Streetsblog New York City

One of four options presented in the Traffic Mitigation Commission's Interim Report. Download the report.

When the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission meets today, it is expected to deliberate four proposed alternatives to Mayor Bloomberg's original congestion pricing plan. While Chairman Marc Shaw writes that that the commission "may choose to modify," "combine elements" or "put forward a wholly different plan," debate has already begun in the media, focused mostly on the proposal to add tolls to all free bridges on the East and Harlem Rivers.

Under that plan, a $4 toll would be imposed on all crossings into and out of Manhattan, 24 hours a day, with higher tolls for trucks. The plan would reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by 7 percent -- qualifying the city for $354 million in federal funds -- while raising an estimated $859 million annually for transit.

Pols including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and City Council Member John Liu are adamantly opposed to tolling the remaining bridges. Liu -- who chairs the council's transportation committee -- pre-empted today's TCMC discussion with another salvo, via the Daily News.

"You can't seal off Manhattan like that," said Liu (D-Queens), who supports congestion pricing. "To think of Manhattan as a castle surrounded by a moat will not get anybody anywhere."

The News points out that in 2006, "Although 557,043 vehicles used the nine free bridges spanning the Harlem River, only 494,576 vehicles crossed the free Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges."

Another proposal, as outlined with the others in a 72-page commission report (pdf), would operate similarly to the mayor's plan, but would move the pricing boundary to 60th Street and remove the $4 fee for trips originating within the zone. It would also raise parking meter rates, eliminate the resident parking tax exemption, and impose a $1 surcharge on cab rides that start and/or end within the zone. Estimated annual revenues for the "Alternative Congestion Pricing Plan" are pegged at $520 million.

The other two plans are the "Combination Plan," which would reduce VMTs by just 3.2 percent and is apparently not considered a viable option as written, and the odd-even license plate scheme, which would raise zero dollars for transit and will ideally end up but a gleam in Richard Brodsky's eye.

Meanwhile, maverick advocate Ted Kheel grabbed some prime op-ed space in today's Daily News to push his plan to double the $8 congestion charge while making transit free. And a new Quinnipiac Poll -- released, true to form, just ahead of the congestion commission meeting -- finds that 60 percent of New Yorkers support congestion pricing to improve transit, though you still wouldn't know it from the headlines.

Gothamist caught up with Ted Kheel, the 93 year old head of the Nurture New York's Nature Foundation, which addresses the "fundamental conflict between development and the environment." Kheel will release the findings of his study "The Kheel Plan for Balancing Free Transit and Congestion Pricing in New York City" later this month:

Many New Yorkers would love for subways and buses to be free, but are skeptical of such a plan actually working? What do you say to the skepticism?

I think the skeptics will be amazed, when they see our report. We have a brilliant team of experts working on this report, and they have been working for almost a full year. They are running the numbers, anticipating the problems, and finding concrete answers. We know what the concerns are, and we took them seriously and are addressing them. Your readers should look at our preliminary mini-report, posted on the web.

Assembly Member Richard Brodsky, archenemy of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, is urging the mayor to seek a carbon tax instead. So he said, following Monday's meeting of the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, as reported by Streetsblog and confirmed by at least one other observer.

I wish Brodsky (pictured) had checked with me first. After all, if there's another New Yorker more obsessed with carbon taxing and congestion pricing than yours truly, I'll eat my bike helmet.

I co-founded the Carbon Tax Center last winter. Since then, I've spent hundreds of hours blogging, number-crunching and campaigning for the carbon tax cause. But my devotion actually began much earlier. Back when Barry Bonds was a svelte 180-pounder, before Dan Quayle wrote potatoe on a blackboard, I published a pro-carbon tax op-ed in the Washington Post (this was in 1989). And I've been banging the drum for congestion pricing in NYC for almost as long.

So I'd love to be able to say that a carbon tax is our ticket out of gridlocked streets. But it ain't so. When it comes to erasing New York's gridlock, a carbon tax would be about as effective as a mouse stomping on an elephant's toes.

But don't take my word for it. Go and input a carbon tax into the Balanced Transportation Analyzer ©, the spreadsheet model I'm creating for Ted Kheel's free-transit proposal. The results are underwhelming.

A carbon tax of $50/ton (of carbon dioxide) would cause a mere 8,000 auto trips a day into the Central Business District to disappear. That's just 1% of current traffic, and barely more than the increase in trips the MTA board just set in motion by raising bus and subway fares. And this is with a tax surpassing any carbon tax bill being considered in Congress.

By comparison, Mayor Bloomberg's proposed $8 daytime toll would eliminate an estimated 45,000 trips a day into the CBD. (The Kheel Plan, combining a $16 'round-the-clock cordon fee with free transit, would eliminate 250,000 daily CBD trips.)

A little math reveals why a carbon tax can't cure Gotham's gridlock: a tax of $50/ton of CO2 equates to 50 cents a gallon of gas, which is roughly the fuel burned on a typical round-trip drive into Midtown. Yet that same trip currently costs around $20 for gas, parking (where applicable) and tolls (ditto). Half-a-buck on top of twenty is way too little to make a big difference in travel choices. Moreover, part of drivers' response to higher gas prices from a carbon tax will be to trade up to more efficient cars without necessarily driving less. In contrast, an $8 cordon toll, or $16 for that matter, is real money, which CBD drivers can save only by reducing trips into the CBD.

Of course, Brodsky may just be feinting. He's a smart guy and may have deduced that his best shot at blocking congestion pricing is to sow confusion.

Or, Brodsky has decided that leading New Yorkers out of traffic hell isn't his concern. He'll attack the "right" to spew carbon without paying an emission fee, but he'll leave untrammeled the "right" to create traffic congestion without paying a congestion fee.

Ordinarily, anytime an elected official calls for taxing carbon, I'm thrilled. Not in this case. Even if Brodsky could deliver a statewide carbon tax tomorrow, New York would still be mired in motor vehicles. Just as a carbon tax is the antidote to too much carbon, charging a price to drive into Midtown is the antidote to too many cars.

Charles Komanoff will be discussing the Kheel Plan with Doug Henwood on WBAI-FM (99.5) this afternoon, beginning a few minutes after 5 p.m.

"If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars."

So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg last April, right about the time he unveiled his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into Manhattan's central business district. Eight months later, as the mayor's original proposal mutates for better or worse, the MTA is hours away from raising transit fares. Neither idea has exactly caught fire with the public, and the fare hikes could actually end up a foil for congestion pricing -- a plan originally intended as a sustained financial boost for the transit system.

And then there's Theodore "Ted" Kheel. The environmentalist, philanthropist, and renowned labor attorney has lobbied for free transit in New York for over 40 years. Last February he commissioned a $100,000 study that, as it turns out, could put the city's money where the mayor's mouth is. A summary of findings released late last week shows that if the city were to impose a $16 congestion fee ($32 for trucks) below 60th Street in Manhattan, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, along with higher curbside parking fees and a taxi surcharge, the MTA could remove its turnstiles and fareboxes forever.

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This is the second installment in a five-part rail travel series that began yesterday.

In between all that fun Amtrak travel I described yesterday, my wife Susan and I stopped on our honeymoon at six great cities with an eye toward observing their built environments and transportation systems (but mostly just being plain old tourists). Below are photos and brief observations from the first three, in the order we visited.

Chicago 

The railroading capital of the United States is a great, great town, loved by New Yorkers for generations. We love it too, right?

Chicago had a lakefront exhibit of great big globes encouraging people to adopt environmentally friendly but inoffensive habits, like setting one's washing machine to cold or switching to compact florescent light bulbs. But next to the exhibit, when we tried to hail a pedicab to take us downtown, we were told that pedicabs are not allowed in the Loop. Ouch. Our recently imposed pedicab restrictions were bad enough, but this takes it to a whole new level. On the plus side, Chicago has the coolest-sounding train-related terminology that we found: the Metra Electric District.

Seattle

We had hoped not to get into a single automobile on the whole trip, but in Seattle (and only in Seattle), that broke down, mostly because we had a friend in town who owned a car and was putting us up at his place. This city has what seems like hundreds of bus routes, but the one we needed never came, even though two drivers on other routes and other passengers all swore it was running on the Sunday we arrived. After we got off the train we waited and waited for our bus. Then we took a different bus to a more central stop to try our luck there. Then our friend Matt offered to pick us up from the bus stop. We accepted because he said he completely understood our motivating principle, but was downtown anyway and would be burning the same amount of gasoline either way. He drove us again a few more times, including to Lake Union go kayaking, which was worth it.

However we still wanted to explore Seattle on foot, so we walked through downtown, adjacent Belltown, where new condos are going up like mad, and residential Queen Anne Hill. Somewhere in there we noticed the signs all around Seattle encouraging people to ride transit. They have sayings like "Take the monorail, Abigail," and "Take the bus and relax, Max." Slogans aside, Seattle already had what Ted Kheel knows is a better incentive. At least downtown, its buses are free.

Portland

Like Seattle's downtown buses, Portland's downtown light rail does not charge a fare. Our hotel was in the free zone, and we felt a little guilty riding so much for free, so we vowed to spend our extra money in various Portland businesses, like the worker-owned bicycle cooperative where we rented bikes. The bikes were great, as they allowed us to really see the city and its nearby bike trails up close and personal. As I stood watching cyclists pass by on a fully-separated bike lane next to a light rail line and a aerial tram depot, I realized why it is said that Portland has the most diverse multimodal transportation network in the country for a city its size. One of those modes is the automobile, which in places is catered to as much as any suburb. On the way to the rail, we'd pass curb cuts used by cars and SUVs in the drive-thru restaurant and drive-thru Starbucks across from our hotel, engines idling as their occupants awaited their morning venti mocha frap. Portland leads the nation in many ways, but hey, it's not perfect.

And even in Portland, we learned, bike and transit networks are under attack. This newspaper article described the efforts of one Craig Flynn, a local activist and one-time city council candidate who "thinks city transportation funds should go toward relieving congestion on freeways and other main roads, specifically adding lanes or building new freeways." He told the paper: "I feel like honking my horn going over a speed bump to irritate the people who want them there."

In tomorrow's installment, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Theodore Kheel (pictured right), has been called by The New York Times "the most influential peacemaker in New York City in the last half-century" in light of the fact that he has participated in the resolution of more than 30,000 labor disputes. Kheel has founded several related foundations devoted to resolving the conflict between the environment and development, and has been an advocate for mass transit for over fifty years. He is a regular Streetsblog reader. A shorter version of this essay appeared in the New York Times this Sunday.

The three commemorative exhibits on Robert Moses, like the press articles covering them, have neglected the mass transit issue almost as seriously as Moses did. The New York Times mentioned in passing that he "championed highways as he starved mass transit" but said no more on the subject. Paul Goldberger, writing for the New Yorker, devoted a few more words to the matter, before dismissing it entirely. He reasoned: "[I]n Moses's day cities all over the country were building highways at the expense of mass transit. Some critics were complaining but most people didn't see [the problem] until long after the damage had been done."

Perhaps Moses was doing what everyone else was doing, or perhaps he was leading the others. Whatever our conclusion, it does a disservice to our city to ignore this piece of the Moses story, and what it has to teach us. With that thought in mind, I decided to share with New Yorkers my most notable experience with Moses.

George Haikalis of the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, with microphone. Environmentalist Theodore W. Kheel, seated next to him, at far right, would reduce the subway fare to nothing.

On December 23, 1943, the New York City subways carried more than 8 million people, said the labor relations arbitrator and environmentalist Theodore W. Kheel last night at a reception celebrating an exhibit promoting greater integration of the region's rail systems. Then the nickel fare was raised to a dime and ridership plummeted. Now it is $2, he noted, and the record ridership of December 1943 has never been achieved since. 

Think the subways are crowded now? No way. We're operating at about half that all-time record, despite more than a decade or more of increasing ridership. "The people haven't gone away," Kheel noted. "They're still here. They've gone to the automobile."

Kheel would like to lure those drivers back to the subway by raising the cost of driving and making the subway free to the riders.

Why raise the cost of driving? "We should make the drivers pay for the cost they impose on the public through the strangulation of movement and the pollution that they bring about."

Why make the subway free? First, Kheel said it would save the city money overall. (He didn't elaborate on how, but I imagine that savings would come in terms of reduced costs for road maintenance, fewer vehicle accidents and hence emergency services, reduced asthma cases, etc.) Second, the city is in the habit of offering public goods for free. Fire and police protection come at no cost to their beneficiaries, for example. Why should safe, efficient transportation?

Kheel, the president of Nurture New York's Nature, Inc., put his money where his mouth is last night. He presented George Haikalis of the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility with a $100,000 check so that the institute can conduct a study that Kheel hopes will show that a free subway fare would indeed reduce taxes on the general public.