Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog: So, what happened in yesterday's election?

James Savage: The tradition in Sweden is to hold all elections on the same day so we have municipal elections, we have a general election and local referenda on various issues. The general election resulted in a change of government with the ruling Social Democrats thrown out after twelve years. In Stockholm, the local municipal authority, which was also Social Democrat, was thrown out and replaced by a center-right coalition.

SB: The headline in your newspaper describes the result of the congestion charging referendum as "Neither a Ja nor a Nej" -- I'm sure I'm not pronouncing that correctly -- but what did you mean by that?

JS: Yeah [laughing], you're not. The congestion charge was introduced by a Social Democratic municipal authority that had gone into elections in 2002 saying that, in fact, there would be no congestion charge. But then the Social Democratic Government, in order to get the support that it needed from the Green Party at the national level, agreed to impose the charge on the municipality in Stockholm. The Social Democratic leadership in Stockholm cooperated with their national leadership even though it was against their manifesto's promises.

SB: Annika Billström (pictured right) is the leader of Stockholm's municipal authority? She's the mayor?

JS: She was the mayor. That's one of the things that happened yesterday. She is no longer the mayor and how much that depends on the way congestion charging was introduced -- that's one of the questions that people are asking now. People suspect that it played quite a large role in her defeat.

SB: How come?

JS: She started out against congestion charging and then basically lay down as soon as the Central Government tried to impose it. That annoyed people even though, ironically, residents of Stockholm eventually started to appreciate the congestion charge and voted to keep it.

SB: So, the party that brought on congestion charging was essentially punished for they way they went about it and yet the referendum still voted in favor of congestion charging.

JS: It's rather contradictory isn't it? But that is basically what happened and the center-right alliance that has been elected to replace Billström and the Social Democrats is broadly opposed to congestion charging.

SB: Must this new government now re-activate the congestion charge? Was the referendum binding?

JS: No. The referendum was only advisory. The government isn't obliged to re-introduce the congestion charge. What makes it more complicated is that the new center-right government has traditionally been opposed to congestion charging. They say that they will respect the will of the people but there is a third confusing factor here. People living in the suburbs which are controlled by different municipal authorities than central Stockholm, and traditionally vote for the right wing, are broadly opposed to the congestion charge because they're the people who have to pay it.

SB: Were these suburban municipalities able to vote on the referendum?

JS: No. And in the plan set up by the Social Democratic government there was no mechanism for the suburbs to be consulted. But the municipal authorities in these different suburbs had their own referenda. The Social Democrats considered this to be completely irrelevant. They weren't going to pay any attention to this at all. But of course now, the Social Democrats are written out of the equation and we've got a center-right government and a center-right council and they will make their own decisions and they will take these referenda into account. So, it puts the whole thing up in the air.

SB: So, the politics of traffic is a mess pretty much everywhere, I guess.

JS: It's a mess [laughing]. It's extremely complicated.

Read more...

From this morning's International Herald Tribune:

Near-complete results for the Sunday referendum showed that 51.7 percent of Stockholm voters approved the traffic toll, while 45.6 percent voted against it.

The congestion fee was contested when city officials introduced it in a seven-month trial that ran between January and July.

Public opinion swung in favor of the charges after studies showed that weekday traffic on average dropped 20 percent during the trial, while pollution decreased 9-14 percent.

Depending on the time of day, Stockholm drivers paid 10 kronor and 20 kronor, or about €1-€2 (US$1.30 - US$2.50) when they entered or exited the city's center. The toll was in effect from 6:30 a.m. to 6:29 p.m. every weekday, with no fees on weekends, holidays or at night.

A city analysis showed permanent congestion fees would bring a net profit of nearly 500 million kronor (€54 million; US$69 million) a year - money that would be spent on improving public transportation and better roads.

Additional Links:

• Neither Ja Nor Nej to Congestion Charge
• Stockholmsforsoket
• "Bra!" to Congestion Pricing
• IBM Solution Chosen for Stockholm

Transponder on the dashboard of a car zipping through the traffic-free streets of Stockholm on January 3, 2006, the first day of that city's congestion pricing experiment. (Photo: Papa Razzi1)

Stockholm, Sweden's seven-month congestion pricing experiment is on hold until a voter referendum in September. Alan Atkisson reports:

Last year, the politics around the planned "congestion tax/environmental fee" got so heated that Stockholm's normally calm radio channels began to sound more like America's whiniest call-in shows. Friendships strained under the divide between the "Ja" and "Nej" side of the equation, and many commentators predicted that Stockholm's currently left-leaning city government would experience a crushing defeat on the strength of its support for this issue. All that is behind us now. Because the toll works. And the people like it. And it has been discontinued.

Discontinuing the toll was actually the plan all along. The political compromise that got the idea through involved framing it as an experiment, the "Stockholm Trial" in official talk. Stockholm would try it for seven months, and look at the data, and then the people of Stockholm would vote about whether to turn the system back on, or dismantle it. And that's where we are now. The toll system, which worked nearly flawlessly since being inaugurated on 1 January, was turned off on 31 July.

The very next day, traffic jams reappeared on the major arteries that had, magically, been free of such jams for the previous half-year....

Read the rest of this article at World Changing.

The IMPACTS conference web site turns out to be a treasure trove of the latest information on how congestion pricing is working in the European cities that are trying it.

Below are a few slides from the presentation delivered by Gunnar Soderholm (PDF file), Stockholm's Deputy Chief Executive Officer. If you are a transportation geek and you read Swedish, you will love this:

I need to double-check this, but from Soderholm's presentation it looks like congestion pricing reduced the daily number of vehicles traveling in and out of the Stockholm by about 22% or nearly 100,000 vehicles total.

In September, three months before it started, public opinion was firmly against the idea of congestion pricing. By May, after five months of living with the system, public opinion had completely flipped. That is, if "bra" means "yes" and "daligt" means "no." If not, then, well, the Swedes hate congestion pricing.

Stockholm's suburbanites appear to be in favor of congestion pricing at just about the same rate as the general population. Perhaps outer borough New Yorkers would be less opposed than people think if the revenues raised by congestion pricing were poured back into transit improvements.

Most remarkable, even motorists appear to be coming around to supporting congestion pricing. 

Experts were surprised by how relatively quickly and easily this high-impact change was adopted and accepted.

Congestion pricing is a single measure that can have a major impact on a city's output of climate change-causing carbon dioxide emissions. Can you imagine a day when New York City's transportation agency concerns itself with global climage change?

"The tragic loss of two bicyclists this week has shocked all of us and our thoughts and prayers are with the victims' families and friends. Unfortunately, New York City's crowded streets often cause conflict between cars and bicyclists as they attempt to share limited space."
-- NYC DOT statement, June 29, 2006.

On Thursday, June 29, 2006, as DOT's press office was issuing the statement above, New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall was in Stockholm, Sweden. She was there to make two presentations to the 11th Annual IMPACTS conference, an international networking event for transportation administrators and professionals from cities in Europe, North America and Latin America.

The first day's focus was congestion pricing (Warning: most of these are links to PDF files) and on Thursday Weinshall's professional counterparts from Stockholm, London, Amsterdam and Copenhagen made detailed presentations on the far-reaching measures that they were taking to reduce traffic, use their cities "limited space" more efficiently, and reduce the type of "conflict" that killed three New York City cyclists in June alone.

Stockholm is the latest major world city to implement a congestion pricing system to reduce urban traffic and the conference kicked off with a presentation by the city's Deputy CEO, Gunnar Soderholm. According to Soderholm's Powerpoint presentation, available online, since launching the congestion pricing system in January, the number of vehicles driving in and out of Stockholm is down 20 to 25 percent. Congestion, or time spent sitting in traffic, is down 30 to 50 percent in the inner city. Noxious emissions have decreased 10 to 14 percent. And there have been no negative impacts on Stockholm's retail or economic growth. All of these results exceed the city's original goals. Facing widespread opposition at its start, polls now show that a majority of Stockholm residents approve of congestion pricing and say they will vote to keep it in place when the issue comes up as in a citywide referendum at the end of July.

Later in the day, a similar story was told by John Mason, Transport for London's Head of Enforcement. London's congestion pricing system, up and running for four years now, has reduced congestion in Central London by 26 percent. Thirty-seven percent fewer cars travel through the middle of the city. Congestion pricing is raising £110 million per year most of which is being plowed back into the city's bus network. As a result, bus patronage is way up and bus reliability and travel times have vastly improved. An unexpected side benefit of congestion pricing is that there are 40 to 70 fewer motor vehicle crashes annually in Central London, air quality has improved measurably and climate change-causing carbon dioxide emissions are down. Though there are fewer cars and less traffic, essentially the same number of people are traveling in and out of Central London daily, the impact on business has been "broadly neutral," and polling shows that the majority of businesses "recognize that decongestion has created a more pleasant working environment."

The focus of the conference's second day was "unexpected events." While European transportation administrators boasted of successes in reducing traffic and ambitious plans for the future, on Friday New York City's transportation commissioner made one presentation on New York City's response to December 2005 transit strike and another on post-9/11 security in New York City. Weinshall had no big traffic reduction strategies or plans to share with the assembled because unlike the other cities at the conference, New York City doesn't have any.

I asked a Department of Transportation spokesperson if Commissioner Weinshall took the opportunity of a Stockholm visit to "look at the new congestion pricing system, experience its effects, or talk with any officials about how it's working out." I was told that "the only time the Commissioner heard about congestion pricing was at the conference when a Stockholm government representative," presumably Soderholm, "spoke to the participants about it."

* * * *

If you only read the first sentence of DOT's brief response to the recent spate of bike fatalities on New York City's streets, it comes across as a nice statement. It's human. It expresses feelings. It's not every day that you get emotion out of a big government bureaucracy.

But then you get to that second sentence and it's all business. New York City's streets are "crowded." Crowding results in "conflict." Sure, when there is conflict between a car and bike, the car is usually going to win. But what are you gonna do? We've got "limited space" here in the big city. 'Flict happens. DOT can always point to the fact that overall pedestrian injury and fatality rates have fallen during the Weinshall years.

New Yorkers tend to view traffic congestion as something akin to the weather. It's good, it's bad, there is nothing much you can do about it. Traffic as a force beyond the control of mere mortals, just like New York City's murder rate and school system were once considered unmanagable and beyond fixing.

In its two sentence public statement on the deaths of Dr. Carl Nacht and Derek Lake, DOT seems happy to reinforce this notion. It is probably more bureaucratic reflex than conscious strategy. The agency has liability issues to consider. And their job is probably a whole lot easier if the public isn't too involved. The last thing DOT needs is community groups running around thinking that New York City could actually do something about traffic congestion. DOT is, after all, the city agency that would have to do it.

And yet, other world cities are proving that it is entirely possible to do something to reduce urban traffic congestion. If Commissioner Weinshall sat in on some of the presentations of her European colleagues on Thursday, she knows.

Thoughts and prayers are nice. But they are not what New York City needs from its transportation agency. 

On January 3rd, Stockholm, Sweden became the latest major world city to begin managing and controlling motor vehicle traffic with congestion charging, an automated system that charges motorists a fee to drive into the most gridlocked sections of the city center. The fee varies depending on the time of day and level of traffic congestion.

Yesterday, The Local, an English-language Swedish newspaper reported the following:

"The widescale opposition to Stockholm’s congestion charge appears to have evaporated. According to a new poll carried out by Sifo on behalf of the Green Party, 62% of Stockholm residents are planning to vote to keep the charge in the autumn referendum… Opinion has shifted in favour of the charge since the trial has shown it to have a positive effect on traffic levels."

According to one newspaper poll, 80% of Stockholm residents opposed congestion pricing before its implementation. A March 10 survey showed that 44% were in favor of congestion charging and 47% were against. In September Stockholm voters will go to the polls for a referendum on whether or not to keep the congestion charge.

Previous headlines:
Stockholm gets congestion charge go-ahead Protests Mar Opening of Stockholm Congestion Tax "Quiet start" for Stockholm congestion charge 197 new buses have been bought by the Stockholm transit agency