[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.

Photo of M14 bus: Kriston Lewis/Flickr.

• 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.

The mayor says his proposal might not cost NYC Transit much since most crosstown bus passengers are free transfers from subways. The story citywide is probably different, though. We estimate that free buses in all five boroughs would cost $740 million a year (after netting $30 million now spent maintaining farebox machinery). How could this lost revenue be made up?

One way would be a modest weekday congestion charge to drive into the Manhattan Central Business District: $6 during peak hours, $2 overnight, and $4 in-between, charged inbound only. That’s just one option; others can be seen by inputting various congestion prices into the Balanced Transportation Analyzer spreadsheet. (All figures in this article are derived from and sourced in the BTA; start with the "Bus Boarding" worksheet.)

Ted Kheel views free buses as a down payment toward universal free transit in NYC, financed largely through a fair congestion charge. With his more limited proposal, a down payment toward Kheel's, Mayor Bloomberg has taken the first step toward realizing that vision.

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.

Politically, who knows? It’s easy to shrug and say that if Albany can’t get it together to enact $2 tolls, there’s no chance for an ambitious plan like Kheel-Komanoff.

And yet … unlike the plans on the table, which impose tolls while giving little back (as did Mayor Bloomberg’s failed congestion pricing proposal), our plan is about gain, and freedom, and relief:

• Gain for the millions of transit riders who will enjoy better service and more spending money.
• Freedom from recurring fare hikes and service cuts.
• Significant relief from traffic congestion that frustrates drivers, dehumanizes our city and saps the economy.

Lately I’ve kept a low profile about our plan out of deference to Dick Ravitch and his well thought out plan that recognizes the gravity of the crisis. But Albany is so stuck, and the dialogue so stilted, that it seems time to air a bolder, more ambitious plan.

Since New Year’s, I’ve discussed the Kheel-Komanoff plan with dozens of electeds and advocates. The private response has been uniformly positive.

There may still be time to win a real hearing -- or at least infuse elements of our plan into Ravitch's. Let’s find each other now, before it’s too late.

...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.

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.

Whence the disparity? There are two sources. First, the Ravitch plan imposes no new tolls on auto trips into the Manhattan core that come from New Jersey and northern Manhattan; these constitute almost one-quarter of the total. Second, another 20% of trips into the CBD -- from Bronx, Westchester and other points north -- use one of the Harlem River bridges. Ravitch wants those drivers to pay less than half the standard MTA toll rate that would apply to the four East River crossings -- the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges.

Under the Bloomberg congestion pricing plan, Brooklyn and Queens actually bore a fairer share of the burden than in the Ravitch plan, in spite of Bloomberg's controversial “toll-net” provision that heavily discounted autos from New Jersey. Even so, under Bloomberg’s plan, auto trips from Brooklyn and Queens, 36 percent of the total into the CBD, would have accounted for 40 percent of toll revenues, making almost a 1-to-1 match-up. That may explain why Councilmember John Liu, from Queens, voted for the mayor’s plan but is blasting the bridge tolls provision in the Ravitch plan.

Was Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal the last word on geographical equity? Hardly. There’s no need for a cordon toll plan to include toll-nets. Nor should it give Manhattanites a free pass; an easy-to-administer surcharge on fares for medallion taxis, which are overwhelmingly used by Manhattan residents, could swell the toll-revenue pie and spread it over a broader population and income base.

Can’t someone fashion a plan along those lines? Hmm, maybe someone already has.

Charles Komanoff in the booth at WNYC earlier this year. Photo: WNYC/Flickr

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.

SB: So the major planning and environmental groups who lined up behind congestion pricing are starting to push the Ravitch plan, and at the same time we have the same opposing forces lining up against bridge tolls. How are you going to sell this politically?

The prime underlying principle in the Kheel Plan is, I would say, "When New Yorkers use transit everybody wins, when New Yorkers drive everybody loses." And what we ought to be doing is maximizing the incentives for New Yorkers to use mass transit and we ought to be de-incentivizing or discouraging New Yorkers from driving.

The real arena is with Brooklyn and Queens, and with the populist -- or faux-populist, as Streetsblog would say -- forces. Why will they come in? Why they ought to support it is because it is geographically balanced, and it’s providing an incredible value to everyone in the city, especially the boroughs, in the form of free buses -- buses being much more of a borough than a Manhattan medium -- and providing nearly free subways, 75 percent discounted subways. The way that I would put is the way that I put it a year ago to Brooklyn and Queens, "How are you going to tell your constituents that you turned your back on a plan that could make mass transit virtually or practically free?"

SB: You do lose a bit of the pitch if you can’t say totally free subways.

CK: We do, so why are we doing that? We’re doing it for $600 million, that’s what we get by holding on to the fare box for those hours. The fare box now [collects] about $2,300 million and we hold onto $600 million. I don't think it's trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I think it’s an ironclad answer to the very legitimate concerns about subway crowding, and if we had free subways during those three morning and three evening most-crowded subway rush hours we might stress the system just beyond what anybody is willing to tolerate.

It's a much easier sell and it's a terrific argument -- the time of day pricing on both modes -- it really solves a lot of problems and creates a lot of benefits.

SB: Does this plan recommend bus service improvements and reaching those parts of Brooklyn and Queens that say, "We don’t have a transit option?" Is that part of this plan or is it implicit that that will be added?

CK: It's an input that needs to be added. There are some things that we don’t have quite the reach to do, but we think it’s really important to do that. I will point out that the existing bus fleet will experience a 20 percent boost in productivity from this plan because of the combination of reduced traffic and the fare-free boarding. So in that sense the existing bus fleet will run much more efficiently, and it will be a much more attractive form of service. That admittedly begs the question of adding the routes and we think it's vital to do that.

SB: What’s the cordon in your model?

CK: It's the same as we had a year ago, but the so called "offset" -- so that if a driver was already paying on a Hudson River crossing or the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the fee would be deducted -- we don’t have that. Whatever tolls there are now stay in effect, and our cordon toll is in addition. When I say that our toll averages out to around $16, that’s $16 in addition to what a driver may now be paying to drive into the cordon.

SB: So it would not equalize prices at cordon crossings across the board, you would have some variation in those prices?

CK: Yes, but what that means is that it would equalize the political impact, so the legislators from Brooklyn and Queens who were very irate about the virtually no-impact cordon toll on Jersey, we’ve defused that argument. Now there may be more cries from New Jersey, from the other side of the Hudson, but at least we’ve laid to rest this idea of geographic inequality that was a big problem with the mayor’s plan.

SB: The Ravitch plan, they anticipate, would generate $2.1 billion per year. How does Kheel Plan 2 compare to that?

The existing bus fleet will experience a 20 percent boost in productivity from this plan because of the combination of reduced traffic and the fare-free boarding.

The other is that we are not at all averse to having the MTA be able to tap some of Bill Thompson's weight-based registration surcharge. Clearly we don’t think that that’s an optimal answer to the whole MTA funding situation, because it’s very unlikely that something of the magnitude Thompson is talking about is going to pass, and the Thompson plan -- just like the Ravitch plan -- isn’t really going to do anything for traffic congestion. In fact it’s not going to do anything for subway congestion either but there’s nothing wrong with having that in a scaled down form. That seems like the kind of revenue source that really is most suited to reducing the state’s budget deficit. It’s not a transportation measure. It’s a revenue raising measure and fine, I would support it as a tax measure primarily for the State of New York, so let the state tap it and then let the state earmark a fraction of it for the MTA.

SB: We are hearing a lot about the stimulus package coming up and how much the federal government might be putting towards transit projects, but once this crisis passes do you think we'll be able to count on heavy spending on MTA capital projects from the feds?

CK: It seems to me that if we can solve the problem of the moment, which is the MTA deficit and the fare, and if we can do it in a way that is as revolutionary and as liberating as [the Kheel Plan], I think we will have done enough and the landscape of transportation and transit will be so different five years after a plan like this has gone into effect. I don’t think we need to fret now about what are we going to do in 2020. Not very many years from now it will be possible to charge VMT fees throughout the city and throughout the region, which will be a more comprehensive funding source, and ultimately the cordon fee ought to be superseded by a VMT fee-based system that will charge more to drive in congestion, or to create congestion, and less for driving that doesn’t. People are beginning actually to talk about that in the transportation policy community, and that would be the next generation, but we're not quite there yet.

SB: One way to look at the Ravitch plan is as an attempt to shore up the MTA's finances according to the principle that every constituency who benefits from the transit system should pay into it. What would you say is the parallel principle undergirding the Kheel Plan?

CK: I don’t think the Ravitch plan meets its own objective, most starkly in the continued exemption of any charge on drivers [from the Upper West Side and Upper East Side] coming in via 60th Street, which is just a stark omission, it's a giant exception. It's a real class issue. Who lives in those neighborhoods [that would avoid paying bridge tolls]? Relatively wealthy New Yorkers.

Why [Brooklyn and Queens] ought to support it is because it is geographically balanced, and it’s providing an incredible value to everyone in the city, especially the boroughs, in the form of free buses -- buses being much more of a borough than a Manhattan medium.

And there hasn’t been that much discussion of the payroll tax. It seems to [Kheel] and to me that it’s practically insane to be raising payroll taxes in the face of a severe recession. It’s discouraging employment and it’s taking money away from workers and companies, and there’s no way to mitigate that. Everybody is going to pay regardless of who they are and what they do. That may seem equitable, but it’s really very penalizing and it goes completely in the wrong direction.

Probably the prime underlying principle in the Kheel Plan is, I would say, "When New Yorkers use transit everybody wins, when New Yorkers drive everybody loses." And what we ought to be doing is maximizing the incentives for New Yorkers to use mass transit and we ought to be de-incentivizing or discouraging New Yorkers from driving. Transit users are already giving something up. They are giving up the autonomy of getting around in a car. To me and to Kheel the playing field has been badly skewed to benefit drivers, the paradox being, of course, that they no longer truly benefit because there are now so many of them that they've gotten in each other's way, as well as our way. The principle that comes first for us, and certainly for Ted, is to provide all reasonable incentives for people to not drive and to use transit, and that makes for a better city.

SB: There’s been repeated mention of the idea that fare payers should be expected to keep up with inflation and pay more into the system as costs rise. The Kheel Plan would go in the opposite direction…

CK: It’s a standard argument that has as an implicit assumption that the current situation is equitable. For us it comes back to the feeling that the transit users are sacrificing through giving up or foregoing the use of cars, so we’re not starting from an equal situation that otherwise should be preserved proportionally. It is a very disproportionate situation.

SB: Last week Ravitch said that a brisk timetable is necessary to head off some of the most severe austerity measures for the MTA. Before you were talking about Kheel Plan 2 being an issue in the 2009 elections. Have you advanced your timetable?

CK: Absolutely. We have advanced the political timetable because the moment of crisis and decision is here. But it could be that the [City] Council and [State] Legislature debate and reshape and vote on a modified Kheel Plan within the next several months, absolutely. I don’t see any reason that they wouldn’t be able to.

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.

The promo flyer:

More from the press release:

Kheel's plan, devised by a team of transportation planners and economists that Kheel has funded for nearly two years, contains these key elements:

• A dramatic cut in subway fares (75%  on average), including a complete fare elimination on weekends and holidays, overnight and mid-day,
• A variable fare during the weekday peak periods that’s lower than the current fare;
• Complete fare elimination on all NYC Transit buses at all times;
• Congestion pricing on car and truck traffic into the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD), with tolls varying sharply by time of day and averaging $16 per trip;
• A 46% surcharge on medallion taxi fares (note that medallion taxis, and no other vehicles, would be exempt from the congestion pricing charge);
• 25% higher tolls on MTA bridges that don’t directly access the Manhattan CBD.

Using their comprehensive proprietary model of the city’s transit system and road network, Kheel’s team concluded that the plan would:

• Yield over $1 billion in net revenue -- sufficient to wipe out more than three-fourths of the MTA's projected FY-2009 deficit;
• Increase overall subway ridership by 12% even as use of the system shrinks by 6% in the morning peak hour (8-9 a.m.) and 10% in the evening peak hour (5-6 p.m.);
• Raise traffic speeds in the chronically gridlocked CBD by one-third during the day and one-quarter overall, while also boosting travel speeds throughout the City.

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.

• The team's findings conservatively reflect the expected reduction in car travel from a $1.00 toll increase on MTA bridges and tunnels.
• The Kheel team assumed that the MTA's subway service cuts result in an average 6% increase in the duration of an average trip.
• The BTA assumes conservatively that only half of “disappeared” transit trips re-materialize as car trips; it also takes carpooling into account, so that each new trip in a car adds less than one new car to the roads.
• The BTA feeds back traffic increases to travel demand (i.e., road gridlock is somewhat self-limiting), thus producing a conservative estimate of the number of additional cars resulting from costlier and less-frequent transit service.
• The BTA includes conservative (low) assumptions of the effect of higher fares on subway use (“price-elasticities” of -0.09 for subway work trips, -0.234 for other subway trips).

“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.

I was lead analyst and author of Kheel’s January report that first proposed this idea. As renowned environmental writer Bill McKibben tells it in an article in the current Plenty magazine, I initially thought Kheel’s idea of zeroing out farebox revenues was nutty. I quickly came around, however, drawn not just by visions of free transit and much less traffic but by the plan’s gorgeous synergies, such as this one for free buses: making bus-boarding fare-free speeds bus service which expands bus patronage which reduces driving which speeds bus service even more which further reduces driving.

Alas, the Kheel Plan surfaced too late to figure in the congestion pricing debate. But Kheel is unwavering. With an eye on next year’s municipal elections, he has commissioned me and programmer Michael Smith to upgrade the labyrinthine spreadsheet I created for his free-transit plan — the Balanced Transportation Analyzer.

The new computer model, BTA 2.0, will enable us — and everyone with a PC or Mac — to examine pricing scenarios that lay beyond the reach of the original spreadsheet, to wit:

• Time-variable congestion fees: instead of being locked into a straight $16 fee 24-7, we'll assess higher peak-periods fees along with offsetting, lower fees when traffic is light.
• Time-variable subway fares: we’ll test retaining the fare during the a.m. peak as a possible transition strategy to ease subway crowding and improve system efficiencies (buses will be free 24-7, regardless).
• Closer integration of parking pricing with road pricing.
• Possible differential tolls into the Central Business District by “portal” (New Jersey vs. Long Island vs. Bronx/Westchester).
• Intra-Manhattan congestion charging: according to some GPS developers, it may soon be possible to charge per-mile or per-minute for driving within the CBD; this would open the door to even more revenue and less traffic and further dispel the rap on congestion pricing as a giveaway to Manhattan.

Our plan is to roll out BTA 2.0 in early fall and offer a new and irresistible free transit + congestion pricing proposal, “Kheel Plan 2,” that can become a central issue in the 2009 mayoral and City Council races.

I’ll be discussing the old and new versions of the BTA on Tuesday at the monthly NYMTC brown bag lunch. NYMTC is the regional transportation planning agency, and my appearance Tuesday is a sign of both the BTA’s potential value as a public planning tool and of NYMTC’s evolving openness to new ideas. The focus will be on analysis rather than politics, but anyone who’d like to peer under the hood of this exciting work-in-progress is encouraged to attend.

Photo: gothamistllc / Flickr 

"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.

The Times reported Saturday that vehicle traffic on Port Authority bridges and tunnels declined by 2.9% in March, in the wake of toll increases that took effect on March 2. In typical bizarre fashion, the Times' lede asks, “Who needs congestion pricing when plain old toll increases seem to do the job?”

Why not this instead: "Dip in traffic after toll hike shows missed promise of congestion pricing"?

After all, the Hudson River portal accounts for just 18% of CBD-bound auto trips, according to traffic guru Brian Ketcham. So a 3% dip in traffic through that portal yields a measly one-half of one percent dip in total traffic into the Manhattan charging zone.

Message: just raising tolls on already-tolled facilities won’t do much to bust traffic. Who needs congestion pricing? NYC, obviously.

But there's value in the story nevertheless: the PA datum offers a means to estimate the price-elasticity of car travel into Manhattan, and thus to validate (or not) the congestion pricing plan that didn't make it, as well as alternatives like the Kheel Plan.

So put your math hats on boys and girls. Here goes.

By my numbers, the estimated average out-of-pocket cost to drive into Manhattan across the Hudson a few months ago was $28.75. That reflects a $5 toll, $3/gallon gas, and a 70% chance of paying market-rate parking in the CBD.

Now the P.A.’s $2 toll hike and the concurrent 25 cent-a-gallon rise in the price of gas have bumped up that cost by an average of $2.30, or 8.1%.

Voila. An average 8.1% rise in the cost of a drive-in commute has led to a 2.9% drop in travel. That translates to a 36% price-elasticity (since 2.9%/8.1% = 36%).

Okay, that’s a first-cut figure. It doesn’t account for the possibility that the worsening economy has damped down traffic, though I doubt the incipient recession was a big factor. But it also doesn’t reflect that some drivers take awhile to react to tolls, especially when their transactions are via credit card.

In my book, the 36% figure says that car use and traffic volumes are responsive to the price to drive. Not 1-for-1 responsive, but responsive nonetheless. Raise the price to drive — through tolls, gas taxes, parking pricing, whatever — and traffic will diminish.

The numbers also practically scream not to look to gas prices as a traffic solution. (Peak Oilers out there, are you listening?) The recent, latest hike in gas prices was barely a blip in the higher cost to drive and the consequent drop in Hudson River auto crossings.

Conclusion: Road pricing will raise the cost and reduce the frequency of driving into Manhattan faster and more permanently than events in the oil sector.

Photo: brandi666/Flickr 

Comrie is right -- $8 to drive into mid-Manhattan is nuts. The fee should be at least $40.

To see why, picture traffic as seen from Chopper 880. A car entering a crowded bridge like the Queensboro causes delays to hundreds of cars behind it; each individual car is delayed only briefly, but summed across the herd, it adds up.

I take my car across the Queensboro and thus cause, say, six seconds of slowdown for each of 600 cars behind me. That's 3,600 total delay seconds -- an hour of lost time. Some of those 600 I've held up are commuters, some are using their cars as part of their work, some are truckers making deliveries. So that hour is easily worth forty bucks or more.

In fact it's quite hard to say how many cars each drivers slows down, and by how much. But we do know the relationship between traffic volume and overall traffic speeds. That relationship is incorporated in the Balanced Transportation Analyzer (BTA) software I created recently to analyze Ted Kheel's free-transit plan. I used the BTA to estimate the effect of 10,000 more cars driven every weekday into the congestion zone.

The result was an increase in time costs to other drivers of $140 million a year, or $400,000 a day. Divide by 10,000 - the number of new car trips in the model -- and you get forty bucks apiece. That's the cost each new car trips imposes on others, so that's what each driver should pay -- at least! (Air pollution, crash risks, noise and nuisance are extra.) While the proposed $8 charge doesn't go nearly that far, it's a start.

Of late, the argument over congestion pricing has mostly been about asthma, global warming, transit lockboxes and such. While these are important, we need to remember there's a fundamental question of fairness involved. In general, people need to pay for the costs they impose on others. Among the costs I impose by driving across the Queensboro is $40 worth of lost time to my fellow drivers.

All those seconds ticking away in gridlock add up to minutes, which become hours, and days. If Councilman Comrie wishes to spend a good chunk of his time on earth stuck in traffic, that's his choice. But it's not his right to impose delays on other drivers without paying for at least some of their delay cost (and vice versa).

The German historian of the motorcar, Wolfgang Sachs, probably said it best two decades ago:

Above a certain traffic density, every driver contributes involuntarily to a slowing of traffic. The time that each individual steals from all the other drivers by slowing them down is greater than the time he or she might have hoped to gain by taking the car. 

Congestion pricing turns this "stealing of time" into a fair exchange and reduces it too. It's time.

Remember the orange bikes locked up all around Manhattan during Fashion Week that managed to outrage the NYPD and Ghost Bike memorialists in equal measure? It turns out they weren't just an advertisement for fashion house DKNY, they were part of a comprehensive "fashion plan to eliminate all motor vehicles in NYC by the year 2018." For a sense of just how difficult it's going to be to implement the plan, note how much air time the video above gives to Mercedes Benz.  

As the faux fur-clad model narrating this video says, "If supermodels can't solve the world's problems, then I don't know who can." George Haikalis of Auto-Free New York (right), are you listening? You and Charles Komanoff and the Kheel Plan are cute and all, but if you really want to increase attendance, how about getting some supermodels to detail this 2018 plan at the next monthly meeting?

[T]his is the giant carrot to accompany Bloomberg's congestion-pricing stick. Charge $16 instead of $8, the authors suggest - and add parking and taxi surcharges. Really make the drivers pay. Then take that money and make all the buses and subway free.

Bold enough for you?

Henican talked with lead author and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff, who said the same approach could be applied to the LIRR, Metro-North and Jersey Transit.

Meanwhile, there's a lively discussion going on over at Second Ave. Sagas, where blogger Benjamin Kabak says he likes the Kheel plan, a lot, but sees it as too good to be true.

People in New York City are, stupidly, married to their cars. They demand below-market, on-street parking. They demand access to roads at the expense of wide sidewalks and bike lanes. They demand access to roads at the expense of common-sense bus rapid transit lanes. They demand the right to drive as though it were protected by the Constitution, and this is simply a misguided and harmful attitude.

But sadly, the ideal society where a Kheel plan could pass because it would negatively impact the people who could afford and positively impact the people who need it doesn't exist. Ted Kheel should be applauded for his vision, and his plan deserves as much attention as anything under consideration now. It's groundbreaking; it's visionary; it would work; and it just won't happen.

Setting aside the Kheel plan's chances of being taken seriously by the mayor and the Congestion Mitigation Commission, before it's over they may be among the few who aren't at least talking about it.

In related news, a new program in Chicago that will allow seniors 65 and up to take transit for free has been deluged with applicants. The AP, via WTHI in Terre Haute, IN, reports that "Governor Rod Blagojevich says response has been so strong that the state is adding a second toll-free number to accommodate callers who are registering for the program."

Yesterday, Theodore "Ted" Kheel's traffic plan was officially unveiled with a 52-page report (pdf) outlining his proposal to make transit free via a round-the-clock $16 congestion charge for cars ($32 for trucks) entering Manhattan below 60th Street. The report says Kheel's "Bolder Plan" would cut CBD traffic by 25 percent, and traffic citywide by nearly 10 percent, all while increasing mass transit funding and decreasing the number of overcrowded trains and buses.

Skeptical? So was lead author Charles Komanoff, he says, until he delved into the data. Not only do the numbers add up, Komanoff writes, the Kheel plan offers an irresistible political hook:

Don Shoup wrote recently that the dilemma confronting congestion pricing is not that opposition is too high, but that support is too low. Free transit resolves this dilemma by offering as tangible a benefit as one can imagine. As I said last week to a legislator from Central Brooklyn who has lined up against the mayor's congestion pricing plan, "Are you really going to tell your constituents that you walked away from a plan that would let them ride the trains and buses for free?" I wish you'd seen his double-take, followed by: "Um, okay, what's this Kheel Plan again, and how exactly is it going to work?"

A highlight of the Kheel plan is the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, an interactive spreadsheet that lets users compare the different congestion pricing proposals (download it here). "Unlike the opaque 'black box' models used throughout the Transportation-Industrial Complex," writes Komanoff, "the BTA reveals its hundreds of underlying assumptions and their interrelationships. It is a true citizen's tool."

Whether this is all too much, too late, considering the Congestion Mitigation Commission's January 31 deadline, and whether or not it's conceivable that the city and all affected bureaucracies would tolerate such a tectonic shift regardless of potential upsides, by leading with the carrot of free transit and following with the stick of congestion pricing, the Kheel planners have shown how Mayor Bloomberg's proposal could have been promoted from day one. On the other hand, it also makes one wonder what might have been if they had brought that approach to the mayor's plan, and pushed along with everyone else.

I co-founded the Carbon Tax Center last winter. Since then, I've spent hundreds of hours blogging, number-crunching and campaigning for the carbon tax cause. But my devotion actually began much earlier. Back when Barry Bonds was a svelte 180-pounder, before Dan Quayle wrote potatoe on a blackboard, I published a pro-carbon tax op-ed in the Washington Post (this was in 1989). And I've been banging the drum for congestion pricing in NYC for almost as long.

So I'd love to be able to say that a carbon tax is our ticket out of gridlocked streets. But it ain't so. When it comes to erasing New York's gridlock, a carbon tax would be about as effective as a mouse stomping on an elephant's toes.

But don't take my word for it. Go and input a carbon tax into the Balanced Transportation Analyzer ©, the spreadsheet model I'm creating for Ted Kheel's free-transit proposal. The results are underwhelming.

A carbon tax of $50/ton (of carbon dioxide) would cause a mere 8,000 auto trips a day into the Central Business District to disappear. That's just 1% of current traffic, and barely more than the increase in trips the MTA board just set in motion by raising bus and subway fares. And this is with a tax surpassing any carbon tax bill being considered in Congress.

By comparison, Mayor Bloomberg's proposed $8 daytime toll would eliminate an estimated 45,000 trips a day into the CBD. (The Kheel Plan, combining a $16 'round-the-clock cordon fee with free transit, would eliminate 250,000 daily CBD trips.)

A little math reveals why a carbon tax can't cure Gotham's gridlock: a tax of $50/ton of CO2 equates to 50 cents a gallon of gas, which is roughly the fuel burned on a typical round-trip drive into Midtown. Yet that same trip currently costs around $20 for gas, parking (where applicable) and tolls (ditto). Half-a-buck on top of twenty is way too little to make a big difference in travel choices. Moreover, part of drivers' response to higher gas prices from a carbon tax will be to trade up to more efficient cars without necessarily driving less. In contrast, an $8 cordon toll, or $16 for that matter, is real money, which CBD drivers can save only by reducing trips into the CBD.

Of course, Brodsky may just be feinting. He's a smart guy and may have deduced that his best shot at blocking congestion pricing is to sow confusion.

Or, Brodsky has decided that leading New Yorkers out of traffic hell isn't his concern. He'll attack the "right" to spew carbon without paying an emission fee, but he'll leave untrammeled the "right" to create traffic congestion without paying a congestion fee.

Ordinarily, anytime an elected official calls for taxing carbon, I'm thrilled. Not in this case. Even if Brodsky could deliver a statewide carbon tax tomorrow, New York would still be mired in motor vehicles. Just as a carbon tax is the antidote to too much carbon, charging a price to drive into Midtown is the antidote to too many cars.

Charles Komanoff will be discussing the Kheel Plan with Doug Henwood on WBAI-FM (99.5) this afternoon, beginning a few minutes after 5 p.m.

"If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars."

So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg last April, right about the time he unveiled his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into Manhattan's central business district. Eight months later, as the mayor's original proposal mutates for better or worse, the MTA is hours away from raising transit fares. Neither idea has exactly caught fire with the public, and the fare hikes could actually end up a foil for congestion pricing -- a plan originally intended as a sustained financial boost for the transit system.

And then there's Theodore "Ted" Kheel. The environmentalist, philanthropist, and renowned labor attorney has lobbied for free transit in New York for over 40 years. Last February he commissioned a $100,000 study that, as it turns out, could put the city's money where the mayor's mouth is. A summary of findings released late last week shows that if the city were to impose a $16 congestion fee ($32 for trucks) below 60th Street in Manhattan, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, along with higher curbside parking fees and a taxi surcharge, the MTA could remove its turnstiles and fareboxes forever.

Relying on exhaustive analyses of dozens of factors ranging from vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and transit capacities to emissions and employment data, assembled in an interactive spreadsheet created by Charles Komanoff, the study, managed by the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility (IRUM) and researched by Joseph Clift, George Haikalis, Brian Ketcham and Carolyn Konheim, found that the Kheel Plan would:

• Reduce traffic within the Central Business District by 25% and within the entire city by nearly 10%. Auto trips into the CBD would drop by one-third.
• Save the public a staggering $4 billion a year in recovered productivity, or more than 100 million "vehicle hours" that would otherwise be spent in traffic. (Some 20% of this value would be realized by bus riders, 32% by truck, taxi and auto users within the CBD, and 48% by vehicle users in the rest of the city.)
• More than recoup revenues now generated by fares. The one-two punch of the $16 automobile toll ($3 billion annually), taxi fare surcharge ($340 million annually) and higher curbside parking fees ($500 million annually) would generate nearly $4 billion annually - enough to replace the $3.5 billion in current tolls and subway and bus farebox revenues and still leave an annual revenue stream of $500 million for improving and expanding transit.
• Provide universal no-fare transit with less crowding than today's service. Making transit free will be an enormous boon for all New Yorkers, particularly low-income residents, and lift, once and for all, the specter of fare hikes. The Kheel Plan also includes a strategy for handling the anticipated increase in ridership that will result in less, not more crowded trains and buses.
• Shorten travel time: Enable a one-third (34%) increase in vehicle speeds within the CBD and an average one-tenth (10%) increase in the rest of the city. A typical 12-minute taxi trip in the heart of midtown Manhattan would be trimmed to nine minutes, while five minutes would be shaved from the typical 55-minute ride for a non-CBD trip, say from Bayside to Bensonhurst. Bus travelers would also save time: a fare-free system would eliminate the tedious swiping of MetroCards that leads to frustrating boarding delays, thereby shortening a typical 20-minute bus ride to 15-16 minutes.
• Produce additional, significant benefits: The plan would generate an additional $2 billion in health cost savings and other benefits from reduced pollution, fewer traffic crashes, lower insurance costs, and increased tendencies to walk and bike - all due to diminished traffic levels.

"The PlaNYC proposal, while commendable and courageous, offers little if any relief to endlessly spiraling subway and bus fares," researchers conclude, while "the Kheel Plan banishes fare escalation from the civic horizon by abolishing the fare itself."

While it was developed independent of the Congestion Mitigation Commission process currently underway, its authors say the Kheel Plan "takes Mayor Bloomberg's visionary congestion pricing proposal to its logical conclusion." As Commission chairman Marc Shaw noted at yesterday's meeting, however, that logical conclusion is going to have to be something that "works in the real world" -- a world filled with term-limited City Council members, parking garage industry-funded lobbyists, a debt-laden MTA and various other challenges. Logical or not, one thing is for certain: With the Commission's aggressive timeline set to deliver an Implementation Plan to City Council by January 31 and Council scheduled to vote by March 28, a conclusion will be reached shortly.

On December 23, 1943, the New York City subways carried more than 8 million people, said the labor relations arbitrator and environmentalist Theodore W. Kheel last night at a reception celebrating an exhibit promoting greater integration of the region's rail systems. Then the nickel fare was raised to a dime and ridership plummeted. Now it is $2, he noted, and the record ridership of December 1943 has never been achieved since. 

Think the subways are crowded now? No way. We're operating at about half that all-time record, despite more than a decade or more of increasing ridership. "The people haven't gone away," Kheel noted. "They're still here. They've gone to the automobile."

Kheel would like to lure those drivers back to the subway by raising the cost of driving and making the subway free to the riders.

Why raise the cost of driving? "We should make the drivers pay for the cost they impose on the public through the strangulation of movement and the pollution that they bring about."

Why make the subway free? First, Kheel said it would save the city money overall. (He didn't elaborate on how, but I imagine that savings would come in terms of reduced costs for road maintenance, fewer vehicle accidents and hence emergency services, reduced asthma cases, etc.) Second, the city is in the habit of offering public goods for free. Fire and police protection come at no cost to their beneficiaries, for example. Why should safe, efficient transportation?

Kheel, the president of Nurture New York's Nature, Inc., put his money where his mouth is last night. He presented George Haikalis of the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility with a $100,000 check so that the institute can conduct a study that Kheel hopes will show that a free subway fare would indeed reduce taxes on the general public.