Streetsblog New York City

The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN plot!

Unfortunately, nuttiness like this is no new thing, and its reach is longer than you might think. It has its roots in an antiquated and peculiarly American belief system that is standing in the way of improved urban livability.

Let’s start with gas prices. In recent weeks, Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and House Speaker John Boehner have all played to the notion that gas prices have doubled since President Obama took office. The price of gas is notoriously volatile; the national average price has actually fallen in 45 of the past 100 months (Excel spreadsheet). So a fair accounting would employ the U.S. average over an entire presidency, as in this chart, for the three most recent:

The chart makes clear that it was former oilman George W. Bush, not Obama, who came closest to presiding over a doubling of gas prices.

At one level, Gingrich and company are merely shilling for the Keystone XL pipeline. But of course excavating Canadian tar sands oil and piping it to Houston is so costly and energy-intensive that without high gas prices, the venture would collapse.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices. And unlike big-box suburbs and the Sunbelt, which were built on the inefficiency of cars, highways, supersized houses and office parks, New York is built on the efficiency of dense neighborhoods and public transportation.

To anyone with common sense, that difference makes the ‘burbs brittle and cities resilient. To Newt, it makes city dwellers suspect.

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Transportation analyst and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff is out with a piece in Reuters today that examines the traffic impacts of adding 2,000 new yellow taxis to Manhattan streets, and it’s not pretty.

As part of the grand bargain struck between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo that will create a new class of hail-able livery cabs, NYC will auction off 2,000 new yellow taxi medallions. The city is expected to haul in a billion dollars from the auction, but Komanoff calculates that in the bargain, central Manhattan streets will be overrun with even more traffic:

No one mentioned traffic when the taxi deal was rolled out last month at City Hall and in Albany. After all, with 800,000 motor vehicles already entering the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) each weekday, what difference could a mere 2,000 additional yellow cabs possibly make?

Plenty, it turns out. Yellow cabs spend three-fourths of each shift, around seven hours, plying CBD streets and avenues. (And of course some are active for two shifts a day.) Most private cars driven in Manhattan don’t do so for long. Even at the CBD’s notoriously labored traffic pace — now averaging 9.5 mph, up from 8 mph before the recession — the two to three miles per day logged by the average car below 60th Street occupy 15 to 20 minutes.

Adding one new medallion is thus equivalent to adding 40 private cars. Adding 2,000 of them — as the City now intends to do during the next three years — would be the traffic equivalent of adding 80,000 cars, a 10% increase in volume.

Some form of congestion pricing would be just about the only way to mitigate the impact of all this additional traffic, Komanoff writes. You can see the analysis underlying his conclusions in this PDF.

In 1951, Milton Friedman coauthored a paper on road pricing. It would be a mere footnote in both Friedman’s career and in the intellectual history of road pricing, if not for one sci-fi flourish: The authors propose painting radioactive material alongside expressways, so that road operators can charge drivers using car-mounted geiger counters. Obviously, this suggestion was never heeded, but it says something about the economics profession’s hunger for pricing roads that a future Nobel laureate would set his imagination to Bradbury mode to advance the cause. Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, later credited Friedman with inspiring London’s pathbreaking congestion charge.

Since the 1920′s, economists have nurtured an elaborate theory of road pricing rules, but until recently, it has never been very practical to price roads on a per-mile, time-variable basis. The time and money wasted collecting the money weren’t worth it. The digital revolution, however, has recently given us E-ZPass, online bill-pay, database computing, and even plate-reading cameras. Putting a price on roads that varies according to demand, or “congestion pricing,” is suddenly practical.

To economists, the problem with congestion is that some drivers are harming other people to get something they don’t even need. It’s like if you were slightly hungry but you ate a starving child’s Thanksgiving dinner. For a congested road, an extra car harms travelers already on the road by slowing down their cars and buses. I’ve illustrated this time cost with the following cartoon:

Of course, it’s all right to consume other people’s time if your benefit from driving is sufficiently large. We just want to make sure your trip is “worth it,” and the way our society makes this determination in the division of other resources is by charging money.

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Not yet three months old, Occupy Wall Street stands this week on the threshold of its first big concrete win. Governor Andrew Cuomo has called a special session of the New York State Legislature, reportedly to recalibrate the state income tax to draw more from the one or two percent at the top and less from everyone else. After refusing for months to consider extending the state’s “millionaires’ tax,” the governor may have sensed a need to stand with the 99 percent, even if it requires bending a campaign promise.

At this point, it’s fair to ask how the changes in the zeitgeist wrought by the Occupy movement might affect transit and transportation in New York City. Will revenue infusions from Albany mean better service and stable fares for that most egalitarian mode of travel, mass transit? Will the most inefficient and socially destructive mode — driving private cars into Manhattan — finally pay for usurping so much street and road space? In particular, might congestion pricing, the sole policy measure that could finance transit and disincentivize driving in gridlock, get a boost from OWS’s paradigm of equity and equality?

All that’s clear at the moment is that little if any new state income tax revenue will go to transit. Any net increase will be too small, while other claimants such as education and medical care are too compelling. New revenues may lessen the chances that dedicated transit funds will be siphoned away, but the connection is tenuous and the potential take — under $100 million — is little more than a rounding error in the MTA’s nearly $13 billion annual budget.

In contrast, a cordon toll to drive into the Manhattan central business district could offer transit a billion dollars a year or more in new net revenues. If all of the tolls were paid by the super-rich, congestion pricing would align nicely with the Occupy movement. Alas, that’s not the case. Though the propensity to drive into Manhattan rises with income, and though only one in 25 residents of the MTA’s 12-county tax district is a habitual driver into or through the CBD, these aren’t necessarily the wealthiest four percent. The chronic CBD car commuter is as likely to be your neighbor Sal as a hedge fund billionaire. Which means that shouting “We are the 96 percent!” isn’t the way to rouse a political and legislative majority for congestion pricing.

Some other rubric is needed.

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At a press conference today, Governor Cuomo touted a new plan to introduce a “rational” pricing mechanism to help the state provide critical resources to New York residents. He was talking, of course, about SUNY tuition, which will be structured to rise five percent a year for the next five years.

As for introducing a rational pricing mechanism to help provide critical infrastructure in the NYC region, the governor won’t stand up for that, apparently. Liz Benjamin reports that Cuomo branded the Port Authority’s proposal to raise Hudson River car tolls by $4 this year and $2 next year “a non-starter.” And, amid rumors that the Port Authority toll hikes could open the door to rational pricing of East River bridges, Cuomo threw cold water on the idea of reviving congestion pricing, saying he doesn’t believe the politics have changed since the Assembly killed it in 2008.

There’s a high degree of political theater going on here. Higher Hudson River tolls are probably coming in some form, even if they don’t end up as high as the current proposal. Cuomo and Chris Christie both stand to reap political rewards if the final numbers are lower than the Port Authority’s initial plans. (“They’re going to come in on a white horse and save the commuters and save the tollpayers — it’s the same thing every time,” one source told the Daily News.)

Still, Cuomo could have taken this opportunity to inject some realism into the public discussion of road pricing. Instead of of telling the press that it’s not a good time to be raising tolls, the governor could have acknowledged that congestion is a big drag on the local economy, infrastructure has to be paid for, and higher tolls will lead to less traffic, more carpooling, higher transit ridership and faster buses.

If you’re looking for a silver lining, it’s notable that Cuomo hasn’t said higher tolls would violate his pledge not to raise taxes. (He did say, however, in reference to the PA toll hike, that “the knee jerk response of ‘government needs more money, go to the taxpayer, put your hand in the taxpayer’s pocket, take out more money, and fund it’ — that doesn’t work for me.”) As Adam Lisberg reported today, if Cuomo makes a distinction between tolls and taxes, transit advocates are holding out hope for a revived push to fund the MTA by putting a price on driving into Manhattan below 60th Street. We’ll probably have to wait until budget season to see if it will gather any momentum in Albany, or if the governor will be content to let transit riders shoulder the burden for NYC’s under-funded transit system and irrationally priced roads.

Video: State of Politics

We hear it all the time: The road lobby insists that the only way to reduce mind-numbing traffic congestion on the roads they built is to build new roads. Federal funding gives huge blank checks to state DOTs, which tend to prioritize road building over transit, bridge maintenance or anything else. But mounting evidence suggests that building new roads won’t do anything to alleviate congestion.

In a paper to be published soon in the American Economic Review, two University of Toronto professors have added to the body of evidence showing that highway and road expansion increases traffic by increasing demand. On the flip side, they show that transit expansion doesn’t help cure congestion either.

We’ll spare you the calculus in the report. Here’s the upshot: “Roads cause traffic.”

Professors Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner analyzed travel data from hundreds of metro areas in the U.S., resulting in what they call the most comprehensive dataset ever assembled on the traffic impacts of road construction. They write:

For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we find that VKT [vehicle kilometers traveled] increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the “fundamental law of highway congestion” suggested by Anthony Downs (1962; 1992). We also uncover suggestive evidence that this law may extend beyond interstate highways to a broad class of major urban roads, a “fundamental law of road congestion”. These results suggest that increased provision of interstate highways and major urban roads is unlikely to relieve congestion of these roads.

Duranton and Turner say building more roads results in more driving for a number of reasons: People drive more when there are more roads to drive on, commercial driving and trucking increases with the number of roads, and, to a lesser extent, people migrate to areas with lots of roads. Given that new capacity just increases driving, they find that “a new lane kilometer of roadway diverts little traffic from other roads.”

Given the huge amount of time consumed by driving (the average American household spent nearly three hours per day in a car in 2001), the authors note that “the costs of congestion are large.” Considering the economic value of time spent doing anything but sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, that becomes an economic problem of the first order.

“Transportation accounts for about one dollar in five that Americans spend,” Turner said in an interview with Streetsblog. “The interstate highway system eats up on the order of two dollars of every $100 of every market transaction in the United States. That’s a huge part of the economy and a huge part of people’s lives. Understanding how that works is really important; you don’t want to make mistakes on something that important. You don’t want to build roads and have them not deliver the effects that you expect them to.”

The implications for this research are significant, especially as Congress considers whether to integrate performance measures into federal transportation spending decisions. These findings make a strong case that Congress should not allocate too many scarce resources to road expansion when that’s not a real solution for congestion.

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In the fifth chapter of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” we demystify the concept of congestion pricing in just five short minutes. Here you’ll learn why putting a price on scarce road space makes economic sense and how it benefits many different modes of surface transportation.

In London, which successfully implemented congestion pricing in 2003, drivers now get to their jobs faster, transit users have improved service, cyclists have better infrastructure, and pedestrians have more public space. More people have access to the central city, and when they get there, the streets are safer and more enjoyable. While the politics of implementing congestion pricing are difficult, cities looking to tame traffic and compete in the 21st century can’t afford to ignore a transportation solution that addresses so many problems at once.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

If congestion pricing is going to resurface as a viable option to relieve traffic, help plug the enormous gap in the MTA capital program, and keep transit fares from ballooning in the years ahead, it won’t come from the Bloomberg administration.

Testifying in Albany on Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal today, Bloomberg said he won’t get involved in a renewed push for congestion pricing, WNYC’s Azi Paybarah reports:

“I’m not going to come back and fight that battle,” said Bloomberg, citing the political risk City Council members took in supporting it, only to see it die in Albany without a vote.

Later, when asked if congestion pricing as a “dead” issue, Bloomberg told reporters it’s up to state lawmakers to come up with a way to fund the state’s mass transit’s needs, saying, he is “not going to stand up and campaign for it.”

Bloomberg’s answer comes shortly after a vaguely-sourced report in the Daily News indicated that some form of congestion pricing is back on the table. The story was apparently enough provocation to get a small group of Queens and Brooklyn pols to preemptively declare this weekend that they still oppose congestion pricing.

The roster of opponents will be very familiar to readers who recall the 2007-08 congestion pricing saga (Tony Avella, David Weprin, the Queens Civic Congress, Marty Markowitz). Their core strategy hasn’t changed either. They still contend, contrary to the data on the city’s commute habits, that funding transit by ending the free ride for the select group of New Yorkers who car commute into Manhattan isn’t fair to the middle class. Never mind that the city’s demographics are trending towards even greater reliance on transit in the boroughs these pols represent.

It does appear, however, that they will need to find a more appropriate venue than the steps outside City Hall to hold their press events.

It’s been 20 months since the state legislature passed an MTA funding package with a conspicuous missing piece. In early 2009, the transit agency was reeling from the recession, and straphangers were about to get walloped by deep service cuts and a 23 percent fare hike. Albany responded by enacting just a partial fix: a regional payroll tax and a smattering of new fees on taxis and car rentals. Tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges were supposed to be part of the deal — getting car commuters who benefit from the congestion-busting effect of transit to contribute their fair share. But the State Senate insisted on preserving the free ride for motorists.

At the time, it was no secret that the package was insufficient, leaving the MTA capital program largely unfunded. The news quickly got worse. Revenue from the payroll tax, which was supposed to raise about $1.5 billion per year, kept coming up short. Throw in state raids of dedicated MTA funds, and Albany’s neglect of transit has hit straphangers with the deepest service cuts in a generation and the third consecutive year of fare hikes.

Tom Namako reports in the Post today that the payroll tax shortfall is not a temporary glitch, as State Senators claimed when the problem first cropped up. In fact, every piece of the 2009 funding packing is not meeting projections, and it’s starting to look like a fact of life:

And the latest jostle for commuters is that the wide-ranging “bailout” package of fees and taxes approved in 2009 is coming in about $400 million short of projections that were established earlier this year, statistics show.

The controversial business tax — which hits all business owners in the MTA region with a 34-cent levy for every $100 of payroll — appears to be $321 million under expectations, MTA data show.

Overall, it will bring in about $1.34 billion instead of the $1.66 billion that bean counters projected.

And the “MTA aid” levies — like a 50-cent surcharge on every yellow-cab ride along with car-rental, garage-parking and license fees — are under projections by $60 million, the numbers show.

Road pricing was the missing piece in 2009, and it’s the missing piece today, MTA board member Andrew Albert told the Post:

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The New York Times called Ted Kheel, who died Friday at the age of 96, New York City’s pre-eminent labor peacemaker from the 1950s through the 1980s. And he was. Ted was also a steadfast advocate for civil rights, a fierce champion of mass transit, a stalwart defender of labor, an urbanist, a philanthropist, and a visionary. And, for the better part of a century, a vital element of progressive struggle in New York and beyond.

Ted became famous in the 1950s and 1960s as the mediator who settled newspaper strikes, railroad strikes and other high-stakes disputes. He was a fixture in The Times — his square jaw and determined face signifying probity and civic virtue. But much of his finest work was done out of the spotlight. It was Ted’s heretical but constant agitation to allocate surplus toll revenues from Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority to the financially ailing public transit agencies, that in 1968 led NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to combine the TBTA with the Transit Authority and the commuter railroads into the MTA — and destroy Moses’s power to fund highways and starve transit.

Ted’s transit advocacy rested on what he called “the fundamental principle that car travel and mass transit are interrelated, like two sides of an equation. There should be a balance,” he wrote, “but instead, our system is enormously, unconscionably out of balance,” causing road gridlock on the one hand and inadequate transit service on the other. Ted fought for five decades to correct that imbalance, with stories in New York magazine like “How To Stop Cars from Devouring the City” [PDF]; with a self-financed lawsuit [PDF] to overturn bond covenants through which the Port Authority enjoined itself from expanding mass transit, that Ted pursued all the way to the Supreme Court (losing on a tie vote); and, in his final years, with an even more audacious venture that would draw me into his orbit and point the way to a new transit revolution with the potential to surpass that of 1968.

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