taxi use due to the surcharge should cause travel speeds in Manhattan to rise, saving time for car and truck drivers and bus passengers. With some taxi trips switching to subway or bus, transit farebox revenues will go up as well. But the surcharge is so slight -- around 5 percent of a typical fare -- that these gains will barely be perceptible: a mere 0.1-0.2 percent rise in Manhattan travel speeds and a $2-$3 million-per-year rise in transit revenues, according to the BTA. And any increase in taxi cruising to make up for the lost fares would cut into the minuscule improvement in traffic.

While the press bewails the surcharge's impact on taxi users, the people likely to suffer the most are the drivers, who on average can be expected to turn 1½ to 2 fewer fares a week. Losing $20-$25 in weekly revenue may not seem like much, but it's a bitter pill for drivers who can barely pay off their medallion leases as it is. Indeed, the taxi surcharge, enacted by the legislature as an afterthought to the "mobility (payroll) tax" last spring, may do to drivers what the new taxi credit card payment system reportedly has not: drive them to the wall, economically.

Does this mean that surcharging taxi fares to pay for transit is categorically a bad idea? Decidedly not. I'm prepared to argue that a taxi surcharge a good deal larger than 50 cents per ride is essential to the political and logistical success of congestion pricing. At the same time, congestion pricing is essential to making a taxi surcharge fair for taxi drivers and passengers. With, and only with, a cordon toll, will Manhattan traffic improve sufficiently that cabbies can book more fares per shift, not fewer. Moreover, the same speedup will enable users to save valuable time, partially compensating them for the surcharge and ensuring that the taxi sector stays robust.

To grasp these synergies, consider a variable toll to drive into the Manhattan Central Business District of $3 to $9 on weekdays and $2 to $4 on weekends, with the revenues used to cut transit fares roughly in half. Residents of Queens and Brooklyn would pony up 45 cents of every dollar in new toll revenue, because of tolls on the East River bridges. Manhattanites would contribute less than 7 cents of each dollar, less than residents of Nassau County, Staten Island and the Bronx, yet would reap most of the benefits of quieter and safer streets, cleaner air, and faster bus service.

Such a plan would be DOA in Albany. Indeed, I would argue that this very imbalance between beneficiaries and benefactors helped doom the Bloomberg cordon fee in 2008 and the Ravitch bridge tolls this year.

Now take the same toll plan and add a 33 percent taxi surcharge -- yes, a one-third increase in the mileage rate, the waiting time rate and the "drop." Instantly, Manhattan residents -- who comprise an estimated three-fourths of medallion taxi users -- would see their payment share nearly quadruple to 25 percent. Brooklyn and Queens residents' share would shrink from 45 percent without the taxi surcharge to 28 percent with it. The borough-inequity argument largely disappears.

Not only that, the taxi surcharge revenue, a cool $400-$500 million according to the BTA, could allow transit officials to eliminate bus fares. Free buses would be a particular boon in distant precincts where subway lines don't reach. As well, the rise in the taxi fare would offset the fall in the "time cost" of taxi service due to the decrease in auto traffic, and keep new taxi trips from inundating the CBD. Total use of medallion cabs would stay roughly constant under this integrated plan, with the reduction in gridlock enabling drivers to handle an extra 15-20 fares per week without booking more hours.

As for the effect on taxi users, the BTA indicates that the integrated plan outlined here would add $2.16 to the price of the average CBD cab trip while shortening the ride by 1.8 minutes. In other words, passengers pay $1.20 per minute saved -- a steep rate, for most of us, and it would be steeper for trips that venture outside the CBD, where the travel time savings would be smaller, percentage-wise. Even with a cordon toll, then, taxi surcharges can't be sold to riders as an unalloyed win-win, although riders could help themselves by cab-pooling and prioritizing their taxi use.

Of course, taxi surcharges are still justified as a means of internalizing the "social delay" costs of vehicle traffic on congested streets. They're most fair and effective, though, when coupled with cordon tolling.

Photo: cunningsue/Flickr

MTA chief Jay Walder floated the idea of off-peak discounts in an interview in today's New York Times. While Walder didn't offer quantification, the Balanced Transportation Analyzer software model I've developed with Ted Kheel can estimate the effects of time-varied subway fares -- not just how ridership might shift from peak to off-peak periods, but indirect impacts such as the shift of auto trips to transit and the resulting changes to car travel speeds.

The results look promising for this prototype fare structure that I tested with the BTA:

• 1/3-off subway fare from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.
• 1/6-off subway fare from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and 7:00 to 11:00 p.m.
• 15 percent higher subway fare from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. (Although Walder referred only to off-peak discounts, the model suggests that forestalling an increase in ridership during the two peak hours, when the system is strained beyond capacity, could require raising fares at those times.)
• No fare change during the "shoulder" hours of 7:00 to 8:00 a.m., 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., and 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
• 1/4-off subway fare at all hours on weekends and holidays.
• 1/4-off bus fare at all times (not mentioned by Walder but assumed here to preserve overall fare parity).

Here are the results:

• The average price of a subway ride drops by 23 percent, equivalent to a $210 annual savings for a typical straphanger who takes 12 trains a week.
  
• Notwithstanding the overall discount, however, peak-hour subway users who could not change their commute times would pay $100 a year more in fares.
  
• Annual savings of $230 for bus riders, due to the assumed 25 percent drop in bus fares.
• Subway usage increases 3 percent, even as morning and evening peak hour ridership drops by 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively, slightly easing crowding during those critical times.
  
• Bus usage increases 5 percent.
• 15,000 fewer cars enter the Manhattan CBD on weekdays, raising average speeds there by 2 percent.
• Car and truck drivers save six million hours of travel time worth an estimated $230 million that they now lose to gridlock each year -- with a majority of the savings occurring outside the CBD.
• A rise in cycle and pedestrian commuting due to lower traffic, with the resulting increase in physical activity translating into health and longevity benefits worth an additional $116 million a year.
• Fewer crashes and less pollution, with health and related benefits close to $100 million a year.
  

The downside of this program is an estimated $300 million drop in farebox revenues: $134 million on the subways, $162 million on buses.

The logical place to make up the shortfall, congestion pricing, is a subject Walder will obviously want to avoid until he is on even firmer political footing. The synergies are strong from a technical standpoint, since differential subway pricing would help the subways absorb car drivers whom a cordon toll would induce to switch to transit. The political synergies could be strong as well if differential fares help expand the constituency for congestion pricing.

[A] cordon-pricing plan … which doesn't charge center-city residents could result in an increase in those residents' automobile use. If the streets are free of outer-borough traffic, more of my Manhattan neighbors might drive to work, or simply make extra automobile trips within the cordon that without CP [congestion pricing], they would have made by subway or taxi.

Jonathan's right: Any Manhattan cordon-pricing scheme will lead to an uptick in car trips that start and end within the charging zone. It's one of those "rebound effects" that congestion-price modeling needs to account for, and which I've taken pains to incorporate in my Balanced Transportation Analyzer pricing model.

Indeed, I daresay that the BTA handles just about every issue ever raised on this blog about congestion pricing. How many transit users will switch to cabs? Will variable tolls really flatten rush-hour peaks? Won't faster roads lure back the trips killed off by the toll (Owen's conundrum)? And many more.

Technically, the BTA is a spreadsheet. But I think of it as a vast mansion, whose 46 interlinked "rooms" (worksheets) are stocked with precious data and ingenious algorithms for cracking open questions like these:

• How does congestion on weekends compare with weekdays?
• How sharply do traffic speeds rise as volumes fall?
• Which boroughs and counties stand to pay the most with congestion pricing?
• Will a cordon toll lead to more bicycling, and will that improve public health?
• Can decommissioning vehicle lanes increase congestion pricing's benefits?
• Which will boost transit use more: lower fares or better service?
• How many fares does a cabbie get in a ten-hour taxi shift, with and without pricing?

Multiply that list a hundredfold and you get a sense of the BTA's hidden treasures.

I say "hidden" because, except for a few mavens like "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, who calls it "the best [modeling] tool that I have seen in my nearly 40 years," the Balanced Transportation Analyzer remains largely untapped by advocates. To me, it's as if we're all starving while this rich storehouse next door goes to waste.

Which prompts me to ask: Why is the BTA so underused? Is our community missing out on a valuable tool? What should we do about it?

Let's make this an open thread, with emphasis on what can we do together to make the BTA more accessible and useful to New York's livable streets community. (The model is adaptable to other cities, so those of you not from NYC are also invited.)

As for Jonathan's question: the BTA shows that over the course of a typical weekday, 72 percent of all vehicle miles traveled inside the Manhattan Central Business District are by cars, trucks and buses that have crossed into the CBD, either at 60th Street or across the Hudson or East Rivers, and thus would pay the congestion toll. The remaining 28 percent of VMT is mostly by medallion taxicabs (22 percent). Cars and trucks that stayed within the cordon zone and couldn't be tolled accounted for just 6 percent of all CBD traffic. (All this is derived and shown in the table at the bottom of the BTA's "Cordon" worksheet.)

This tells us that: 1) Even if "intrazonal" traffic rises sharply, as Jonathan fears, it will add relatively little VMT because it's such a small share of overall cordon traffic to begin with; and 2) rather than fret over the free pass for intrazonal trips (which are impractical to toll with current technology), congestion pricing needs a strategy to stop a surge in taxicab use from filling the newly freed road space.

The plan currently advocated by Ted Kheel and myself does just that. It combines a 33 percent surcharge on all three taxi-fare components -- mileage, waiting time, and the "drop" -- with time-variable car tolls of $3/$6/$9 on weekdays and $2/$3/$4 on weekends (trucks pay double, reflecting their greater bulk, while medallion cabs are exempt from the toll but pay the surcharge). Under this Kheel-Komanoff Plan, intrazonal VMT is predicted to rise by approximately 120,000 miles a day -- 40,000 by cars and trucks, 80,000 by taxicabs. But cordon VMT by vehicles coming from outside, and thus tolled, falls far more, by 450,000. This yields a net drop in cordon travel of 330,000 VMT, an 8 percent decline that, the model predicts, will boost average travel speeds within the CBD by around 20 percent.

The point of this post isn't to advocate for a particular plan, however. It's to show that rebound effects and other asserted congestion-toll pitfalls can be modeled and, with the right plan, accommodated.

The figures are based on 2007 traffic levels. Current volumes are probably slightly less. While a decrease in "baseline" traffic cuts into the benefits of congestion pricing, both the saved time and new transit revenue predicted for Kheel-Komanoff are still striking. And, yes, if you want to test our pricing plan (or your own) with reduced baseline traffic, the BTA even has a switch to adjust the volume.

Photo: The Wall Street Journal

For some reason Owen has taken a dislike to congestion pricing, and it has led him to construct an elaborate Rube Goldberg argument to prove that congestion pricing leads to more driving:

If reducing [congestion] merely makes life easier for those who drive, then the improved traffic flow can actually increase the environmental damage done by cars, by raising overall traffic volume, encouraging sprawl and long car commutes.

What a lovely paradox … and how ridiculous, as Owen could have discovered by giving London’s congestion pricing experience (or Stockholm’s or Singapore’s) more than a cursory glance.

As any student of urban traffic now knows, London’s cordon pricing scheme cut traffic within the charging zone an average of 15 percent, raised travel speeds 30 percent, and greatly expanded bus ridership and cycle commuting — with little increase in traffic outside the zone or other negative effects. Nearly seven years on, the reasons are fairly obvious:

• Raising the price to drive into the center of London made car commuting less attractive.
• The gain in driving speeds attracted some new trips but not so many as to cancel the lost ones.
• Bus transit benefited from a virtuous cycle in which improved speeds attracted riders, further reducing traffic and also financing service improvements which attracted still more riders, further reducing traffic, etc.
• Ditto for cycling, though here the synergy was via safety in numbers.

All this was intuited back in the day by Transport for London staff, including Jay Walder, who has subsequently become the new MTA chief. The only uncertainty was the extent to which new car trips attracted by the time savings would undercut the reduction in trips from the congestion charge.

As it happened, some “induced traffic,” as Owen might have termed it, did materialize, but at far less than the one-for-one rate he assumed in his article. Without it, the drop in traffic might have been 20 percent or more. But the actual equilibrium, a settled 15 percent reduction in cordon traffic, was robust enough to achieve the desired results: faster travel by every mode, greater use of transit, and less VMT (vehicle miles traveled). Congestion pricing is indeed green.

To trace Owen’s error, look no further than his hypothesis: “If reducing [congestion] merely makes life easier for those who drive …”

Emphasis added; the “merely” is quite important. When the reduction in traffic is caused by a congestion charge, life is not just easier for those who continue driving but more costly as well. Yes, there’s a seesaw between price effects and time effects, but setting the congestion price at the right point will rebalance the system toward less driving, without harming the city's economy.

What's that right price point, then? It's not quite rocket science to figure it out, though it does take some thinking (not to mention continual tinkering if exogenous reductions in road capacity erode the original congestion benefits, as TfL reported recently). It's a subject Ted Kheel and I have in fact been thinking about for quite a while now, and if you would like to do some thinking about it too, start with our Balanced Transportation Analyzer and contact us with questions or criticisms (email: kea AT igc.org).

In his piece, Owen linked former Londoner and current MTA honcho Walder with the idea of congestion pricing. One can't help wondering whether he or the Journal intended it as a pre-emptive strike against a possible renewed push for congestion pricing in New York City. Whatever the motivation, it’s disappointing to see a writer who has rightly urged Americans to “live closer” peddling the defeatist — and false — notion that the price of urban virtue is eternal gridlock.

From the first (and only) town-hall meeting of the Manhattan Borough President’s Planning for Pedestrians Council in 1987, to Manhattan Community Board 8’s “Bicycle Forum” this week, I’ve sat through innumerable gatherings on cyclist-pedestrian conflicts.

Cycling and pedestrian advocates, with Charles Komanoff at left, gather on the UES in 2007. Photo: Jonathan Barkey

The CB 8 forum on Tuesday evening did have hopeful elements, however. Local residents wanting more bike and pedestrian infrastructure and fewer cars outnumbered those who wanted cyclists put in their place. None of the five elected officials in attendance played the anti-bike card; all seemed receptive to the livable streets agenda. And one or two attendees who professed to be terrified by bicycles even took pains to support bike lanes.

Some highlights:

• Deputy Borough President Rosemonde Pierre-Louis “commend[ing] City DOT and Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan for their visionary work to make New York City more walkable and bikeable.” (City Council Member Jessica Lappin had a more guarded version of the same message.)
• Council Member Daniel Garodnick deflecting criticism from a pro-congestion pricing audience member by insisting he had been a “strong, outspoken supporter” of Mayor Bloomberg’s toll plan and, by implication, could be counted on to champion traffic pricing in the future.
  
• A diverse collection of Upper East Siders — a 50-something male attorney who has cycled to work for decades, a young woman who recently took up bike-commuting, a female African-American community board member, and a husky pedestrian who pronounced himself too un-coordinated to ride a bike — passionately and eloquently speaking up for cycling and cycle facilities. Here are some of their remarks:

“Cycling makes me healthy.”
“After biking to work, I feel good all day.”
“Cycling is saving my life.”
“Broadway is really great, Second Avenue is awful.”
“Summer Streets was fabulous.”
“There’s been nothing to teach people how to use these new streets.”
“A message should be sent by the community board to the District Attorney and the NYPD that there needs to be a re-evaluation of our priorities to protect cyclists and pedestrians.”

Okay, it wasn’t all a lovefest. There were these complaints from several women of a certain age, CB 8 members all:

“Transit is a priority, cars are a priority, bikes are not a priority.”
“The thought of having double, triple, quadruple the number of cyclists terrifies me.”
“The bicyclists have become the darlings of the [Bloomberg] administration, even though the number of bicyclists is a rounding error compared to the number of fire engines, buses and taxis.”
“One day we woke up to find all these circles and lines on our streets.”
“You’re afraid to go outside … You can’t be sure you’re not going to be killed [by a bicyclist].”
“I’d like to see bicycles registered and bicyclists licensed.”

None of the electeds took up the call for registering bikes. NYS Assembly Member Jonathan Bing and NYS Senator Liz Krueger did call on Albany to stiffen penalties for restaurants whose delivery cyclists flout laws against riding on sidewalks. Lappin has a local law in the works to allow the city to penalize the owners of restaurants and other businesses whose delivery staff ride on sidewalks or violate one-way rules or red lights. A hearing on her Intro. 624 is set for 10 a.m. next Thursday.

Garodnick has a bill pending, Intro. 813, to require the NYPD to post delivery-bicycle violations on line “to help send a message and give restaurants a reason to improve their practices.” Garodnick is also drafting legislation to increase penalties for operating motorized bicycles, which in his view are becoming more common (I agree), on sidewalks.

My verdict on the forum? The pervasive tonedeafness toward bikes (e.g., transportation committee co-chair Jonathan Horn categorizing all cyclists as either recreational or delivery) would have dumbfounded a visitor from Portland or Copenhagen. Any practitioner of risk management or harm reduction would have been appalled by the electeds’ indifference to motorized mayhem. And it’s still possible that the make-the-bikes-go-away ladies will carry the day at the October 7 CB 8 Transportation Committee meeting, when issues raised at the forum get turned into resolutions.

There was also a disconnect between the officials’ insistence that “pedestrians’ grievances about bikes is one of our top complaints” (Garodnick) and the sparse turnout (around 50, many of whom were pro-bike). Still, I came away feeling that, unlike 22 years ago, the embattled minority isn’t cyclists but the anti-bikes. We may never get them to turn against autos, but we might, finally, be outnumbering and out-organizing them.

The occasion was publication of Bicycle Diaries, Byrne’s idiosyncratic meditation on cities, urban form, culture and fashion, distilled through his three decades as touring musician and bicycle tourist. In the introduction, Byrne writes of navigating New York and other cities a velo, as both a smart way of getting around and a means to a fresh vantage point:

This point of view -- faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person -- became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years -- and it still is.

Byrne "came out" as an urban bike advocate a few years ago and periodically does events with Transportation Alternatives. Over the years, too, his artistic focus has branched out from art-rock innovator to world-music collaborator and design philosopher. Inviting DOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan and TA head honcho White on stage allowed Byrne to serve his twin impulses of advocate and curator.

Byrne’s presentation drew on his mordant photos of dreary cityscapes drained of human activity. “Most of America is like this,” he intoned over scenes of empty boulevards and ghoulish strip malls, mixed with design images from brutalist architect Le Corbusier (“We must kill the streets”), which Byrne likened to termite mounds. “We’re not termites,” he insisted, invoking livable streets deity Jane Jacobs before turning over the mic to the professionals.

Sadik-Khan’s affectionately titled slide show, “NYC’s Bicycle Diaries, 2007-2009,” offered a stirring response to Byrne's plea to city shapers to stop “separating everyone in separate pockets.” Insisting that streets be “places of social exchange” as well as of movement, Sadik-Khan located cycling infrastructure in a larger context of World Class Streets that includes walkability, better transit and fewer cars. Her parade of heartening statistics on new bike lane miles, burgeoning cycling volumes, and fewer pedestrian injuries on bike-laned streets flew by too quickly to jot down. What lingers is Sadik-Khan’s passionate regard for cycling as key to a more humane city, and her zeal to grow and defend all DOT has wrought in her two-and-a-half years at the helm.

White picked up Byrne’s riff in Bicycle Diaries about “the aura of uncoolness and the danger” of NYC cycling in the punk era, and traced cycle culture’s progression from “freak” to “geek” to today’s nascent “chic.” With cycling finally entering the mainstream, it’s time, White declared, for cyclists to retire their outlaw persona and adhere to the pedestrian-friendly street code in TA’s Biking Rules. He also exhorted the crowd to defend the embattled Grand Street bike lane against grandstanding politicians: “Call [Comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate] Bill Thompson (212-608-6555) and tell him that safety is not negotiable on NYC streets.”

The audience questions -- all earnest and mostly from women -- brought out the visionary in Byrne. (From the next seat, my middle-school son made me promise not to sing out, “My building bike lane has every convenience / It’s gonna make life easy for me.”) To a recent arrival from Amsterdam (“I’m really amazed that in a short period of time, so much positive change has been made in the City of New York... What’s to prevent a new mayor from taking that away?”), Byrne replied, “If we can get a third of the people biking to work, like in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, it would be pretty hard to turn that around.” To a questioner worn down by internecine cyclist-pedestrian conflict, Byrne offered this: “We’ve gone through eight or ten years of a bully culture -- on Wall Street, in politics. I think we’re turning a corner.”

Ed Fay: time-polluter and proud of it. Photo: Daily News.

I decided that I'm not going to give the transicrats another cent to get to and from work. The MTA has stuck it to all of us countless times over the years and now it was time for me to pay them back. I will personally screw them out of $1,000 over the next year.

The ironies are many. For one thing, Fay could offset that toll hike three times over by signing up with E-ZPass, but he swears by cash. For another, since straphangers are a big part of the dwindling market for the daily paper, you could say that Fay’s rebellion undermines his employer by shrinking NYC Transit's take from the toll revenues. There’s also the fact that in stiffing the MTA Fay is paying a stiff price in lost time; by his own estimate, detouring around the tolls adds 15 minutes each way to his commute. As one Streetsblog commenter pointed out, Fay implicitly values his own commuting time at not much more than the minimum wage.

But Fay’s biggest grotesquerie is his obliviousness to the consequences of his commute for other drivers. By my estimation, an average 11-mile rush-hour car trip into the Manhattan Central Business District and back out again creates three to four hours of aggregate delays to all the other people trying to get around in cars, trucks and buses on the same roads at the same time. (With the recessionary drop in traffic, that figure is currently somewhat lower, but it’s also higher in Fay’s case if most of his return trips take place in the p.m. peak.)

By choosing to car-commute daily into the CBD, Mr. Screw-the-MTA is mostly screwing his fellow drivers.

And this is true whether Fay drives on local streets or ponies up the $3 bridge toll ($2.09 with E-ZPass). To be sure, those three to four hours of delay are spread among thousands of drivers, no one of which loses more than 10 or 20 seconds queued behind Fay’s automobile at each stoplight or highway ramp. And his contribution to traffic delays is no greater than that of anyone else who drives in the same places at the same time.

What’s different is Fay’s glee. He’s spewing pollution, not so much from his tailpipe (autos rank relatively low in emissions these days), but "time pollution," by stealing precious minutes and seconds from his fellow New Yorkers. And he’s proud of it:

Each night I add $6 to the pile. And when the pile gets to $1,000 -- about eight months from now -- I'll take my family out for a spectacular dinner and raise a glass toasting the bloated bums at the MTA and the toll increase that sent me over the edge.

Fay's bluster notwithstanding, I’ll wager that after the big blowout he'll tire of rat-running and revert to the toll bridge. After all, even if he makes “just” $100,000 a year at the News and values his commute time at only half his imputed hourly pay, he’s still trading $12.50 worth of time each day to save a measly $6.00. But that return to sanity won’t solve the systemic dysfunction by which anyone choosing to make a single car-trip to and from the CBD can impose $100 in societal delay costs but pay just $5 or $10 in tolls themselves.

What Fay confronts us with is nothing less than the moral imperative of congestion pricing. Decisions that impose large delay costs on others demand commensurate charges. These need not begin at full-price. Congestion fees on the order of one-tenth of the full cost, as Ted Kheel and I propose (with revenues allocated to benefit transit), would be an excellent start. Let Ed Fay, time-polluter, pay.

Photo of M14 bus: Kriston Lewis/Flickr.

• MTA Bus engineers recently clocked "dwell time" -- those maddening seconds and minutes taken up by passenger boarding -- on the Bx12 Limited route from 207th Street to Co-op City. A typical run takes 56 minutes and 17 seconds, with passenger stops consuming 16 minutes and 16 seconds -- nearly 30 percent. The engineers found that doing away with fare collection could slash dwell time on the Bx12 to 2 minutes 36 seconds: an 84 percent reduction and a 24 percent saving in total trip time.
• The combination of free fare and speedier service -- including less waiting, since faster buses would arrive more quickly -- would attract many more riders. We estimate 28 percent more (16 percent from the fare savings, 12 percent from the time savings).
• The 28 percent gain in ridership wouldn’t require more buses, even on crowded routes, since the average fare-free bus would travel 32 percent faster. (That 24 percent time saving equates mathematically to a 32 percent speedup.) In effect, absent the human gridlock to collect fares, buses could complete four runs in the time it now takes to do three.

To be sure, these numbers aren't fully proven. The speed gains were measured on one bus route among hundreds, and the imputed boosts to ridership are based on elasticity studies from years ago. But the numbers make intuitive sense. And they're certainly impressive. We place the time savings to bus riders alone at $460 million a year, even valuing passengers' time at a meager nine bucks an hour. The additional travel-time savings to motorists from attracting even a modest number of drivers to transit buses would probably be worth far more.

The mayor says his proposal might not cost NYC Transit much since most crosstown bus passengers are free transfers from subways. The story citywide is probably different, though. We estimate that free buses in all five boroughs would cost $740 million a year (after netting $30 million now spent maintaining farebox machinery). How could this lost revenue be made up?

One way would be a modest weekday congestion charge to drive into the Manhattan Central Business District: $6 during peak hours, $2 overnight, and $4 in-between, charged inbound only. That’s just one option; others can be seen by inputting various congestion prices into the Balanced Transportation Analyzer spreadsheet. (All figures in this article are derived from and sourced in the BTA; start with the "Bus Boarding" worksheet.)

Ted Kheel views free buses as a down payment toward universal free transit in NYC, financed largely through a fair congestion charge. With his more limited proposal, a down payment toward Kheel's, Mayor Bloomberg has taken the first step toward realizing that vision.

Hike 1, the 10-12 percent rise in subway, bus and rail fares set to take effect within a month, is a fait accompli. But Hikes 2 and 3, set for 2011 and 2013, are fair game. With municipal and state elections in the offing this year and next, the timing couldn't be better.

Hikes 2 and 3 are each intended to net $400 to $500 million annually. A geographically balanced traffic-pricing plan can replace that, no sweat. The MTA rescue plan I laid out in March, featuring a time-varied ($1-$2-$3-$4-$5) price to drive into the Manhattan CBD (charged inbound only) along with a 20 percent taxi fare surcharge, would bring in $1 billion a year. The plan can be ratcheted up as need warrants and politics allow.

I know, I know -- tolls have already failed, twice. But the Bloomberg and Ravitch Plans were grossly skewed, with a Jersey exemption and a Manhattan free pass, among other failings. The messengers, through no fault of their own, were flawed as well.

Rather than a billionaire mayor or another permanent-government state commission, we need a popular movement made up of straphangers, bus riders, truckers and tradespeople (who will easily make up the CBD toll in saved time), business interests, pedestrians and cyclists -- a true New York majority. And we should start posing the question now, as the 2009 municipal elections get in gear: Which should the MTA toll -- transit users or traffic?

It is true that the recession has eased traffic congestion. By how much is hard to say, but if vehicle volumes are down 5 percent, the drop in gridlock -- time stuck in traffic -- may be as great as 10 percent citywide and 20 percent within the CBD. When the Albany deal was revealed this week, a policy savant told me it demonstrated "the lack of political support for reducing traffic congestion." He may be right, but I believe that as fare hikes and a general economic recovery restore car use to prior levels, gridlock will again matter.

The German social thinker Wolfgang Sachs drilled to the heart of gridlock several decades ago:

Once a certain traffic density is surpassed, every driver contributes involuntarily to a slowing of traffic. The time that the individual driver steals from all the others by slowing them down is greater many times over than the time he or she might have hoped to gain by taking the car. (emphasis added)

Sachs’ "theft of time" can now be quantified. Using the Balanced Transportation Analyzer computer model I’ve developed with transit advocate Ted Kheel, I estimate it to average almost three hours per weekday car round-trip into the CBD and back home. Meaning: each additional weekday drive into the Manhattan Central Business District imposes aggregate delays on all other motor vehicle users totaling nearly three hours (more for peak-period trips, less for off-peak). Applying an estimated per-vehicle cost of $35-40 per hour spent in NYC traffic (a blend of costs for 18-wheelers, plumbers’ vans, private cars, etc.), the societal "time cost" imposed by each car trip into and out of the CBD is around $100.

(Note: figures in the previous paragraph are derived in the BTA worksheets, "Delay Costs" and "Value of Time," and were revised by the author in August, 2009 to reflect modeling refinements following the May 7, 2009 appearance of this post.)

This “theft of time” by auto trips into the CBD should form one moral basis for our transportation reform campaign. The other, of course, is the need to prevent any further burdening of hard-pressed working people with the MTA’s financial failings.

Ted, who turns 95 on Saturday, has said that if he were younger he would run for mayor on this platform. Here’s a Plan “B”: The advocates who fought valiantly for the Ravitch Plan unite behind a new, effective and equitable approach such as the traffic-pricing plan outlined here -- one that breaks, finally, the triple hell of spiraling fares, traffic gridlock, and the legislature’s tyranny over mass transit. Candidates run for City Council and state legislature on this plan, and we elect them.

1. East and Harlem River bridge tolls of $2.16 each way with EZ Pass, $2.50 without.
2. 50-cent taxi fare surcharge.
3. A higher tax rate on parking in Manhattan.
4. Revenue from (2) and (3), an estimated $150 million, to fund “toll mitigation rebates,” with details decided by a new commission to be established by the legislature.
5. (Unchanged: a regional payroll tax of 33 cents on each $100 of earnings.)

I figure the net take from the tolls at around $600 million, or a few hundred million less than from the original Ravitch proposal of $5 East River and $2 Harlem River tolls. The higher tax on lots and garages portends more cruising for parking, and, what's worse, that new Toll Mitigation Entitlement Commission would establish a bad precedent: bureaucrat-approved rebates for "deserving" bridge commuters.

It’s tempting to lay the blame for these moves on Albany, particularly the handful of senators who torpedoed the original Ravitch tolls and their colleagues who then backed away from the heart of the transit rescue package: the payroll tax being counted on to generate $1.6-$1.7 billion a year for the MTA. But in the past month, the Ravitch Commission has taken a pass on two proposed amendments that just might make its plan politically palatable.

One is to modulate the payroll tax rate so that the suburbs pay less. A source close to the Ravitch Commission estimates that lowering the tax rate to 22 cents per $100 for businesses in Nassau and Westchester and to 11 cents for the five exurban MTA counties (Suffolk, Putnam, Rockland, Orange and Dutchess) would reduce the tax revenues by just 13%, or $215 million. That’s a giveback that wavering lawmakers could sell as a win but that doesn’t torpedo the plan as a whole.

The other amendment would replace the Ravitch bridge tolls with a traffic-pricing plan that does three things the Ravitch tolls don’t do: (1) make Manhattan (and New Jersey) residents pay, (2) give drivers choices, and (3) save drivers time. Here’s how it works:

• One-way tolls of $1 or $2 or $3 or $4 or $5 to drive into the CBD (Manhattan south of 60th Street); the toll rate varies with time of day and weekday vs. weekend (nets $690 million a year).
• No cordon toll for taxis, but a 20% surcharge on all medallion taxi fares (nets $300 million, after assigning one-tenth of the surcharge revenues to drivers and owners)

(Click here for the Balanced Transportation Analyzer spreadsheet showing details.)

Why might this toll plan be a winner? First, drivers get a toll choice, and their round-trip toll averages less than the proposed East River bridge tolls -- around $3.50 versus $4.50. Second, drivers get valuable time savings: the estimated 10% speedup in traffic within the CBD means that on a typical peak-period (weekday 6-9 a.m.) trip into the CBD, a driver whose time is worth $45 an hour saves enough minutes to more than offset the $5 toll. Third, “outer borough” residents and Long Islanders see their toll burdens drop by a quarter to a half, while Manhattan residents’ contribution to the revenues almost quadruples, from under 7% to 26%, and New Jersey’s rises from 1% to more than 10%. Tourists chip in too, through the taxi surcharge.

Neither the graduated payroll tax nor the traffic-pricing proposal is exactly revolutionary. Indeed, both fit perfectly with the overall Ravitch conception of rescuing the MTA through a three-part program of fare hike + payroll tax + traffic tolls.

Pointing fingers at retrograde legislators has been cathartic and by all means let’s hold them accountable. But it’s time to also offer a better Ravitch Plan.

Using the Balanced Transportation Analyzer (BTA), I estimate that the fare hikes and service cuts which begin June 1 will:

• Add an average of 6 percent more waiting and travel time to bus and subway commutes; which will...
• cause 40,000 more autos to pile into the Manhattan Central Business District each day; which will...
• slow traffic by an average of 5 percent in the CBD and 1-2 percent across the City; costing...
• drivers, truckers and bus riders $600 million in lost time annually within the CBD, and probably $1.5 billion or more citywide.

The one-two punch of higher fares and less frequent service can be expected to shrink subway use by around 8 percent and bus ridership by 6 percent. This is a calamity not only to our city's vitality but for the MTA as well, since it cuts deeply into the very revenue these measures were supposed to generate. Indeed, the BTA model projects that the real gain in farebox revenues won't even reach $500 million -- well under half of the projected $1.2 billion deficit.

The key criteria by which New York City transportation policies are judged are driver expenses, rider expenses, driver travel times and rider travel times. The MTA and the legislature have managed to worsen three out of four -- and, for good measure, have aggravated others, such as traffic pollution and mayhem. A stopped clock could hardly have done worse.

Advocates spent four months in feverish but fruitless campaigning for a stopgap solution -- the Ravitch Plan -- that was buoyed more by Dick Ravitch's sterling reputation than by its intrinsic merits. Indeed, the plan was rife with inequities:

• Payrolls in exurban Dutchess County would be taxed at the same rate as those of transit-reliant New Yorkers.
• Most Bronx and Brooklyn drivers would pay new tolls and yet those driving in from New Jersey would not.
• Manhattan residents would garner much of the benefit from lighter traffic in the form of quieter streets and faster cab rides, yet they would pay little of the tolls.

In short, “shared sacrifice” was more rhetoric than reality. Plus, the Ravitch Plan offered no incentive to switch trips out of rush hours to less crowded travel times, in effect foreclosing on both choice and efficiency.

On the four criteria above, Ravitch offered not a single solid win. The plan was a Band-Aid, but the times demanded a major overhaul.

True, Albany is broken. Even a perfectly balanced plan would have faced tough sledding. Political reform is essential, but so too is recognizing that transit and traffic won’t get the needed makeover until they are addressed in a unified and broadened transportation vision.

Our plan rests on three powerful attributes: revenue generation, tolling equality, and sheer efficiency. We achieve these with an inclusive pricing model that asks drivers to pay a fee ranging from $2 to $10 upon entering the Central Business District with the price dependent on the time of day, and charges taxi passengers for their contribution to congestion as well.

The basics:

• Our toll plan generates $1.7 billion a year in revenue; that’s twice as much as the $800 million from Ravitch’s tolls, even though our top toll of $10 matches Ravitch’s $5 (we charge inbound only). As for Sheldon Silver’s $2 toll plan, it nets just $450 million.
• Our plan has no free riders; oops, make that free drivers. Jersey drivers pay the toll, drivers entering the CBD at 60th Street pay the toll, and Manhattanites pay the lion’s share of a 33 percent taxi fare surcharge that raises a quarter of our total revenue. Under the Ravitch and Silver plans, East River drivers who make only 36 percent of crossings into the CBD would be coughing up 60 percent of new toll revenues.
• Everyone wins something in our plan. Buses are free (paid for by $800 million of our $1.7 billion revenue pot). Straphangers get deep off-peak discounts (paid for by the rest -- though some of the reductions might need to be deferred to help stanch the MTA deficit) and a bit more elbow-room in rush hour due to peak-spreading. Drivers get a 20 percent traffic speed-up in the CBD (faster travel “upstream” too), while the variable toll offers a measure of choice.
• Free and faster-moving buses will achieve three goals. They’ll lure enough drivers and straphangers out of gridlocked streets and packed trains to ease crowding on both. By stopping drip-torture boarding that halts movement during Metrocard-swiping, they’ll traverse their routes fast enough to handle the influx. And they’ll provide a huge break to riders across the city, a disproportionate percentage of whom live in poorer, non-Manhattan neighborhoods.

Too good to be true? No, it’s real, the numbers have been checked and re-checked, the plan works.

Politically, who knows? It’s easy to shrug and say that if Albany can’t get it together to enact $2 tolls, there’s no chance for an ambitious plan like Kheel-Komanoff.

And yet … unlike the plans on the table, which impose tolls while giving little back (as did Mayor Bloomberg’s failed congestion pricing proposal), our plan is about gain, and freedom, and relief:

• Gain for the millions of transit riders who will enjoy better service and more spending money.
• Freedom from recurring fare hikes and service cuts.
• Significant relief from traffic congestion that frustrates drivers, dehumanizes our city and saps the economy.

Lately I’ve kept a low profile about our plan out of deference to Dick Ravitch and his well thought out plan that recognizes the gravity of the crisis. But Albany is so stuck, and the dialogue so stilted, that it seems time to air a bolder, more ambitious plan.

Since New Year’s, I’ve discussed the Kheel-Komanoff plan with dozens of electeds and advocates. The private response has been uniformly positive.

There may still be time to win a real hearing -- or at least infuse elements of our plan into Ravitch's. Let’s find each other now, before it’s too late.

It’s easy to dismiss City Councilmembers Lew Fidler and Peter Vallone, Jr. as transportation troglodytes. They’ve led the pushback against bridge tolls -- most recently at the City Council hearing this week on the Ravitch Commission recommendations -- yet neither has ever put forth a workable alternative for reducing job-killing, community-wrecking traffic congestion. Judging by their anti-toll rhetoric, you’d think that half their district drives to jobs in the Manhattan Central Business District, yet the actual percentages who do so are surprisingly meager: 5.3 percent for Fidler’s Brooklyn district and 4.4 percent for Vallone’s Queens district (plus another 1.7 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively, who carpool).

But in one respect, bridge-toll opponents may have a point: tolling equity. According to my calculations, 60 percent of the proposed Ravitch bridge tolls would be paid by Brooklyn and Queens residents. Yet these residents make only 36 percent of car trips into the CBD. The disparity would mean a hefty cross-subsidy -- worth a few hundred million dollars a year -- of the region's drivers by drivers from these two boroughs.

Whence the disparity? There are two sources. First, the Ravitch plan imposes no new tolls on auto trips into the Manhattan core that come from New Jersey and northern Manhattan; these constitute almost one-quarter of the total. Second, another 20% of trips into the CBD -- from Bronx, Westchester and other points north -- use one of the Harlem River bridges. Ravitch wants those drivers to pay less than half the standard MTA toll rate that would apply to the four East River crossings -- the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges.

Under the Bloomberg congestion pricing plan, Brooklyn and Queens actually bore a fairer share of the burden than in the Ravitch plan, in spite of Bloomberg's controversial “toll-net” provision that heavily discounted autos from New Jersey. Even so, under Bloomberg’s plan, auto trips from Brooklyn and Queens, 36 percent of the total into the CBD, would have accounted for 40 percent of toll revenues, making almost a 1-to-1 match-up. That may explain why Councilmember John Liu, from Queens, voted for the mayor’s plan but is blasting the bridge tolls provision in the Ravitch plan.

Was Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal the last word on geographical equity? Hardly. There’s no need for a cordon toll plan to include toll-nets. Nor should it give Manhattanites a free pass; an easy-to-administer surcharge on fares for medallion taxis, which are overwhelmingly used by Manhattan residents, could swell the toll-revenue pie and spread it over a broader population and income base.

Can’t someone fashion a plan along those lines? Hmm, maybe someone already has.

Author and son in 2005

"The madness just came to Grand Street as well, where a dangerous bike lane is shunned by any sane cyclist."

I take that personally, seeing as how just last Sunday, my teenage son and I used the Grand Street bike lane to ride from Hudson Square to the East Village.

The lane was great. The green paint, the arrows that mark the lane at intersections, and the strategic placement of the lane between the curb and the line of parked cars, evidently made it clear to our fellow New Yorkers that this was indeed a bicycle lane. For the entire distance, a good 3/4 of a mile, we only had to maneuver around one parked car and a handful of pedestrians.

Otherwise, it was smooth sailing, and a lot safer and more relaxing than the usual Sunday traffic mix. For me, it's no big deal, I'm an adult and have been cycling daily here for 35 years. But for my 14-year-old, who's still learning what it takes to maintain his legal right to the road in the face of swarms of cars and trucks, many of them operated heedlessly, the lane made a big difference.

I know the Post pays you to ridicule anything that deviates an inch from the USA-SUV norm; but how you can call the Grand Street bike lane dangerous is beyond me.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention where we were biking that day: to a movie house on East Houston Street to see "Man on Wire," the documentary film about Philippe Petit's 1974 wire-walk between the Twin Towers. The film is a testament to the human spirit and imagination -- the same spirit, I would say, that animates me as a cyclist, and the same imagination that is, finally, guiding the new DOT to create a bit of safe space for non-motorized vehicular travel in New York City.

Best,

Charles Komanoff (father of two, a New Yorker since 1968)

Too good to be true, right? But that's the slant of the front-page headline in today's Times, "Politics Failed, but Fuel Prices Cut Congestion":

Soaring gas prices and higher tolls seem to be doing for traffic in New York what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's ambitious congestion pricing was supposed to do: reducing the number of cars clogging the city’s streets and pushing more people to use mass transit.

The article reports that traffic on MTA bridges and tunnels within the city and the Port Authority's Hudson River crossings was down this spring by 4-5 percent compared with a year ago -- within hailing distance of the 6.3 percent drop sought by the mayor's plan.

Good news, but how much of the decline is due to the price of gas and how much to the toll increases that took effect around the same time?

I think that so far the tolls have been the bigger factor. Here's why: a typical round-trip into the Manhattan CBD uses between 1.3 and 1.4 gallons of gas (based on an average 22.6-mile round-trip distance and a stop-and-start 17 miles per gallon). Nationally, gas cost $3.65 this April-May and $3.05 a year earlier, for a year-to-year increase of 60 cents a gallon or just 80 cents per trip. The toll increase was a good deal higher than this, even accounting for trips into town via the free bridges.

Okay, hardly anyone does these calculations before deciding whether or not to drive. And perhaps $4 gas will start to act as a tipping point, making it socially acceptable to drive less and triggering larger defections from cars than the numbers would predict -- particularly in transit-rich environments like the New York region.

Could happen. But I wouldn't count on it. In recent years, the "elasticity" of gasoline consumption, as indicated by changes in usage relative to changes in pump prices, has been fairly constant across a wide range of price fluctuations. (See spreadsheet.) We'll know more on this score in a few months, when usage data corresponding to the $4 price become available.

The Times quotes traffic guru Sam Schwartz:

If we start eclipsing $5 a gallon, which we might over the summer, I think we might get very close [to the mayor's goal].

Gridlock Sam may be right. But what the article doesn't say is, first, whether that 6.3 percent drop in Manhattan traffic (and 1-2 percent citywide) is so momentous; and, second, which tool for cutting traffic is more desirable: a "market-driven" gasoline price rise that enriches the owners of petroleum, or a socially-decided road-pricing policy whose revenues would be available to improve transit.

Relying on punishingly high gas prices to undo a century of motorist-skewed traffic policies is like praying for a hailstorm to cure a drought. Congestion pricing, particularly via game-changing programs such as the Kheel Plan, remains essential for New York. 

Photo: dM.nyc™/Flickr

“In for a penny, in for a pound” is how the Brits express what we Americans less elegantly call “the whole hog”: why do something halfway when you might as well go all the way?

That’s the thinking behind Ted Kheel’s free-transit proposal. If an $8 congestion fee, as unsuccessfully proposed recently by Mayor Bloomberg, infuriated drivers, Kheel reasons, then let’s go the whole hog and charge $16 to drive into Manhattan. Drivers are already as mad as they’re going to get about any congestion charge. With $16, we won’t stir up twice as many hornets, but we’ll raise twice the revenue — enough to finance universal free transit throughout the five boroughs and disarm the faux-populists who sank Mayor Bloomberg’s more modest plan.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Bloomberg's plan appeared to too many people to be “all stick.” There wasn’t enough direct and concrete payoff, for anybody, to attract wide public support. The Kheel Plan remedies this defect with the very considerable, tangible, obvious "carrot" of free transit.

I was lead analyst and author of Kheel’s January report that first proposed this idea. As renowned environmental writer Bill McKibben tells it in an article in the current Plenty magazine, I initially thought Kheel’s idea of zeroing out farebox revenues was nutty. I quickly came around, however, drawn not just by visions of free transit and much less traffic but by the plan’s gorgeous synergies, such as this one for free buses: making bus-boarding fare-free speeds bus service which expands bus patronage which reduces driving which speeds bus service even more which further reduces driving.

Alas, the Kheel Plan surfaced too late to figure in the congestion pricing debate. But Kheel is unwavering. With an eye on next year’s municipal elections, he has commissioned me and programmer Michael Smith to upgrade the labyrinthine spreadsheet I created for his free-transit plan — the Balanced Transportation Analyzer.

The new computer model, BTA 2.0, will enable us — and everyone with a PC or Mac — to examine pricing scenarios that lay beyond the reach of the original spreadsheet, to wit:

• Time-variable congestion fees: instead of being locked into a straight $16 fee 24-7, we'll assess higher peak-periods fees along with offsetting, lower fees when traffic is light.
• Time-variable subway fares: we’ll test retaining the fare during the a.m. peak as a possible transition strategy to ease subway crowding and improve system efficiencies (buses will be free 24-7, regardless).
• Closer integration of parking pricing with road pricing.
• Possible differential tolls into the Central Business District by “portal” (New Jersey vs. Long Island vs. Bronx/Westchester).
• Intra-Manhattan congestion charging: according to some GPS developers, it may soon be possible to charge per-mile or per-minute for driving within the CBD; this would open the door to even more revenue and less traffic and further dispel the rap on congestion pricing as a giveaway to Manhattan.

Our plan is to roll out BTA 2.0 in early fall and offer a new and irresistible free transit + congestion pricing proposal, “Kheel Plan 2,” that can become a central issue in the 2009 mayoral and City Council races.

I’ll be discussing the old and new versions of the BTA on Tuesday at the monthly NYMTC brown bag lunch. NYMTC is the regional transportation planning agency, and my appearance Tuesday is a sign of both the BTA’s potential value as a public planning tool and of NYMTC’s evolving openness to new ideas. The focus will be on analysis rather than politics, but anyone who’d like to peer under the hood of this exciting work-in-progress is encouraged to attend.

Photo: gothamistllc / Flickr 

The Times reported Saturday that vehicle traffic on Port Authority bridges and tunnels declined by 2.9% in March, in the wake of toll increases that took effect on March 2. In typical bizarre fashion, the Times' lede asks, “Who needs congestion pricing when plain old toll increases seem to do the job?”

Why not this instead: "Dip in traffic after toll hike shows missed promise of congestion pricing"?

After all, the Hudson River portal accounts for just 18% of CBD-bound auto trips, according to traffic guru Brian Ketcham. So a 3% dip in traffic through that portal yields a measly one-half of one percent dip in total traffic into the Manhattan charging zone.

Message: just raising tolls on already-tolled facilities won’t do much to bust traffic. Who needs congestion pricing? NYC, obviously.

But there's value in the story nevertheless: the PA datum offers a means to estimate the price-elasticity of car travel into Manhattan, and thus to validate (or not) the congestion pricing plan that didn't make it, as well as alternatives like the Kheel Plan.

So put your math hats on boys and girls. Here goes.

By my numbers, the estimated average out-of-pocket cost to drive into Manhattan across the Hudson a few months ago was $28.75. That reflects a $5 toll, $3/gallon gas, and a 70% chance of paying market-rate parking in the CBD.

Now the P.A.’s $2 toll hike and the concurrent 25 cent-a-gallon rise in the price of gas have bumped up that cost by an average of $2.30, or 8.1%.

Voila. An average 8.1% rise in the cost of a drive-in commute has led to a 2.9% drop in travel. That translates to a 36% price-elasticity (since 2.9%/8.1% = 36%).

Okay, that’s a first-cut figure. It doesn’t account for the possibility that the worsening economy has damped down traffic, though I doubt the incipient recession was a big factor. But it also doesn’t reflect that some drivers take awhile to react to tolls, especially when their transactions are via credit card.

In my book, the 36% figure says that car use and traffic volumes are responsive to the price to drive. Not 1-for-1 responsive, but responsive nonetheless. Raise the price to drive — through tolls, gas taxes, parking pricing, whatever — and traffic will diminish.

The numbers also practically scream not to look to gas prices as a traffic solution. (Peak Oilers out there, are you listening?) The recent, latest hike in gas prices was barely a blip in the higher cost to drive and the consequent drop in Hudson River auto crossings.

Conclusion: Road pricing will raise the cost and reduce the frequency of driving into Manhattan faster and more permanently than events in the oil sector.

Photo: brandi666/Flickr 

Comrie is right -- $8 to drive into mid-Manhattan is nuts. The fee should be at least $40.

To see why, picture traffic as seen from Chopper 880. A car entering a crowded bridge like the Queensboro causes delays to hundreds of cars behind it; each individual car is delayed only briefly, but summed across the herd, it adds up.

I take my car across the Queensboro and thus cause, say, six seconds of slowdown for each of 600 cars behind me. That's 3,600 total delay seconds -- an hour of lost time. Some of those 600 I've held up are commuters, some are using their cars as part of their work, some are truckers making deliveries. So that hour is easily worth forty bucks or more.

In fact it's quite hard to say how many cars each drivers slows down, and by how much. But we do know the relationship between traffic volume and overall traffic speeds. That relationship is incorporated in the Balanced Transportation Analyzer (BTA) software I created recently to analyze Ted Kheel's free-transit plan. I used the BTA to estimate the effect of 10,000 more cars driven every weekday into the congestion zone.

The result was an increase in time costs to other drivers of $140 million a year, or $400,000 a day. Divide by 10,000 - the number of new car trips in the model -- and you get forty bucks apiece. That's the cost each new car trips imposes on others, so that's what each driver should pay -- at least! (Air pollution, crash risks, noise and nuisance are extra.) While the proposed $8 charge doesn't go nearly that far, it's a start.

Of late, the argument over congestion pricing has mostly been about asthma, global warming, transit lockboxes and such. While these are important, we need to remember there's a fundamental question of fairness involved. In general, people need to pay for the costs they impose on others. Among the costs I impose by driving across the Queensboro is $40 worth of lost time to my fellow drivers.

All those seconds ticking away in gridlock add up to minutes, which become hours, and days. If Councilman Comrie wishes to spend a good chunk of his time on earth stuck in traffic, that's his choice. But it's not his right to impose delays on other drivers without paying for at least some of their delay cost (and vice versa).

The German historian of the motorcar, Wolfgang Sachs, probably said it best two decades ago:

Above a certain traffic density, every driver contributes involuntarily to a slowing of traffic. The time that each individual steals from all the other drivers by slowing them down is greater than the time he or she might have hoped to gain by taking the car. 

Congestion pricing turns this "stealing of time" into a fair exchange and reduces it too. It's time.

Grief, solidarity and resolve brought out two hundred New York cyclists yesterday for the third annual Ghost Bikes Memorial Ride, to commemorate cyclists killed by motor vehicle drivers last year.

At the Canal Street & Bowery triangle by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge bike path, Steve Hindy raised his empty arms in a pantomime of a bike lift in honor of his son Sam, age 27, who died on Nov. 16 when he struck a barrier and fell to the bridge's lower roadway, where he was hit by a car.

"Sam died because he could not find his way," Steve told the throng, which had converged from separate feeder rides in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx and was squinting in the late-afternoon sun. "Look around and you'll see this area was designed for cars." Cars and nothing but cars, Steve might have said. And he might have said the same for every street the riders visited en route to 14 known sites of cycle fatalities in 2007. (Another 9 fatalities were consecrated at an "unknown cyclist" ghost bike installation on the Park Row sidewalk outside City Hall.)

The Brooklyn contingent alighted in mid-morning on Bay Parkway in Bensonhurst, at the ghost bike created for 18-year-old Mark Grichevsky, a senior at City-As-School and a veteran intern at Recycle-A-Bicycle. On May 29, Mark, who lived in Bensonhurst, was struck by a car while cycling. He was thrown from his bike and suffered fatal head injuries, despite wearing a helmet. He died four days later.

Several hours later, we were in Bushwick at the corner of Central & Palmetto Avenues, at a shrine marked with flowers, a cross and a kid-sized ghost bike. Last April 29, Anthony Delgado, age 13, was bike-riding with a friend when one SUV passing another went into Anthony's lane and killed him before speeding off. The family's own black GMC Envoy, a luxury SUV with license plate ANT94 marking Anthony's year of birth, was double-parked just up the block. "He wanted to be a car mechanic when he got older," said his mother. The Envoy's back windows were inscribed with tributes from Anthony's parents, his brother and three sisters.

Earlier, as we wended through Flatbush, Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, two drivers had cursed at cyclists who were briefly "corking" -- crossing traffic so the riders could stay together. During this long stretch through the sprawling heart of Brooklyn, the family of 47-year-old Jeffrey Moore was waiting to meet us at Chauncey St. & Rockaway Ave. in Ocean Hill. Moore's sister Jade Oliver thanked the crowd for remembering Jeffrey, a construction worker and former amateur boxer, who was run over on his bike on May 29. Shaqwana Oliver, his niece, added: "I just want to thank you all for coming out and showing love to my uncle. We really appreciate you because we miss him so much.This just brings a lot of comfort to us. When people say you don’t care, you all just proved that people do care, so thank you."

Early in the morning of Oct. 18, 26-year-old Craig Murphey was killed by a turning fuel oil truck in East Williamsburg. The only witness, the truck driver himself, claimed that Murphey was racing the truck to the intersection. As Streetsblog previously reported, Murphey's friends say this would have been unlike Murphey, an experienced cyclist who rode daily from Brooklyn to his job in Harlem. It would also have required him to be riding away from his home in the wee hours of the morning.

Murphey was a social worker with the West Harlem Action Network Against Poverty and a member of Right Rides, a group that provides late-night rides and walks home to GLBT populations vulnerable to assault. The leader of the Brooklyn ride and a key Ghost Bikes organizer, Ryan Kuonen, fought back tears as she spoke at Craig's site: "This is someone I happened to know, though not well, mostly from passing him on the streets and on the bridge. Every ghost bike is made with a lot of love, and this one is especially so. Every time a biker is hit I wonder if it's someone I know. This time it was."

Ryan, who rallied the riders at every stop during the long day, was one of dozens who researched the crashes, installed the ghost bikes, designed the routes, got the word out, reached out to families and attended to countless details. For this writer, who helped start the Street Memorial Project over a dozen years ago, yesterday's ride, with hundreds of cyclists fanning out across the city in a perfectly choreographed ensemble, was a dream come true, despite the nightmarish context.

The final stop was City Hall. Consistent with its marginalization of cyclists in death as in life, the NYPD provided only a single "security check" line for cyclists to enter the sanctum of City Hall plaza. Judging the wait to be at least a half-hour, emotionally spent from the ride, and contemplating my own precious family, I got on my bike and pedaled home.

Photo: darko666/Flickr