"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.

In an op/ed piece in Monday's Daily News, Brooklyn-based transportation consultant Brian Ketcham proposed some changes to Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. Ketcham, who has been pushing for some form of congestion pricing since his time working for the Lindsay Administration more than 30 years ago, argues that New York City should:

• Put tolls on the free East River Bridges.
• Move the pricing zone's northern boundary down to 60th Street.
• Eliminate all free and long-term street parking and charge hefty garage rates at on-street meters inside the Central Business District.

It is not surprising to see the idea of East River bridge tolls popping up right now. Prior to Mayor Bloomberg's Long-Term Sustainability announcement in April, virtually everyone who was doing serious thinking about New York City traffic reduction was focused on the 170,000+ vehicles traveling over the free East River bridges each day.

In July 2003, Ketcham and economist Charles Komanoff published, The Hours, a study that found that tolling the free East River Bridges would "do away with more than 9% of the idle time that motorists, truckers and bus riders now lose in traffic tie-ups throughout New York City" with significant congestion reductions in the outer boroughs, in particular.

Earlier that year, Komanoff also published "Who Will Really Pay," a study that found commuters who drive to work over the East River bridges earn, on average, $14,300/year more than those who don't drive to work over a free bridge (download it here).

A September 2003 Transportation Alternatives study of East River bridge tolls by Bruce Schaller made similar findings. Schaller also noted the difficult "political realities" of tolling the bridges.

In November of 2003, Jeff Zupan and Alexis Perrotta at the Regional Plan Association published a study that tested four different congestion pricing scenarios, all of which included some form of East River bridge tolls (download it here). One of their models found, "At the East River bridges traffic would drop by about 25 percent, likely leading to the virtual elimination of congestion at those crossings," as well as "relief on local streets" and "less traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway."

With all of that in mind, here is Ketcham's Daily News editorial, re-printed in full:

Congestion pricing is a terrific and necessary idea, and Mayor Bloomberg deserves great credit for reenergizing the concept. But to have a real chance to work, his plan must be rejiggered - now. It must be simplified in its design and coordinated with proposed fare hikes.

The basics are clear. Across the city, people are fed up with traffic. And they don't want to pay more for transit until it gets better. That's why we should immediately halt the MTA fare and toll hike process so we can determine whether a simpler congestion charging plan could net a reliable $500 million a year for fares and capital improvements.

But that's just the necessary first step to purchase the goodwill of the public. At the same time, Mayor Bloomberg should roll out a much simpler traffic control system that really makes sense to all New Yorkers. The plan that's currently on the table prescribes a needlessly complex infrastructure and demands costly administration and enforcement.

Here's how to fix it. First, ditch the elaborate detection grid. For his three-year trial, the mayor has proposed building a full-scale network with 340 charging stations on Manhattan streets south of 86th St. A grid of E-ZPass sensors and cameras would track and charge cars $8 and trucks $21 to drive into the core of Manhattan during the business day. Trips that begin and end in the charging zone would pay $4 a day. Taxis and through-traffic, which are a large part of the traffic, would be exempt from charges, as would residents moving their cars on street-cleaning days.

Charging cars and trucks to get into the central business district makes perfect sense - but the rest of this scheme would be a logistical nightmare. All trips would be screened and photographed, some many times, and payments and locations recorded, producing a database of great concern to the American Civil Liberties Union - but adding little revenue.

The complication, controversy and confusion are not worth the costs - which would be around $169 million more than the federal government has allotted to install the new technology.

There's an easy alternative that would actually work. New York should capitalize on its bridge and tunnel portals to Manhattan. Close the loophole of the four untolled East River bridges in Brooklyn and Queens - which right now are the source of nearly half the free entries into Manhattan. Install overhead charging monitors on the six inbound bridge spans and set the congestion fee on them so there is no difference with MTA tolls.

Drivers would then no longer clog local streets to find cheaper routes. Research shows that tolls on the four bridges will cut congestion citywide by 9%, which is more than the mayor's 6.4% traffic reduction goal in his Manhattan target zone.

The bigger challenge is how to charge the more than half of drivers who now enter the central business district free from north of 60th St. This traditional northern boundary of midtown provides an elegant line in the sand - and an ideal site to test charging on Manhattan streets. Tolls would be collected only once on the two highways and on the 11 southbound avenues that cross 60th St. These 19 total stations would cost $7 million to install - well within the $10.4 million in federal funds allotted for the pilot. The low operating cost would leave $500 million a year for public transit improvements.

Supporters of the mayor's plan might have one reasonable objection to this idea: How can we also discourage people from driving within the central business district? The answer: Eliminate all free and long-term street parking and charge hefty garage rates at on-street meters.

New York needs congestion pricing. But to succeed, congestion pricing itself needs to be transformed into a more sensible version of the mayor's costly, headache-prone proposal.

Ketcham has more than 30 years of professional experience in traffic engineering. As a New York City official in the early '70s, he authored the nation's first transportation control plan to meet clean air standards.

Congestion pricing advocate Carolyn Konheim and consulting partner Brian Ketcham are advising the Bloomberg administration to drop its resistance to a congestion pricing Environmental Impact Study.

The two say a study is needed to head off "likely 11th hour litigation" aimed at stopping the three-year pilot program from taking effect, a possibility Streetsblog alluded to following the first meeting of the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission late last month.

"[D]ecision-makers need to know that the selection of the system to be tested has considered all reasonable alternatives to achieve the Mayor's admirable goals," reads a press release announcing Konheim and Ketcham's open letter to Mayor Bloomberg.

The most promising alternative to be examined in an environmental assessment is "charging at the real chokepoints in roadway capacity -- our river crossings and highways," according to Ketcham, a traffic engineer who has regarded bridge tolls as the premier congestion pricing strategy since he introduced them in his landmark Clean Air plan for New York City in 1973. Tolling the four free East River bridges equal to all MTA crossings and across 60th Street, river to river, he calculates "would be at least as effective as PlaNYC in reducing congestion and would generate far more funding for transit."

The independent Brooklyn-based planners estimate that a pricing cordon that crosses bridge and tunnel spans and 60th Street would require E-ZPass monitors on about 50 inbound lanes, whereas the charging network necessitated by PlaNYC's complex avoidance of tolls could require detectors and cameras on1,000 to 2,000 lanes. Based on London's operating costs for a simpler single cordon, they foresee that the charging grid in PlaNYC would consume most of the congestion pricing revenue, leaving little funding for transit -- a major goal of the mayor's plan and the long-term aim of transit advocates.

Mr. Ketcham and Ms. Konheim suggest numerous strategies as alternatives to or companions of congestion pricing, particularly, the kind of comprehensive parking control and parking pricing program instituted in London before road pricing, and measures to reduce taxi cruising, a "major source of New York's congestion."

The full text of the letter appears after the jump.

Hon. Michael Bloomberg

Mayor

City Hall

New York, NY 10007

Re: Congestion Pricing Pilot Test Must Undergo Environmental Review

As long time advocates of congestion pricing in New York City, we fear that your entire plan could be in self-imposed jeopardy. Some of your PlaNYC team wrongly assert that compliance with the State Environmental Quality Review Act need not occur until after the three-year pilot test. It is a mistake to dismiss this clear legal mandate as a delaying tactic of opponents of congestion pricing. Their call for an EIS now is a sure signal that they will see you in court if you have not taken some defensible action to comply with SEQRA, described further in the enclosure. The SEQR process may be inconvenient and is certainly imperfect, but it is mandatory in New York State for all discretionary actions of government that have the potential for causing a significant impact -- as, indeed, is your intent. The virtue of your program's goals does not exempt compliance with the SEQR process. Nor does virtue protect your proposal from 11th hour litigation that could de-rail implementation on the grounds of failing to identify unintended consequences or not adequately evaluating alternatives that further PlaNYC goals.

Your team cannot argue both ways. On one hand, they are saying that the data already collected are adequate to meet the purpose of SEQRA, which is to enable government agencies to make informed decisions. At the same time, they are saying that any SEQR review requires collecting data during the 3-year pilot because the regional model is an imperfect tool for predicting local impacts. If so, they cannot then cite the model to assure communities outside the pricing zone that they would not be adversely affected by commuter parking or over-crowded trains.

Most of all, decision makers need to know that the selection of the system to be tested has considered all reasonable alternatives to achieve your admirable goals: reducing congestion and global warming emissions; generating funds to improve transit; maintaining the city's global economic leadership; and promoting community quality of life and air quality. Thus, the most promising cost-effective alternative must, by definition, be identified in advance of the pilot test.

It is also specious for your team to claim SEQR exemption on the grounds that the Action is reversible and is "not like having to tear down a building." Overhead gantries at hundreds of charging locations would, in fact, be major construction. Last week, the MTA reported that the half-billion dollar cost of transit services to support the pilot period would cause a major reordering of its adopted capital program. The 3-year test will extract well over a billion dollars from the region's motorists. A 3 year change of travel patterns will have long-term effects -- for good or ill -- on the business climate, people's lifestyles and investments across the region. In no way can it be argued that a full scale 3-year "trial" qualifies for the SEQR exemption allowed for feasibility, engineering and planning studies and other purely paper exercises.

Your compelling case for road pricing finally permits rational assessment of closing New York's free bridge loophole, especially in combination with a single charging cordon across Manhattan. Charging at the chokepoints in roadway capacity -- our river crossings and highways -- could be at least as effective as PlaNYC in reducing congestion and would generate far more funding for transit, a major goal. Based on London's costs for operating a ring of street charging monitors, it is evident that administering the more complex charging network in PlaNYC of monitors on 1,000-2000 lanes would consume most of the revenue, leaving little for transit. When your advisors seized on London's street cordon charging system as a way for New York to avoid the historical political stigma of bridge tolls, we think they had no idea of the power of the campaign you would mobilize. Nor did they gauge the latent anti-traffic fervor across the city that now seeks the local traffic relief of bridge tolls, the premier "congestion pricing" strategy in NYC for three decades.

Most promising, but rarely discussed, is the reduction of congestion far beyond the pricing zone that will likely result from reducing trips to the city center and eliminating the distortions of travel due to toll differentials. Our modeling in 2003 shows that tolling the four free East River bridges at the same rate as the MTA crossings would cut more than 9% of the time citywide that motorists, truckers and bus riders now waste stuck in traffic. Most of the travel time savings would be in Brooklyn and Queens where drivers would no longer clog routes to the free bridges. The ripple effect of faster travel would benefit motorists not even using the bridges -- and communities everywhere. Not only would this exceed your goal of 7% less congestion delay in Manhattan, but it could be accomplished virtually overnight with about 25 overhead E-ZPass scanners on the four free East River bridges. Adding another 28 charging points across 60th Street, river to river, would capture the other half of the traffic that now escapes tolls and it would achieve the political equity missing in past tolling proposals. Instituting London-style annual fees for residential parking permits and strict limits for parking in the pricing zone could provide an equitable revenue trade off for eliminating fees for Intra-zonal trips and the costly collection grid.

Our 1995 Four World Cities Study, a milestone comparison of transport in the global financial capitals, revealed strong similarities between London and New York. But important differences must be accounted for in predicting the effects of congestion pricing. In New York, the tolls at most entrances will be deducted from the new charge, lowering its differential impact. Manhattan highways fall far short of London's ring road bypasses with their capacity improvements that smoothed the absorption of traffic diverted from the congestion zone. New York lacks London's comprehensive parking pricing program that prevents long term parking almost everywhere. New York has none of London's initiatives to curtail taxi cruising and erratic maneuvers which are a major cause of congestion. And New York has not created the pervasive pedestrian streetscape, which London First Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron cites as the real objective of congestion pricing. When you are next in London, get the lowdown on reliance on high-tech charging systems from Deputy Mayor Gavron. Last May at NYU, she confided: If London had New York's bridges and tunnels, it would never have created a street cordon. Why would New York propose multiple cordons-London has enough trouble with one. You've got parking all wrong in New York. Parking pricing should come first or, at least, as a companion to road pricing

Your PlaNYC team cannot continue to validate their public assurances by referring to London without these caveats and without making the PlaNYC model completely transparent, reporting all its underlying data and assumptions. To maintain the momentum of your potential congestion breakthrough, the City should now be preparing at least an EAS to preempt 11th hour litigation. This necessitates gathering and openly analyzing the extensive baseline data, as preceded London's test program. A forthright SEQR/CEQR process will build confidence in the selected outcome by enabling public scrutiny of the analysis of alternatives and their consequences. A full accounting of the societal costs of vehicle travel would also show that the economic benefits of comprehensive congestion reduction are even greater than have been reported to you to date. With a vested interest in your success that goes back 30 years when we first introduced the pricing concept, we stand ready to help you and your team assess what works best for New York.

Sincerely yours,

Carolyn Konheim & Brian Ketcham, P.E.

cc: Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission; other interested parties

Photo: fabrisalvetti/Flickr

Mayor William Jay Gaynor, August 9, 1910, moments after being shot in the throat by a disgruntled former City employee. On the left, moving forward to help the mayor is Robert Todd Lincoln, the only surviving son of the first U.S. president to be assassinated. (Photo: William Warnecke)

Perhaps New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was channeling the ghost of one of his predecessors, Mayor William Jay Gaynor when he dismissed the possibility of London-style congestion charging as "a non-starter" the other day. 

Gaynor was Mayor of New York City nearly a century ago. Like Bloomberg, he was a political outsider, never even having set foot in City Hall until the day of his inauguration. Like the current Mayor, Gaynor was also a kind of technocratic managerial type. Rather than appointing hacks and cronies from the Democratic Party machine of Tammany Hall, he was noted for filling his administration with competent civil servants.

Perhaps not as good at negotiating city contracts as Bloomberg, on August 9, 1910, Gaynor was shot in the throat by a disgruntled former city employee. The Mayor survived the assassination attempt and a few months later removed the five cent tolls from the four bridges crossing the East River. The bridges have been free ever since, doomed to a century-long cycle of disrepair followed by expensive emergency fix-ups.

While "there's never been a serious connection drawn between the assassination attempt and Gaynor's tolling policy," says former Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, "I'm suspicious."

Schwartz has reason to be suspicious. He is one of a small cadre of transportation policy experts who have been working, in some cases, for more than thirty years to sell the idea of congestion charging to a resistant public and political power structure. The idea of using pricing to control the amount of traffic that flows into Manhattan has a long bitter history and you can hear it in the voices of those who have worked on the issue the longest.

In 1973 Mayor John Lindsay, Governor Nelson Rockefeller approved a plan to bring New York City into compliance with the federal Clean Air Act by putting .50 cent tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges. In those days before unleaded gas and catalytic converters, the plan was to clean up the city's air by simultaneously reducing motor vehicle traffic and raising money for the failing transit system. Brian Ketcham was a young, rising star in the Lindsay Administration, responsible for developing the city's clean air plan and selling it the public.

"The taxi industry hated me. The trucking industry, at that time mafia-controlled, was threatening me. Everybody was angry. It was a lot of agony." he recalls. "Eventually, the business community and government decided they didn't want tolls. They finally fired me because I was trying to get it enforced and they were trying to bury it," Ketcham says.

The National Resources Defense Council sued the city and in 1975 the federal government moved to enforce the plan. Finally, in 1977, Senator Daniel Moynihan and Representative Elizabeth Holtzman amended the federal Clean Air Act to allow New York City to forgo tolls in return for funding the transit system through other sources. "That really, ultimately led to $40 billion of investment and the saving of the transit system," Ketcham says.

Upon leaving government, Ketcham and his wife, Carolyn Conheim, also in the Lindsay Administration, set up shop as consultants and continued to advocate for bridge tolls. "I pursued it for about 15 years in a tortured effort but I finally gave up on it. There's only so much of your life you can devote to that kind of crap until you just say, 'Well I've done as much as I could.'"

"The fact of life," Ketcham admits, "is that back in '77, we still didn't have the technology to do it. Accommodating toll plazas on the bridge entrances and exits was clearly an impossibility. But it led to saving the subway system. It was, you know..." Ketcham's voice trails off. "I suffered a lot and it cost me a shitload of money. But in the end the public benefited."

"Gridlock" Sam worked with Ketcham during the Lindsay administration and later became a Deputy Commissioner for the Department of Transportation under Mayor Ed Koch. "In 1980 after the transit strike, Ed Koch actually introduced a traffic regulation, a new law, to charge people in driver-only cars. If you wanted to drive into Manhattan and you were alone in your car you had to use one of the toll facilities," Schwartz said.

The legislation passed City Council and was within days of being implemented when the parking garage industry and the Automobile Club of New York sued to stop it. "We lost the law suit on the argument that the city didn't have the authority to toll the bridges. Tolling the bridges requires state legislation." Though many of today's congestion pricing advocates believe Automobile Club of New York v. Koch is flawed and could be overturned in court (PDF file), the City's own lawyers and many in Albany believe that any congestion pricing system that involves tolling the city's bridges must go through the state legislature before its enacted -- an added complication to say the least.

Schwartz who later became renowned for inventing the term "gridlock," for posting signs in midtown reading, "Don't even think of parking here," and for having Mayor Koch's car ticketed for illegal parking while the two were having lunch together, has been advocating a complete redesign of New York City's tolling system for years.

"We really have a very dysfunctional pricing scheme in New York City," Schwartz says. He blames much of the dysfunction on Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato who in 1986 used federal law to get rid of the eastbound tolls on the Verrazano Bridge as a gift to his Staten Island constituents. The one-way toll, according to Schwartz is one of the most "pro-congestion" traffic measures ever enacted in New York City. It "encourages truckers to barrel down the rickety BQE and downtown Brooklyn's neighborhood streets, bounce across the creaky Manhattan Bridge, thunder over choked Canal Street, and leave the city via the Holland Tunnel" which is also free going westbound. Using this circuitous route, New Jersey and Staten Island truckers and commuters can save as much as $40 a day in tolls. Neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan bear most of those costs instead.

Schwartz believes that where motorists don't have good mass transit options and where tolls don't do much to reduce traffic in the city's central business districts, they should simply be eliminated. The tolls on the Whitestone, Cross Bay and Marine Parkway bridges in Queens are good examples.

In fact, "we shouldn't even be thinking in terms of 'tolls' anymore. We should be thinking in terms of 2010 technology" that will allow us to charge variable fees based on traffic conditions, time of day or the kind of car you're driving, he says. "We may not have a problem with someone coming over the Brooklyn Bridge on their way to the Bronx and staying on the FDR Drive. But if they want to drive up First Avenue to bypass some of the traffic, we're going to charge them money. If you want to drive by and show your kids the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree from the window of your SUV, I'll charge you $25 for the pleasure of doing that. We should use pricing to establish traffic patterns that are desirable."

Schwartz gave congestion charging one more shot before he left city government. In 1987 "DOT commissioner Ross Sandler and I got Koch to go forward and propose congestion pricing," Schwartz recalls. The result? "There were demonstrations in front of City Hall. We were nearly tarred and feathered."

Ethan Geto was the political operative handing out the tar and feathers. Geto's playbook for killing the Koch proposal is classic bare-fisted New York City politics and gives you a good sense of what any traffic reduction proposal is up against, even today. "I forged a business-labor coalition," Geto says. "At the time, the number one labor leader in the city was a guy named Barry Feinstein, president of the Teamsters. The Teamsters repped the parking garage workers. It was so fucking parochial."

With Big Labor on board, Geto rounded up the Borough Presidents, the tourism, hotel and entertainment industries, and found that hospitals also wanted to keep it cheap and easy for their patients and doctors to drive into Manhattan. "Then we got Lou Rudin, the city's number one business and civic leader as president of the Real Estate Board of New York. It was a real powerhouse group. We had a meeting -- just three guys in the room. Rudin and Feinstein conveyed the message to the Mayor. Koch withdrew it." And that was that.

Undeterred by previous failures, the Dinkins administration made a move towards congestion pricing as well. In 1990, Janette Sadik-Khan, Mayor Dinkins' Transportation Advisor, had just completed the first draft of a major study on East River Bridge tolls.

"I remember walking into Assembly Speaker Mel Miller's office. He was the first guy that I was presenting the results of our study to and I said, 'Hi, I'm here from New York City DOT to talk to you about the proposal to toll the East River bridges," Sadik-Khan recalls. "He looked at me and gave me this big smile and said, 'Oh, that's so cute!'"

"That pretty much epitomized the uphill battle that we faced politically at the time."

Today Sadik-Khan is a vice president at Parsons Brinkerhoff, a global engineering firm that specializes in large-scale transportation projects. She and her staff are leading participants in the traffic congestion study that the Partnership for New York City released today (PDF). Fifteen years after her Mel Miller experience she says, "I'm not sure that the politics have changed that much. There tends to be a knee jerk reaction to anything associated with pricing."

When the issue of congestion pricing was raised in the immediate aftermath of Bloomberg's landslide victory, the mayor killed it just about as fast as he possibly could. The idea was floated on the front page of the New York Times, above the fold, in a quote by Partnership for New York City president Kathy Wylde. Immediately, the idea of a congestion pricing push during Bloomberg's second term swallowed up the news cycle. Cornered by reporters on Fifth Avenue before the start of the annual Veteran's Day parade, a clearly annoyed mayor slapped the idea aside, saying, "It's not on our agenda to look at it." And just like that, congestion charging was dead again.

Geto, for his part, says that his successful effort to kill traffic reduction during the Koch Administration is the one major lobbying campaign in his career that really gives him reservations. "Traffic has reached such a point that it is clearly a net negative for the city's economy."

But his experience running another controversial public policy effort, the city's 1995 and 2002 ban on smoking in restaurants and bars, gives him the sense that if Mayor Bloomberg really wanted to take major steps to reduce traffic congestion in New York City he could do make it happen. "Every lobbyist in the city was working for Phillip Morris. We stitched together a public health coalition with much less funding. Everyone said, 'You'll never get this done.' All the doom and gloom turned out to be scare tactics by people with very parochial interests."

While Geto acknowledges that the traffic issue is more complex than smoking, which had three decades of public health studies and national campaigning behind it before the city's ban went into effect, he believes that with the city's business groups, civic associations and public health community all clamoring for traffic relief, the time is right for another run at congestion pricing.

But how do you sell it to a resistent public via a reactionary tabloid media? "It's always the substance that sells it. You're not going to sell this through bullshit public relations." To sell congestion pricing, Geto says "you'd have to create a variety of incentives to coax people out of their cars and improve other transportation options. You'd have to ease the pain for certain constituencies and make people in Brooklyn and Queens happy. You'd need to put together a package that says, 'Look, we've got to bite the bullet on something that's very tough for this town but the pay-off is going to be enormous.'"

"No matter how you slice it you're going to have people squawking. It's going to be a fight. But Bloomberg took on smoking. He reorganized the schools," Geto says. "There are very few things that a mayor can do that would have the kind of impact that a traffic reduction program could have on improving quality of life in this city."

"Talk about a Bloomberg legacy - this would be it."