Streetsblog New York City

Rohit Aggarwala, New York City's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, sat down to answer some of the more frequently asked questions about Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for a three-year congestion pricing pilot program. Below is the third part of our four part interview. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

Aaron Naparstek: Mayor Bloomberg's plan proposes that all of the congestion pricing revenue would go to a new public authority called the SMART Fund. Why not let the MTA receive the funds? Why is it a good idea to create a new bureaucracy?

Rohit Aggarwala: I think that's one of those things that has to be discussed and worked out. Our proposal was to create the SMART Fund. Roughly half of its revenue would come from congestion pricing, the other half would be a joint contribution from the city and state. By devoting the revenue to a new financing board that would make regional decisions about transportation investment priorities, that would be one way that you can prevent the money from disappearing.

There are a variety of other ways you can do it. I think the commission and the state legislature and the governor are going to wind up weighing in on whether the SMART Fund is the right way. But I think there is near universal agreement that congestion pricing revenue should be dedicated to transit investment.

AN: What transit enhancements will the City undertake prior to the launch of congestion pricing?

RA: The proposal that we submitted jointly with the MTA and the State to the U.S. Department of Transportation envisioned a number of things, the most important was the roll out of more than 300 new buses. The buses would be used for increasing the frequency of bus service, new express routes, and some enhanced express bus service to specific areas within the suburbs.

What's particularly important in terms of making those buses move quickly are some of the Bus Rapid Transit improvements that the City will do, like signal prioritization, automated bus lane enforcement, and some of the incremental improvements that, for example, could facilitate easier transfers from certain bus lines to certain subway stations, things like that.

Writing for the Brooklyn Rail, Carolyn Konheim overviews the legacy of "Tammany-style" former Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito, and posits that the deceased "capo di tutti capi in New York politics" still exerts influence on city transportation policy.

Konheim, who is a proponent of tolling the East River bridges, argues that Esposito's record of protecting motorist privilege eventually led to what she calls "an unnecessarily costly structure of Mayor Bloomberg's otherwise crucial initiative to get New Yorkers out of their cars and onto better subways and buses."

The Mayor's congestion pricing brain trust, including purveyors of high-tech traffic detection, saw in London's on-street charging system a way to make an end-run around what they saw as the lingering Meade mindset regarding bridge tolls. Ignoring the recent comprehensive studies about the effectiveness of various scenarios of tolling the free bridges, the mayoral team proposed a charging system entirely in Manhattan that had a single political benefit.

For years, planners have advocated a London-style cordon, which would run across the 60th Street boundary of the Manhattan Central Business District, river to river, and impose tolls at all river crossings leading to the CBD. Instead, the Mayor's plan calls for thousands of camera and E-ZPass monitors at hundreds of sites around and within the charging zone. The internal charging stations are intended to charge car trips that begin and end within the zone a fee of $4 per day, and charge trucks $21.

When the Deputy Mayor of London was told about charging intrazone fees, she said, "It's complicated enough with a single cordon. Why would you want to do that?" Whereas London only charges residents of the charging zone a 10% fee on re-entry and trucks the same as cars, the Mayor's plan banks heavily on intrazone trips for revenues. Without any explanatory data, it's difficult to discern if the forecasts account for the more than a third of intra-zonal trips that are by taxis or livery vehicles and would be exempt from any fee. Most of all, there is no accounting for the cost of operating a network of multiple charging cordons, which will surely exceed the 42% collection and enforcement cost of London's single cordon system, possibly adding up to more than half of gross revenues.

The bottom line is that an unnecessarily elaborate congestion charging network will reduce revenues for transit to about $250 million a year. In contrast, installing E-ZPass monitors on the four free bridges and across 60th Street would likely net more than $500 million a year for transit and more reliably garner the desired benefits in reduced congestion and faster commutes. These revenues would increase as MTA tolls increased and could be dedicated to improving transit service, not keeping transit afloat.

Can the need to circumvent Meade Esposito's legacy be worth the loss of $2.5 billion over a decade in revenues for transit? Or will the fact-finding process over the coming months reveal what makes a pricing system that equalizes tolls on all entries so effective: it benefits motorists with faster travel everywhere; it provides transit riders with the most revenue for transit; and it boosts local economies by freeing up road space for drivers with local destinations.

NYC Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability Rohit Aggarwala discussed why the city decided not to propose tolling the East River bridges in part two of our interview series.

UPDATE: The 2003 analysis of bridge tolls by the "two-man team" mentioned in Konheim's article is available here (PDF).

Photo: Docman/Flickr

Rohit Aggarwala models the latest in Long-Term Planning & Sustainability chic: Gray flannel, subway token cuff links, Columbia U. class ring and a global warming mug: Pour a hot drink and coast lines disappear.

This is the second segment of a four-part interview with New York City's Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Rohit Aggarwala. We're talking about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal for a three-year congestion pricing pilot project in New York City. Part 1 of our interview can be found here.

Aaron Naparstek: Why does the mayor's congestion pricing plan designate 86th Street as the northern boundary rather than 60th Street, which is traditionally considered the top of the Central Business District?

Rohit Aggarwala: There are a couple of problems with 60th Street as a boundary for congestion pricing. The CBD traditionally ends at 60th Street, but on the west side up in the 60s you've got Lincoln Center, ABC TV, and other big office buildings. On the east side, you've got the hospitals, the buildings to the north of Bloomingdale's and the museums. There are lots of non-residential destinations for drivers well above 60th Street. That's the first issue.

Second, if you look at traffic patterns, it's not as if the traffic immediately dissipates as you cross 60th Street going northbound. Depending on the time of day, depending on which avenue you're looking at, the traffic really changes in the quality of the congestion and delay somewhere between 72nd and 110th Street. And so while that doesn't dictate 86th as exactly the right line, it suggests that the boundary should be somewhere north of 60th Street.

Finally, some people have argued that people are going to drive in and park in Greenpoint or park on 87th Street and take the subway the rest of the way in and, frankly, we don't see that as being a big risk. Compared to a round trip subway ride, you're only saving $4 and you're adding a lot of time to your trip, both because the parking itself is scarce and because the subway trip will add time. So, it's unclear to us why anybody really would do that.

But if somebody is going to Bloomingdale's on 59th Street, certainly, if you charge $8 to drive south of 60th Street they're going to park on 61st and walk. And if somebody is going to Columbus Circle or Carnegie Hall, or any of the many businesses and offices in the 50s, you are more likely to have that parking problem.

So, those three reasons combined suggested to us that the boundary ought to be somewhere between 72nd and 110th Street. We picked 86th Street as a place that we thought made sense but as the mayor has said many times, we're open to conversation about that.

AN: Wouldn't it be far less expensive and nearly just as effective simply to toll the East River bridges?

RA: Not really. The largest vector through which cars enter the Central Business District is not the East River, it's 60th Street. More cars are coming south from upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester than are crossing the East River. So, you would get some of the benefit by only tolling the bridges but you wouldn't get all of it.

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.

Here are more points from Friday's PlaNYC Hearing: 

• Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff estimated congestion pricing would remove 112,000 cars from city streets on a daily basis, with 94,000 would-be drivers switching to transit, in what he said would be "Probably the single greatest mode shift anywhere."

• DOT Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller said that whatever edge effect might be felt would be countered by removing 112,000 cars from traffic.

• Using existing E-ZPass technology, congestion pricing fees would be enforced by employing one camera per lane at 300 to 340 stations.
  

• Assembly Member Richard Brodsky more than once referred to congestion pricing as a "regressive tax," and seemed fixated on what motorists would gain in speed inside the congestion pricing zone. Brodsky's Friday line of questioning was encapsulated in one pre-hearing quote from the Daily News: "Why is this worth a regressive tax on the middle class and a new invasion of privacy to go only six-tenths of a mile further in an hour?"

• Also said by Assemblyman Brodsky during the hearing: "privacy values"; "tremendously unpersuaded"; "I don't have a plan, Mr. Doctoroff."
  

• Queens Assembly Member Cathy Nolan leveled the mayor with a number of pointed questions and comments about the magnitude and efficacy of the pricing scheme. Nolan, a strong supporter of public transit who is considered a thoughtful lawmaker by many advocates, wondered why no Environmental Impact Statement was required and why the City Council did not need to pass a home rule message before the state legislature considered pricing. Deputy Mayor Doctoroff answered that pilot projects do not need an EIS. He added that a home rule message was not required. Nolan followed by asking why fees from residential parking would potentially go the city's general fund and not a dedicated transit fund. She also asserted that the worst air pollution hotspot in Queens was at the tolled Queens Midtown Tunnel and not the untolled Queensboro Bridge. Implicit in Nolan's remarks is that pricing does not work. She concluded by calling congestion pricing "extremely problematical" for areas outside Manhattan.

Read more...

Flanked by dozens, if not hundreds, of citizen spectators in bright green "I Breathe and I Vote" t-shirts, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city staffers this morning made the case for a three-year congestion pricing pilot program to a largely hostile cadre of state Assembly members.

Seated alongside ten colleagues in the auditorium of the New York City Bar building in Midtown, Herman "Denny" Farrell, Jr. (D-New York), set the tone right away. In opening remarks, Farrell complained that legislators had been chastized in the media for not acting on PlaNYC before "a single public hearing" could be held, and pledged that the hearings would uncover the facts -- and "just the facts" -- about congestion pricing.

"Clearly, something must be done" about congestion, Farrell said. "However, we must be sure that the cure is not worse than the disease."

Farrell disagreed with Bloomberg over whether a possible $500 million federal grant for city transportation projects hinged on the approval of congestion pricing by state lawmakers, insisting that other initiatives could attract the funds. Bloomberg told Assembly members that almost half of the $500 million would cover pricing start-up costs, while the remaining funds would be invested in immediate transit improvements in the run-up to implementation. The mayor, having met with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters yesterday, said the feds will steer the half-billion dollars to another city if congestion pricing doesn't clear the legislature.

Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff said pricing is expected to net $380 million in revenues in its first year, all of which would be spent on further transit upgrades. Farrell was unimpressed, wondering what effect a congestion charge would have on "working folks," and predicting that cars kept off Midtown streets by pricing would be replaced by trucks. When Doctoroff reminded Farrell that large commercial trucks would be subject to a $21 fee, Farrell was dismissive: "It's a write-off, though."

At times Farrell seemed to be arguing for the sake of arguing. In discussing the E-ZPass technology that would be used for billing and collections, the Assembly member declared "I don't give E-ZPass my money." When Bloomberg and company explained that congestion charges could be paid online, by phone and at retail locations throughout the city, Farrell responded with "I don't have a computer."

Read more...

The once traffic-filled street between Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery is now a thriving plaza.

Climate change is a greater threat to London than terrorism, one of the city's top planners said yesterday.

Debbie McMullen (right), a one-time New Yorker who heads implementation of the "London Plan," made this matter-of-fact announcement at a Tuesday evening forum, sponsored by the Forum for Urban Design and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and held at the Center for Architecture in the East Village. As New York awaits the unveiling of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030, McMullen outlined the "spatial development strategy" that London Mayor Ken Livingstone has spearheaded during his seven years in office.

Like PlaNYC, the London Plan, published in 2004, is designed to help mitigate the environmental impacts of a predicted one million new residents in the coming decades. Backed by the power of the Greater London Authority (GLA) -- a city-wide governmental structure established in 2000 -- the London Plan integrates sustainable development practices with innovative social and economic policies.

As London becomes "younger, more female and less white," said McMullen, the city wants to build 305,000 new housing units over the next 10 years, spread throughout its 32 boroughs. The London Plan calls for 50 percent of those units to be priced for low- and moderate-income citizens. New construction standards cover insulation requirements, building orientation (to make the most of solar power potential), green (or "living") roofs, and renewable on-site energy.

To reduce CO2 from vehicle emissions -- in addition to congestion charging, which McMullen said has reduced car trips by 50,000 per day -- the London Plan prescribes that scattered "town centres" in the boroughs be linked by public transport routes radiating from the city core, along with other light rail and tram service. The city's canals are to be relied upon for ferrying more freight and waste, reducing truck traffic on the streets.

The plan is aimed at nothing less than making London a "zero emission city," said McMullen, with CO2 reduction targets of 30 percent by 2025, and 60 percent by 2050.

Read more...

After Mayor Bloomberg's December announcement of his PlaNYC initiative to prepare for a sustainable New York of 9 million people by 2030, New York New Visions, the group of architects and planners originally organized around Ground Zero rebuilding, announced it was expanding its scope to tackle the new challenge. Last night, in a stark white room in the basement of the American Institute of Architects building in Greenwich Village, a collection of almost equally stark white faces began reimagining the New York of the future.  

Rohit Aggarwala, the management consultant tasked by Bloomberg with heading up the new project (pictured right), began by laying out the PlaNYC goals, a laundry list of urban niceties that it should be hard for anyone to disagree with: more housing, parks within a 10-minute walk for all residents, a well-maintained transportation grid, cleaner air and land and water. (All these were in the newspaper insert the city placed in local newspapers back in December; if you missed it, you can still download one from the mayor's website.) Noting that "sustainability" is a "terribly overused word," Aggarwala nonetheless offered his own definition: "a city that is cleaner, healthier, more reliable, and in general better."

The devil, of course, lies in the details, something that NYNV's assembled panel of architects and planners wasted no time in pointing out to Aggarwala, even as they gave the mayor points for just raising the questions:

• Where will the new housing for all these new New Yorkers go, and who will be living in it? "The million people who are coming are not coming with MBAs," noted Bloomberg's former Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Jerilyn Perine, saying the city needs to be "screaming our heads off for a new [federal] public housing program." (Less seriously, she also suggested "trading Staten Island to New Jersey for Newark.")
• "I don't want to be the harbinger of doom here," began structural engineer Joseph Tortorella, "but I will be." The flood of new construction already underway in the city, he said, is already creating a rush to use non-union labor to keep up with the workload, something he worries could lead to "a war in this city" that will make inflatable rats seem tame. The quality of work is also already at "a dangerous level," he said, with city building sites averaging one collapse a week.
• How will all this be paid for, and what gets cut from the agenda if the money falls short? "This is a great PR beginning," said former City Planning Commission chair Donald Elliott, stressing he meant that as a compliment. "But you're going to have to get into some evaluation of the opportunities and constraints."

And that's not even getting into some of the bigger questions about PlaNYC: Will new residents, most expected to be immigrants from Asia and Central and South America, really "bring jobs" with them, as Aggarwala asserted? If the city swells to 9 million people, what happens to the surrounding suburbs? And while the "GreeNYC" portion of the plan sets a laudable goal of cutting city carbon emissions by 30% (and cleaning up pollution), there's little else about preparing for what's likely to be a radically altered climate 23 years hence. Talk of a "more reliable" New York is likely to sound quaint if the Stillwell Avenue subway terminal has been washed out to sea.

NYNV has scheduled working group meetings the next three Fridays to follow up on last night's meeting, but the more interesting bit will likely be the public town hall meetings that Aggarwala promised would be announced soon. That's when the mayor should hear from not just those who hope to design the future New York, but those who hope to live in it.

Photo: SvdR on Flickr

Chris Smith has an outstanding story in this week's New York Magazine pointing out that New York City has fallen behind other world cities in addressing climate change and challenging the Bloomberg Administration to do more. An excerpt:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been cruising through his second term. At this point, with a gaudy approval rating, Bloomberg should be willing to risk his popularity on behalf of a life-and-death subject. But on global warming, Bloomberg has so far been more gesture than guts.

It is only now, five years into his reign, that Bloomberg has started considering the broader changes that could bring striking improvements, and that might inflict short-term political pain. In December, he raised the stakes at a flashy press conference in Flushing Meadows, introducing his "sustainability" agenda for the city through 2030. The speech was long on meritorious goals and almost completely free of specifics. Those are supposed to arrive in March or April.

The mayor's sustainability brain trust is headed by Rohit Aggarwala, an academic expert in city history who was working as a management consultant at the ubiquitous McKinsey & Co. before being hired by Dan Doctoroff. The task force is mulling anti-car ideas that could stir serious rage, like shrinking the number of parking spaces in Manhattan. But Bloomberg punted on congestion pricing, which would have cut traffic and pollution, because he considers it politically impractical, and he's far more likely to pursue technocratic and financial avenues.

At an event hosted by the League of Conservation Voters, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will deliver a major speech outlining sustainability challenges and goals for the City of New York through the year 2030. This will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw.

When

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006, 11:00 am

Where

The Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens

The speech is the next step forward for the Long-Term Sustainability initiative that Mayor Bloomberg announced during a visit with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California on September 21.

As reported by Streetsblog, the Sustainability office is headed by Rohit Aggarwala and, we can only hope, has been significantly influenced by the work of Dr. Rachel Weinberger, an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in land use and transportation planning.

And, yes, this is the big sustainability speech that Streetsblog incorrectly reported was happening last month. Hey, if the headline is labeled "Rumor Mill" take it with a grain of salt. Still, the editorial commentary from that story still applies to tomorrow's big speech:

There are high hopes that tomorrow's public unveiling, whatever it may show, begins to lay the groundwork for a serious traffic reduction program in New York City, perhaps in the form of London-style congestion charging. With this year's elections out of the way there is no longer any worry that the inevitably difficult public discussion of congestion charging might force a gubernatorial candidate into a corner. Governor Elect Spitzer's vow to raise subway fares only as a last resort almost guarantees an MTA fiscal crisis in the coming months. Might a fiscal crisis also serve as the impetus for a congestion charging push? Among political insiders there is a feeling that the only possible way to sell congestion charging to New York is in response to a serious crisis. In other words, the Doctor needs to make it clear that the patient is sick and needs to make dificult, but ultimately fulfilling, lifestyle changes.

And it's important to note that the Mayor can do a ton to enhance New York City's long-term sustainability without London-style congestion charging.