Streetsblog New York City

DOT's Dani Simons and City Hall's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Rohit Aggarwala, at a joint hearing of Manhattan Community Boards 4, 5 and 6 on July 9; one of many public hearings where Bloomberg Administration officials have met with communities to discuss congestion pricing. Tonight, Brooklyn Community Board 6 hosts a similar public forum.

Here is the fourth and final installment of Streetsblog's congestion pricing Q&A with Rohit Aggarwala, New York City's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. Click these links to find Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Add your questions to the comments section and we'll see if we can get Aggarwala or someone else in city government to try and answer them for you.

Aaron Naparstek: Should the mayor's congestion pricing plan be submitted to an Environmental Impact Statement process?

Rohit Aggarwala: I don't think so. And the reason is simply that an EIS would be no more valuable for the decision of whether or not to go forward with congestion pricing, and what to do to mitigate its impacts, than the analysis that we've already done, and the analysis that the commission will be doing. The problem with traffic congestion is that it is so difficult to model.

That's why we've proposed a three year pilot. The pilot itself effectively will be the Environmental Impact Statement. Keep in mind congestion pricing is very different from building something you can't tear down. We can turn this system off whenever we want. If it turns out that the environmental impacts are negative, then by all means we'll want to turn it off. We're pretty convinced that the impacts will be wildly positive, and any specific impacts that might take place that are negative are things that we would be able to adjust.

AN: What exemptions do you foresee or would you like to have or not have?

RA: The mayor's plan has a few exemptions. First of all, yellow cabs and radio cars. Second, handicapped license plates. Third, mass transit and emergency vehicles. The reason for the third is kind of obvious, As for the handicapped, although we have Access-a-Ride, if you have a disability but you can still drive, there are large parts of the transit system that don't really work that well for you.

The reason for yellow cabs and radio cars is that we believe those pretty much function as an extension of the transit system. If you take a subway into Manhattan and you're going to the far west side, you may want to take a taxi or you may want to have the option to take a taxi home at the end of the night if you work late or something like that. Similarly, because it can be difficult to find a yellow cab, particularly parts of the outer boroughs, we want to keep the ability for people to use radio cars. I don't think we want to force people out of taxi cabs. A taxi is actually very efficient use of the street. It never circles for parking and, particularly at rush hour, you have very high utilization of taxis, as we all know since it's hard to find one that's unoccupied.

Black cars and limousines would be charged in the mayor's plan. Frankly, those are corporate trips that, number one, can bear the cost, and number two, we want those people to think, "Well, couldn't I just take the subway it would be faster and cheaper?"

Rohit Aggarwala, New York City's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, sat down to answer some of the more frequently asked questions about Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for a three-year congestion pricing pilot program. Below is the third part of our four part interview. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

Aaron Naparstek: Mayor Bloomberg's plan proposes that all of the congestion pricing revenue would go to a new public authority called the SMART Fund. Why not let the MTA receive the funds? Why is it a good idea to create a new bureaucracy?

Rohit Aggarwala: I think that's one of those things that has to be discussed and worked out. Our proposal was to create the SMART Fund. Roughly half of its revenue would come from congestion pricing, the other half would be a joint contribution from the city and state. By devoting the revenue to a new financing board that would make regional decisions about transportation investment priorities, that would be one way that you can prevent the money from disappearing.

There are a variety of other ways you can do it. I think the commission and the state legislature and the governor are going to wind up weighing in on whether the SMART Fund is the right way. But I think there is near universal agreement that congestion pricing revenue should be dedicated to transit investment.

AN: What transit enhancements will the City undertake prior to the launch of congestion pricing?

RA: The proposal that we submitted jointly with the MTA and the State to the U.S. Department of Transportation envisioned a number of things, the most important was the roll out of more than 300 new buses. The buses would be used for increasing the frequency of bus service, new express routes, and some enhanced express bus service to specific areas within the suburbs.

What's particularly important in terms of making those buses move quickly are some of the Bus Rapid Transit improvements that the City will do, like signal prioritization, automated bus lane enforcement, and some of the incremental improvements that, for example, could facilitate easier transfers from certain bus lines to certain subway stations, things like that.

Rohit Aggarwala models the latest in Long-Term Planning & Sustainability chic: Gray flannel, subway token cuff links, Columbia U. class ring and a global warming mug: Pour a hot drink and coast lines disappear.

This is the second segment of a four-part interview with New York City's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Rohit Aggarwala. We're talking about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal for a three-year congestion pricing pilot project in New York City. Part 1 of our interview can be found here.

Aaron Naparstek: Why does the mayor's congestion pricing plan designate 86th Street as the northern boundary rather than 60th Street, which is traditionally considered the top of the Central Business District?

Rohit Aggarwala: There are a couple of problems with 60th Street as a boundary for congestion pricing. The CBD traditionally ends at 60th Street, but on the west side up in the 60s you've got Lincoln Center, ABC TV, and other big office buildings. On the east side, you've got the hospitals, the buildings to the north of Bloomingdale's and the museums. There are lots of non-residential destinations for drivers well above 60th Street. That's the first issue.

Second, if you look at traffic patterns, it's not as if the traffic immediately dissipates as you cross 60th Street going northbound. Depending on the time of day, depending on which avenue you're looking at, the traffic really changes in the quality of the congestion and delay somewhere between 72nd and 110th Street. And so while that doesn't dictate 86th as exactly the right line, it suggests that the boundary should be somewhere north of 60th Street.

Finally, some people have argued that people are going to drive in and park in Greenpoint or park on 87th Street and take the subway the rest of the way in and, frankly, we don't see that as being a big risk. Compared to a round trip subway ride, you're only saving $4 and you're adding a lot of time to your trip, both because the parking itself is scarce and because the subway trip will add time. So, it's unclear to us why anybody really would do that.

But if somebody is going to Bloomingdale's on 59th Street, certainly, if you charge $8 to drive south of 60th Street they're going to park on 61st and walk. And if somebody is going to Columbus Circle or Carnegie Hall, or any of the many businesses and offices in the 50s, you are more likely to have that parking problem.

So, those three reasons combined suggested to us that the boundary ought to be somewhere between 72nd and 110th Street. We picked 86th Street as a place that we thought made sense but as the mayor has said many times, we're open to conversation about that.

AN: Wouldn't it be far less expensive and nearly just as effective simply to toll the East River bridges?

RA: Not really. The largest vector through which cars enter the Central Business District is not the East River, it's 60th Street. More cars are coming south from upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester than are crossing the East River. So, you would get some of the benefit by only tolling the bridges but you wouldn't get all of it.

Too many unanswered questions.

Among New York State Assembly Democrats, that has been one of the most frequent criticisms of Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for a three-year congestion pricing pilot project in New York City. Last month, Lower Manhattan Assembly member Deborah Glick said that she and her colleagues were "confronted with a dearth of information regarding the Mayor's proposal." Bronx Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz made similar complaints in an editorial to the Riverdale Press a couple of weeks ago. 

In an attempt to get answers to some of the more frequently asked questions about congestion pricing, I did what I assume any state legislator could do just as easily, if not more so. I called Rohit Aggarwala and asked him for a meeting to talk about congestion pricing. He agreed.

Aggarwala is New York City's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability and the lead author of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030. We met for about 45 minutes on a Monday afternoon in August in a conference room at the Mayor's Office of Operations. I've divided the interview into four parts. Here is the first part:

Aaron Naparstek: How are you enjoying the job? It's been what? A year?

Rohit Aggarwala: Fourteen crazy months, actually. It was June 12th when I started.

AN: A lot has happened since then.

RA: It's been amazing. It seems like only yesterday but it's been a lot of work.

AN: I bet.

RA: Had we just written the plan, that itself would have been a lot of work, but to do so with the input that we got from the advisory board and the town hall meetings -- all of the input makes the plan better -- but it meant a lot more work too.

AN: Having gone through that public input process, what is your impression of how New Yorkers view transportation issues and the idea of congestion pricing?

RA: New Yorkers are keenly aware of the problem that we have in terms of transportation congestion. Whether it's on the roads, on your daily subway commute or just walking through Time Square, we all know that mobility is a challenge. Everybody wants to solve the problem. The challenge is that nobody really wants to pay for it. Everybody thinks that the other guy shouldn't be driving, but I'm driving for all the right reasons. Everybody says, sure, I want more people on transit, but not on my train because I want to get a seat. And, yeah, we need more money for transportation investment, but don't take it out of my wallet.

But thinking back to the town hall meetings, far more people were in favor of congestion pricing than anybody would have thought just a year ago. If you told a politician a year ago that when asked point blank, "Should we have congestion pricing in Manhattan," without even being told that the money would go to transit, that nearly 40 percent of New Yorkers would say, "Yes," nobody would have believed that high a number was possible.

AN: A Wall Street Journal opinion piece was forwarded to me recently that said, "Their goal isn't easing congestion at all, it's raising money. The city's plan foresees only negligible improvements in traffic density and speeds, less than 8 percent, but millions for the city to spend on other priorities." Is the congestion pricing just about raising money?

RA: If all the mayor had wanted was additional revenue, there would be far easier ways to get it than to engage in the congestion pricing debate. It would have been so much easier for us to find the money in a different way.

That quote that you just read completely misses the fact that this money isn't going to be for the city to spend. Our proposal was that the revenue goes to the SMART Fund, which the city would have only a 50% voice in. Others have proposed the money goes to the MTA. The bottom line is congestion pricing revenue is not going into the city's budget, it's going towards transit.

It's misleading to say that we're only doing this for the revenue. The reason that congestion pricing is such a powerful concept, and the reason that the mayor, who was initially skeptical about it, warmed to it and now has obviously embraced it and believes in it quite strongly, is that it solves multiple challenges at once. It reduces traffic while raising money for transit. And it gets people to think more about the personal choices they make.

The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is the official companion volume to today's Live Earth concerts, 24 hours of nonstop concerts broadcast from around the world on 7/7/07. It's a fun little book, meant to connect with a younger audience via tongue-in-cheek suggestions, practical advice, factual information, and imaginative, bluesky solutions for climate change.

Each of the book's 77 articles is presented as a brief instruction or command. I contributed a few pieces that Streetsblog readers might appreciate. They were: Ride a Bike, Decongest Downtown, Ride the Train and Fly Right (which, more accurately would have been titled "Fly Less," but that's not very snappy). It was a fun project and, I think, a great opportunity to inject some of the progressive ideas that we talk about here on Streetsblog into the mainstream.

The book was edited by Duncan Bock and produced on a ridiculously short timeline by Melcher Media. Charles Komanoff also helped to research and fact check some of the book's carbon emission calculations.

Here is the Ride a Bike chapter...

Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek will be talking with Brian and others about why motorists, cyclists and pedestrians don't seem to get along too well these days. Feel free to call in. 93.9 FM. From the WNYC web site:

Why cyclists, drivers and pedestrians can't just get along, with Aaron Naparstek, editor of Streetsblog, a blog that advocates for cycling issues, Robert Sinclair, manager of media relations for AAA New York, Harris Silver, founder of a pedestrian rights advocacy group called CityStreets.

Meet and mingle with other readers, activists, and supporters of a livable approach to transportation, development, and public spaces. Get to know the others who share your values about the kind of city we want to live in. Put faces behind the screen names online. And have a drink!

A Livable Streets Discussion and Happy Hour
Wednesday, March 28th, 6:30 pm @ The Tank
279 Church Street, downstairs

At 7 o'clock, leaders from a few organizations will introduce themselves and say a few brief words about their current activities:

• Aaron Naparstek, Streetsblog
• Sean Clifford, Streetfilms
• Jasper Goldman, Municipal Art Society
• Nick Grossman, The Open Planning Project

In the aftermath of last Thursday's CB6 transportation committee meeting on the DOT's proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn to one-way arterials, some observers are noting that the motion that came out of the meeting may not accurately reflect the input of the nearly 700 people who came out to oppose the plan. As Norman Oder points out at Atlantic Yards Report, the language voted on by the committee leaves the DOT plenty of leeway.

Judge for yourself. Here's the text:

Motion 1: CB6 thanks DOT for their efforts to improve pedestrian safety and facilitate the flow of traffic in and around Park Slope as dialogue and discussions are always beneficial; however, we request that DOT not proceed with their proposal to convert 6th and 7th Avenues from two-way to one-way streets at this time because there are too many questions about the impact of this change and how it would affect the neighborhood's traffic flow and pedestrian safety.

We further request that DOT continue to work with the Community Board and the Park Slope community in resolving Park Slope's very real traffic and pedestrian safety problems. For example, the perceived/actual high rate of speed of vehicles traveling on 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West, and the congested Union Street approach to the Grand Army Plaza . By working more closely with the Community Board and community we are committing to work with DOT to produce an improved set of remedies and actions designed to further enhance pedestrian safety and facilitate the safe movement of vehicles within our community.

Motion 2: CB6 would table making a recommendation on the 4th Avenue proposal until after such time as we have had a chance to engage DOT in a more comprehensive discussion of the traffic planning needs and challenges facing the Park Slope community.

Streetsblog's Aaron Naparstek (who, full disclosure, is a member of the committee) reported the next day that the committee "fully and unequivocally" rejected the DOT proposal. But AYR's Oder was correct when he wrote that things were a bit more complicated, and that what actually happened was that "the committee, expressing disapproval, voted to table discussion on the plans until further talks with DOT and implementation of community-requested changes." Watch video of the motion's passage by Kevin Burget here.