Alternatives to Congestion Pricing
A Few Modest Proposals

By JIM CALLAGHAN

Mr. Callaghan, a staff writer for the New York Teacher, is a longtime bus, subway and ferry rider. The views expressed are his own, not his union's.

Missing from the congestion pricing debate so far is what the Mayor and Governor can do now - at not much cost - to reduce traffic and to improve mass transit. The models are Sept. 12, 2001 and the 2005 transit strike, when Giuliani and Bloomberg imposed strict rules about who could drive into Manhattan. Just as most New Yorkers were getting acclimated to the post-9/11 restrictions, Bloomberg chickened out and relaxed them, dealing a major blow to relieving traffic congestion.

Let Them Eat Fumes

What has happened since is that the "one-person-in-a-car" mentality has taken hold again, highlighting the arrogance of people who are too good to share a subway or bus with their three million neighbors who use mass transit every day. And the only way to crack that mentality is to force-feed them a daily dose of sitting in traffic for an hour or two while buses fly past them.

Also missing from the debate is the requirement - or lack thereof - for a Home-Rule Message from the City Council, which Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was hinting at on a TV show in late June. "Where is the City Council on this?" he asked. A spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation told The Chief that no Home-Rule Message was needed.

In addition, the Federal Government did not require any city to submit plans for congestion pricing. The plans were for traffic reduction. Congestion pricing was Bloomberg's half-hearted idea and, like the Olympics and the West Side stadium, it had to be his way or no way.

Roberts Doubles Back

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow READING BETWEEN THE LANES: Some people wonder how, if the city can't make sure that bus lanes are actually open for buses rather than for idling commercial vehicles, it will make a success of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan to limit traffic in Manhattan below 96th St.

Confounding New Yorkers even more was the announcement from NYC Transit President Howard Roberts, who said on June 24 that the most crowded subway lines were maxed out. "There is no room at the inn," he said.

The Mayor must have used a two-by-four on Roberts, because the next day, he changed his story but added a new twist. Roberts told the Daily News that increased subway ridership from congestion pricing is expected to be minor - just 3,500 riders systemwide during the peak rush hour. That appears to be a paltry number, especially since the city gave the News a figure of a 12-percent drop in traffic - which would be roughly 96,000 vehicles a day, most of them cars. Even if every car paid the full $8.00 - many will not - that amounts to $192 million a year - not billions - for mass transit.

A Truckload of Doubt

And this doesn't take into account that the trucking company owners just might decide to do off-peak deliveries before 6 a.m. and after 6 p.m. and cost the city revenue, and the trucks that now pay more than $21 to enter the zone. They will not have to pay more, so where is the incentive for those drivers?

The Mayor's sympathies for straphangers stuck on a train during a power failure weren't reassuring last month after another Con Edison fiasco. He compared the inconvenience to setting your clock back, and then pronounced his Number 6 IRT train just perfectly fine (forgetting to say that the MTA added an extra run on that line when he became Mayor).

But the hidden story, written by David Seifman in the Post, was how the number of riders changes in an hour. Citing a 2002 Straphangers report, Seifman summed up the problem nicely: the numbers on the Lexington line from 86th Street go from 19,348 passengers between 7 and 8 a.m., when the Mayor rides to work, to 28,479 between 8 and 9 a.m.

Stagger Work-Hours

GOING MAYOR'S WAY?: After New York City Transit President Howard Roberts (left) initially brought momentum for Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing program to a screeching halt by saying that several key city subway lines couldn't handle the extra transit riders it would produce, he abruptly shifted gears by offering a lowball estimate on the number of additional passengers expected during rush hour.

Those numbers call out for a staggered hours and work-at-home experiment. The City of New York is the largest employer in town. Add state and Federal agencies and corporations with large numbers of workers, and you are talking about really having an impact on how we think about the rush hour and the Monday to Friday work-week. Bloomberg should call an all-day meeting at Gracie Mansion with union members and CEOs and Governors Spitzer and Corzine to figure this out. In this rapidly changing technological age, many jobs do not require the workers to be in their offices from 9 to 5. It's worth a try, for spreading out the traffic, the rush-hour subways, buses and even electricity use.

Only after some or all of the following happens should we be discussing congestion pricing:

- Clearing major Manhattan avenues and selected cross-town streets of parking all day - not just during rush hour. Yes, there will be howling from the short sighted who defend the right to park anywhere. The MTA estimates that slow-moving buses cost it $250 million a year. With faster running times, there will also be more passengers and cleaner air. Let the Real Estate Board run TV ads for that idea.

- Following the policy of the Port Authority at the George Washington Bridge and Lincoln tunnel, the MTA can institute bus-only lanes and HOV lanes with three people in the city's tunnels and bridges and the city can do the same for its free bridges. The problem here is that the MTA is the same agency that collects those hefty taxes on cars and trucks, so Governor Spitzer will have to order it done - tomorrow. It is not fair that a car with one driver shares the same lane as a bus with 55 people.

- Put an immediate hold on all MTA station rebuilding projects. Sure, they look awfully pretty, but the need for the money is greater on the tracks and in upgrading the signal system. Yes, trains traveled faster in 1904 than they do now. The Mayor called for faster and increased subway service in 2001.

- Extending the platforms at the Lexington Ave. express stops to add two cars - a 20-percent increase in passengers.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood-James STEERING A ZIG-ZAG COURSE: Even as Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan includes new ferry service, last month his Transportation Commissioner retired a Staten Island ferry boat that could carry 3,500 passengers per trip. Increasing night-time ferry service could reduce the number of cars coming into Manhattan from Staten Island.

- 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.

- Increase ferry service and express bus service from park-and-ride locations, like Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and Aqueduct racetrack. Such a simple solution is anathema to the Mayor, who takes the train to work but not mass transit to Staten Island - a two-hour trip. In 2005, when the City Council voted to provide half-hourly service on the Staten Island Ferry, he vetoed the bill. After the Council overrode the bill during an election year, Speaker Gifford Miller crafted a compromise that fell far short of the bill's intentions. If you want to go out on the town in Manhattan, good luck getting home. It is now an hour wait for a ferry after 7:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and an hour after 1 a.m. on weekdays. Again, a simple solution:

- Cancel every city permit - except for the disabled - issued to government workers "on official business," which everyone in town knows is a joke. The number varies, but Bloomberg's 2001 estimate of all "official" placards was 100,000, which is one-eighth of all the cars coming into Manhattan every day - all with free parking.

Bloomberg can issue bonuses to traffic agents who write tickets to people with the phony cards, and if that doesn't work, tow the cars. In 2001, Bloomberg wanted to equip all city buses with cameras to record traffic violators, and to give traffic agents digitized cameras instead of taking time to write the tickets.

In my neighborhood, St. George in Staten Island, small business owners who, unlike David Rockefeller and Goldman Sachs, don't have the pull to get a billion dollars in handouts from Bloomberg, constantly complain about illegal parking damaging their business. St. George is one of the neighborhoods touted by Bloomberg as ready for a "renaissance." There are more than 100 cardboard placards - some don't even look like "official permits'' - and PBA cards and court officer from New Jersey cards.

Cops Prime Offenders

Cops with their private cars park on hydrants all day and all night and under signs that read "Police Department vehicles only." They park all day at meters, costing the city enough revenue to give every cop in the precinct a raise that would exceed any arbitrator's awards.

Asked about the abysmal lack of enforcement, the Commanding Officer of the 120th Precinct, Richard Bruno, told members of the precinct community council this spring that it was "unrealistic" to expect cops to issue tickets to other cops, leaving unexplained what other laws cops are not required to obey. He issued orders that night for the cops to clear the streets, which they did. The next day, they were back to their law-breaking ways.

Cleaner air and a greener city? How about a pilot project in selected neighborhoods to do away with alternate-side-of-the-street parking, a colossal waste of gasoline and time whose main purpose now is as a revenue-producer for the city. Pick a few community boards and block associations and offer them a deal: if they can work out a plan with the Sanitation Department (no layoffs) to keep the streets clean, the city will take the signs down.

Who would reject such an offer? Peer pressure will work on the lollygaggers, the streets will be just as clean, and the pollution levels from those thousands of cars circling the block - think asthma again - will drop drastically.

As part of this deal, the city could also experiment with night deliveries.

Tree-Muggers

The Mayor's plan also for 2030 calls for the planting of one million trees between now and then, an utterly unattainable figure, given how the city now treats its tree-planting, unless Bloomberg and his Parks Commissioner are using Joel Klein's new math.

This doesn't count the trees ripped up for the South Ferry boondoggle in Battery Park ($500 million to extend the platform by five cars) or the trees torn down illegally by developers all over the city, who pay a small fine as the cost of doing business. One of those developers is Vito Fossella Sr., the father of GOP Congressman Vito Fossella, the Mayor's 2005 campaign manager. Reporters should be challenging the Mayor to produce that plan next week, with the times and places where these 600 trees a week will be planted.

What has been lost in the discussion of congestion pricing is the Mayor's indifference to improving mass transit, which he now claims is a major issue. But is it contingent on taxing drivers to come into Manhattan, or will it happen anyway?

The Mayor's record on this score leaves a lot to be desired. He cut the city's subsidy to the MTA in 2002 to $70 million a year, down from $130 million a year under Ed Koch. The current MTA CEO, Elliot Sander, said then that Bloomberg and Governor Pataki had "walked away" from funding the MTA capital plan. Although he complained in 2001 about the unfair split of MTA tolls between the suburbs and the city (50-50), Bloomberg hasn't done any shouting since then to change the formula.

There is a model for increased bus service, lower fares, and cost savings to the MTA, organized by a union, not transit officials or the Mayor or Governor. After Larry Hanley, then president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 726, led the fight in 1996 to reduce the express fare from $4 to $2, (the compromise was $3), ridership skyrocketed and the MTA was able to cut its cost-per-passenger-mile and cost-per-passenger dramatically.

Mike Raised Fare Higher

In the wake of this unique success story, Bloomberg increased the express bus fare from $3 to $4 to $5, and he hasn't really lobbied for those seamless express lanes that would cut travel time in half. The extended HOV/bus lane on the Staten Island Expressway has just been pushed back to 2012. Go figure.

The city's plan to reduce traffic congestion calls for new ferry service, yet in late June, Bloomberg's new DOT Commissioner "retired" a Staten Island Ferry boat that carries 3,500 passengers. At two trips an hour, that means one boat can carry 84,000 people from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Last year, DOT sold another 3,500-passenger ferry for scrap. Both boats were in good running condition despite their age - they were built in 1965. Replacement costs? $40-to-$50 million each.

Also, 90 percent of the MTA's express bus fleet sits idle all weekend - $300,000 buses not producing any revenue for the agency or doing anything to reduce traffic and clean the air. A private company - Bloomberg's model - would be bankrupt doing that. Express bus service now is drastically reduced after the rush hour, leading to overcrowded buses, many with 15 standees per trip. The MTA should add service immediately on those routes.

Bloomberg hasn't done enough to encourage bike riders - especially if they are riding in groups, when they might be arrested. Indeed, a top Weinshall appointee quit in disgust last year, claiming the agency was dragging its wheels on bicycle safety. The bike lanes idea has been around since at least 1965. Contrary to popular myth, it wasn't the "green" Mayor John Lindsay who first proposed them in congested Gotham - it was the Conservative Party's candidate for Mayor in 1965, William F. Buckley.

Accentuating the Elite

Charging people who can afford it or whose companies will reimburse them to drive into Manhattan exacerbates the class differences already in play in this city. It is nice that the Real Estate Board is running pro-congestion-pricing ads, but will they lobby for no parking on main thoroughfares?

Will the Broadway producers agree to a fee to bring those behemoth coaches into crowded Midtown or agree to a plan where they are parked elsewhere and people can actually walk a few blocks to the theatre? Will Bloomberg do anything to untangle the bus mess in downtown, where out-of-state buses from Pennsylvania and New Jersey share bus stops with MTA buses and the Downtown Alliance private bus company? Will anyone insist that these buses go to the Port Authority and pay the going rate and let the folks from Scranton ride the subway to work? The original idea for the Port Authority bus terminal in 1950 was to end the practice of private bus owners deciding where they would park.

One of the main boosters of the congestion plan is the NYC Partnership, a big-business outfit disguised as a civic group that was opposed to bus-only lanes in Manhattan, claiming they would slow the delivery of goods. Is there anyone who believes congestion pricing will really be a shared sacrifice when traffic enforcement hasn't been for six years of this administration, whose mantra to the city workers - not the corporate welfare clients or the Yankees and Mets - has been: "Sure, you can have any raise you want, so long as you pay for it out of your pocket."

Ways to Pay for It

The Mayor talks a good talk about raising revenue for the plan. It's there for the asking - hire more traffic agents to crack down on the violators of the plan, run the subways and buses faster and more frequently, and he will raise the money. He has four members on the MTA board, whose budget will soon be broken if the agency is allowed to spend money hand over fist the way it has been doing and plans to do. The debt service is strangling the budget for projects like the Fulton St. connector, which doesn't lay one mile of new track.

If the Mayor wants to raise revenue for mass transit, he can do something that no Mayor since Abe Beame has done: re-bid the Department of Education bus contracts, which have not been bid since 1977. Talk about clout.

The Port Authority wants to spend $2 billion - you can double that figure - to build a new station for New Jersey commuters. There is nothing wrong with the one we have now. Also, the MTA should seriously consider light rail for the 2nd Avenue Subway, first planned in 1920, as well as the 7 line extension, which the MTA is now claiming will have "projected" cost overruns. How do they know?

Expect Costs to Rise

Once you start talking about tunneling through rock, the extra work-orders pile up. If you think the 2nd Avenue line will really cost $20 billion and be completed on time, or the East Side access for the LIRR will "only" cost $6 billion, then Google 2 Broadway to see how the MTA loused up that deal. It took the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations 13 years, with monstrous cost overruns, to build a new ferry terminal - four stories above ground - at the tip of Manhattan. The new minor league baseball stadiums for the Mets and Yankees were built in two years - with tax money.

The same company that fouled up the ferry terminal has been hired to do projects all over town, including the 2nd Avenue Subway and the new PATH station. Hold on to your wallets.

Finally, instead of acting like passive supporters of the Mayor's plan, labor leaders should be re-inventing something from their past, when union pension funds helped build housing for the workers and when the city owned the power stations on the subways and ran its own asphalt plant on the upper East Side. The state and city pension funds are worth a few hundred billion dollars and they are already invested in real estate in New York and around the world.

Role for Unions

There is no reason why the union leaders can't figure out a way to lease the Brooklyn Navy Yard or abandoned ship-building factories on Staten Island's North Shore to build subway cars, buses, high-speed ferries, light rail cars, and floating truck and rail barges, and to mix concrete. (In 1949, the city contracted for three new ferryboats, which were built in 18 months in Staten Island). The unions can reach back to their glorious history and fund new housing and the upgrading of housing on Governor's Island, 182 acres in our harbor which the Mayor has yet to figure out how to use after Bill Clinton gave it to us for one dollar. (A permanent housing program for the homeless would be revolutionary if accompanied by doctors, nurses, Teachers, social workers, therapists and nutritionists).

Labor leaders should negotiate with Bloomberg for free transit - with no givebacks - for all city workers.

There is no reason why subways cars must be built in Japan or France so Al D'Amato can get his fat lobbying fees.

Doing it here would produce paying blue-collar jobs. The Ontario Teachers pension fund just bought out the lease at Howland Hook container port from the Port Authority. Somewhere along the line, unions have to decide if they are truly "green" or if they will build anything, like football stadiums that would have snarled traffic on the west side or NASCAR tracks, which would have had 20,000 cars piling into the city to watch demolition derby drivers waste gasoline all day and pollute the air.

There is plenty of work for all union members, private and public, if they join with the community groups to push for a greener New York with less traffic and better mass transit and more non-luxury housing and more schools - not publicly supported new baseball stadiums for billionaire owners of the Yankees and Mets for which there is no need.

A change in our political mindset wouldn't hurt, either.

Free Fare for All?

More than one hundred years ago, an unlikely candidate for Mayor ran on the ticket of the Municipal Ownership League; it was just what it sounded like: public ownership of utilities. He lost by 4,000 votes. This radical was named William Randolph Hearst. Fifty years later, another radical, Mike Quill, suggested a free subway fare, when the ride was only a nickel. His slogan was that "the rubber should pay the rail."

Bloomberg has hinted at a free fare a few times on the radio, but with little enthusiasm and no follow-through, as his mayoralty seems to be playing out the clock. Now is the time to discuss a mechanism for it, even if it is phased in over time. In the era of global warming threats, when even the very rich of New York City are worried, it is not a radical idea any longer, any more than "free" police, fire, sanitation, education and city hospitals.

Subways and buses should be financed by a general tax. It should be a whole lot easier - and cheaper - to get around the entire city, not just Manhattan, via mass transit.

Labor leaders and civic groups and politicians should let the rubber pay the rail and begin the process of improving mass transit and cleaning air and reducing congestion - this week.

Then we can talk about congestion pricing, but not until then.