Streetsblog New York City

From NYC.gov. Bios of the members after the jump.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg today joined Governor Eliot Spitzer, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith, Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to announce appointments to the New York City Traffic Mitigation Congestion Commission established by the Governor and Legislature as part of the congestion pricing legislation.

Mayor Bloomberg appointed three people to the commission: Gene Russianoff from the New York Public Interest Research Group and the Straphangers Campaign, New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and civil rights attorney and Executive Director of UPROSE Elizabeth Yeampierre.

“Today we are continuing to move forward and work with our partners in State government and in the Council to relieve congestion in New York City,” said Mayor Bloomberg.  “Together, we’ll reduce traffic, improve New Yorkers’ health and strengthen the City’s economy.”

Governor Spitzer’s appointments include former First Deputy Mayor Marc Shaw, Port Authority Executive Director Anthony Shorris, and Metropolitan Transportation Commission Executive Director and CEO Elliot “Lee” Sander.  Mr. Shaw will be nominated to be the head of the commission. 

Governor Spitzer said, “Putting the congestion pricing commission in place is an important step towards creating a healthier, cleaner environment for our children and generations to come.   The Commission has a vital task to ensure the ability of New York City’s continued growth, and do so in an environmentally responsible manner.  My nominees all have extensive transportation and public policy experience that will ensure that the congestion pricing plan is well thought out in terms of the impact on the transportation system, the economy, and the environment of the City of New York.  My thanks go to the Mayor and his staff for their hard work on this crucial issue.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver appointed Assemblyman Herman “Denny” Farrell, Jr., Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, and Assemblywoman Vivian E. Cook. 

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said, “The traffic congestion mitigation legislation signed into law by the Governor last month outlines a process for a thoughtful and in-depth discussion of the most effective means to address traffic congestion and related health and environmental issues. I am pleased with the nomination of Marc Shaw to head this effort. His demonstrated experience and ability to build consensus on difficult issues will be a great asset to this Commission.”

Senator Bruno appointed New York City Central Labor Council President Gary LaBarbera, SUNY Chairman Thomas F. Egan and Nassau County Council Chamber of Commerce President Richard Bivone to commission.

“We are pleased to join Mayor Bloomberg and others in announcing the Senate Majority’s appointments to the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission.  By naming the members of this important commission, we have taken another step forward in our efforts to make New York a national leader in reducing traffic congestion, modernizing mass transit and improving the quality of the air we breathe,” Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno said.

Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith appointed Counsel and Project Director of Arverne By the Sea, Gerard Romski, to the Commission.

“Mr. Romski will be a strong asset for members of the Senate Democratic Conference in working to address New York City's long-term transportation needs,” Senator Smith said. “His appreciation of public transit's role in that process as well as his open mind about the structure of any traffic congestion mitigation plan will serve our Conference well.”

Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco appointed Environmental Defense New York Regional Director Andy Darrell to the Commission.

“Andy Darrell’s track record on environmental and health-related issues is second to none,” said Assembly Republican Leader Jim Tedisco. “His input and ideas will be invaluable as we look for answers to New York City’s traffic congestion problems. I am honored to appoint him to this crucial commission.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has appointed Drum Major Institute Executive Director Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Greater Allen Cathedral CFO Edwin Reed and Partnership for New York City President and CEO Kathryn Wylde to the Commission.

“New York City anticipates adding nearly one million new residents over the next two decades, and we must have a forward-looking plan in place to handle such substantial growth,” said Speaker Christine C. Quinn. “We are confident that the Commission will carefully consider the different proposals and find a responsible and impartial solution to reduce traffic congestion in our City. The Council’s appointees are extremely familiar with moving and shaping public policy in our diverse communities.  They bring a broad range of experience that will enable the Commission to come up with a plan to make New York a cleaner, greener, more livable city.”

Read more...

Yesterday on WNBC's "News Forum," Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City and congestion pricing panel appointee, went head-to-head with anti-pricing Assemblyman Richard Brodsky. While Brodsky once again recited the "tax on the working man" même chapter and verse, he failed, once again, to articulate an alternative plan to raise the money everyone agrees is necessary to shore up mass transit.

Here's a typical exchange, with host Jay DeDapper joining the fray. Note Wylde's comment at the end about free parking for government employees. A sign of changes to come?

DeDAPPER: Actually, wait, but I want to actually challenge you on this point of this drivers. Only 5 percent of the people commuting in from the boroughs, from the outer boroughs, are driving, so it's not a tax on everybody. It's not a tax on the 95 percent who take the buses and subways.

Mr. BRODSKY: It's not...

DeDAPPER: It's a tax on the 5 percent who feel like they've got to drive.

Mr. BRODSKY: That's correct. But those 5 percent...

DeDAPPER: So it's not a middle class tax or a tax on the poor...

Mr. BRODSKY: No, no, no.

DeDAPPER: It's a tax on the people who choose to drive.

Ms. WYLDE [sic]: And we did a survey--we did a survey of people...

Mr. BRODSKY: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Ms. WYLDE: Let me finish this point. We did a survey of those people who drive into the city for work, south of 60th Street, and we found that 83 percent said they drove out of choice, that they had good or better, faster public transit alternative. This is not a forced situation for even that 5 percent.

DeDAPPER: So...

Mr. BRODSKY: The commission will deal with these dueling studies, but wait a minute, it's a question...

Ms. WYLDE: It's not a dueling study. There's no study on the other side.

Mr. BRODSKY: The...(unintelligible)...data shows that the people who come in make--the average income is about $45,000, the ones who pay the full fee. The ones who escape the fee average $85,000. Now, you can call that what you want, but that's the depth--excuse me, the data.

Ms. WYLDE: And who are they? Who do they work for, Richard?

Mr. BRODSKY: One second.

Ms. WYLDE: They're working for government and have free parking.

From Elizabeth Benjamin at The Daily Politics:

Aides to Council Speaker Christine Quinn are calling Council members this morning with the news that none of them made the cut when it came to her three appointments to the 17-member city/state commission that will decide the fate of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan.

According to Council sources, Quinn's appointees will include Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, who, aside from Bloomberg himself, has been perhaps the most outspoken proponent of congestion pricing and whose organization spent considerable time and cash on pushing the mayor's plan.

Another Quinn pick is Ed Reed, a top aide to the Rev. Floyd Flake, whose Queens church, Allen AME, was one of several that played host to Bloomberg in July as he made an eleventh-hour push on a congestion pricing deal by arguing that reducing traffic is an environmental justice issue because cleaner air would result in fewer cases of asthma in kids.

The third Quinn appointee, whose name I have yet to confirm, is someone from the Drum Major Institute, which pushed back against congestion pricing opponents' claims that the mayor's plan would hurt the middle class.

A number of Council members are very unhappy with Quinn's choices, which clearly were made with an eye toward making Bloomberg happy.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the one anti-congestion pricing leader who has three appointments to the commission, is also poised to announce his picks - all of whom will be members of his Democratic conference, according to Assembly sources.

Here are two initial responses to this morning's news that the US DOT will grant New York City $354 million to implement Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan:

Walter McCaffrey, right, a former city councilman from Queens who has been coordinating opposition to the mayor's plan on behalf of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, The Automobile Club of New York and parking industry interests, said in a statement:

If the goal truly is to reduce traffic, the city has a moral and legal obligation to seek any and all alternatives before adding a new tax scheme to overburdened New Yorkers. Further, the plan foresees less than an 8 percent improvement in traffic density, with the bulk of the federal funding earmarked for the city to spend on other priorities. The fact remains that the overall congestion tax and vehicle surveillance plan still can - and should - be derailed by the various legislatures if its proponents fail to prove the plan will not cause our citizens, especially those so vigorously opposed in the outer boroughs, an onerous expense and disruption. At all times, the public's best interest should be in the driver's seat, and we will keep our hazard lights on to continue warning all New Yorkers to the problems ahead.

Kathryn S. Wylde is the president of the Partnership for New York City, a leading member of the The Campaign for New York's Future, a coalition of more than 150 civic, business, environmental, labor, community and public health organizations who support congestion pricing. Wylde said in a statement:

In selecting New York City for the Urban Partners Program, the federal Department of Transportation has allowed us to meet the threshold criteria established by recent state legislation for implementation of a comprehensive program to reduce traffic congestion and improve mass transit in the region. The Partnership has documented the high cost of excess traffic, which results in losses of more than $13 billion and 50,000 jobs each year from our regional economy. Federal funding provides the carrot that will help pay for new buses, faster subways and the other measures required to incentivize people to get out of their cars and on to public transportation. This is a tremendous breakthrough in the struggle to achieve a more efficient, mobile city.

This Morning's Forum: Road Pricing Worked in London. Can It Work in New York?

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.

Car-Free lunchtime on Madison Avenue, April 19, 1971. New York City policy-makers haven't seriously considered traffic reduction since the Lindsay Administration. (Image courtesy of Jeff Zupan)

This week's New York Magazine publishes a brief timeline of the history of congestion charging in New York City, adapted from a much lengthier article that I reported and wrote a few months ago. I'll publish the longer piece later today here on Streetsblog. For now, here is New York Magazine's Unlocking the Gridlock:

It's traffic week! And not because of holiday shoppers. In the eye of the storm between election cycles, city politicians have exactly one year to tackle one of the most pressing yet sensitive issues there is: congestion. "The gridlock on our streets has become a brake on the city's economy," asserts Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, an association of top city business leaders. This week, hers and a handful of other groups will roll out reports and hold conferences on the topic. Opponents have been prepping for an all-out spin war. A few weeks ago, Walter McCaffrey, a city councilman turned lobbyist, says he was hired by a nascent group calling itself the Committee to Keep New York City Congestion-Tax Free. Wylde says it's really just "a front" for the Metropolitan Garage Owners Association. (McCaffrey says the New York State Restaurant Association is with him.) Wylde's report will propose "anything from improved mass transit to road charges."

Read on...

Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density.  This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.

The movement for congestion pricing needs to start here, would inevitably start here and has started here. Here is a simple submission: People should pay for the privilege of bringing their air-polluting, noise polluting, lethal, two-ton pieces of private property onto the streets of such a dense place. But the reason for the payment shouldn't be for any of those unsavory attributes of the automobile.

Drivers everywhere should be required to pay for the cleanup that will be needed for their pollution, not just here. Many industries with more concentrated negative externalities, to use the economic term, are required to pay into funds that ameliorate the consequences of their pollution. G.E. had to pay to clean up the Hudson River after it contaminated the river with PCBs; motorists should have to pay to clean up their pollution too.

Noise pollution (namely, honking) isn't a problem unless there are people around to have to hear it. Here in New York, heavy fines are threatened on anyone who honks unnecessarily. We are also working toward a ban of audible car alarms.

As for the car's deadliness, its worst attribute, well, the engineers are working on it.

No, the best reason for congestion pricing is that cars get in the way of business.

As Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City says, "The gridlock on New York City's streets has become a brake on the city's economy." She warns, "It is going to be increasingly difficult for New York to market itself as a place where you can get the most done in the least period of time with the best workforce if we're not able to solve the congestion problem."

Traffic congestion slows you down when you're trying to get somewhere. It slows down the delivery of essentially goods throughout the city and slows the movement of people -- the city's most valuable economic input -- by clogging the roads that could be moving them along much more quickly with free flowing buses, cabs and bicycles. Traffic congestion gets in the way of emergency vehicles, no doubt contributing to the finding that heart attacks are more likely to be fatal in New York City than anywhere else in the nation. The fact that congestion pricing would lead to less air and noise pollution while improving the public realm is just a happy coincidence. But it is one that should make every New Yorker support congestion pricing, whether you're in favor of making New York into an efficient platform for commerce or you are concerned about a rise in sea levels or you simply want to live in a more pleasant, breathable city.

Congestion pricing is working in the world city most similar to New York and it would work here. In fact congestion pricing should be applied not just to New York, but to every city in the United States with more than 8 million people living at a density of greater than 25,000 people per square mile.

As we reported this morning, Mayor Bloomberg is in California with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to make a major policy announcement on a major, long-term, environmental sustainability initiative. The key components of the Mayor's plan include:

• The creation of the Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability.
• The undertaking of a major greenhouse gas inventory for City government and the City overall.
• The appointment of a Sustainability Advisory Board to advise the City on environmentally sound policies and practices.
• The creation of a new partnership with the Earth Institute of Columbia University to provide the City with scientific research and advice on environmental and climate change-related issues.

Here are some of the more interesting snippets from the City's press release:

The announcement took place during a visit with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale, California, where the Mayor and Governor talked about the State of California's groundbreaking sustainability initiatives.

"Now, we intend to make New York City a national leader in meeting the challenge of making ours an environmentally sustainable city. To make New York a truly sustainable city, we need a bold plan to use our land in the smartest way possible," Bloomberg said (Editor: Clearly the Mayor here is referring to this morning's Park(ing) Squat in Midtown).

The Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability is led by Director Rohit T. Aggarwala the Office's mission is three-fold: to help develop a plan for the City's long-term growth and development, to integrate sustainability goals and practices into every aspect of that plan; and to make New York City government a "green" organization.

The Mayor announced the launch of an unprecedented effort to measure the entire carbon emissions of New York City. This much broader effort, with a target completion date within six months, will give us the first picture of the total carbon impact of everyone who lives in, works in, or visits New York City.

The Sustainability Advisory Board will be chaired by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding Daniel L. Doctoroff, and its kick-off meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 27th.

Members of the Sustainability Advisory Board include:

• Christine Quinn, Speaker of the New York City Council
• James F. Gennaro, Council Member and Chair of the Committee on Environmental Protection
• Carlton Brown, COO and Founder, Full Spectrum
• Marcia Bystryn, Executive Director, New York League of Conservation Voters
• Robert Fox, Partner, Cook + Fox Architects
• Ester Fuchs, Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs
• Peter Goldmark, Program Director of NYC Office, Environmental Defense
• Ashok Gupta, Program Director of Air and Energy, Natural Resources Defense Council
• Michael Northrop, Program Officer of Sustainable Development, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
• Ed Ott, Executive Director, NYC Central Labor Council
• Elizabeth Girardi Schoen, Senior Director of Environmental Affairs, Pfizer, Inc.
• Peggy Sheppard, Executive and Co-Founder, West Harlem Environmental Action Coalition (WE ACT)
• Daniel Tishman, Chairman and CEO, Tishman Construction Corporation
• Kathryn Wylde, President and CEO, Partnership for New York City
• Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association
• Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director, UPROSE