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Why Congestion Pricing Won't Work
History Against Him In the "no traffic-enforcement" downtown area, as in other parts of the city, the concept of the Mayor's "shared sacrifice" applies only to those with the political clout to snag a cardboard placard for their car so they can park all day in no-standing zones, block fire hydrants and crosswalks and make response time slower for emergency vehicles. These princes and princesses of the city are also permitted to clog up the "bus only" lanes that were touted by the Mayor in 2001 as a way to speed traffic. Instead of amusing himself and the media by pretending to run for President and giving speeches at Google headquarters in California, the Mayor should Google himself, particularly his 2001 campaign white paper on how to improve traffic and mass transit. Most of his ideas, for which he surely paid a consultant dearly, are still on the drawing board. As one example close to City Hall, we can go back just three years ago, when the Mayor and then-Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall announced the creation of the two-mile-long Church St. Busway, by which only buses would be permitted on Greenwich St. at the Battery. Signs were posted, traffic agents deployed, tickets issued for offenders. Finally, a new day in traffic management had arrived. Bus riders and downtown residents were amazed: the Mayor was getting serious, albeit in a small way, about improving mass transit and speeding the flow of traffic. Today, the Busway is a disaster. There is one lonely traffic agent directing cars, buses and trucks around the construction site on Battery Place and Greenwich. Private cars routinely whiz past the agent, ignoring the signs. There isn't a police officer in sight to stop them, and the ones who are there also illegally park their private cars all day.
Parking Free-for-All Across the street, the no-standing signs are also laughed at by important government workers. In the broken windows theory of traffic, this leads to trucks double-parking, which leads to only one lane open, which leads, inexorably, to a massive traffic jam every day. The Mayor's tough enforcement is so ridiculed that you don't even need an official sign. One guy at the corner of Whitehall and Pearl has a hand-scrawled "Fruit Man across the street" sign in his windshield. Behind him one day last month was a private car that was ticketed, and behind that car was an MTA van and private cars with Motor Vehicles, Board of Elections, Department of Health, NYPD, etc. All on "official business," we can presume. The failed Busway experiment is yet another indication of the power of headlines and the failed management follow-up on what is a simple solution - at no cost to the city. At some point, the Mayor and Weinshall, whose office on Worth and Church streets was around the corner from the Busway, gave up on clearing the street. Traffic agents issue tickets, but nothing changes because the Mayor is unwilling to order towing and the confiscation of the placards for abuse of privilege.
Dedicate Bus Lanes During the 2001 campaign, he promised he would introduce Bus Rapid Transit, whereby major avenues - he specifically cited First and Second Aves. - would have a dedicated bus lane all day, with sensors turning the light green for the bus, prepaid tickets and extended curb cuts so the bus doesn't have to pull in and out of traffic. The Mayor should put an emergency rush on real Bus Rapid Transit plans, not just a few here and there. There is no longer any question that BRT works to speed up bus traffic and reduce costs. City workers should be working 24/7 (on three shifts) to get that done. Unlike major cities around the world, which have completed such systems, Bloomberg is just getting started, more than six years after he was sworn in. Yet this is only one lost opportunity that the Mayor hasn't used to dramatically reduce traffic without imposing a regressive tax on working people to get around a city that is congested in every borough, not just Manhattan south of 86th St. The sudden public-relations interest in traffic management by the Mayor has caught a lot of New Yorkers by surprise, for he has shown little interest in the topic for six years; indeed, as recently as December, he described congestion pricing as a "non-starter." He floated the idea of tolls on the East River bridges, and then backed away when the firestorm was too much for even a term-limited Mayor to bear. Bloomberg shrugged when the traffic-mess topic came up at a town hall meeting three years ago, saying that congestion "was proof that the economy is thriving." Plan Keeps Changing One of the major deficiencies of the Mayor's congestion plan is that it has confused the voters - for good reason. It keeps changing with each passing week, sort of like governing on the fly for a distracted Mayor who is off to his next adventure. Originally Bloomberg said he would exempt city residents, making it a back-door commuter tax, which he has refused to lobby for since it was killed as state legislators tried to influence a Rockland County election, at a cost to the city of $500 million a year. That exemption sounded good, especially after Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff told civic groups that only five percent of the cars entering Manhattan are driven by New Yorkers going to work, a figure that he couldn't back up with any empirical evidence. Just last month, the Mayor reached a deal with the Teamsters union giving trucking companies a break on the toll - from $21 to $7 - if they retrofit their trucks for lower emissions (but apparently not noise). He also claimed that if you paid a toll already to drive to work, that toll would be deducted from the congestion price, making it only a $4 fee to enter Manhattan - hardly a deterrent for the well-heeled. Then he raised the issue of permit-parking for residents, as is done in other cities, including New Brunswick, N.J. - another class issue for the tone-deaf Mayor. Played the Asthma Card Somewhere along the way, he came up with a dandy - the asthma issue, which heretofore has been on the back burner while more than 800,000 fume-belching vehicles pile into Manhattan every day. Then, there was the "emergency" of possibly losing $500 million in Federal transit aid if the plan is not in effect by August, a deadline that didn't occur to anyone in City Hall until the Mayor changed his mind on the plan. In a Democratic-controlled Senate, it shouldn't be a heavy lift for Senators Clinton and Schumer to extend the deadline. The seemingly insurmountable problem with the Mayor's plan is the glaring unfairness of it. Essentially, the Mayor is saying that if you can afford it, you can drive anywhere, any time, with unfettered access to Manhattan's streets. Supporters of the plan can work all day to come up with a term for that, but it sure isn't economic fairness. Non-Staten Island residents have their own congestion pricing. They now pay $9.00 to cross two miles of water over the Narrows. (Staten Islanders with EZ Pass pay $4.80). Everyone else can drive to and from the other four boroughs for free. Pegged to Growth One of the main arguments for the Mayor's plan is that the city will add one million residents by 2030, from eight million (the "official" count but probably off by a half million or so if you count the illegal immigrants hiding from the census-takers), to nine million. This can only be done by rezoning industrial and commercial land, an end to the popular down-zoning, or the continued wink and a nod the Mayor has given to illegal building all over the city, where two-family homes have been turned into SROs with 30 to 50 people living in firetraps. The Plan NYC document gives us the opportunity to actually plan the neighborhoods before the building boom, not after. What exactly is the role of City Planning, headed by a wealthy socialite friend of the Mayor, in this administration? Why are we imposing a tax on workers for things that might happen 23 years from now, as if we have no control over our future?
Next week: A few modest proposals. | |||||||||
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