New York celebrated the 100th birthday of the Queensboro Bridge yesterday, and Clarence Eckerson was on hand to document the occasion for Streetfilms. As pointed out in the vid by "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, back in 1909 drivers paid 10 cents to cross the Q'boro -- or $4.66 for a round trip in today's dollars. Motorists were accustomed to using the bridge for free by the 1980s, even as it was falling apart, and now pay less than the three pennies it once cost to ride across on horseback.

Even so, with today's bankruptcy filing by General Motors, the Queensboro has held up better than two of the Big Three.

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

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

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

This handy illustration, courtesy of DOT via "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, should be in the training curriculum for every delivery driver who does business in New York. Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson, who came across this graphic last week, says his appeals to delivery drivers stationed in bike lanes are often met by the excuse that it is not illegal to double park. When a vehicle blocks a bike lane, the law says otherwise:

No vehicle is allowed to block a bicycle lane at any time. If there is no curbside spaces on either side of the street within 100 feet of a delivery/pickup location, commercial vehicles may stand, “double parked,” next to a bicycle lane. If there is no active loading or unloading taking place standing a vehicle in such a manner can result in a violation. Please note also that this does not apply to midtown Manhattan.

Transportation Alternatives is seeking proposals to reinvent the intersection of 9th Street and 4th Avenue in Park Slope. "Designing the 21st Century Street," a competition open to the general public, will reward the three most promising submissions with up to $6,000 in prize money.

TA lays out some of the obstacles at hand on the competition web site:

Ninth Street is excessively wide and allows motorists to travel at speeds greater than the posted City speed limit of 30 miles per hour. Furthermore, Ninth Street was recently treated with a new bicycle lane that leads people to and from Prospect Park. Though the reasons for placing a bike lane on this street are clear ... the bike lanes have attracted some controversy because of the rampant double-parking that occurs in the neighborhood.

Fourth Avenue has a raised median to separate travel direction for the length of the avenue. At this intersection, the median has been shaved away to create dedicated turning lanes. This is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements and is not a safe refuge for pedestrians, particularly the children and elderly, who can not make it across the street in the allotted time.

To be contenders, TA says, "Competitors must re-imagine this intersection as a healthy, safe and sustainable street that serves pedestrians and bicyclists first, while functioning as a transit hub and truck route."

Jury members include city planning and transportation staff, along with "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz and Danish planner Jan Gehl. Entrants must register by July 18 and submit proposals by August 18.

Care to get the ball rolling, Streetsbloggers? 

Photo: Transportation Alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Times quotes traffic guru Sam Schwartz:

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

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

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

Photo: dM.nyc™/Flickr

Rendering of the preliminary design for Lakeside Center in Prospect Park.

A new Prospect Park skating rink and recreational facility will come with a smaller parking lot and improved bike access, reports neighborhood blog Hawthorne Street. The plan to re-design the southeast area of Brooklyn's flagship park, unveiled at a public meeting this Monday, will also restrict car access at one entrance, but stops short of doing away with the current rink's parking lot altogether. It remains to be seen whether the re-design will address the hazardous entrance at Parkside and Ocean.

A full report on how streets may be altered, courtesy of Hawthorne Street's Carrie McLaren, comes after the jump.

• The Ocean/Parkside entrance to the park is currently open 24 hours a day to cars, as the access point to the (free) Wollman Rink parking lot. Under the proposed changes, the entrance will only be open to cars during the morning rush hour commute, a total of two hours. Drivers wishing to avail themselves of the parking lot will instead enter at Lincoln Road.

• The parking lot will be moved from its current location to nearby Breeze Hill. The new lot has 150 parking spaces. The old lot has about 300 spaces in theory, but, according to Thomas, so many of those spaces are unusable (due in part to park containers and trucks taking up space there) that there will be little-to-no net loss of parking spaces.

• The DOT, working with Sam Schwartz, is currently conducting a traffic study to reconfigure the Lincoln Road entrance. The plan is to add two bike lanes -- one for entering and one for exiting -- alongside pedestrian paths and the new car entrance. The bike paths will connect to bike paths on Lincoln Road, which (listen up, DOT!) need to be more clearly marked. The Park plans to install a traffic light, and is working with the traffic engineers to come up with traffic calming methods to reduce the likelihood of collisions with pedestrians and cyclists.

McLaren also notes that some key concerns have yet to be resolved:

• The Lincoln Road entrance is right next to a playground. What steps will the Park take to insure that increased car traffic there doesn't jeopardize the safety, health, and pleasure of kids using the playground?

• Will the DOT execute a comprehensive plan that not only provides safe pathways for cyclists and pedestrians inside the park, but makes it easier to cross Ocean and Parkside to enter the park as well?

• Will parking spaces be metered to discourage park-and-ride commuters and others exploiting the park as their own private parking space? (Hope so.) Will the Lincoln Road entrance be open to cars 24 hours.
  

Image: Prospect Park Alliance

Only three days remain until 20 percent of government parking placards must be surrendered, but as Gridlock Sam wrote here last month, that should be just the beginning of placard reform. Case in point: Uncivil Servants featured a story last week of an Upper East Side synagogue that manufactures its own bogus placards while the 19th Precinct turns a blind eye and infamous Community Board 8 lends a hand. Uncivil Servants reports that employees of the Park East Synagogue on East 68th Street have been getting away with the printing of homemade placards since the attacks of September 11, 2001:

The original baloney excuse for their parking was terrorism following 911 but the truth is they have used the tragedy of 911 as an excuse to get a free parking perk at the expense of the community. The signage by the way is either NO STANDING or NO PARKING 7AM - 7 PM. The location of this abuse is East 68th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues on both the South and North side of the street where typically you will find 8 to 10 of Park East employees' personal vehicles parked all day using bogus xeroxed placards.

Post columnist David Seifman picked up the story on Sunday, writing that the synagogue has agreed to gradually reduce -- but not eliminate -- its use of false permits, in a scheme brokered by Community Board 8:

"After a very lengthy and detailed discussion, [Park East] agreed to the recommendation that they reduce the number of placards to eight by the end of June 2008, then decrease by four by June 2009, and two the following year, until the number of placards in use is reduced to two by June 2010," said the e-mail from Assistant District Manager Latha Thompson.

City Councilman Dan Garodnick (D-Manhattan) told The Post the community board was way out of bounds. "It's unacceptable for individuals to be generating their own parking placards," he said.

Seifman also reports that Park East director Joel Baum offered an alternative explanation for the placards. Baum says they are used by teachers at the synagogue who are following the example set by the city's public school teachers. More proof that once one group claims a special privilege, the circle of entitlement tends to widen.

Photo: Dick Tracy / Uncivil Servants

Mayor Bloomberg correctly recognizes that reining in city workers' parking privileges is a pre-requisite to congestion pricing. But his goal of 20 percent is too modest, and he should know it's easier to do than it looks. Believe me I know; I led the effort to reduce government parking under Mayor Koch in the 1980s, even under threat of arrest. Here's what Mayor Mike needs to do in 2008 under my ten-step plan:

1. Set up a triumvirate to review every permit application. Put DOT, NYPD and the Mayor's Office on the team, an NYC parking version of "checks and balances."
2. Publish the names and civil service titles of every placard recipient. A small number belonging to undercover officers would not be revealed, but their number would be published to ensure no significant changes without explanation.
3. Establish just two recognized machine scannable permit types: 'Law Enforcement' and 'Agency.' Include State and Federal Permits into the mix. Currently, I estimate around 75 different permits, some of which are phonies.
4. Ticket first, ask questions later. If a car has a permit and is in violation, tag it. Let the recipient pay or argue his or her case before the triumvirate.


5. No permits given for routine commutation (yes, I know NYPD and FDNY must be treated differently; I'll get to that). Ostensibly, the reason we give permits to civil servants is because they use their cars to go "into the field." Set a three hour limit on parking at offices. See step four for enforcement and adjudication.
6. Parking by police stations and firehouses is "out-of-control." First hand, I've observed roughly a third of the permits appearing to be "phonies" with some belonging to clerical positions. In my day, we mapped out police and fire department parking with the commanding officer and left it to him or her to get rid of the bogus ones. We also ticketed and towed cars outside the established zones regardless of a permit.
7. Create a force of about 100 officers who report to the DOT Commissioner and are backed to the hilt when they tag NYPD, FDNY officers' cars. In my day, parking enforcement was a DOT function, and this was easier to do though several of my officers were handcuffed and I was personally threatened with arrest by the feds (my first meeting with then U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani).
8. Slash "official plates" by a third. My guess is that much of this can be accomplished by banning cars of assistant, deputy assistant commissioner, and other commissioner titles. If the subway is good enough for Hizzoner, it should be good enough for them. Besides, most commissioners rarely go into the field and they can use a "pool car" when transit's a hardship.
9. Get rid of ALL teachers' parking. Perhaps the most galling image is that of teachers' parking in school playgrounds. The second most galling is teachers' parking adjacent to schools. The curbs next to schools are meant to provide emergency access and a space for pick-up and discharge. Teachers' parking was granted in the 1960s when Title I teachers traveled between schools. That program is long gone. Furthermore, parking next to schools is dangerous. A DOT study found that about 100 children per year are struck by cars after darting out between cars parking by schools during school hours.
10. "No Permit Zones" were set up in the 1980s to identify areas of abuse and inform the city worker that extra enforcement would be working the area. Ticket defenses were particularly tough in these areas. The city still has some "No Permit Zones" but enforcement is spotty (witness the bike lane on Adams St.). I say expand "No Permit Zones," publicize them and send the DOT Enforcement Squad to patrol (see steps four and seven).

These ten measures would vastly help pave the way for congestion pricing. But let's make sure government workers don't get permits for that too.

Samuel I. Schwartz was a civil servant from 1971 to 1990 under four different mayors.

Photo: Uncivil Servants

Gridlock Sam warns of widespread "pedlock and "traffic wrath" today. Not helping matters was this morning's NASCAR Victory Lap around Times Square, conveniently timed to coincide with the morning rush.

Times Square will serve as one big pit stop for NASCAR's annual Victory Lap Wednesday, starting at 44thSt. between Broadway and Sixth Ave. and proceeding via the following route: 44th St., Broadway, 42nd St., Madison Ave, 53rd St. and Seventh Ave./Broadway, and ending between 43rd and 42nd Sts. outside the Hard Rock Cafe. Between 8:30a.m. and 9:30a.m., there will be rolling closures on the above streets, with 44th St. closed from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. Traffic will be affected throughout the day.

Fear not, New York City, 2007 may very well be the last year of NASCAR's annual Midtown celebration of laundry detergent, motor oil and the lunacy of American car culture. Tom Bowles at Sports Illustrated writes: 

After 27 years in the Big Apple, strong rumors persist that this week-long celebration at the Waldorf will be NASCAR's last; the event appears ready and raring to shift to the bright lights of Vegas for 2008 and beyond.

On paper, it seems a smart move; with a race track already nearby and the shrewd promotion of octogenarian track owner Bruton Smith, the city will doubtless embrace NASCAR with open arms.

"I think we've worn out our welcome in New York," said Smith

Correct.

Photo: Photo Gallery / Flickr

Enter Sam Schwartz to break the political gridlock. New York City traffic guru, consultant and former DOT Traffic Commissioner calls himself a "strong proponent" of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing efforts. Schwartz is quietly shopping around a variation on City Hall's traffic plan that he believes could generate "broad-based support" and serve as the basis for a "good potential compromise" between congestion pricing advocates and their outer borough and suburban opponents.

Schwartz's plan, which you can download here, is based on the premise that New York City's overall road pricing scheme is irrational, dysfunctional and makes very little sense from a traffic management perspective:

Adding to the dysfunction, Schwartz notes, is the fact that four separate agencies manage the city's traffic and control the region's transportation funds: The Port Authority, MTA Bridge & Tunnel, and the City and State Departments of Transportation.

And don't forget the federal government! Senator Alfonse D'Amato helped to create one of New York City's most egregiously senseless road pricing policies when, in 1986, he pushed to eliminate the inbound tolls on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge as a gift to Staten Island Republicans. The "New Jersey Trucker's Special," as Schwartz calls 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 $58 per trip in tolls.

Schwartz's plan proposes wiping the slate clean and redesigning New York City's entire road pricing system. The new system would seek to impose fees on drivers only "where there is serious congestion and where there are good transit options." He would remove or reduce tolls on every inter-borough crossing except the ones that lead directly into Manhattan's Central Business District and he would set Manhattan's 60th Street as the pricing zone's northern boundary.

"Give something back to the boroughs by eliminating some of the tolls," Schwartz says. "Reduce the Verrazano toll. Lower or eliminate the Throgs Neck, Whitestone and Henry Hudson tolls. Let the people in Rockaway go grocery shopping without having to pay $4.50. Only apply pricing where you have heavy congestion and good transit."

Schwartz's plan includes a number of other suggestions: Set traffic reduction targets and if they are exceeded the congestion fee will be reduced, thru-trucks would "get socked" with a $100 charge, bus fares would be reduced in neighborhoods with no subway access (like the ones that Council member Lew Fidler represents), the the Staten Island Expressway would be widened and the Goethals Bridge double-decked.

While Schwartz is pretty non-specific when it comes to costs, revenues and traffic impacts, he argues that a bridge-oriented pricing system would be significantly cheaper to set up and run than the system being proposed by the Mayor. As for the political feasibility of the plan, you can't help but notice the word "FREE!" stamped across many of the districts that are currently most opposed to Mayor Bloomberg's pricing plan, on the map above.

With the Traffic Mitigation Commission working away and $354.5 million in federal transportation funds dangling in front of New York City, this may be the best opportunity in decades to bring together New York City's balkanized transportation agencies and hash out a new, regional transportation policy. Clearly, that's not likely to happen if outer borough and suburban politicians aren't on board. Which is why it sure would be interesting to see Gridlock Sam's compromise plan in the hands of an ambitious outer borough politician with mayoral ambitions. 

Here is Schwartz's entire presentation:

| View | Upload your own

One way to reduce congestion is to reduce the number of taxis - permanently. I did the math when I was traffic commissioner and found that the optimum number of taxis was just under 12,000. We now have more than 13,000. With taxi medallion prices at $400,000, it would be too heavy a lift to buy back 1,000 medallions all at once. Instead, the city should purchase 100 medallions a year over 10 years.

There's a second kind of vehicle that's overpopulated on our roads, with more than 40,000 all over the city: black cars, or so-called limousines. The mayor's congestion pricing plan excludes them. It's time to create a black car medallion to 1) reduce those numbers and 2) generate the funding to buy back taxi medallions.

The third big troublemaker is the through truck, or trucks with neither origin nor destination in Manhattan's central business district. Our current pricing scheme - double tolls to go out via the Verrazano Bridge and no tolls to drive through downtown and midtown - encourages truckers to clog many key arteries inside the city. More than 10,000 trucks a day are doing this. We must do two things: 1) bring back two-way tolls on the Verrazano Bridge and 2) charge through trucks $100 for the privilege of using streets and avenues in central Manhattan.

Finally, we need to curtail "privileged" parkers. I estimate that some 150,000 government workers either park free in reserved spaces or just plain park illegally. That blocks access to curbs - and causes a chain reaction of other problems. Privileged parkers contribute to about 8% of the traffic downtown, and add far more than that share to congestion because of their "piggish" behavior of blocking bus stops, bus lanes and even hydrants. I haven't seen conditions this bad in 25 years.

Yesterday we put forth the argument that fastest, cheapest, easiest and most symbolically rich way for Mayor Bloomberg to initiate his new green agenda for New York City would be to make Central Park car-free during the summer of 2007.

Last fall, in a wide-ranging interview with Open Planning Project executive director Mark Gorton, New York City transportation expert "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz explained how eliminating cars from the Central Park Loop Drive will not result in long-term traffic nightmares for the surrounding neighborhoods or NYC in general.

Schwartz served as NYC's Commissioner of Traffic from 1982-86 and is a former Chief Engineer/First Deputy Commissioner at the NYC DOT. He also writes a daily transportation column for the Daily News.

Dear Gridlock Sam:

I received a summons for driving the wrong way in a one-way street. I do admit that I made a wrong turn in a one-way street, and when I did reach the end of that street I resumed driving correctly. I remember reading somewhere that, according to traffic laws, a driver is allowed, if by accident, to continue driving the wrong way in that street, as long as you don't continue going the wrong way on the next turn street. Should the officer have issued me that summons if this traffic law is true?

-- Carlos, via e-mail

Dear Carlos:

If you drive the wrong way on a street, you're subject to a summons immediately, no matter what you do next! The only time you're given a second chance is with an equipment violation (i.e. broken light), and you get it fixed by the next day.

-- Gridlock Sam

We will know if Mayor Bloomberg heard that call by the choice he makes for DOT. 

As a wise New York City traffic engineer once told me:

"Traffic engineers have failed," Sam Schwartz says. "If you compare the accomplishments of our profession over the last 50 years to the medical profession, our performance is equivalent to millions of people still dying of polio, influenza and other minor bacterial diseases that have been cured."

While London, Paris, and cities and towns all across Northern Europe are, with great success, developing ways to make their dense central districts less convenient, accessible and free to automobiles, American traffic engineers are still focused on figuring out how to shove more motor vehicles through our nation's roadways. The traffic engineers' solution for congestion is to add a lane or build a new road. In Schwartz's words, that's like "telling an obese person that the way to get healthy is to buy a bigger pair of pants and a longer belt."

While Parisians are starting to complain that "an invasion of noisy scooters and motorcycles and a rise in accidents involving pedestrian and motorcyclists" is one of the "unintended consequences" of Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's traffic reduction policies, "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz's consulting firm just issued a report claiming that New York City could better meet its long-term sustainability goals by adding more scooters to the traffic mix. Commissioned for Piaggio, the Italian manufacturer of Vespa scooters, the study says:

Data from a new traffic model released today demonstrates that the nation's largest city could significantly reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a key factor in the global warming debate, and reduce fuel consumption while saving a great deal of time lost to congestion by simply incorporating more motor scooters into the commuting vehicle mix.

By shifting the daytime vehicle mix to 80 percent cars / 20 percent scooters, the following would result annually: 

• A total decrease in delay of more than 4.6 million hours per year - which translates to time savings of nearly 100 working hours per person
• A reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by over 26,000 tons (52,000,000-pounds) per year
• A decrease in fuel consumption by over 2.5 million gallons per year
• A total savings for New York City of more than $122 million per year in fuel and labor productivity.

Insiders believe that Mayor Mike Bloomberg will look inside his administration for Iris Weinshall's replacement as transportation commissioner. But because Bloomberg will be out in 2009, top transportation people may favor state jobs: state transportation commissioner, Long Island Rail Road president or New York City Transit president. NJ Transit is seeking an executive director.. Two private-sector candidates could be Janette Sadik-Kahn of Parsons Brinckerhoff, who lost out to Weinshall for the job, and former MTA chair Bob Kiley, who implemented congestion pricing in London. Weinshall is leaving for CUNY in mid-April.

Sadik-Kahn was Mayor David Dinkins' Transportation Advisor. In addition to setting up London's congestion charging system, Kiley was chairman of the MTA in the 1980's.

Here are some other names that are flying around:

• Emily Lloyd
• Sam Schwartz
• Gary Toth
• Jack Lettiere
• David Woloch
• Michael Primeggia
• And then there's this one. It's not quite a "name" per se. More a question: Isn't there some deputy commissioner from London we could call?

Three specific proposals to reduce New York City's ever-increasing traffic congestion emerged from a highly anticipated Manhattan Institute forum this morning. One seeks variable prices on cars driving in to central Manhattan, with express toll lanes and higher parking fees to keep things moving. Another seeks to get rid of tolls on less-congested bridges in car-friendly parts of town and replace them with congestion charging technology in gridlocked, transit-friendly sections of the city. A third plan relies entirely on enforcement of existing parking laws.

The forum, organized by the Manhattan Institute's Center for Rethinking Development, opened with Partnership for New York City president Kathryn Wylde setting a collegial but urgent tone two days after releasing a report that put a $13 billion price tag on New York City's traffic congestion. The Partnership's analysis, she said, found that 48 percent of all motor vehicle traffic delay is "excess traffic congestion, beyond what we ought to put up with."

"Why do you think construction prices are going up one percent a month?" Wylde asked. It takes crews too long to get to job sites, and once they get there they spend valuable work time waiting for deliveries. "Manufacturing, an industry we have been hemorrhaging" is leaving New York City, in part, because of the difficulty in moving people, supplies and products, Wylde said. "A person who might go to a restaurant" in Manhattan will skip the trip if she's staring at brake lights.

The problem Wylde says, is "How do you attack traffic without making commercial deliveries or taxis suffer?" London achieved a 15 percent "mode shift" moving approxmately 60,000 commuters from cars to other forms of transportation with its congestion charge. How can New York achieve similar results?

Bruce Schaller, who released a major new study on New York City traffic congestion this morning, presented the first and most detailed answer to that question. He proposed a combined system of congestion charges, highway express lanes and parking reform, emphasizing that the plan can't just be about getting rid of cars or punishing motorists. It has to be about "making New York the kind of city that New Yorkers want."

Schaller pointed to the results of a Tri-State Transportation Campaign survey showing that 44 percent of New Yorkers feel that congestion pricing is "a good idea" versus 45 percent against. It is worth noting that congestion charging starts with much higher approval ratings in New York City than it had in either London or Stockholm.

Schaller ran focus groups to test three ideas: London-style congestion charging, highway express lanes with tolls, and increased parking fees. He found that New Yorkers, in fact, are quite sophisticated in their thinking about the city's traffic congestion problem and possible solutions.

Schaller found that there are six factors that drive public reaction to congestion pricing and other solution ideas:

1. Will reduce traffic congestion
2. Will solve my transportation problems
3. Enhances my transportation choices
4. Fair and equitable
5. Works as intended
6. Is supported and complemented by non-pricing policies

In other words, New York City's auto dealership-supported tabloid media may not be accurately reflecting New Yorkers' apparently intelligent and nuanced thinking on local transportation issues when it blares "Traffic Tax!" headlines and reports knee-jerk opposition to congestion charging and other traffic relief measures.

Schaller's plan combines three elements: Selective road pricing, new highway express lanes, and more tightly managed and higher priced curbside parking.

Schaller's traffic relief charges would apply to anyone crossing the Hudson River, East River or 60th Street boundary into Lower Manhattan. On weekday mornings he would charge $4 to any vehicle entering the zone between 6:30 and 10:00 am. During mid-day, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, all vehicles traveling in or out of the zone would pay $4. Then from 4 pm to 6:30 pm vehicles traveling out of the zone would pay the $4.

Schaller's highway express lanes would be open to buses, vehicles carrying three or more passengers and any motorist willing to pay a fee. Times and fees would vary depending on congestion and also the State Department of Transportation's identification of "feasible corridors."

Schaller's parking plan would apply to commercial districts and selected parking spaces. To show skeptics that usage fees can influence drivers' behavior, he suggests setting up a pilot project to increase curbside parking rates with, perhaps, rates rising incrementally each hour a car occupies a spot.

To make these ideas politically palatable, Schaller added, all revenues generated by these new plans would need to be plowed back into public transport - especially in underserved areas like Staten Island, Eastern Queens and the Upper East Side.

Next up was transportation guru "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, a former city transportation commissioner. Gridlock Sam immediately went to the root: "Our road pricing stinks." He lamented a regime in which "we toll people going from Queens to Queens or from Staten Island to anywhere" but let drivers "drive across the Queensboro Bridge" without paying tolls (and without funding upkeep on that bridge). His solution: Eliminate all tolls on bridges outside the central business district and impose charges "only where there is congestion and good public transit." This approach could work politically, he said, if it is demonstrably "revenue neutral."

Schwartz also argued that Brooklyn and Queens drivers would benefit from this approach. "People from Brooklyn and Queens would have five river crossings with no tolls. If you go over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the FDR and across the Willis Avenue Bridge, you didn't set rubber in midtown Manhattan" and so you should pay no tolls, he reckoned. To make any traffic reform effective, Schwartz counseled, "we have to give Brooklyn and Queens a lot." And short of extending subway lines to Maspeth or Gerritsen Beach, the idea of a tight area for fees presumably leaves residents of those areas some latitude.

Councilmember David Weprin, who represents eastern Queens disagreed with Schaller and Schwartz. Since most people who live east of Kew Gardens or north of Forest Hills have to drive at least a mile to get to the subway, he noted, more frequent express bus service would have to complement any changes that made driving into Manhattan more expensive. He warned the audience to consider people who count on driving for their business and cited a statistic: "In London, 62 percent of businesses reported a drop in customers" after congestion charging. What Weprin didn't say, however, is that the start of congestion charging in London coincided with a nationwide economic recession and a massive Tube construction project that shut down subway service in Central London.

The political gap between Weprin and Schaller seemed large, especially when a former Queens City Council member named Walter McCaffrey, now a lobbyist heading up a newly formed group called the Coalition to Keep New York City Congestion Tax Free, rose from the audience to declare: "A tax is a tax is a tax." But there may be more room for compromise than such rhetoric might suggest. Council member John Liu, who represents Flushing and chairs the Transportation Committee, told me that he would like to see more express bus service in his district. "Nobody wants to pay new charges for anything," he said. "But if, in return, they get something like more express buses." He left the forum at about 9:50 to conduct a hearing at City Hall on express bus service.

So wheels are in motion. Mayor Bloomberg will deliver a major speech within a week outlining his sustainability plan for the city, and advisers say traffic congestion issues will be front and center. Stephen Hammer of Columbia University challenged the panel to push the New York City metro region into a broader conversation about encouraging walking, bicycling and living near mass transit. Road pricing, clearly, is just one cog in the machinery New Yorkers will have to build to make the city livable.

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."

The Bulldozers Came Out and We Removed the Bicycle Lanes
A Clarence Eckerson Street Film
Running time: 5 minutes 43 seconds

Over the last year or so I've been riding a very young child to daycare on the back of my bike three days a week. Increasingly, I find myself unwilling to ride in the street with the baby on board. Here's a snippet of Sam's interview that really sums up the argument, for me:

Yes, the very experienced rider in Manhattan traffic can do just fine and mix with the traffic and weave in and out of the traffic, but in 1980 I was a young father. I had a three year old son and he often rode on the back of my bike. I'd rather be in a protected lane. If you're inexperienced you're better off in a protected lane. As long as the lanes are ubiquitous enough it makes a lot of sense to have dedicated to roadway space for the bike riders. And I know all of the arguments.