http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/03/plan-could-finally-free-new-york-city-traffic-congestion/8671/
By Eric Jaffe, March 20, 2014
There's a reason for New York City's ongoing flirtation with road
pricing: the city is set up perfectly for it. It has a clear core
business area (Manhattan) accessible by limited entryways (bridges and
tunnels) that would be easy to price for traffic reductions (via tolls
or cordons). Its overwhelming traffic oozes into and out of town each
morning from all sides at the speed of … ooze. Its expansive transit
system is in perpetual need of revenue and further expansion.
Oh, and its current system of handling commuter traffic is
completely busted.
If you can even call it a system. Three different entities manage the
bridges and tunnels surrounding Manhattan — Port Authority, the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the city — with no concerted
effort to reduce traffic. Case in point: the four city-owned bridges
over the East River are free, but the two MTA-owned tunnels beside them
cost commuters $15 cash round trip, leading to rampant "bridge
shopping."
"The term I'd borrow from my father is that we have a cockamamie system
of charging people that makes absolutely no sense," says engineer and
former city traffic commissioner
"Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, "and in fact encourages people to drive through our densest part of the city: Manhattan."
On Friday Schwartz and the Move NY group will launch a public campaign
to rally support for what they're calling a "fair" tolling plan for the
city. The fact that the new effort follows so closely behind the
failed Bloomberg pricing plan
suggests that New York has reached a natural breaking point with its
traffic woes. "I describe it as a vampire," says finance scholar
Jonathan Peters
of the College of Staten Island. "Whenever you put the stake in it,
it's going to come back to life, because nobody else has a better
answer."
As with everything else related to vampires, the rest of the country will be keeping a close watch. Congestion pricing — or
whatever name
you'd like to apply to a scheme for charging fees to reduce traffic
congestion — has generally worked in the cities bold enough to adopt it:
Stockholm, Singapore, and
London
being the standard examples. If New York buys into this new plan, some
experts believe the path to road pricing could open for congested
American cities to follow.
"I think in the grand scheme of things, we need something that works in
North America for the idea to move forward," says transport economist
Gilles Duranton of Wharton. "I think New York is about as good a place as it gets."
• • • • •
The Move NY plan remains in its formative stages and open to change,
but some of the basics are in place. Its first goal will be to
distribute bridge and tunnel traffic more evenly and dissuade bridge
shopping on the East River. To that end, all the eastern crossings,
including the currently free bridges, will cost the same price: $10.66
round-trip for E-Z Pass users, $15 cash. Those increases will be
counter-balanced with toll reductions on the outer bridges of as much as
50 percent.
That takes care of commuters entering the island from everywhere but the west. (The
outcome of Bridgegate
aside, the plan does not involve the Port Authority bridges and tunnels
that carry travelers from Jersey for various logistical reasons.) Next
the plan takes aim at congestion in Manhattan itself. A toll cordon
would be placed at 60th Street to charge drivers heading into the part
of the city with the greatest demand: the midtown business district.
Map by Mark Byrnes.
Those are the broad strokes; now for some of the finer details. Drivers
will be encouraged to pay with a transponder (like E-Z Pass); those
without one will be captured via license-plate cameras. Cars will pay
the tolls each pass, but commercial vehicles will only have to pay once
round-trip in a 24-hour period, to limit the burden on businesses.
Yellow cabs will pay a surcharge south of 96th Street — the idea being
that they contribute to congestion but in their
quasi-transit role shouldn't pay the full cordon price every time.
All told the plan could generate up $1.5 billion in net revenue every
year. The MTA would manage the money (under the terms of the plan, the
agency would lease the four free East River bridges from the city,
though the feds might have final say about that). Precisely where the
money will go is what Schwartz and Move NY leaders hope to determine
with public input awareness campaign. For now, most of it (roughly a
billion) is earmarked for transit: maintaining current service and
expanding into
transit deserts,
with anything extra stowed away for long-term capital projects. The
rest would go toward the city's roads and bridges, as well as subsidies
for suburban buses or rail commuters.
The revenue number might attract local eyes, but it's the traffic
improvement that will get the attention of other cities. Schwartz and
Move NY want traffic flows in the cordon area to improve by 20 percent.
Right now the tolls are fixed, but Schwartz says they'll be adjusted on a
quarterly basis to make sure that mark is being met. If traffic is
flowing above expectations, it could be lowered. If it's still oozing
like ooze, the tolls might go up.
• • • • •
There are plenty of rumors and even
some legitimate reasons as
to why New York's last pricing plan failed, but Sam Schwartz says what
he hears most often, when speaking about his plan to residents in the
outer parts of the city, was that they weren't consulted. "What I find
in going around — and I've been traveling a good deal over three years
around the city and suburbs — is each person wants to know what's in it
for me," he says. "That wasn't well articulated in the past according to
them. In many cases they felt there was nothing in it for them except
paying more."
Schwartz and Alex Matthiessen, head of MoveNY, are determined not to
make the same mistake this time around. Their "public listening tour,"
as Matthiessen calls it, is organized to make sure everyone from
Rockefeller Center to the Rockaways learns about the pricing plan and
engages in a meaningful dialogue about how to shape it. They want to
meet with elected officials and Chambers of Commerce and labor unions
and transit groups and environmental groups and so on. "Everybody we can
possibly get a hold of we think would have an interest," says
Matthiessen.
That includes
past opponents.
Schwartz and Matthiessen each say they've already had constructive
talks with Mark Weprin, a city council member who was vocally opposed to
the Bloomberg plan but seems now to be more receptive. The same goes
for AAA New York, which had gone so far as to sue past city
administrations over previous toll hikes. "We've been preaching to the
rebels," says Schwartz. In a further attempt to distinguish itself, the
plan is
conspicuously not being referred to as "congestion pricing."
At the end of the day, Move NY wants all parties to feel that even
though they're paying something, they're gaining something. Some drivers
will pay higher tolls but get an easier trip. Other commuters will be
priced out of their cars but have their transit corridors improved.
Manhattanites will pay higher cab fares but reach their destination
quicker; cabbies will owe the surcharge but pick up more passengers.
Transit riders may fight more crowds at first, but they'll get better
service over time. The MTA has more things to manage but gains a stable
funding source and new revenue from drivers-turned-straphangers.
Environmental groups will see fewer cars on the road, and retailers
should see an increase of people traveling into the city.
"One of the things we really try to emphasize over and over is this is
about fairness," says Matthiessen. "This isn't about sticking people
with new tolls. Everybody's paying their fair share, and everybody's
getting something in return." Envisioning New York several years from
now, if the plan works as he hopes, Schwartz says he'd expect to witness
a much better transit system, much less traffic, far fewer car crashes,
and millions fewer vehicle-miles traveled. "It'll be a happier place,"
he says.
• • • • •
Happier from a traffic perspective, perhaps, but others aren't so sure
the city will be happier from an economic one. New Yorkers already pay
$2.5 billion in tolls a year and about a quarter of the
nation's annual
tolls; boosting those figures with new tolls could tip the balance in a
city already struggling with affordability. Jeffrey Brinkman of the
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
recently argued that the traffic advantages gained through road pricing could be offset by the loss of
business agglomeration over the long-term. In non-economist speak: people
and jobs might leave the city.
A congestion pricing zone sign in London
No population is left more exposed in a road-pricing plan than
low-income drivers. Any equitable parsing of the new toll revenue must
provide vastly improved transit options in the tolled corridors —
including hard to reach corners of the city like the eastern parts of
Queens and the Bronx, outer Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Pricing a
low-income driver off the road from a 40-minute car commute might be a
win for traffic, but it's a loss for society if that person now rides
two hours to work.
"I think it's a step in the right direction in terms of equity to talk
about trying to deal with the transit deserts and look at it as a
holistic mobility equation," says Peters, the finance scholar at the
College of Staten Island. "Inequity problems are most profound in a
corridor that has poor transit alternatives. Because what do the poor
people have as an option? The answer is nothing. They're priced off the
facility and they can't shift."
Some transportation experts worry that a pricing plan won't even
advance to the point of debating the economic and equity questions. Over
the years some notable pricing plans — Hong Kong in the 1980s,
Edinburgh in 2005 — failed to get off the ground because residents
lacked faith in the funding agency to manage the new revenue. Scholars
Michael Manville of Cornell and David King of Columbia call this the
"credible commitment"
problem of congestion pricing. A few years back, Manville and King
interviewed 50-some officials in Los Angeles about road pricing. About a
third explicitly said they would not support a congestion plan because
they didn't trust state officials to redistribute the toll revenue as
promised, the same share who feared that pricing might be unfair to the
poor.
"What happens is, absent that trust, that sort of revenue promise
doesn't necessarily lead to the kind of political support you might
think," says Manville. "In some ways, what people were saying is it
would never get far enough for pricing's regressivity to be a problem,
because we would just never see this money."
Considering the emphasis Move NY's plan places on revenue redistribution, not to mention the MTA's
own mixed record
of public promises, those findings give reason for pause. The way
around the commitment problem, says Manville, is to stress the traffic
benefits that a strong pricing plan will bring, as opposed to the
revenue gains. Some believe the best way forward is to run a pilot
project first, as officials did in Stockholm.
But there's no pilot project in the works at the moment, and convincing
drivers of the traffic benefits is traditionally the hardest part of
passing a road-pricing plan. That's a bit odd, since they stand to
benefit most. Manville compares the situation to patients who've
suffered from an illness so long they can't even conceive of a cure.
• • • • •
It's not such a stretch to think of traffic as a disease. Long commutes pose well-documented harm to a person's
physical and
mental
health, something drivers in congested metro areas don't need to lay
eyes on a study to know. So if we accept traffic as a disease, the
traditional treatment has been building roads. That does relieve the
symptoms — for a time. But only for a time.
Singapore congestion pricing.
Then the fundamental law of highway congestion sets in. Discovered by
Anthony Downs in 1962, and augmented by Gilles Duranton and Matthew
Turner
in 2011,
this law says that any rush-hour space created on urban roads will
quickly be filled. The instinctual response is to up the treatment
dosage, though all that really does is require more treatment.
There are
alternative therapies,
such as transit improvements, but these too mask the underlying cause
of the disease: an insatiable demand for free roads. In that sense, the
only true cure for city traffic is to reduce the demand through pricing.
And since traffic is non-linear — meaning one less car opens up more
than one space — a fee need only nudge a few drivers onto mass transit
or off-hour trips to turn a terminal case of congestion into a healthy
road.
"We've been fed this stream of cures that go down easy for drivers:
we're going to improve transit, we're going to have a bike plan. All
these things that don't require any real change on driver's behavior,"
says Manville. "But if the problem really is congestion, what should
have happened a long time ago is the tough-talking doctor says: this
isn't going to go down easy — tolls — but it's going to cure the
disease."
Many patients
just don't want to hear it.
This isn't a new problem; Columbia economist William Vickrey, who won
the Nobel Prize in 1996 for his idea on pricing (and tragically died of a
car crash days later) felt perplexed by opposition his whole career.
"People see it as a tax increase, which I think is a gut reaction,"
he once said. "When motorists' time is considered, it's really a savings."
It is, however, a persistent one. Analyzing
why pricing failed under Bloomberg, New York Deputy Commissioner for Traffic and Planning
Bruce Schaller
concluded that drivers perceived too little benefit for themselves.
They felt transit was not a viable option and were unmoved by arguments
of greater social benefits. (They also doubted the MTA would use the
revenue as promised.) In a 2010 paper, Schaller writes that
HOT lanes,
another pricing scheme, often gain support because they still offer a
free alternative — whereas congestion pricing plans generally don't.
"These lessons from the New York City experience, supported by
experience elsewhere, suggests that it will be very difficult to obtain
approval of congestion pricing in U.S. cities," he wrote.
Duranton remains hopeful the New York plan can break through and become
that model other U.S. cities sorely need. Despite seeing flaws in the
New York plan — pricing should vary by time of day, he argues, and
costly technology like license-plate readers should be scrapped for
transponders and fines — he's found that pricing can bring significant
traffic benefits even when the plan is "deeply imperfect." He also fails
to see another option. "The more I think about it," he says, "the more I
think that there's only one solution."
