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.

Similarly suspect, in the eyes of Tea Party activists, are “all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy,” as the Times reported on Saturday. “Government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space [is seen] as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.” Ditto, bike lanes. And, you better believe, congestion pricing or any form of traffic pricing.

What’s at work here, according to the writer (and New Yorker) Dan Lazare, is the “Jeffersonian ideology that assumed that individual actions were autonomous unless proven otherwise. Whether a motorist chose to drive or not to drive,” Lazare wrote in his 2000 classic, America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How You Can Stop It, “was nobody’s business but his own; any suggestion to the contrary was positively un-American.”

The standard counterweight to the agrarian Jeffersonian model is the Hamiltonian sovereign nation-state drawing strength from cities built on manufacturing and trade. Lazare plumbed this duality in America’s Undeclared War, but he also broke new ground by contrasting Jeffersonianism to the “theory of externalities” that emerged in the early 20^th Century, which emphasized “the public dimension of individual acts” that consumed resources or otherwise damaged the commons:

Rather than regarding individual acts as private unless proven otherwise, the growing volume of external costs suggested that they had to be regarded as public acts — unless, that is, affirmative action was taken to mitigate the social consequences. To drive or not to drive, in other words, was no longer an individual decision but a social question because so many people were affected besides the motorist himself.

A great many people are affected by an individual’s decision to drive in NYC. I have shown elsewhere that a single car round-trip into the Manhattan Central Business District generates external costs on the order of a hundred dollars, just in terms of other road users’ lost time. Although the Bloomberg administration didn’t use this meme in its 2007-2008 push for congestion pricing, it is the essential motivating idea behind tolling vehicles entering the CBD. As I wrote on Reuters last month, any New York-area driver “is cognizant of the time he will expend being slowed by other cars, but not of the far greater delays he will impose on them.” A congestion toll helps close that feedback loop.

Tea Partiers are having none of that, of course, and Dan Lazare helps us make sense of their antipathy to treating driving — not to mention land use, transit provision, and climate change — as a social question rather than the sole province of individuals. To paraphrase America’s Undeclared War, “Where the externalities analysis highlights the tyranny that a mass of atomized individuals imposes on society, adherents of Jefferson worry about the tyranny imposed by society on the individual.”

In short, congestion pricing’s benefits be damned, you’ll still have to pry the car keys out of my cold dead hand.

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.

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.

Obviously, the test of “willingness-to-pay” is unhelpful when the price tag is impoverishing — surgery, for example. But the rush-hour congestion price typically hovers in the movie ticket bandwidth of $5-12. American society comfortably asks drivers to purchase cars, insurance, and gasoline, so there’s no compelling social justice argument against a price for road use — especially at hours when the marginal car wastes hundreds of minutes and begets carcinogenic pollution via the start-stop of pistons in gridlock.

Some people assume that only an extraordinarily high price could curb rush hour driving. After all, people need to go to work. This is where a economist’s view most sharply diverges from an average person’s. Economists assume that, as the price rises, a continuously growing number of would-be drivers will forgo or delay a car trip. To lay folk, on the other hand, there’s a high and sudden tipping point: below this price, everyone drives; above it, only millionaires hit the road.

I believe this error is due to our tendency to let the most “representative” member of a set stand for all members. The representative driver is a working stiff with no other options. Fortunately, the benefits from congestion pricing don’t require such a person to stop driving at rush hour. They only require some would-be drivers to stop. You can see how in this cartoon:

Others say adequate public investment in transit and/or roads would render pricing unnecessary. Fundamentally, though, pricing is a revenue source, while added capacity is an expenditure, so there is no trade-off between the two solutions. Imagine someone at a school board meeting saying, “Why raise property taxes when we can build more schools?”

The more enduring mistake, however, is believing that the amount of traffic is a fixed quantity. In reality, traffic volume expands to fill capacity, because how much people want to drive depends crucially on how bad driving is. Two University of Toronto researchers recently studied U.S. metros and found:

Increasing lane kilometers for one type of road diverts little traffic from other types of road. We find no evidence that the provision of public transportation affects [vehicle kilometers traveled].

You can see my animated take here:

Finally, even though we normally talk about congestion pricing in the United States, road pricing can also curb pollution and roadwear on uncongested highways. Germany has used road pricing to manage truck hauling, as illustrated:

Lewis Lehe is working toward a Masters in Transport Economics at University of Leeds in England. He’s created a website, PriceRoads, to raise awareness about congestion pricing and other types of road pricing, He’d appreciate your views and comments, at priceroads@gmail.com.

Photo: AFP/Getty

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.

How about the unfairness of letting each CBD-bound driver impose a hundred dollars worth of “time costs” on other drivers, truckers and bus riders, without paying a dime for the privilege? Yes, you read that right. When you or I take a car into the Manhattan core on a weekday morning, each mile we drive causes other road users to ring up $3 worth of aggregate delay costs on the approaches to the CBD and close to $7 on the streets within it. Apply that rate to each mile of a Manhattan-bound round-trip from New Hyde Park or New Rochelle, and pretty soon your trip has racked up a social toll north of $100. In this light, a peak cordon toll of, say, $10 per trip seems eminently fair.

And yet, given that every driver who contributes to gridlock is stuck in it along with everyone else, the absence of a congestion toll is more a signifier of inefficiency than inequity. A more effective rubric for congestion pricing may be the egalitarian nature of the benefits provided by the transit improvements it will pay for. Not only subway and bus and rail riders benefit from better mass transit; so do drivers, who will be moving on freer-flowing highways and less-gridlocked streets because transit has attracted some trips that would otherwise be done in cars.

I estimated last summer that cutbacks in transit service causing just five percent of daily users to bail from the subways would cost drivers more than half-a-billion dollars a year in lost time by throwing an additional 30,000 cars onto CBD-bound roads. The converse is equally true. A cordon toll that reduces the number of car trips to the Manhattan CBD will cut down on traffic and save drivers time in two ways: not just via the stick of the toll but also by the carrot of better transit service that the tolls can pay for. Of course, transit users benefit as well.

Yet that too is an efficiency argument. It seems that, at the end of the day, the case for congestion pricing must rest on efficiency grounds: the efficiencies of driving, of transit, and of urban density in general are vastly improved when at least some of the “externality costs” of traffic congestion are internalized into the price charged for the most congestion-causing trips.

But even if “We are the 99 percent” isn’t a suitable rubric, the impact of the Occupy movement may still ease the path to a political and legislative majority for congestion pricing. A huge obstacle cited by veterans of the 2007-08 congestion pricing fight was that many of the clearest beneficiaries — straphangers and bus riders — identified with car owners and thus failed to give the toll plan full-throated support. This “aspirational” thinking isn’t the sole province of congestion pricing; it is seen in the tepid support of low- and middle-income voters for the highly progressive estate tax, for example. Four years ago, it helped keep transit commuters on the sidelines and enabled opponents of congestion pricing to claim the high ground.

Now, however, OWS has raised awareness of the true extent of economic inequality in America. It may also be renewing pride in belonging to the working and middle class, and helping to redefine the American dream as something more enduring than a fancy house and a shiny car. If this more-communitarian consciousness can be harnessed to the fight for congestion pricing, we advocates might have a decent shot next time.

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

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.”

Duranton and Turner: If you build it, you will sit in traffic on it. Photo: Arch and the Environment

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.

Duranton and Turner say that metropolitan areas tend to get new roads regardless of whether or not the prevailing level of traffic warrants expansion. They urge the establishment of transportation policies based on their findings and the data they compiled, rather than the “claims of advocacy groups”:

Unfortunately, there is currently little empirical basis for accepting or rejecting the claims by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association that “adding highway capacity is key to helping to reduce traffic congestion”, or of the American Public Transit Association that without new investment in public transit, highways will become so congested that they “will no longer work”. Our results do not support either of these claims.

They didn’t find that transit reduces congestion. But that doesn’t mean that metro areas shouldn’t build transit as a way to maximize the efficiency of their transportation networks, they say. Turner said transit is a good way to get more “person-miles” out of roads. But more buses and trains won’t reduce congestion, he added, because regardless of how many drivers switch to transit, other drivers will fill the vacuum.

“If you think about the result that we’re finding for roads – if you add a little bit of capacity, someone uses it, right?” Turner said. “So there are all these people out there waiting to take trips as soon as there’s space on the roads. So if somebody stays home, or if you add capacity to the road, there’s somebody there waiting to use that space. Well you should expect the same thing to happen if somebody gets out of their car and gets on the bus, it’s bringing up a little bit more room on the roads, and there’s somebody out there waiting to use it.”

Still, Turner says transit plays a vital role in maximizing the value of our transportation networks. “Transportation infrastructure is just so expensive,” he said. It’s important to use it efficiently.

The researchers didn’t discern between light rail, commuter rail, and buses. Turner said he feels that buses allow cities to move just as many people with a much cheaper infrastructure network, but there are passionate arguments on both sides of the bus vs. rail debate, and the authors don’t choose one over the other in their paper. In fact, they only have one significant policy recommendation:

These findings suggest that both road capacity expansions and extensions to public transit are not appropriate policies with which to combat traffic congestion. This leaves congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion.

“The menu of policy responses to congestion is not really that long,” Turner said in our interview. “You’ve got building more roads, building more transit, and congestion pricing, and if you’d like you can put smart growth on there. We looked at two of those really carefully and found that they didn’t perform as advertised. So if you’re thinking about these things purely as responses to congestion, it doesn’t look like they work. There is some evidence that congestion taxes work. So if you were going to pick one of these things to go for, that would be it.”

They’re working on research now to investigate the impacts of smart growth on traffic.

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.

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.

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:

“The riders have done their part with service cuts and fare hikes, but motorists aren’t doing their part,” fumed Andrew Albert, an MTA board member.

He added that the bailout bill “is not a good package” and that city’s free bridges should be tolled to help finance mass transit.

The state legislature is not thinking about completing the transit funding picture, however. They’re talking about weakening transit funding that’s already in place. As soon as they gained the majority in the State Senate, Dean Skelos’s Republicans immediately made noise about repealing the underperforming payroll tax.

With Albany set to wrestle with a budget gap greater than $9 billion next year, the payroll tax could be an irresistible bargaining chit — the temptation will be strong to give up the payroll tax revenues in suburban counties as part of a larger deal to win the votes of those legislators.

Andrew Cuomo and NYC legislators can’t let that happen. The MTA still has a $9 billion hole in its capital program, and the slightest tremor in its operating budget could set off another round of service cuts or fare hikes. The payroll tax, while not meeting projections, is now a bulwark against utter disaster for straphangers. Trading away any part of it would be a betrayal of New York City transit riders.

Kheel was an ally of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

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.

In early 2007, already well into his nineties, Ted asked transportation engineer George Haikalis to examine whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to finance free mass transit throughout the five boroughs. Yes, free, not just to help drive a stake through traffic gridlock but to establish urban transport as an essential public service, on a par with public education and safety, while giving working people the equivalent of a pay raise. George hired me onto his team, and by fall I had fashioned a skeletal spreadsheet model that appeared to answer Ted’s question affirmatively: a $16 congestion toll, charged 24/7, would allow 100 percent free buses and subways [PDF].

On a brilliant October Sunday, I went to Ted’s Fifth Avenue office and showed him my work. Ted loved the model, which he dubbed the “Balanced Transportation Analyzer.” What really stays with me from that day, though, was Ted’s ringside recollections of events that had rocked New York City and State and even the nation. As Central Park’s blazing colors softened into shadow, Ted and I relived fifty years of history: the fateful 1966 transit strike, Lyndon Johnson’s dangling of Supreme Court seats in front of prospective nominees, and implacable personages from TWU chief Mike Quill to Rockefeller and JFK.

Komanoff and Kheel looking forward to free transit.

That day three years ago marked a personal turning point. With Ted’s active guidance and the generous support of his Nurture Nature Foundation, I threw myself into fleshing out the BTA and becoming an advocate for Ted’s vision of free transit. The work has been by turns frustrating and exhilarating. Frustrating because we lacked the political muscle to get our more-nuanced congestion pricing approaches considered alongside the plans advanced by Mayor Bloomberg in 2007-08 or the Ravitch Commission in 2008-09. But exhilarating because the BTA has blossomed to where it can handle time-of-day-varied toll and fare plans and estimate the resulting revenues and travel time savings. (The current BTA spreadsheet can be downloaded here; requires Excel 2007 or later.)

The BTA also reveals the extent to which the proverbial “one additional car trip” to the CBD slows down other vehicles on the road: by several hours (the aggregate of the seconds of road delay imposed on hundreds or thousands of cars and trucks), worth $100 of lost time, plus or minus, depending on time of day and week. This novel element, a kind of “foundation stone” of congestion pricing, attracted the interest of financial blogger Felix Salmon and Wired magazine. Felix’s article in the June Wired conveys Ted’s prescient grasp of the extent to which the social costs of car use far outweigh fiscal support for transit:

Now 95 years old, Kheel has been trying to improve New York’s traffic for more than half a century. He is obsessed with the economic damage that cars do to cities — damage that’s much greater than most people realize… in a New York magazine cover story arguing against another fare increase [he wrote]: “Any balanced analysis will surely prove that the taxpayer actually pays, for every person who chooses to drive to and from work in his own car, an indirect subsidy at least 10 times as great as the indirect subsidy now paid the mass-transit rider.”

When the article was published, in June, I went to Ted’s apartment and read it aloud. We beamed, seeing our handiwork manifested in print. Ted had cast his bread upon the waters and seen it returned as mathematical validation. I had found, in this protean man, both a patron and a kindred spirit.

Ted’s Nurture Nature Foundation has subsequently retained renowned environmental campaigner Alex Matthiessen to spearhead education and outreach to fulfill Ted’s vision of tolling driving to finance transit. With deep deficits in Albany and at the MTA placing free transit off limits for the time being, Alex is reconfiguring free transit as Sustainable Transit and helping make Ted’s and my plan even more synergistic and compelling. The mutually reinforcing elements — time-varied tolls to drive to the CBD; medallion taxi charges so that outlying boroughs and counties don’t subsidize Manhattan; off-peak transit discounts; targeted improvements in transit service today while supporting the MTA capital plan for tomorrow — promise 20 percent improvements in CBD travel speeds along with a time-out from the endless spiral of fare hikes. (Several versions of the plan are on display in the “Results” tab of the BTA; see earlier link.)

“I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Martin Luther King declared in his sermon in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” Ted Kheel, a political ally and financial supporter of Dr. King’s, was privileged to live a long and full life. He may not have made it to the promised land of free transit. But Ted did as much as anyone to bring New York to the mountaintop of a transportation system that subordinates the damages caused by the auto to the needs of public transit and the multitudes who benefit from it.

Thank you, Ted, for letting me walk with you in the last part of your journey.

The Paterson plan calls for enormous reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve the targets would require a total transformation of how New York grows and how residents get around.

As Andrew Cuomo transitions into the governorship, David Paterson just handed him a parting gift: a comprehensive blueprint for how the state can tackle its greenhouse gas emissions. The plan, which has been in development since a Paterson executive order in August 2009, goes into spectacular detail about how the state might reach the ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels over the next forty years.

With Paterson exiting the stage soon, the plan carries little weight, but it shows what it would take for New York to tackle climate change with the urgency it deserves. While emissions from buildings are the largest contributor to climate change in New York, the team of experts who authored the report make clear that it will take an all-out transformation of the state’s transportation and land use systems to reach the climate goal. Transit expansion, smart growth, complete streets, and congestion pricing (for New York City, at least) all figure into the plan.

The biggest transportation-related reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would come from a total shift to clean vehicles powered by clean fuels by 2035. Over the next 20 years, moving toward that goal could eliminate 130 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, more than every other transportation and land use proposal combined.

The other big-ticket reduction in the transportation sector would come from a massive expansion of transit. That includes everything from bus rapid transit in every metro area in the state, to new subways and the roll-out of high-speed rail. All that new transit would cut greenhouse gas emissions by a large amount, though the report notes that it couldn’t reduce driving very much in more rural parts of the state.

The transit expansion would cost an additional $25 billion over the next two decades, making it the most expensive transportation-related suggestion. “Achieving these goals would require funding well above what is available today,” the authors write. Of course, the report, which is more scientific than political, doesn’t specify where the funding for this transit expansion would come from.

Under the plan, the biggest greenhouse gas emissions reductions would come from changes to how cars are fueled. Smart growth policies offer the state big cost-savings and could be an appealing early action for Andrew Cuomo.

Smart growth initiatives, without which the transportation emissions targets would be impossible, loom large in the plan. “Without significant changes in land use and development patterns in New York State, the level of VMT reductions and mode share changes contemplated in the entire suite of transportation and land use policies will be difficult to achieve,” the report states. If New York keeps sprawling, we won’t be able to build well-used transit systems, and increased driving will eat away at fuel efficiency gains.

The report offers two principal strategies to combat sprawl. First, the authors recommend the creation of “priority growth centers” where compact, mixed-use, walkable and bikeable development can flourish. These centers would exist in urban, suburban, and rural forms. Again, the goals here are extremely ambitious. The report calls for half of all new construction to take place in these priority growth centers by 2030 — a tough bar to clear considering the state can provide smart growth incentives but can’t directly regulate land use.

Even so, the plan emphasizes that smart growth initiatives need to be implemented as soon as possible, especially in fast-growing downstate areas. If action isn’t taken quickly, all that new sprawl gets baked into the cake. “Land use patterns are difficult to change once established,” says one understated passage.

Putting growth in the right parts of the state, however, doesn’t get you across the finish line. You also need to take what the authors call “a micro-planning approach by creating specific, people-friendly/oriented network/land use connections.” That means endorsing complete streets, for example. While more compact development makes it far easier to walk to the store, on a terribly designed street it might still be dangerous or unpleasant.

The plan also endorses two policies particularly important for the densest urban environments in the state: congestion pricing and parking reform.

Congestion pricing, the authors propose, should be instituted in New York City with the revenues going to pay for some of their other recommendations.

The plan also calls for a major revision of parking policy across the state. In the downtowns of all the state’s major cities, smarter pricing of on-street parking could reduce a major incentive to drive. Off-street, employers can offer their workers the option of cashing out their parking benefits rather than only offering free parking. The authors suggest that “the true cost of parking should be reflected in municipal development policies and zoning ordinances.”

Neither congestion pricing nor parking reform offers a large reduction in statewide emissions. In fact, they offer the two smallest reductions of any land use or transportation policy. However, a place like Manhattan already has the best transit and most compact development in the country. The most important policies are already in effect, essentially. Congestion pricing and parking reform would push it a step even further and allow the very green, very massive, very densely populated regional core to function more smoothly.

This climate plan doesn’t have any sort of binding power or even an abstract commitment from the state to eventually follow its specific recommendations, though Paterson’s executive order does promise to reach that 80 percent reduction somehow. Even so, it could serve as a blueprint for the new administration to follow as it tackles climate change and a yardstick against which to measure future environmental efforts.

For the fiscally conservative Cuomo, the report also makes clear that a number of these efforts will actually help the state’s bottom line. In particular, by reducing the cost of new infrastructure, the smart growth initiatives save the state billions over time. If Cuomo wants a way to burnish his environmental reputation without compromising on fiscal discipline, there’s no better place to start.

New Jersey’s loss will be somebody else’s gain: $3 billion in Federal Transit Administration funding will shift from ARC to other projects. Already, elected officials are making their case to the feds. In a letter sent to U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood a few days ago, New York City Council transportation chair Jimmy Vacca said he’d be sad to see ARC go, but…

…if New Jersey is intent on abandoning this worthy project, it is imperative that the $3 billion in federal funds available be used to fund the many other vital transportation projects on queue in the New York region, such as the long overdue Second Avenue Subway, the 7 train extension, and the Long Island Rail Road East Side Access project. All are at risk of not being completed due to lack of funding.

…the MTA’s five-year, $26 billion capital program is currently funded only through the second year, with no guarantee that New York State will fund the remaining three years. This capital program funds station rehabilitations, new communication signals and tracks, and routine replacement of buses and subway cars… If the ARC Tunnel is canceled, then the Federal Government’s contribution should stay within the Greater New York Metropolitan Region and help stabilize the MTA’s finances.

It will probably be rather difficult to convince the FTA to put more money into the MTA capital program. The feds are already the primary funder of the Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access, and this June FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff promised Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd that “not a single penny” more from the New Starts program would go toward the escalating costs of those mega-projects. New Starts is the same pot of money that would have funded ARC.

However, $3 billion is a lot of money — nearly a billion more dollars than LaHood’s DOT has dispensed in two rounds of TIGER grants. Surely some of it should go toward the MTA, which provides about a third of all transit trips in the United States. So indulge in the following scenario…

Say the FTA makes a proportional amount of the $3 billion available to New York. About a billion dollars would go toward the MTA. But if I were the feds, I’d make New York earn its share. No spoils from ARC without a new local revenue stream to plug that yawning, $9 billion gap in the capital program, which threatens to bury straphangers under an avalanche of MTA debt.

How about a billion dollar carrot to help Albany finally muster the guts to enact congestion pricing?

Congestion pricing was projected to translate into $4.5 billion in bonds for the capital program, before Democrats in the Assembly killed it in 2008. Add that revenue to $1 billion from the feds, and you’ll go a long way toward staving off a slow-motion disaster of continually rising fares and shrinking service.

Photo: pneedham/Flickr

Not every “disappeared” bus or subway trip will materialize as a car trip, of course. Some trips will be made on foot, by bike or by sharing a car, and some others won’t happen at all. But the number of additional car trips caused by the cuts and hikes will be significant, as will the increase in gasoline to fuel them.

I’ve estimated the impacts, using the BTA spreadsheet that has been written about here and was profiled recently in Wired magazine. I inputted an average 7.5 percent bus and subway fare hike along with a five percent increase in the time required to complete an average transit trip. (That's a rough "proxy" for the effects of increased crowding and unsanitary conditions as well as of longer waits between buses and trains and longer walks caused by eliminating some lines.)

The result: by inducing additional car trips as well as reducing the fuel-efficiency of all vehicles due to worsened traffic congestion, the transit cuts and hikes will lead New Yorkers to use an extra 13.5 million gallons of gasoline per year.

On top of that, the hybrid cab requirement would have been expected to save 31.3 million gallons, or almost two-and-a-half times as much as deteriorated transit will cost.

The point isn’t to compare the two -- in a more politically accountable world, the taxi rule would go forward while the transit cuts and hikes would be stayed -- but to show that both impacts are roughly in the same ballpark. In our society, political inertia, whether manifested as government neglect or as judicial narrow-mindedness, tends to reinforce energy consumption and oil dependence.

In this connection, it's worth noting that a well-designed congestion pricing plan -- one that surpassed the Bloomberg plan in scope and, I would argue, cured its political deficiencies -- would, at least on paper, reduce motor vehicle fuel use in the city by an estimated 77.3 million gallons of petroleum per year. That’s between double and triple the taxi-fleet savings. Yet while the associated benefits, in terms of less ecosystem destruction and reduced public pressure (or political cover) to wage war in Asia or elsewhere, would be impressive, they account for less than one percent of the overall expected societal benefit from such a plan. That’s testament not to the low price we pay for oil dependence but to the magnitude of the other benefits, chiefly travel-time savings followed by increased physical activity, that smart and imaginative congestion pricing could bring to our city.

Congestion charging has already greatly improved bus service. Will Londoners vote to use congestion fees to reduce fares, too? Photo: Wikimedia

Introduced in central London in 2003 and then extended westward in 2007, the congestion charge has curbed traffic, reduced the number of car crashes, cut emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, raised nearly a billion dollars to invest in public transport, and encouraged people to travel in more sustainable ways, with increased bus ridership and cycling rates.

So the congestion charge is a fixture in the British capital. The debates today center over what shape the congestion zone should take, and what to do with the revenue. While the current mayor, Boris Johnson, is intent on shrinking the zone, one of his potential successors has raised the prospect of maintaining the current cordon and using congestion fees to reduce bus fares. 

Johnson has backed the removal of the western extension, which mainly covers the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and is approximately half of the current zone, since he was a candidate. Why would the mayor want to remove such an apparently successful measure?

Whereas the original congestion charging zone, which encompassed the economic and cultural heart of the city, has enjoyed wide public and political support, the more residential western extension has always been more controversial. In particular, there have been concerns about the impact on small businesses and residents living just outside the zone who are not eligible for the 90 percent discount for residents. Johnson used the idea of eliminating the western extension during the 2008 mayoral campaign as a way of differentiating himself from the policies and management style of the incumbent, Ken Livingstone.

In online surveys, highly motivated residents have clamored for the western extension to be removed. Surveys of Londoners as a whole, however, show a more balanced view. It is expected that removing the western extension will result in small increases in congestion, CO2 and air pollutant emissions.

Johnson's final decision is expected in the fall, with removal penciled in for December 24 this year. A series of mitigation measures have been proposed if removal goes ahead.

Even if the western extension is removed, that may not be the end of the story. Both of the Labour Party's candidates for mayor, Livingstone and Oona King, a former member of Parliament, are expected to re-introduce the western extension if elected in 2012.

At the launch of King's transport platform earlier this week, she even suggested that the revenues from the re-instated western extension (approximately $75 million a year) could be used to reduce bus fares. “Half of all Londoners' journeys on public transport are by bus and it's time we used money raised from elsewhere to start reducing fares for everyone," King told the London Evening Standard, "especially the least wealthy who rely on this essential service to get around the capital.”

In London, travel survey data shows that buses are more likely to be used by people with lower incomes. Those who drive, meanwhile, tend to have higher incomes and are better able to absorb additional costs.

With New York's MTA still facing a $400 million deficit, which could result in more fare hikes and further service reductions, the need to properly fund the city's transit system is as strong as ever. The official proposals for road pricing here -- congestion pricing and the Ravitch Commission's bridge toll plan -- haven't been linked explicitly to holding down transit fares (although the backers of the Kheel Plan did make that connection). New York and other cities considering congestion pricing will want to keep tabs on the political fate of such a proposal in London.

The B71 made its last run Saturday night. Photo: Aaron Naparstek

The initial shock will subside, eventually, after which we'll settle into the unpleasant truth that living without a car in New York City is harder now. For some people, that will mean longer commutes and less time with their families. Others will drive instead of taking transit. Or opt for commuter vans. Or, if they feel safe enough, ride their bikes. Some people just won't leave their homes as much.

Ask a hundred New Yorkers why this is happening, and I would estimate, conservatively, that eighty or ninety of them will direct their anger toward the agency that's implementing the cuts -- the MTA. And sure, the MTA isn't blameless. These austerity measures could have been put off, for the time being, using a one-shot infusion of federal stimulus cash. Does that make the MTA the right target for New Yorkers' frustration? Not at all.

These cuts are quite plainly the result of political decisions made by our elected officials. The Daily News editorial page nailed it today: If lawmakers in Albany hadn't swiped $143 million in dedicated transit tax revenues from the MTA, the $93 million in savings from service cuts would not be necessary. That theft was only the latest in a long line of decisions to deprive bus and subway riders of an adequately funded transit system.

If the State Senate hadn't blocked bridge tolls in 2009, these service cuts could have been prevented. If Sheldon Silver's Assembly hadn't killed congestion pricing the year before that, these cuts could have been prevented. If the state and city had maintained support for student transit service at historical levels, these cuts could have been prevented. If the state and city hadn't gutted funding for the MTA capital program in the 1990s, setting the clock ticking on the MTA debt bomb, these cuts could have been prevented.

Even in 2010, the cuts could have been avoided. Congestion pricing or bridge tolls are not a panacea for all the problems plaguing the transit system and its finances, but they could have raised sufficient funds to avert the current day of reckoning, and probably a few more that are already visible on the horizon.

The fact that Albany deemed road pricing too toxic to even consider in an election year speaks volumes about the political calculus at work. Saddling New York City's car-free majority with the worst transit cuts since the mayoralty of Abe Beame: That's an acceptable electoral risk. Asking a small minority of relatively privileged car commuters to help pay for the transit system that saves NYC streets from unrelenting gridlock: That's unthinkable to our elected leadership.

Unless New York City representatives are forced to re-evaluate the political risk of allowing transit service to deteriorate, today's cuts probably won't be the last.

Of all the revenue options offered by the Progressive Caucus, bridge tolls were the second-least popular. Click here for larger image. Graphic: Progressive Caucus.

The newly-formed caucus is still in the process of inventing itself. Though the 12 members have signed on to a general statement of principles, precisely what they will advocate for remains to be seen. Two months ago, the caucus released a survey asking New Yorkers how they'd fix the city's budget gap. That survey included a question about tolling bridges into Manhattan.

The results show just how much organizing remains to be done around tolling. Of all the revenue sources surveyed, bridge tolls were the second-most unpopular. Only a property tax hike fared worse. Bridge tolls still had more supporters than opponents, but since every revenue option did, that's probably just due to the framing of the question.  

Interestingly, despite the opposition to bridge tolls, when it came to open-ended responses, support for congestion pricing was one of the most common. So was raising revenue through stepped-up enforcement of traffic and parking regulations. 

In other words, support for road pricing is strong -- proponents went to the extra trouble of filling in the open-ended questions -- but not broadly distributed. And there are a lot of opponents, even among self-selected respondents to a Progressive Caucus survey.

The caucus's statement of principles calls for "a more sustainable and environmentally just city" and mentions a "sound transportation system" specifically. That should entail strong support for transit, the clean mode choice of most working-class New Yorkers. But if the Progressive Caucus pays attention to these survey results, support for bridge tolls (and presumably congestion pricing as well) may end up pretty low on the agenda. 

Road pricing won't ease this BQE traffic jam unless drivers want it to, says Bruce Schaller. Image: photoAtlas via Flickr.

Schaller argues that the high-profile debate over congestion pricing in 2007 and 2008 helped forge a consensus in support of sustainable transportation, even if no such consensus exists around road pricing. He also writes that New York's experience showed that it's easier to sell congestion pricing when it is "embedded in goals related to climate change and the city's growth" as compared to narrower transportation-related goals. 

Overall, however, Schaller concludes that New York's failure to pass congestion pricing is indicative of the overwhelming political obstacles to pricing roads in the face of driver opposition. "Congestion pricing can be thwarted by a relatively small group of people," he writes, "particularly when it requires approval from several legislative bodies."

The five percent of New York City workers who would have paid the congestion fee were able to block its implementation despite the support of four of the five relevant government bodies: the City Council, the mayor, the State Senate, and the governor. The measure ultimately met its demise in the State Assembly. In comparison, the mayor of London was able to implement congestion pricing without any legislative approval at all. 

Schaller links the outcome of New York City's congestion pricing saga to the prevalence of veto points and preference for the status quo endemic to the American political system: 

The out-sized power of negatively affected groups to block a proposal is not new to road pricing. Because neighborhood residents have been able to stop large-scale highway, transit and airport projects, major transportation projects since the 1970s have been subject to a 'do no harm' constraint.  Proponents of such projects have had to plan them to 'be sited, designed and mitigated so as to leave no victims in their wake.' (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 228)  Drivers in New York City who would have had to pay as much as $2,000 annually in congestion fees showed a similar power to prevent adoption.

Schaller goes on to note that most successful attempts to price roads in America leave drivers the option of taking a free ride. Whether by pricing only a few HOT lanes or building new toll roads entirely, American road pricing exists where it doesn't draw drivers' fury. "Schemes that require all drivers to pay," he writes, "will need to convince drivers that they will benefit from the scheme... But the case for driver benefits is not an easy one to make." Road pricing does make the drivers who pay it worse off, argues Schaller, at least until the revenues are spent.

In the end, Schaller sees some sort of broad-based VMT tax replacing the gas tax. Once drivers are already paying per mile, he writes, adding a congestion surcharge might be more politically feasible. That day might not come for several years, so one implicit conclusion of the report is that road pricing won't likely be enacted as a consequence of New York's immediate transit funding crisis.

Schaller is currently NYCDOT's Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Sustainability, but the opinions in the paper are his own. Read tea leaves at your own risk.

At the last three regional assemblies, funding our transit system with congestion pricing or bridge tolls seemed within reach, to varying degrees. (After the State Assembly killed congestion pricing in 2008, the zeitgeist was still kind of optimistic, because the insiders knew that road pricing would be revived soon.)

This year, the impending transit cuts in New York and New Jersey cast a bit of a pall on the proceedings. At times, the atmosphere felt tinged with foreboding, like when Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch told the crowd, "It's hard to imagine what life will be like if we don’t make the investments in infrastructure that we have historically made."

The official theme of the event was "innovation," often encapsulated as "doing more with less" by speakers coping with shrinking budgets.

One of the more notable exchanges came at a panel on technology and transportation, when New York City Transit chief Tom Prendergast noted that the financial battering his agency has absorbed is "forcing us to do things we've never done before." One example: the MTA's new open data policy.

Prendergast didn't share much in the way of specifics, but he did hint that the MTA hopes to make transit arrival info accessible to riders before adding countdown clocks at every station and bus stop. "We're looking at simple and innovative ways of getting that information up to people on the street," he said.

Countdown clocks are the most expensive component of a real-time transit information system, said Chris Dempsey of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation, and they take the most time to implement. You can get schedules and arrival times to passengers much more quickly and cheaply -- through mobile devices -- by opening up transit data to developers and letting them do the work.

Prendergast agreed that the MTA shouldn't be trying to create a wholly proprietary system to distribute its transit information. "[MTA Chair] Jay Walder wants to reach out to the people with the core competency to run with this," he said. "You have to get past the issue of ownership at the agency level."

As for big, regionally transformative ideas, congestion pricing and the failure to enact it were still very much on people's minds today. Port Authority chair Chris Ward told the morning crowd that "letting politicians demagogue on congestion pricing has been terrible for New York. The most important thing we can do for working class New Yorkers is to keep those subways running."

Later in the day, White House urban affairs director Adolfo Carrion got a big hand when he mentioned congestion pricing about 29 minutes into a 30-minute speech. The former Bronx Borough President and rumored 2013 mayoral contender said the Obama administration's vision for "metro innovation" in New York includes "traffic congestion mitigation strategies and new, more innovative transportation options, including bicycles, ferries, and even maybe, dare I say, congestion pricing."

An analysis using the Balanced Transportation Analyzer shows how much time individual drivers steal from fellow drivers by choosing to drive into the New York City CBD.

I presented a paper last week at an international forum on traffic congestion in Guangzhou, China. People in that city are beginning to look at congestion pricing, and I was asked to discuss why the Bloomberg toll plan failed politically.

As part of my talk, I described the “social delay costs” from an additional car trip into the center of Manhattan -- literally, the total time that all road users combined spend in traffic because any one of them decided to drive. Afterwards, one of the organizers, a professor of transportation engineering, asked me to present a technical version of my paper to his students at South China University of Technology.

The next day, when I came to the part about social-delay costs, the professor peppered me with questions about my methodology. As I went through the steps -- basically, every trip takes up an incremental amount of limited street space, which lowers speeds, which adds to everyone's travel times -- the professor grew more intrigued. It wasn’t that the idea itself was new, but that if traffic speeds and other baseline data were known, then the delay-impact of one trip could be quantified. And, moreover, that the impact varied enormously depending on the time of day: when there is ample spare road capacity, say, in the middle of the night, an extra trip has little discernible impact, whereas one trip during congested peak times adds several hours to the aggregate time that all other vehicles must spend on the road.

I daresay that for the professor, my elucidation of one trip’s delay costs helped move congestion pricing from the realm of abstraction to something tangible and, perhaps, essential. If a peak trip to the center of New York or some other city can impose one or two hundred minutes worth of delays on others -- and if no driver is ever called on to take that impact into consideration -- then of course the city will be awash in gridlock. No city, not even Guangzhou, despite an emerging 21st century transit infrastructure of Bus Rapid Transit and new subway lines, will be able to forestall the tide of free driving.

The same construct animates the FreshDirect analysis in my Time Thieves paper, except that there the bulk of the delays result from the trucks’ double-parking. The point is the one I made in my Dot Earth post from Guangzhou: Motorists who pay only for their own lost time, but not for the time their trips take from other motorists, have little incentive to make efficient decisions about when to drive and how often. In the case of FreshDirect, this "time theft" averages $15 per delivery. If that cost were added to the delivery price, FreshDirect’s business, I estimate, would drop off by around 20 percent.

Then again, no one in New York City -- myself included -- is proposing congestion tolls even close to the social delay costs of the trips that would be tolled. The Kheel-Komanoff Plan’s $2-$9 variable tolls ($2-$3-$4 on weekends and holidays, $3-$6-$9 on weekdays) are a little under 10 percent of the same trips’ respective $30-$130 congestion costs. Yet, as I told the forum in Guangzhou, even this toll -- modest relative to the trip's full social cost -- would eliminate enough car trips that speeds within the Manhattan CBD would rise more than 15 percent.

Without congestion pricing, fare hikes will hit New York's many transit-using families hard. Image: Ed Yourdon via Flickr.

The choice for policymakers, Petro writes, should be clear: Congestion pricing could raise $420 million in new annual revenue, enough to close most of the MTA's current budget deficit and spare working New Yorkers the brunt of painful fare hikes and service cuts.

DMI is a progressive think-tank based in New York City with an explicit focus on middle class issues. Today's report puts the economic and equity impacts of congestion pricing front and center. If the MTA tries to balance its budget with only service cuts and fare hikes, Petro estimates that a transit-dependent family of four will be forced to spend an additional $2,300 a year to get around the city.

Fully 55 percent of New Yorkers commute to work via transit. In contrast, only five percent commute into the CBD by car, and they are disproportionately affluent [PDF]. "One of the most frustrating arguments against congestion pricing is that it would disproportionately hit the middle class," said Petro. "It's frustrating because it's so plainly untrue." The DMI report makes a strong case for why congestion pricing is exactly the kind of policy that supports New York's middle class.

What's more, Petro argues, congestion pricing would be the most fiscally and environmentally responsible way to fund the MTA. Congestion pricing wouldn't force the MTA to raid its capital budget just to keep buses and trains running and would also take 100,000 cars off the road, improving bus service for millions and reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and asthma-causing air pollution.

The MTA needs to balance its budget, one way or the other. Congestion pricing offers a fiscally sustainable and socially equitable revenue stream with major environmental benefits. That said, Petro's numbers show that the MTA's $783 million deficit -- caused principally by declining revenues and shrinking government funding -- can't be closed solely with the $420 million that Mayor Bloomberg's 2007 congestion pricing plan was projected to raise per year.

The details of the plan could be tweaked, however. "Some form of congestion pricing could be created to raise enough revenue to close the gap, if that's what the goal is," Petro said. If Albany gets its act together, could congestion pricing be passed quickly enough to avert the current crisis? Petro believes it's possible, although to get the money in time for this budget cycle, he says the MTA will have to take out an expensive short-term loan.

That's a small price to pay when the alternative is to collect $2,300 more in fares from every transit-riding family of four in New York City. "If another source of revenue is not found, that is what we're looking at," said Petro.