Streetsblog New York City

Saturday will mark two months of non-stop acclaim for Gridlock Sam’s traffic-pricing plan. The accolades kicked off on March 5 with a gushing op-ed, “Meet Sam Schwartz,” by New York Times emeritus editor Bill Keller, and they haven’t let up. The Wall Street Journal, Transportation Nation, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, Channel 13, and Crain’s New York (a profile plus an editorial) have extolled Sam’s plan to overhaul New York’s tolling network and generate $15 billion over the next decade to improve roads, bridges, subways and buses across the city. By now, any New Yorker who professes ignorance of the plan has either been hiding under the proverbial rock or is flummoxed by its political implications.

Such an outpouring of support is unprecedented for congestion pricing proposals anywhere, and is virtually unheard of for any serious policy proposal in New York. I’ve spent a good deal of time pondering it from my vantage point as a long-time traffic-pricing proponent; as an exponent of rival but complementary pricing plans, first with Ted Kheel and more recently with the Move NY coalition; and currently as a modeler helping Sam quantify his plan’s traffic and revenue benefits. (That work is supported not by Sam but by the Kheel family’s Nurture Nature Foundation.)

So how do I explain the overwhelmingly positive press reactions to Gridlock Sam’s Fair Plan, as he calls it?

First, the plan feels inclusive, far more so than any prior traffic-pricing plan.

Consider what it offers residents of Queens, the city’s most car-dependent borough after Staten Island: dollar fares on MTA buses in subway-less areas; Bus Rapid Transit service on the Long Island Expressway; and, most spectacularly, a halving of current tolls on the borough’s five MTA bridges, from the Throgs Neck in northern Queens to the Gil Hodges and Cross Bay Blvd. Bridges in the Rockaways. These benefits are palpable — the MTA bridge discounts alone will save Queens residents $100 million a year — and they are integral to the plan, in accordance with the precept of charging premium tolls to drive into the congested heart of the city. Other boroughs are slated to get similar discounts and benefits including BRT on the Belt Parkway and the Bruckner Expressway, a widened Staten Island Expressway, and highway expansions intended to take trucks off Brooklyn streets.

Second, Sam’s plan feels egalitarian.

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For the last nine years, private motorists entering central London between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. have paid a fee (currently £10 or US$16.22) to drive on the city’s scarce street space. The revenue from the congestion charge is plowed into the city’s transit system, and as Transport for London has amply documented, many Londoners have changed their commuting habits.

Now a flurry of maps released by ITO World, a British company that specializes in visualizing transport data, shows London’s dramatic shift to more sustainable modes from 2001-2010. (The congestion charge went into effect in February 2003.)

The map above depicts the extraordinary decrease in private motor vehicle traffic, with the bright blue dots showing where driving has gone down more than 30 percent and the bright red dots showing where it’s up more than 30 percent. By the looks of it, the drivable suburbs are still a bastion of private vehicles, but the central city is seeing far less traffic.

Of course, people aren’t just sitting at home. They’ve embraced other ways of getting around. So while there are fewer vehicles in London now than in 2001, one motorized mode has become more ubiquitous: the bus.

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Top transportation officials from three global cities — London, Singapore and Stockholm — shared their experiences in expanding the use of transit at a panel at the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference last Friday. Eyeing those cities, it’s easy for New Yorkers to get jealous.

“I was, in many ways, salivating,” said MTA chief Joe Lhota.

Singapore's massive transit expansion plans -- the dotted lines are all system expansions planned for the next ten years -- wouldn't be possible without congestion pricing. For a larger version, click here.

Singapore is doubling the size of its rail network in the next ten years, according to the Singapore Land Transport Authority’s Lew Yii Der. Using driverless technology, he added, Singapore will soon be running subway trains as little as 90 seconds apart.

London boosted bus ridership by 60 percent in a decade (in contrast, New York’s bus system is seeing fewer passengers year after year) and recently hit an all-time high for Underground use, said Transport for London’s Elaine Seagriff. Projects in the pipeline will add an entire new rail line through the heart of the city and boost capacity in the existing Underground system by 20 percent.

Stockholm plans to spend 8 billion Euros on expansion projects through 2020 for a region of only 2 million people, reported Stockholm Public Transport Managing Director Anders Lindström. In the New York region, per capita spending on that level would come out to $115.5 billion.

In a city where “mega-projects” mean three new stations for the Second Avenue Subway and one on the 7 line — and where it’s possible no system expansions at all will be included in the next five-year capital plan — it’s hard to imagine the cash-strapped MTA ever reaching such lofty levels. How did these other cities do it?

It’s foolish to call anything a silver bullet, but even so, it’s no coincidence that each of these cities do something New York hasn’t done: price the use of scarce road space.

London’s phenomenal growth in bus ridership, for example, can be significantly attributed to the fact that surface transit doesn’t have to sit in gridlocked traffic, thanks to the city’s congestion charge. Analyst Kenneth Small estimates that in the typical American city, bus ridership would jump 31 percent due to the introduction of congestion pricing, without bus service even receiving any of the revenues.

But the money certainly helps. London’s congestion charge generated approximately $240 million in 2009, all dedicated to transportation. Stockholm’s pricing scheme took in about $112 million in a much smaller region.

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At a distracted driving event yesterday, Andrew Cuomo dodged his own responsibility for the politics of transit funding. Image: Brigid Bergin/WNYC

Andrew Cuomo knows he’s the governor of New York, right?

You couldn’t tell from this exchange about congestion pricing yesterday, via Transportation Nation:

Q: Have you seen Sam Schwartz’s revised congestion pricing plan? Do you support it?

A: I have not seen it. We’ve talked about congestion pricing for many years. We’ve tried to pass it in the past. It hasn’t passed. I don’t know that anything has happened to change that dynamic. I just don’t know if you have the political support to pass it.

That’s the kind of detached punditry that might be appropriate coming from Chris Cuomo, TV journalist, but not the governor. Andrew Cuomo, for better and for worse, practically defines political support in this state.

Let’s look back at one of Cuomo’s signature achievements, passing a law allowing same sex marriage in New York. Two years before Cuomo signed that bill into law, gay marriage didn’t have political support either. It died by a vote of 38-24 in the State Senate. That’s significantly less support than bridge tolls had in the same year, which only needed votes from four more state senators.

Cuomo didn’t sagely nod his head and tell New York’s gay couples that he didn’t know if there was enough political support for them to marry. He launched an all-out effort to, in his words, change the dynamic.

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Image: Sam Schwartz Engineering

Sam Schwartz’s proposal to collect a half-a-buck per bicycle entry on bridges to the Manhattan Central Business District is putting New York cyclists in a bind. Cyclists, like drivers, don’t relish paying for something they’ve been getting for free, particularly when they feel they’re being singled out. Yet Schwartz’s bike-toll idea is merely one part, and a minor one at that, of an audacious scheme to restructure bridge and road tolls across the city and revolutionize travel by car, bike, train and bus. If a bike toll can help sell the grand plan — and Schwartz insists it can — it might be a price worth paying.

Full disclosure first: I’m helping Sam with quantitative analysis of his plan; my BTA model runs its numbers. But my connections to Sam go back much further. In 2009, he hosted a briefing in which I showcased the BTA to other transportation wonks, and his rave for the model in Wired magazine was a big boost for me. I’ve been a Gridlock Sam admirer for decades, captivated by his ability — unique among policy types — to speak the language of the person he’s talking to: cab driver, planner, politician.

So when Sam tried out his bike-toll idea on me months ago, I listened. You can sell easier with honey than vinegar, the saying goes, and Sam’s plan slathers on the honey with a 50 percent drop in tolls on MTA bridges like the Verrazano and the Throgs Neck that connect one outer borough to another. But not even honey packs the zest of sticking it to someone you can’t stand. “You’re going to make the bikers pay to pedal into Manhattan?,” marveled one elected official, an opponent of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan, after seeing Sam’s plan in slideshow. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I introduced this plan?”

The plan Sam wants to sell would charge a uniform ten bucks for each auto round-trip into the CBD, whether via the Hudson, the East River, or 60th Street. After slashing outer-borough bridge tolls, paying for the tolling system and discounting bus fares in the city’s non-subway-served precincts, there would still be $1.2 billion a year left over to invest in infrastructure. Sam would apply most of that to expand transit routes and improve service without bonding that adds pressure to fares. Some would go to highways — Sam is convinced that widening the Belt Parkway to allow trucks will take dangerous commercial traffic off Brooklyn streets. And some will go to the bicycle bridges.

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Gridlock Sam's plan chops $5 off the roundtrip E-ZPass price of major MTA bridges and sets the E-ZPass price for East River crossings at a uniform $5 each way.

New York City is coming up on the four year anniversary of a moment that will live in infamy for transit riders and sustainable transportation advocates: the demise of congestion pricing, which was put down in the state Assembly without a vote on April 7, 2008. The city lost a great opportunity that day to fund its transit system while relieving the city’s most congestion-choked streets from suffocating traffic.

Road pricing has been hibernating since a plan to toll crossings into Manhattan was narrowly defeated in the State Senate in 2009. But last Sunday former New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller put it squarely in the public eye again, featuring the latest plan from the city’s best-known transportation engineer, ”Gridlock” Sam Schwartz.

The basic bargain in Schwartz’s plan boils down to this: Motorists pay more to enter the most congested part of the region, and pay less to travel between the boroughs outside Manhattan. He’s also added a slate of fees so Manhattanites pay more into the system, and a menu of infrastructure projects ranging from widening the Staten Island Expressway to building three new bike and pedestrian bridges into Manhattan.

The plan aims to produce both broad-based benefits and broad-based sacrifice. While the package would be a huge improvement over New York’s dysfunctional road pricing system and result in a major infusion of revenue for the financially troubled MTA, the grab bag of spending is hit or miss. Unlike the 2008 congestion pricing plan, which was supposed to be paired with surface transit improvements and shift trips away from driving all over the city, Schwartz’s plan would induce traffic in some areas outside Manhattan.

Schwartz is constantly refining the plan as he takes it to different constituencies. Here’s a look at the major pieces in the current version of the plan, which is up on the Sam Schwartz Engineering website [PDF] (note: it’s a little different than the summary we posted on Wednesday):

• $5 E-ZPass/$7 cash fee to drive into and out of the congested heart of Manhattan
• $5 roundtrip reduction in tolls on the Verrazano, Triborough, Throgs Neck, and Whitestone bridges
• $2 roundtrip reduction in tolls on the Cross Bay and Marine Parkway bridges, which connect the Rockaway peninsula to the mainland.
• End the parking tax rebate for Manhattan residents, who currently pay about half the tax rate on car storage compared to residents of other boroughs.
• $1 drop fee on yellow cab trips in the Manhattan CBD, with cabbies keeping part of the revenue.
• Reduced express bus fares for residents far from Manhattan.
• New elevated busways built over the median, Airtrain-style, on the Bruckner, the Long Island Expressway, and the Belt Parkway.
• Widening the Staten Island Expressway and the Van Wyck approach to JFK.
• Widening the Belt Parkway and allowing commercial traffic so fewer trucks are on local streets.
• Building three new bike and pedestrian bridges into the Manhattan CBD, one from Hoboken/Jersey City, one from Red Hook via Governor’s Island, and one from Greenpoint/Long Island City.
• Investment in MTA maintenance and capital improvements (specific dollar amount TBD, but it would be more than the amount spent on road projects).

According to Charles Komanoff’s Balanced Transportation Analyzer, Schwartz’s plan would raise a net of $1.26 billion annually, reducing the number of vehicles entering the Manhattan CBD each weekday by 21 percent, while increasing the number of people entering by 3.3 percent. The revenue would be bonded, allowing for up to $15 billion in borrowing that would be spent on transit investment, the roadway projects in Schwartz’s plan, and infrastructure maintenance.

I spoke to Schwartz this morning about how he’s been adjusting his plan over the last four years. Below are edited highlights from the interview.

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NYU students got a sweeping overview of NYC transpo and traffic issues from two of the city’s top thinkers this afternoon, as DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt and independent analyst/congestion pricing advocate Charles Komanoff took turns on the mic at a forum moderated by NYU Law School professor Roderick Hills. I got so caught up in the moment that I completely forgot to snap a photo of Orcutt and Komanoff sharing the stage.

The tolls are higher now than they were when Gridlock Sam started showing this slide in 2007, and the dysfunction remains.

With the MTA budget all over the headlines and “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz’s plan to rationalize NYC bridge tolls nabbing a full-throated endorsement from former Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller, the juiciest info to come out of the forum were the road pricing plans that Komanoff outlined. He went over the basics of the current Sam Schwartz plan and his own “Move NY” package, both of which now mix fees on driving into the Manhattan CBD with toll discounts on crossings in the other boroughs.

Each plan promises to fund the region’s transit system while curbing traffic on city streets that see the heaviest pounding from motor vehicles. First up, the basics of Gridlock Sam’s “Fair Plan,” as presented by Komanoff:

• $5 E-ZPass or $7.50 cash fee each way for motorists crossing the Manhattan CBD cordon (assessed at the East River crossings and 60th Street).
• An average 39 percent toll reduction on the seven MTA bridges that don’t enter the CBD (i.e. the Verrazano, Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Triborough, Henry Hudson, Cross Bay, and Marine Parkway bridges).
• Truck tolls would be 2.2 times higher than private car tolls.
• A $1.00 “drop fee” assessed on each cab trip.
• About one percent of vehicles would be exempt from tolls (not clear how the exemption would be determined).
• In addition to funding transit with its projected $1.2 billion in net annual revenues, the Fair Plan would set aside funds for regional highway investments and three new bike-ped bridges into Manhattan — one over the Hudson, one from Long Island City, and one from the Brooklyn waterfront that would connect to the Battery via Governors Island.

You can see how Komanoff calculates the benefits of the Gridlock Sam plan in his Balanced Transportation Analyzer spreadsheet.

Komanoff’s Move NY Plan, which is being advanced by the campaign that grew out of Ted Kheel’s advocacy for road pricing combined with lower transit fares, has a time-variable tolling structure, like the 2008 congestion pricing plan. You can also look up the projected benefits and costs in Komanoff’s spreadsheet. It features:

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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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