Streetsblog New York City

Bronx Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz is hosting a forum tonight on Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. Speaking in favor of congestion pricing will be Kathryn Wylde, President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City. Speaking in opposition to congestion pricing will be Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, Chairman of the Assembly Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions. Both are members of the 17-person Congestion Mitigation Commission.

The press release says that residents of the Riverdale, Kingsbridge, Van Cortlandt Village, Norwood, Woodlawn and Wakefield communities will be given an opportunity to ask questions and make statements on this important issue. Perhaps if you work, shop or travel through the Bronx on a regular basis, they'll also let you say a few words. You can find the details here.

It would be good for traffic relief advocates to show up. You can bet that opponents of congestion pricing will be out in force. Dinowitz has made clear that he himself is one of them. And Riverdale is identified in PlaNYC as one of 22 neighborhoods with a higher-than-average concentration of Manhattan-bound car commuters.

In recent writings, Dinowitz has been responsible for propagating many common misconceptions about Mayor Bloomberg's plan -- that efforts to reduce automobile dependence and traffic congestion are somehow "elitist in nature," that air quality benefits will magically stop at the 86th Street border, that mass transit won't improve under the Mayor's proposal, and that the federal grant deadline to fund congestion pricing was "a lie." So, all in all, it's great to see Dinowitz hosting a debate on the issue between two players who represent their sides well.

Watching the goings-on in Albany since summer I've increasingly gotten the sense that many New York State legislators must be profoundly cynical about the possibility that government can actually make New Yorkers lives better (apparently I'm not alone in that feeling).

Read more...

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.

Read more...

I'm not sure I'll ever understand how Richard Lipsky of the Neighborhood Retail Alliance figures he's helping "mom and pop" business by defending the increasingly miserable, congested, automobile-dominated status quo of New York City streets but I do enjoy his Mom and Pop blog. He is an entertaining writer, an experienced political player, and a skilled propagandist (in these quarters, that's a compliment). If Mayor Bloomberg's congestion relief efforts are ultimately shot down in Albany, Lipsky will deserve a fair share of the credit. Remember him, future C-Town delivery truck drivers, as you inch your way through traffic.

This week the Wal-Mart killer joins the Jeffrey Dinowitz fray, and takes a poke at "The Streetsblog," a web site that "is apparently dedicated it appears to returning New York back to the 19th century" (a time when mom and pop business thrived, by the way).

In his first piece Lipsky refers to all you Streetsbloggers as -- and I'll just mash up all of the descriptors into one set of quote marks -- "phony, invidious, self-righteous street corner ideologues and useful idiots." After that, Lipsky accuses congestion pricing advocates of "a level of vitriol" that is "so counterproductive" he'd almost believe it if he and Walter McCaffrey were running the traffic relief campaign themselves.

If anyone can find the vitriol in the original Streetsblog post that started all of this, let me know. 

In his second piece on the subject, Lipsky fleshes out the "useful idiots" concept and provides some pro bono strategic advice for congestion pricing advocates, otherwise known as Mayor Bloomberg's "dimwitted amen choir."

As we have said, the critics are not doing their cause much good. Over the top statements and personal invective, so characteristic of some denizens of the netroots, will only make the legislature that much more skeptical of a plan that they think needs a great deal more thought. This biting the hand that feeds you approach, which we can only hope will continue into total self-immolation, is not a very smart lobbying strategy.

People pay good money for Lipsky's advice, so it's worth noting. But Albany is the-hand-that-feeds New York City? That's a bit hard to swallow. Maybe it's because Albany's other hand is so firmly wrapped around our necks.

PlaNYC identifies North Riverdale, a neighborhood represented by Bronx Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz, as one of 22 New York City neighborhoods with a higher than average concentration of Manhattan-bound drivers. (Download the transportation section, page 86)

Bronx Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz wasn't happy with Streetsblog's presentation of his Riverdale Press editorial against congestion pricing last week. Dinowitz sent a response to the New York Press. In it, he suggests that my comments about his editorial were "nasty and personal" and that some of the support for congestion pricing "is very elitist in nature." He notes repeatedly that I'm not "a Bronxite," suggests that I twisted his words, and makes a few points around the substance of the Mayor's plan as well.

I'd like to give a call or write a letter to Dinowitz. State Assembly Democrats can't be written off. They will have a vote over whatever congestion reduction plan emerges from the 17-member traffic mitigation commission. Aside from letting him know that my family has deep roots in the Bronx, how should I respond to Dinowitz? What would be the most productive approach here, do you think? Suggestions are welcome, especially if you're a Bronxite or, like hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of non-Bronxites each week, you happen to drive through the Bronx on your way to somewhere else.

The16% of Bronx residents who own cars tend to have significantly higher incomes than those who do not, according to data from the State Department of Motor Vehicles and the 2000 Census.

In an editorial in this week's Riverdale Press, Bronx Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz says that if the vote on Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan were held today, he'd vote "no." Though he presents his position as a change of heart, Dinowitz was railing against the mayor's plan back in July.

Dinowitz represents and lives in Riverdale, a relatively well-heeled Bronx neighborhood where, according to the 2000 Census, only 5.2% of workers commute by car into Manhattan's Central Business District. As noted in his editorial, Dinowitz is one of them.

So, what are the Assembly member's objections to the Mayor's plan? Dinowitz's first and seemingly most passionate issues are procedural and political:

• He is "outraged" that the Legislature "had a gun held to our heads" to pass legislation before the July 16 federal funding deadline which, Dinowitz says, "was a lie." No mention of the $354.5 million grant that New York City won thanks to this outrage.
  
• Despite the formation of a 17-member commission and the opportunity we now have for months of public debate, Dinowitz is still "troubled" that the Mayor and congestion pricing supporters are trying to "ram it through with as little discussion as possible."
• The commission "appears stacked in favor of one side of the argument, putting into question its ability to be fair. The 17 members consist mostly of Manhattan residents and, it appears, no residents of the Bronx or Staten Island."
• Dinowitz says that he has raised "serious concerns" about the plan but the Mayor's people haven't "given satisfactory responses."

And what are these serious, un-addressed concerns? Dinowitz writes:

Read more...