The one-size-fits-all transportation project is going to have to give way to one that’s more tailored to preserving and enhancing the qualities -- the sustainability, the environmental qualities, the community values -- that make each city, each county across this country special. We're looking to sustain and build communities -- reinforce them in ways that work.

After the meeting wrapped up, I spoke to Tri-State Transportation Campaign director Kate Slevin to get her take on Barrett's remarks. "Building communities is very different than building roads," she said. "It's more about creating places that attract people."

Kind of gets you wondering whether there's a secret backchannel between Ray LaHood and the fine folks at Project for Public Spaces.

“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 

Yesterday we noted that District 1 City Council Member Alan Gerson was the only Manhattan representative to indicate that he would vote against the congestion pricing plan in its current form, according to an "unofficial roll call" conducted by the New York Times. We contacted Gerson's office to find out why, given the upsides for a district in which 79 percent of households are car-free, which is saddled with chronic gridlock and which, ostensibly, will someday benefit from the pricing revenue dependent Second Avenue subway line. An aide told us the council member's staff was "trying to get a correction," and has submitted this letter to the paper:

Dear Editor:

Your article, "Traffic Plan In Trouble", misstates my position. I have consistently stated that I would support congestion pricing if the Bloomberg Administration enhances or modifies the commission's plan in four critical areas, on which the plan remains silent or deficient: the Holland Tunnel/ Canal Street corridor; bus management, including clean engine standards for all the buses the plan will bring into lower Manhattan ; non-pricing traffic management, which carries over into non-pricing hours; and equity among city residents. I have proposed detailed recommendations, based on community and expert input. Implementing the commission's plan without those enhancements or changes will worsen congestion and pollution on many streets, including the canal street corridor. Meetings are scheduled to discuss these proposals. I remain optimistic that the City Council and the Administration will reach agreement on the best possible traffic plan for all New Yorkers.

At our request, Gerson's office also sent over the council member's eight-page position paper on congestion pricing [PDF], in which he describes the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission report as "deeply disturbing."

Significant sustained congestion avoidance and reduction requires focus on the various specific, localized congestion points and causes. It is unbelievable to me, that the TMC's staff report does not once mention the Canal Street corridor or the Holland Tunnel.

I repeatedly urged the commission to incorporate a focus on this hottest of traffic hot spots. The New York Metropolitan Traffic Consortium (NYMTC) has spent several years developing a Canal Area Traffic Study (CATS). One would think that any serious TMC plan would evaluate how to build on NYMTC's work and would propose resources to support and implement NYMTC's findings and recommendations.

Three additional flaws become apparent upon examination of the analyses undertaken by the commission to date: the overemphasis on revenue generation; the failure to consider needed mitigation of adverse impact from increase in commuter buses, proposed in several schemes; and the lack of regard for the impact of different proposals on the integration and unity of the City.

Like some pricing opponents, Gerson worries about a "gentrification of the streets" effect:

Many of us over the years have become increasingly concerned about the widening stratification of our city, with parts of Manhattan becoming elite enclaves. Commission analyses have shown the relative progressivism of most congestion pricing measures. However, those analyses do not take into account the non-financial perception and actual experience of areas cordoned off by several congestion pricing schemes as socially apart from the rest of the city. To avoid this, all plans should aim to minimize the cordoning-off effect.

As also noted yesterday, this isn't the first time Gerson has been polled as anti-pricing. Considering the number of problems he has with the plan as written, and the reductive nature of "yes/no/maybe so" surveys, it isn't hard to see why.

Photo: J Blough/Flickr

Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller has clearly been busy. At Monday's Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission meeting he presented more than a dozen separate congestion pricing scenarios. Having run each of them through NYMTC's state-of-the-art regional traffic model, Schaller delivered estimates for how each of the various pricing schemes would impact total vehicle miles traveled, costs and revenue.

Commission chairman Marc Shaw introduced the day's discussion by saying that "Everything's still on the table" while acknowledging that some of the scenarios Schaller was modeling were "obviously controversial." Shaw also went out of his way to express disappointment that the New York Times had chosen to editorialize against the idea of East River Bridge tolls "before we've even had a public discussion about it."

Schaller's Powerpoint presentation is available in its entirety below. There were a lot of numbers and transportation policy jargon but here are a few notable points:

• NYMTC's "Best Practices Model" was updated in September of this year. The previous model, which was used to derive the transportation data for Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC, was based on New York City's 2002 mass transit network. The updated model uses the 2005 transit network. Thanks to the opening of two more subway tracks across the Manhattan Bridge and other improvements, Schaller said, "the amount of transit service has increased over the last few years," making it more attractive and feasible for motorists to switch to transit "when you apply a pricing signal." As a result, when the numbers are run through the new model, Mayor Bloomberg's original congestion pricing plan shows an increased reduction in VMT, jumping from the intial 6.3 percent estimate to 6.7 percent. All of the data that Schaller produced for Monday's meeting was generated using the updated model.
• The reduction in VMT produced by moving the northern boundary of the pricing zone from 86th to 60th Street is "smaller than a lot of us expected," Schaller said. While the Mayor's original proposal produces a 6.7 percent VMT reduction and $420 million per year in net revenue, moving the border to 60th Street produces a 6.2 percent VMT drop and $387 million.
• The big news was that eliminating the "intrazonal charge," the $4 fee for driving a car inside the pricing zone, barely has any impact on VMT reduction while significantly reducing capital and operating costs. Moving the boundary to 60th Street while eliminating the intrazonal fee (and all of the technology required to make it work) would produce a 5.9 percent reduction in VMT along with $94 million less in capital costs and a whopping $135 million/year less in operating costs. Shaw was clearly intrigued by this scenario.
• Levying a $1 surcharge to motorists who aren't using EZPass would be "an attractive thing to have whatever the final package may be," Schaller said in a rare expression of overt opinion. Processing EZ Pass vehicles is cheaper than using license plate recognition technology.
• Plain and simple East River bridge tolls -- $8 flat fee, 24-hours-per-day, would reduce VMT 5.6 percent, would cost only $39 million/year to run (compared to the $229 million operating cost of the Mayor's plan) and would raise $531 million in net revenue (versus the Mayor's $420 million).
• Add the 60th Street cordon to the ERB tolls and use the MTA's toll rates, $4 inbound and $4 outbound, and you're looking at a whopping 13.4 percent projected reduction in VMT and net revenue of more than $1 billion. Upon seeing that scenario Teamsters president Gary LaBarbera reminded his fellow Commissioners, "truck traffic has to be considered seriously. You can't put 12 yards of concrete in the subway."
  
• After Schaller's presentation, Partnership for New York City president Kathy Wylde suggested that, in addition to road pricing, the Commission would need to propose some sort of "assessment" for on-street and garage parking, adding, "I think it's pretty clear there's a consensus here that getting rid of the intrazonal charges will result in greater revenue and greater equity" and that tolling the East River bridges would, essentially, "collect the same money from the same people but do it in a more efficient fashion."
• Shaw, who is becoming increasingly assertive in these meetings, noted that putting the fee on the bridges themselves might also allow New York City's regional transportation agencies to more easily "coordinate all of the tolls" coming in and out of the city. "One could start to look at a way to do coordinated congestion mitigation strategies for everyone coming from all sides whether it be west of the Hudson or over the East River."

 

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Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller's team at the Department of Transportation has been taking ideas offered up by Traffic Mitigation Commission members and running them through NYMTC's regional traffic model. Schaller's job is to help the Commission determine how effective each of these ideas will be in cutting traffic and reducing total vehicle miles traveled in New York City. To keep its $354.5 million federal transportation grant, the City must reduce VMT 6.3 percent using road pricing.

Schaller presented his findings at yesterday's Commission meeting. You can flip through his presentation above (though, I recommend clicking through to the Slideshare web site and viewing the larger version). Since the first and most important slide is too small to read, here is the list of the traffic reduction ideas that Schaller's team has been modeling either as alternatives, supplements or modifications to Mayor Bloomberg's original proposal (you'll note that Lew Fidler Tax'n'Tunnel plan didn't make the cut):

• Night delivery incentives
• Telecommuting incentives
• Increasing the cost of parking in the CBD
• Taxi stands
• Surcharge on taxi and livery fares
• East River Bridge tolls
• License plate rationing
• Required carpooling
• Creation of High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes
• Changing the northern boundary
• Charging to drive on the FDR and West Street
• Changing the hours / variable charges
• Changes to the toll credit policy
• Exempt hybrids.

Aside from Assembly member Richard Brodsky's continued treatment of the scrupulous, forthright Schaller as the quintessential evil government bureaucrat (Brodsky knows exactly how important it is to attack the credibility of the "Keeper of the 6.3%"), the highlight of yesterday's hearing, for me, was an exchange towards the end on government employee parking permits.

Brodsky was pressing Schaller for more detailed modeling of the VMT impact of reducing the number of government-issued parking placards when Teamsters president Gary LaBarbera, pictured right, cut in with strong objections. LaBarbera didn't want Schaller or anyone to do any additional modeling -- or talking -- about government-issued parking permits. I couldn't quite type fast enough to keep up with him, but this is pretty close to exactly what he said:

Parking permits are a form of compensation for teachers, firefighters and police officers. I don't believe in employees losing benefits or compensation. We've got to think seriously before we talk about taking away this benefit from one segment of our community; teachers, firefighters and police officers.

So, there you have it. Though you won't find it accounted for in any City budget, spelled out in any City employee contract, or fought over in any recent negotiation, union leadership believes government-issued parking permits are "a form of compensation." Now that LaBarbera's put it on the table, the City and the unions can finally begin to account for this "form of compensation" and talk about exactly how much of it New York City's hard-working civil servants are actually owed.

In 2004, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) counted hundreds of greenway cyclists and pedestrians entering Inwood Hill Park at Dyckman Street, just south of the HHB. Now, instead of making their way through the last remaining natural forest in Manhattan, greenway users enroute to the Bronx -- as well as residents of Inwood, Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale who use the HHB walkway for transportation and recreation -- must detour east to the far less hospitable Broadway Bridge.

Streetsblog has queried the MTA office of Bridges and Tunnels for specifics on the planned three-year shutdown, a longer period than it took to construct the HHB itself.