[A] cordon-pricing plan … which doesn't charge center-city residents could result in an increase in those residents' automobile use. If the streets are free of outer-borough traffic, more of my Manhattan neighbors might drive to work, or simply make extra automobile trips within the cordon that without CP [congestion pricing], they would have made by subway or taxi.

Jonathan's right: Any Manhattan cordon-pricing scheme will lead to an uptick in car trips that start and end within the charging zone. It's one of those "rebound effects" that congestion-price modeling needs to account for, and which I've taken pains to incorporate in my Balanced Transportation Analyzer pricing model.

Indeed, I daresay that the BTA handles just about every issue ever raised on this blog about congestion pricing. How many transit users will switch to cabs? Will variable tolls really flatten rush-hour peaks? Won't faster roads lure back the trips killed off by the toll (Owen's conundrum)? And many more.

Technically, the BTA is a spreadsheet. But I think of it as a vast mansion, whose 46 interlinked "rooms" (worksheets) are stocked with precious data and ingenious algorithms for cracking open questions like these:

• How does congestion on weekends compare with weekdays?
• How sharply do traffic speeds rise as volumes fall?
• Which boroughs and counties stand to pay the most with congestion pricing?
• Will a cordon toll lead to more bicycling, and will that improve public health?
• Can decommissioning vehicle lanes increase congestion pricing's benefits?
• Which will boost transit use more: lower fares or better service?
• How many fares does a cabbie get in a ten-hour taxi shift, with and without pricing?

Multiply that list a hundredfold and you get a sense of the BTA's hidden treasures.

I say "hidden" because, except for a few mavens like "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, who calls it "the best [modeling] tool that I have seen in my nearly 40 years," the Balanced Transportation Analyzer remains largely untapped by advocates. To me, it's as if we're all starving while this rich storehouse next door goes to waste.

Which prompts me to ask: Why is the BTA so underused? Is our community missing out on a valuable tool? What should we do about it?

Let's make this an open thread, with emphasis on what can we do together to make the BTA more accessible and useful to New York's livable streets community. (The model is adaptable to other cities, so those of you not from NYC are also invited.)

As for Jonathan's question: the BTA shows that over the course of a typical weekday, 72 percent of all vehicle miles traveled inside the Manhattan Central Business District are by cars, trucks and buses that have crossed into the CBD, either at 60th Street or across the Hudson or East Rivers, and thus would pay the congestion toll. The remaining 28 percent of VMT is mostly by medallion taxicabs (22 percent). Cars and trucks that stayed within the cordon zone and couldn't be tolled accounted for just 6 percent of all CBD traffic. (All this is derived and shown in the table at the bottom of the BTA's "Cordon" worksheet.)

This tells us that: 1) Even if "intrazonal" traffic rises sharply, as Jonathan fears, it will add relatively little VMT because it's such a small share of overall cordon traffic to begin with; and 2) rather than fret over the free pass for intrazonal trips (which are impractical to toll with current technology), congestion pricing needs a strategy to stop a surge in taxicab use from filling the newly freed road space.

The plan currently advocated by Ted Kheel and myself does just that. It combines a 33 percent surcharge on all three taxi-fare components -- mileage, waiting time, and the "drop" -- with time-variable car tolls of $3/$6/$9 on weekdays and $2/$3/$4 on weekends (trucks pay double, reflecting their greater bulk, while medallion cabs are exempt from the toll but pay the surcharge). Under this Kheel-Komanoff Plan, intrazonal VMT is predicted to rise by approximately 120,000 miles a day -- 40,000 by cars and trucks, 80,000 by taxicabs. But cordon VMT by vehicles coming from outside, and thus tolled, falls far more, by 450,000. This yields a net drop in cordon travel of 330,000 VMT, an 8 percent decline that, the model predicts, will boost average travel speeds within the CBD by around 20 percent.

The point of this post isn't to advocate for a particular plan, however. It's to show that rebound effects and other asserted congestion-toll pitfalls can be modeled and, with the right plan, accommodated.

The figures are based on 2007 traffic levels. Current volumes are probably slightly less. While a decrease in "baseline" traffic cuts into the benefits of congestion pricing, both the saved time and new transit revenue predicted for Kheel-Komanoff are still striking. And, yes, if you want to test our pricing plan (or your own) with reduced baseline traffic, the BTA even has a switch to adjust the volume.

Data: IBM's CPI

When asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and $20. That's about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation's climate-change exchanges.

And the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 -- or more than $100 per hour.

What does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested transport network shouldn't let that stop policy-making. As every successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message. When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And it's not that lawmakers don't know how to decrease congestion, particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI. Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Is it time to nickname the White House's Sustainable Communities Initiative the "Shorter Commutes Initiative"?

At this point, it's difficult to know exactly what the government's "cash for clunkers" program is supposed to accomplish.

To add to Elana's post yesterday on the "myths" circulating about the program, let me offer a few thoughts on how best to think about whether the program has provided actual net benefits.

The first thing to consider is what would have happened in the absence of the program. Vehicle sales rose fairly strongly in July, and this will no doubt be attributed to the "clunkers" rebates.

But during the recession, sales hit historic lows. Replacement rates for vehicles sank to unsustainable levels, suggesting quite a bit of pent up demand in the economy.

With economic recovery and continued improvement in credit markets, sales were sure to begin rising, with or without a government subsidy.

"Cash for clunkers" may have altered the timing of purchases, but in all likelihood most of these buyers were going to be in the market soon anyway.

What about the efficiency savings generated by the program? To generate its 0.5 percent of oil consumption savings estimate, the study Elana cites used the following assumptions:

The projection assumes some 250,000 "clunkers" with an average 15 miles per gallon efficiency are traded in for vehicles rated at an average 25 mpg, and travel an average 10,000 miles per year.

Given that far less than a 10 mile per gallon improvement is required to get a $3,500 voucher for a car or any voucher on an SUV or truck, it's not clear that this is an appropriate number to use. And even when efficiencies do improve significantly, the increase in mileage can't be solely attributed to the program.

Moreover, most of the clunkers being traded in this summer will have been purchased at a time when oil prices were lower than they are at present. Real oil prices in 2003 were half their current level; those in 1998 were one-fifth of prices now.

So in all likelihood, efficiencies for new vehicle purchases would be, on average, higher than those of trade-ins even without the program.

Where the program has succeeded in creating new sales, the environmental benefits are even sketchier than Elana relates. Once the energy emissions from producing a new automobile to replace a functioning old one are taken into account, the meager savings from the program may vanish entirely.

In assessing "cash for clunkers," we should also compare it with potential alternative policies. Money for the program might instead have been used to close budget holes at transit agencies, limiting service cuts, or to fund other green measures like weatherization programs.

As economic stimulus, the plan likely performed poorly relative to alternatives. As mentioned above, it is questionable whether the program generated many new sales.

Those currently in the market for a new car are probably not among the hardest hit by the recession and will be less likely to use a marginal dollar. That means that the subsidy provided by "cash for clunkers" may simply be replacing private spending rather than facilitating spending that wouldn't otherwise take place.

Unemployment benefits, on the other hand, overwhelmingly add to consumption; recipients would be spending less, in absolute terms, without the benefit.

Perhaps with more stringent efficiency requirements -- particularly for truck purchases -- the policy would have performed better. As it stands, "cash for clunkers" primarily served to give people who didn't need the help money to buy cars they were going to buy anyway.

"The federal government can promote better jobs, protect taxpayers, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by simply taking some lessons from states and cities," said Greg LeRoy, Executive Director of Good Jobs First. "These well-established safeguards are consistent with President-elect Obama’s stated goal of reforming programs to make them more transparent and cost-effective."

The study deals with five federal programs: the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program; the Department of Labor’s Workforce Investment Act; the Department of Commerce’s Public Works and Economic Development Program; Industrial Revenue Bonds as allowed under the Internal Revenue Code; and the Department of Agriculture’s Business and Industry Guaranteed Loans Program.

The report, which could hardly be more relevant than it is today, may be downloaded here.

Photo: Michael Hinton/Flickr

Mr. Obama is coordinating with Congressional Democrats behind the scenes on the stimulus plans, which would include more jobless benefits, food stamps, aid to financially strapped states and cities, and spending for infrastructure projects that keep people at work. His chief liaison has been Mr. Emanuel.

"You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid," Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. "In 1974 and 1978 we never dealt with it, and our dependence on foreign oil never changed."

Good stuff, except for that "foreign" part.

The National Infrastructure Bank will assemble a portfolio of projects for investment by the public and private sector. I will follow the formula developed by the renowned economist Felix Rohatyn so that any project seeking over $75 million in federal support would be required to submit a proposal to the bank. The submission would include the contribution to be made by the state and local governments, user fees and a plan for maintenance. The bank would then decide to fund the project outright, or through credit guarantees for state bonds or loans against future revenues from user fees and other sound financial strategies.

The federal government will favor cities that introduce congestion pricing. A recent study by the Brookings Institute found that more than $100 billion could be raised annually by road pricing in the 98 largest metropolitan areas. We will adopt the previous administration’s call for a dedicated Metro Mobility (MM) Program (pdf) for metropolitan areas with populations greater than 500,000. These are the battle grounds for congestion, fuel inefficiencies and production of greenhouse gases.

The gas tax is a dinosaur (pun intended). As long as it remains a flat tax at 18.4 cents per gallon and gas consumption decreases (a goal of my administration) it will be a dwindling source of revenue. I propose that the tax, like most other taxes, be indexed against the sale price. This way, when foreign influences raise the price of gas, some revenue will be returned to the taxpayers in public works projects. I propose a 5 cent/gallon increase over present levels, the first increase since 1993, to generate about $10 billion annually. But, if the price of gas goes down, and I hope it does, the tax will go down accordingly.

Following yesterday's Build for America launch and last night's presidential debate, the Regional Plan Association released a major report today recommending an array of public transportation improvements for New York City and northern New Jersey, adding its name to the ever-growing list of orgs and officials calling for federal investment to spur and sustain economic growth in the coming decades.

Over a dense 53 pages, "Tomorrow’s Transit: New Mobility for the Region’s Urban Core" [PDF] lays out dozens of projects, large and small, that would improve transit access and performance, with a focus on underserved and, in many cases, high poverty areas. The report, as breathtaking in scope as the $29 billion five-year capital plan unveiled by MTA head Lee Sander last March, also proposes augmentations to long-planned mega-projects like the Second Avenue Subway, and stresses links between modes to maximize coverage and efficiency.

Proposals are categorized by cost and level of need, as determined by existing transit service, income levels, and rates of auto ownership.

Follow the jump for highlights.

• Bronx: Extend the Second Avenue Subway to the Third Avenue corridor and Co-op City; provide added service on Metro-North at six Bronx station stops on the Harlem and Hudson River lines; offer peak express service on the Dyre Avenue line; and establish ferry service from Soundview.
  
• Brooklyn: Convert the Atlantic Branch of the LIRR to subway service and connect it to the Second Avenue Subway; build a Utica Avenue branch off the converted Atlantic Branch of the LIRR; extend the Nostrand Avenue 2 and 5 lines to Kings Highway; extend the Canarsie L line to Spring Creek Towers/Starrett City; and establish high speed ferry service from Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bay Ridge.
  
• Manhattan: Implement no-fare rides on the 34th Street, 42nd Street and 50th Street cross-town bus routes; extend the Second Avenue Subway west along 125th Street; construct a station entrance on the east end of the First Avenue L station; and establish a midtown Bus Rapid Transit or light rail route loop.
  
• Queens: Convert the LIRR Atlantic Branch to subway service; connect Queensboro Plaza and Queens Plaza and the E, F, G and V at Court Square; and begin Bus Rapid Transit on Queens Boulevard.
• Staten Island: Proceed with Hylan Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit; establish ferry service from southern Staten Island; and establish a bus lane along the full length of the Staten Island Expressway.
• New Jersey (Hudson County and Newark): Extend currently planned Bus Rapid Transit routes in Newark to include cross-town and Sumner/Mt. Prospect Avenue corridors; construct a new Hudson Bergen Light Rail Station at Grand Street and 17th Street in Hoboken; and extend the Hudson Bergen Light Rail to Route 440.
  

In addition, the RPA recommends a number of complementary measures, including parking and land use reforms, transit-oriented development, and congestion pricing.

"Tomorrow's Transit" was composed over the course of a year in conjunction with area transportation experts, NJ TRANSIT, the MTA and New York City DOT.

What the mainstream is truly missing here en masse is that another tsunami is building right behind the finance fiasco, and that it will render moot the whole reeking cargo of schemes and wishes that comprises the Great Bail-out. I am speaking of the global oil problem. In fact, the problems in banking and money currently roaring in the center ring of the world circus, can be described categorically as a product of the oil problem -- since oil is the primary resource of industrial economies and therefore the motive force behind our ability to generate "wealth." Without reliable and ever-growing supplies of oil, there is no industrial growth, and without industrial growth things like capital investment instruments lose their legitimacy. That is why the Frankenstein family of Ponzi securities was invented in the first place -- to compensate for the demise of industrial growth by creating wealth out of... nothing!

While press coverage of Summer Streets has been generally positive, tales of the miffed muffler shop owner and complaining cabinet maker are bound to continue, as reporters hunt for naysayers to "balance" out their stories. But what will be the economic reality of Summer Streets? Here, Streetsblog Publisher Mark Gorton gives his account of Saturday lunch with the family at an outdoor café on Park Avenue and 51st Street.

The host told us that he could seat us, but that they couldn't put our order in for at least a half hour because the kitchen was so backed up. He said on a normal Saturday they would have had three or four tables occupied, but there were about 30 tables filled. He pointed and said, "Look, even the manager is taking tables." We were happy to wait, so we sat and ate. As I looked around the café, only a couple tables looked to be filled by bikers. My guess is that lots of people who would never have bothered to walk along Park Ave. on a Saturday suddenly found it an interesting place to be.

Most of the stories we've seen reflect Mark's experience: In general, businesses which rely on foot traffic expected and/or received a boost from Summer Streets. Streetsblogger Larry Littlefield has suggested altering the route to exclude more car-dependent enterprises, like furniture stores. What else could, or should, the city do -- if anything -- to take such businesses into account? And how did (or will) Summer Streets affect your spending habits?

Photo: Ben Fried

The Dutch call it a woonerf -- a “livable street” resplendent with wide sidewalks, ample retail, greenery and minimal automobile traffic. It’s designed to boost quality of life for citizenry, the till for retailers and property values for landowners. Perhaps you've noticed that New York City doesn’t have many woonerfs amid its warren of streets, which make up one-fourth of the city's land area.

But what if it did?

Retail sales and property values would jump; pollution and noise would drop; and contentment among those lucky enough to live near or on a livable street would abound.

The full report promises to raise a lot of good questions. One leaps to mind already: Given the rewards to be reaped from more pedestrian-oriented streets and less traffic, will the city continue to enable car-dependent projects in the pursuit of its goals for housing and economic development? 

Graphic courtesy of the Observer; click through for full version.

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.

Meanwhile, America's historically underfunded transit systems are also struggling with rising fuel prices and record demand. No word yet on how taking money away from transit to pay for highways fits in to George W. Bush's plan to end America's oil addiction but maybe time for Americans to take a good, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves what kind of nation do we want to be?

Saturday's Times delved into the history of the MTA's mounting debt burden, which, along with rising fuel costs and plummeting revenues from the real estate transactions tax, has severely squeezed the authority's finances:

Debt payments are the system’s largest single cost after payroll, and by 2012 they will account for one of every five dollars the authority spends.

The problems facing the agency now are no surprise. Independent analysts and the agency’s own financial planners have warned of rising debt costs for years -- most loudly and urgently after a huge debt restructuring in 2000.

Called at the time the largest deal in the history of American municipal finance, the refinancing -- taking advantage of lower interest rates -- led to lower debt payments. The agency, facing political resistance to fare increases and new taxes, decided to sell new bonds to finance the system’s first major expansion since the 1930s. In a few short years, the debt burden it had amassed over nearly 20 years had doubled.

Before the debt restructuring, the article notes, state and city contributions to the MTA capital budget fell to historic lows during the 1990s, causing the authority to rely more on borrowing.

When former MTA chairman Richard Ravitch proposed the authority's first bonds, issued in 1982, the cash made possible investments that revived a transit system in crisis. Now all eyes are again fixed on Ravitch, appointed by Governor Paterson to find a way out of the MTA's current funding woes. With the state and city facing budget crunches of their own, where might the money for transit come from?

Graphic: New York Times

New York City has long sent the feds billions more in taxes each year than we get back in services. To give you an idea of one place the money goes, here is what the feds gave corn farmers to tend their fields in a two-year period: $36 billion.

Here is what we got to run the subway: 0

The feds have been reasonable when it comes to helping out with big projects like the new subway and train tunnels that never get done. But, we get not a penny toward the day-to-day cost of transporting 4 million straphangers.

I interviewed Larry Hanley a couple of weeks ago. He's the former Staten Island bus driver (famous for getting up in Rudy Giuliani's grill, among other things) who now serves as a Vice President of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Negotiating contracts across the Northeast, Hanley is seeing smaller transit systems in places like Lancaster, PA and Albany, NY struggling with increasing operating costs at a time when they are also experiencing record increases in ridership.

With New Yorkers facing a pair of fare hikes and a deteriorating transit system, Hanley is arguing that federal funding in mass transit is an investment in local economies, green jobs, the environment and national defense. "We've got a Saudi Arabia's worth of energy savings beneath the streets of New York City," Hanley said. "It's called the subway."

Photo: Crowded bus in Champaign-Urbana by Benchilada on Flickr.

It's always a bit of a mind-boggler when some statistics emerge showing how much oil the U.S. military consumes. From yesterday's Politico:

So, you think you've got the gas prices blues. Just consider Al Shaffer, the man in charge of drafting an energy strategy for the gas-­guzzling Pentagon.

With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and troops spread around the world, the Department of Defense is the nation's biggest oil consumer, burning 395,000 barrels per day -- about as much as Greece.

Rep. Steve Israel, a Democrat from Long Island who formed a Defense Energy Working Group back in 2004 after learning that the the Army's Stryker combat vehicles got only 5 miles per gallon of gas, sums it up as such:

"Here is our current defense posture," Israel said. "We are borrowing money from China to fund our defense budgets to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to fund our military to protect us from China and the Persian Gulf. It is an insidious vulnerability."

And that's not even including the part about destroying the planet.

The U.S. military's insatiable thirst for oil isn't exactly news. Blood and Oil author Michael Klare wrote a nice piece on this same topic last year:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis... Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million

The Allied war effort during World War 2 was fueled by six billon barrels of American oil.

Photo: Jacobnbailey / Flickr

From today's Crain's Insider:

The city is weighing a new set of street design guidelines that would make installation of pedestrian-friendly elements, like curb extensions, easier. The Department of Transportation has developed a number of new street and traffic plans in Madison Square Park and other places around the city. But each one requires special budgetary approval, and the city wants to streamline the process. By adopting a series of pre-approved templates, the city could implement the designs without getting capital approval.

Too good to be true, right? But that's the slant of the front-page headline in today's Times, "Politics Failed, but Fuel Prices Cut Congestion":

Soaring gas prices and higher tolls seem to be doing for traffic in New York what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's ambitious congestion pricing was supposed to do: reducing the number of cars clogging the city’s streets and pushing more people to use mass transit.

The article reports that traffic on MTA bridges and tunnels within the city and the Port Authority's Hudson River crossings was down this spring by 4-5 percent compared with a year ago -- within hailing distance of the 6.3 percent drop sought by the mayor's plan.

Good news, but how much of the decline is due to the price of gas and how much to the toll increases that took effect around the same time?

I think that so far the tolls have been the bigger factor. Here's why: a typical round-trip into the Manhattan CBD uses between 1.3 and 1.4 gallons of gas (based on an average 22.6-mile round-trip distance and a stop-and-start 17 miles per gallon). Nationally, gas cost $3.65 this April-May and $3.05 a year earlier, for a year-to-year increase of 60 cents a gallon or just 80 cents per trip. The toll increase was a good deal higher than this, even accounting for trips into town via the free bridges.

Okay, hardly anyone does these calculations before deciding whether or not to drive. And perhaps $4 gas will start to act as a tipping point, making it socially acceptable to drive less and triggering larger defections from cars than the numbers would predict -- particularly in transit-rich environments like the New York region.

Could happen. But I wouldn't count on it. In recent years, the "elasticity" of gasoline consumption, as indicated by changes in usage relative to changes in pump prices, has been fairly constant across a wide range of price fluctuations. (See spreadsheet.) We'll know more on this score in a few months, when usage data corresponding to the $4 price become available.

The Times quotes traffic guru Sam Schwartz:

If we start eclipsing $5 a gallon, which we might over the summer, I think we might get very close [to the mayor's goal].

Gridlock Sam may be right. But what the article doesn't say is, first, whether that 6.3 percent drop in Manhattan traffic (and 1-2 percent citywide) is so momentous; and, second, which tool for cutting traffic is more desirable: a "market-driven" gasoline price rise that enriches the owners of petroleum, or a socially-decided road-pricing policy whose revenues would be available to improve transit.

Relying on punishingly high gas prices to undo a century of motorist-skewed traffic policies is like praying for a hailstorm to cure a drought. Congestion pricing, particularly via game-changing programs such as the Kheel Plan, remains essential for New York. 

Photo: dM.nyc™/Flickr

Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan, immediately issued a statement condemning the measure:

S.7594-B, introduced by Senator Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island), would exempt gasoline and diesel from the State's excise tax, Sales Tax, and Petroleum Business Tax, from May 23, 2008 to September 2, 2008.  These taxes are currently used to provide funds for highways, roads, bridges, and mass transit.  By suspending the taxes the Senate Republicans will create an estimated $600 million budget gap for these necessary services.

"This bill is obviously meant to prey on the desperate need for relief of New York's suffering drivers," said Senator Liz Krueger.  "In reality this bill will only worsen the economic crisis in New York, and at best result in little to none of the intended aid.  Increased demand will lead to higher prices and negate any positive effect the gas tax holiday was meant to have."

So far so good, but then Krueger serves up a cocktail of alternative policies meant to ease the burden on drivers. Even in relatively rail-rich New York, transit doesn't enter the picture.

Among the ideas she floats, which were all proposed by Senate Democrats and rejected by Republicans:

Initiating a middle income gas and diesel fuel tax rebate program, which will give a $100 tax rebate to all New Yorkers, who earn $75,000 or less, that live in and have a vehicle registered in New York.

Instituting criminal penalties for price gouging and increasing fines of offenders to $25,000. 

But if the goal is to lower people's transportation costs, why reward only car owners? How about packaging that relief in the form of incentives to take transit instead of driving? And why promote the idea that gas prices will go down if only those "price gougers" along the supply chain would stop taking advantage of innocent consumers?

While Krueger does mention conservation and reducing the gas consumption of the state's vehicle fleet, encouraging non-government workers to drive less is noticeably absent from her proposals. As the summer driving season gets underway, will any politician outside the second smallest state in the union have the guts to talk about mode switch?

Copenhagen-based Flickr photographer Zakkalicious tells us that this cartoon was originally published in the May 1933 issue of Toy World magazine and also appeared in David Herhily's 2004 book, "Bicycle."

In this five-minute speech, delivered at the Stonewall Democratic Club in Manhattan and captured by The Politicker, Council Member Lew Fidler draws on the 2005 mayoral campaign of Freddy Ferrer to rehash the old saw that congestion pricing would create a city of "haves" and "have-nots."

"This is its stated purpose. This is exactly how it's supposed to work, so there's no debate on this point: it allocates your ability to enter the heart of our city by who can and can not afford it."

Again, Fidler betrays his windshield perspective. Of course congestion pricing will not keep a single person from entering Lower Manhattan, as long as they can walk, bike, or pay the (up to) $2 transit fare. And, as has been stated ad nauseum on Streetsblog, the city is already stratified, only in reality the "haves" have cars and/or parking placards while the "have-nots" have MetroCards.

Judging by the tepid reception Fidler gets here, his audience seems to get this, even if the councilman does not.

This almost daily journey of mine up to Columbia, where I've been going a lot lately to research a book, was anecdotal confirmation of what any serious study would probably show you: the city's transit system, while packed at rush hour, has considerable capacity in the off-peak hours.

While I enjoyed my ease in finding a seat, for the city and for its citizens it would be better if the subway lines were more crowded during non-rush hours. The city's transit lines are one of its more expensive and valuable pieces of infrastructure. Having more riders means that the taxpayers, who, lest we forget, ultimately own the subway, are getting more value out of this publicly owned piece of infrastructure.

There's an easy way to do this and that's to substantially lower the cost of an Unlimited Ride MetroCard so that most residents buy them. This is a far more effective way of encouraging off-peak ridership than lower-cost single fares at off-peak hours, which has also been discussed.

Economists talk about the elasticity of purchases, meaning how price sensitive a purchase is. Commuting to work is very inelastic because most people have to get to work and they will pay what they have to to get there. Sure, in the long run they may move to a different neighborhood if commuting costs are too high, but they won't change habits much on a daily basis.

Not so with more optional trips. If you are thinking of stopping for a book on the way home, or trying out a new place for lunch, or even sunbathing in a park, then an extra $2 or even $1 will be a significant deterrent. This is a very elastic commodity. If you have an Unlimited Ride MetroCard, then the cost of an additional trip, once you have committed the "sunk cost," is zero. That's a good thing for citizens' quality of life, and a good thing for the economic health of the city.

In just a few weeks, on March 2, we will all be paying more for those unlimited ride cards. A monthly pass, for example, will rise to $81, up from $76. The law of supply and demand being what it is, this means that fewer people will buy Unlimited Ride MetroCards than otherwise would have, and thus fewer people will use the subways.

This rise in price came out of the push earlier this year by MTA CEO Elliot Sander to raise base fares, and the campaign ended exactly the wrong way. Under pressure from Governor Spitzer, the MTA ended up keeping the base fare the same and raising the price of the unlimited ride cards. For some reason, this is more politically palatable.

I have an alternate policy suggestion for next year: let's drop the price of a monthly Unlimited Ride MetroCard to a breathtakingly low $30. Meanwhile, let's raise the price of an individual fare to $3. This would push most people to buy the unlimited ride cards, leaving the individual tickets for the tourists and out-of-towners, who are less price conscious and whose money we should be seeking to extract anyway.

Someone about now might be asking what all this has to do with street life. A lot, actually. As we walk around our favored part of the city, it's easy to forget that an essential part of being able to sip a coffee at a café or stroll along a shopping strip is the thundering tracks underneath the sidewalk. They enable people to live densely, without cars and their necessary parking spaces, and so create the possibility of having many people per square foot of sidewalk, which is in the final analysis the essential component of a livable street. The transit system lubricates street life.

Some transit expert could determine how lowering the cost of the unlimited pass while raising the single fare would impact MTA finances. Such a move might increase the gap between revenue and expenses, and thus increase the need for public funding. But even if that were the case, the city and state should fill any gap, and the public should demand they do so. We accept higher fares with a grudging stoicism, not fully realizing that this our transit system, publicly owned, built and now operated. (We can leave for another day the common misperception that the transit system was originally private. It wasn't. See my essay here for info on this.)

Higher tax revenues from increased business activity might even make up for any additional necessary funding of the MTA. The main point though, is that this is our transit system. We should start acting like it in our policies.

Photo: petra jane/Flickr