Streetsblog New York City

My recent post refuting David Owen's attack on congestion pricing ignited a long, rich thread. Here's one comment, from "Jonathan," that struck a nerve:

[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.)

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Mayor Bloomberg lifted a page straight from the Kheel Plan playbook yesterday in calling on the MTA to make crosstown buses free [PDF]. Bus riders and transit advocates should be beaming.

Free buses will save bus riders time and money and will benefit everyone by luring some taxi and car users to transit and easing traffic gridlock. Ted Kheel recognized this as far back as the 1960s. Over the past year, he and I have quantified the benefits from free buses, and they're striking:

• MTA Bus engineers recently clocked "dwell time" -- those maddening seconds and minutes taken up by passenger boarding -- on the Bx12 Limited route from 207th Street to Co-op City. A typical run takes 56 minutes and 17 seconds, with passenger stops consuming 16 minutes and 16 seconds -- nearly 30 percent. The engineers found that doing away with fare collection could slash dwell time on the Bx12 to 2 minutes 36 seconds: an 84 percent reduction and a 24 percent saving in total trip time.
• The combination of free fare and speedier service -- including less waiting, since faster buses would arrive more quickly -- would attract many more riders. We estimate 28 percent more (16 percent from the fare savings, 12 percent from the time savings).
• The 28 percent gain in ridership wouldn’t require more buses, even on crowded routes, since the average fare-free bus would travel 32 percent faster. (That 24 percent time saving equates mathematically to a 32 percent speedup.) In effect, absent the human gridlock to collect fares, buses could complete four runs in the time it now takes to do three.

To be sure, these numbers aren't fully proven. The speed gains were measured on one bus route among hundreds, and the imputed boosts to ridership are based on elasticity studies from years ago. But the numbers make intuitive sense. And they're certainly impressive. We place the time savings to bus riders alone at $460 million a year, even valuing passengers' time at a meager nine bucks an hour. The additional travel-time savings to motorists from attracting even a modest number of drivers to transit buses would probably be worth far more.

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As Albany lawmakers ponder which of a half-dozen Ravitch plan variations they might support, the possibility looms that no solution may come in time. New Yorkers could see their fares rise 25 percent while service is cut back -- a twin catastrophe in this tough economic time. Yet no big new ideas are being advanced to protect mass transit users, which is why I believe the time has come for consideration of Ted Kheel’s and my traffic plan.

Our plan rests on three powerful attributes: revenue generation, tolling equality, and sheer efficiency. We achieve these with an inclusive pricing model that asks drivers to pay a fee ranging from $2 to $10 upon entering the Central Business District with the price dependent on the time of day, and charges taxi passengers for their contribution to congestion as well.

The basics:

• Our toll plan generates $1.7 billion a year in revenue; that’s twice as much as the $800 million from Ravitch’s tolls, even though our top toll of $10 matches Ravitch’s $5 (we charge inbound only). As for Sheldon Silver’s $2 toll plan, it nets just $450 million.
• Our plan has no free riders; oops, make that free drivers. Jersey drivers pay the toll, drivers entering the CBD at 60th Street pay the toll, and Manhattanites pay the lion’s share of a 33 percent taxi fare surcharge that raises a quarter of our total revenue. Under the Ravitch and Silver plans, East River drivers who make only 36 percent of crossings into the CBD would be coughing up 60 percent of new toll revenues.
• Everyone wins something in our plan. Buses are free (paid for by $800 million of our $1.7 billion revenue pot). Straphangers get deep off-peak discounts (paid for by the rest -- though some of the reductions might need to be deferred to help stanch the MTA deficit) and a bit more elbow-room in rush hour due to peak-spreading. Drivers get a 20 percent traffic speed-up in the CBD (faster travel “upstream” too), while the variable toll offers a measure of choice.
• Free and faster-moving buses will achieve three goals. They’ll lure enough drivers and straphangers out of gridlocked streets and packed trains to ease crowding on both. By stopping drip-torture boarding that halts movement during Metrocard-swiping, they’ll traverse their routes fast enough to handle the influx. And they’ll provide a huge break to riders across the city, a disproportionate percentage of whom live in poorer, non-Manhattan neighborhoods.

Too good to be true? No, it’s real, the numbers have been checked and re-checked, the plan works.

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Ted Kheel and Charles Komanoff are out with an updated version of their plan to fund low-cost transit with congestion fees on cars and trucks. Coming hot on the heels of Kheel Plan II, the latest iteration -- called Kheel-Komanoff -- lowers the cordon tolls in a bid for political support but does not close the MTA's budget deficit:

...the schedule of cordon entry fees in the Kheel II Plan, which tops out at $25, appears too radical for the public to accept in one gulp. This necessitates an “entry-level” congestion-toll proposal, one tailored to be politically palatable while retaining the Kheel Plan essence of combining a free or cheaper transit “carrot” with a congestion fee "stick."

We have fashioned such a plan. We call it the Kheel-Komanoff Plan to distinguish it from the basic Kheel model of free or nearly-free public transit. Kheel-Komanoff substitutes a $2 to $10 sliding toll scale for the $5 to $25 tolls in Kheel II. It also reduces the 50% taxi surcharge to 33% and trims the 25% rise in non-cordon bridge tolls to 20%.

More bullet points come after the jump. For the full pitch from Komanoff, head over to Grist.

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Under the Ravitch Plan, driving into Manhattan over the Third Avenue Bridge will be a relative bargain for Richard Brodsky's Westchester constituents.

It’s easy to dismiss City Councilmembers Lew Fidler and Peter Vallone, Jr. as transportation troglodytes. They’ve led the pushback against bridge tolls -- most recently at the City Council hearing this week on the Ravitch Commission recommendations -- yet neither has ever put forth a workable alternative for reducing job-killing, community-wrecking traffic congestion. Judging by their anti-toll rhetoric, you’d think that half their district drives to jobs in the Manhattan Central Business District, yet the actual percentages who do so are surprisingly meager: 5.3 percent for Fidler’s Brooklyn district and 4.4 percent for Vallone’s Queens district (plus another 1.7 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively, who carpool).

But in one respect, bridge-toll opponents may have a point: tolling equity. According to my calculations, 60 percent of the proposed Ravitch bridge tolls would be paid by Brooklyn and Queens residents. Yet these residents make only 36 percent of car trips into the CBD. The disparity would mean a hefty cross-subsidy -- worth a few hundred million dollars a year -- of the region's drivers by drivers from these two boroughs.

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Today Ted Kheel released a revised version of his plan to fund transit through a congestion pricing mechanism on motor vehicle traffic. Streetsblog spoke to one of Kheel's lead analysts, Charles Komanoff, about the updated plan (see the major components here) and why he believes it offers a more comprehensive answer to New York City's transportation problems than the MTA rescue package unveiled by the Ravitch Commission last week. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Streetsblog: What are the major ways that the second version of the Kheel Plan differs from the original version?

Charles Komanoff: The major difference -- and it's kind of profound -- is the time of day and also weekend versus weekday pricing for both motor vehicles and the subways. A very cool result is that the average cordon fee under our plan would work out to be around $16, so we’re matching the number we had before, but we're doing it with a range from $5 to $25 that is geared to the amount of congestion that the trip causes. Which makes much more sense because the city gains a good deal more from eliminating a cordon car trip at eight in the morning on a Tuesday than from three in the morning on a Sunday.

A second difference is that we don’t have 100 percent free subways anymore but we have something that is in some ways better, which is peak pricing. This will spread the peak load in the subways so that 22 out of 24 hours of the day -- and all the hours on a weekend -- there will be more subway use than there is now. During the two peak hours -- 8 to 9 a.m. and 5 to 6 p.m. -- there will be considerably less subway use than there is now, which means not only do we address the concerns that people had previously -- “My goodness the subway is so crowded now at rush hour, you’re going to make it worse!” -- we’ve defused that argument because during those two worst hours there’s going to be less subway use than there is now. And I should make clear the six hours a day in which we're going to charge on weekdays are 7 to 10 in the morning and 4 to 7 [in the p.m. rush].

There is a third important change. The taxi surcharge is now 50 percent; previously it was 25 percent. Now remember that medallion taxis under our plan are not going to pay a cordon fee. You couldn’t do it because they’d be going back four or five times. I wish we could charge for Manhattan residents who have cars that are just going to be driving within the CBD and not breaking the cordon. We can’t get to that and that’s got to happen in the future, but at the very least we can charge a healthy surcharge for medallion taxis and that accomplishes three things. One, it generates almost $700 million and the system needs money. Second, it acts as somewhat of a break on what could otherwise be a big boom in taxi use as the streets get less congested... And third -- and this is where the politics come in -- who is going to pay the lion’s share of this taxi surcharge? It’s going to be Manhattanites, so we are really trying to balance the equities geographically.

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Ted Kheel and his band of transportation analysts are releasing an updated version of their low-cost transit proposal, which they are pitching as an alternative to the Ravitch Commission's MTA rescue package. The revised Kheel Plan retains the original's congestion zone cordon, charging vehicles to drive into Manhattan below 60th Street. The major twist is that drivers and subway riders would be charged variable-rate fees depending on the time of day (straphangers would only pay a fare during the morning and evening peaks).

I spoke to Kheel Planner Charles Komanoff about the new version, why politicians in Brooklyn and Queens should embrace it, and how it stacks up against the Ravitch Plan. We'll post the interview later today. Follow the jump for the major points from Kheel Plan 2.

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New Yorkers can expect more misery on the streets as well as underground if the MTA has to follow through on the austerity measures it unveiled yesterday. The transportation analysts behind the Kheel Plan -- the congestion pricing variant that balances higher driver fees with free transit -- calculate that the likely combination of service cuts and higher fares and tolls will put tens of thousands more cars on the road:

Kheel's team reported these likely consequences from a combination of a 25% across-the-board subway-and-bus fare hike and proposed service cuts, along with a $1.00 increase in MTA bridge and tunnel tolls:

• An additional 30,000 cars (a 4 percent increase) driven into the City’s most congested streets
• A 6 percent drop in subway ridership and a 4 percent drop in bus ridership;
• A 4 percent decrease in already snail-paced traffic speeds

The figures derive from an updated version of the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, the Kheel planners' number-crunching algorithm. The new BTA will be unveiled shortly, together with a revised Kheel Plan, "with time-varying tolls and subway fares sufficient to close the MTA deficit and fund vital expansions." That means the new plan will include the option to charge fares during peak times, spokesman Mark Hannah told Streetsblog. (Charles Komanoff outlined the revisions on Streetsblog this June.)

Free transit was not bandied about much at the Ravitch Commission's public hearings in September, but Kheel's team sees a window of opportunity in the next election. "Our major goal is to make our plan an issue in the 2009 campaign," Hannah said, noting that several electeds have reacted positively to the Kheel proposal. "It's a matter of, at this point, getting a champion."

Meanwhile, for all you wonks in the audience, follow the jump for more information on the methodology behind the projections.

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“In for a penny, in for a pound” is how the Brits express what we Americans less elegantly call “the whole hog”: why do something halfway when you might as well go all the way?

That’s the thinking behind Ted Kheel’s free-transit proposal. If an $8 congestion fee, as unsuccessfully proposed recently by Mayor Bloomberg, infuriated drivers, Kheel reasons, then let’s go the whole hog and charge $16 to drive into Manhattan. Drivers are already as mad as they’re going to get about any congestion charge. With $16, we won’t stir up twice as many hornets, but we’ll raise twice the revenue — enough to finance universal free transit throughout the five boroughs and disarm the faux-populists who sank Mayor Bloomberg’s more modest plan.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Bloomberg's plan appeared to too many people to be “all stick.” There wasn’t enough direct and concrete payoff, for anybody, to attract wide public support. The Kheel Plan remedies this defect with the very considerable, tangible, obvious "carrot" of free transit.

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As former deputy mayor and Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission Chair Marc Shaw predicts that congestion pricing may re-emerge soon in the form a proposal to toll 60th Street and the East River bridges, the Daily Politics reports that Ted Kheel is planning to put up $1 million to promote his free transit plan heading into the 2009 mayoral election.

"If I was half my age, I would run for mayor in 2009 on the issue," said the 93-year-old Kheel, who has already met with what a spokesman described as "one serious mayoral contender who showed interest in the free transit idea," although he declined to reveal which would-be candidate that was.

Kheel plans a multifaceted campaign to keep congestion pricing in the news that will include advertising and coalition building. No further details were immediately available.

"I now see free mass transit as the key to the resolution of traffic congestion, a problem cities throughout the world face, I am now prepared to spend an additional million dollars to save the city I was born in from choking on automobiles."

The Kheel plan would double the proposed congestion charge for private autos to $16 ($32 for trucks) and eliminate transit fares.