Westchester Assembly member Richard Brodsky on Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal: "My problem is that I don't understand what you've proposed."
"This is going to be interesting," Straphangers Campaign Senior Staff Attorney Gene Russianoff said as he waited for the start of yesterday's inaugural Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission meeting. "Usually with these things, the fix is in before you start but I really don't know what's going to happen."
Commission chairman Marc Shaw, a former Bloomberg Administration deputy mayor, opened up the meeting saying, "I'd like the Commission to operate as informally as possible." It was a not-so-subtle suggestion that the presence of the press and public weren't necessarily going to help the 17-member group come to a deal any more quickly, and that the real discussion would be taking place offline. When someone in the crowd complained that Shaw's microphone wasn't working and no one could hear what he was saying, Shaw joked, "Good."
After a unanimous vote ratifying him as chairman, Shaw took a few minutes to describe the context in which they'd be working. "The most important thing is the economic backdrop," Shaw said. "We'll be talking about slower economic growth in the next 12 to 18 months. As we look for ways to provide resources for the MTA in its capital plan, we're not going to have any new state or city resources."
As for the city's gridlock, Shaw said, "At end of the day there are only two ways to deal with traffic congestion in this town. One way is to have less economic activity take place in midtown and downtown, a choice that no one wants. The only other way to deal with congestion is to find ways to improve mass transit."
Noting that the Commission would need "a fairly aggressive work plan" in order to come up with an agreed upon plan within the four month time frame laid out in the deal made with the US Department of Transportation, Shaw offered a set of criteria by which various traffic reduction proposals might be measured consistently. The criteria were:
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Reduction of vehicle miles traveled
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Peripheral parking and traffic impacts to neighborhoods
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Privacy issues
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Air quality and environmental concerns.
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Impact on various economic classes
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Revenues for mass transit
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Cost of implementation
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Best practices
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Overall economic impact of any proposal
Following Shaw's introduction, Rohit Aggarwala, City Hall's Long Term Planning and Sustainability Director presented Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for a three year congestion pricing pilot program and some of the thinking and data behind it (see Aggarwala's presentation here)
Aggarwala noted that about 30 percent of travelers into Manhattan's Central Business District go by car or truck and that despite significant improvements in subway and bus service, that "modal share" hasn't changed since 1975. That "leads us to believe that transit improvements and incentives alone would be insufficient" to reduce traffic congestion," Aggarwala said.
A slide from Rohit Aggarwala's presentation to the Commission.
Aggarwala also noted that "only a small percentage of New York City residents," 4.6 percent, "drive in every day as their main way to get to work." Even among Staten Island residents, the percentage of commuters regularly driving in to the CBD doesn't reach 10 percent. If you looked at what causes traffic, one of Aggarwala's slides showed that 59.5 percent of the vehicles in Manhattan's CBD are private autos. About 30 percent are taxis and for-hire cars.
At the end of Aggarwala's presentation, Shaw opened up the floor for questions, most of which came from two of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's three appointees, Northern Manhattan Assembly member Denny Farrell and Westchester Assembly member Richard Brodsky.
"Is it a tax or is it to lower the amount of vehicles coming in?" Farrell asked.
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