Sounds great! Why do I think it will never happen?

Not a fan of the huge increase in taxi fares. If you want to raise some revenue sell some more taxi medallions. Taxis are a pretty efficient way to get around the city if you look at # of passengers per vehicle mile traveled.

Also, is there a limit on how many times you can be charged the congestion fee? e.g. once per day for trucks.

This sounds great.

I’m not sure I follow why the subway usage drops during the rush hour. Is that due to the buses?

Also, tolling trucks higher at twice the rate of cars is detrimental to business in the city. Trucks, unlike cars, are mostly traveling to carry items not transportable by other means. I am including small trucks in this definition. And many of these are for small businesses that are more tied to the fluctuations of the economy. Remove their livelihood, & then we are stuck with big chains & other unsustainably-run companies for our commerce needs.

Would tolling only trucks with more than 2 axles still give the revenue needed for the Kheel plan work?

I would like to see, tho I don’t know if it is doable with EZ-Pass, variable rate tolling on passenger vehicles coming into the city. Let’s say a $20 toll for a car with 1 passenger, $16 for 2 passengers, $12 for 3, $8 for for & $4 for 5. Or something along those lines. Perhaps adding that in on the Port Authority bridge & tunnels will make up reducing the truck revenue & reduce the number of cars entering the city.

Ian, I’m not sure what you mean – isn’t the price of a taxi medallion paid to the TLC?

New taxi medallions generate revenue for the TLC, but old medallions (dating back to 1937) are guaranteed to be reissued without additional payments. This is why medallions are so expensive: They trade for roughly $250,000, which is to say the city could collect an extra $1419 per cab per month if medallions were not renewable.

I think incentives for off peak truck travel & delivery are great, but doesn’t that also incur an extra cost to businesses needing to hire hands to receive shipments at 2 am etc. Not every place is open late nights and such high truck fees are the right idea, but i fear not practical.

It’s been just a few days since the Ravitch report came out and I’m already sensing we’re bound for the exact same politic narrow-mindedness of the congestion pricing debate which claimed tolls were ‘regressive taxes.’ When will the squabbling stop so everyone, constituents and electeds alike, realizes we’ll all need to throw in a few more bucks or watch the transit system collapse?

I proudly ride my bike to work now, but don’t want my two wheels as the only option left standing after these political standoffs let the MTA crumble.

Is there no capturing of revenue from use of private cars within the cordon? What will stop drivers like me from taking advantage of the free open streets? This seems to be a gap that needs to be closed — or am I missing it?

Hi all — thanks for your interest in Kheel Plan 2. I have a few answers/comments:

Hillary: We would love to be able to charge for “intra-cordon auto travel” (let’s call it ICAT), but the technology for that isn’t quite available yet. The good news is that ICAT is a very small fraction of total VMT inside the cordon — I estimate it’s just 300,000 out of 4,800,000 miles, on an average weekday. (See the “Motor V’s” worksheet of the BTA 1.1 spreadsheet, which is linked to on http://www.nnyn.org, and check out Rows 52 & 55.)

Taxis, in contrast, are almost 1,300,000 miles. That’s one reason it’s vital to surcharge them — otherwise they would constitute an enormous loophole in cordon pricing. (The taxi surcharge also generates a huge amount of revenue, $690 million per year, mostly from Manhattan residents, thus ensuring that the Kheel Plan is reasonably geographically-equitable.

Lee and Ian — I hope the above answers your taxi questions. Would we limit truck charges to one per day? Most likely yes, though we might want to retain the option to charge more than once to discourage gaming and/or dysfunctional business models like Fresh Direct.

J. Mork — thanks for answering Miketivist’s questions.

I want to encourage S’bloggers to download the BTA spreadsheet and twirl the knobs — try your own subway fares and cordon prices, or just have a look around. It’s quite a trip. Click here.

Agreed, it would make a lot more sense to increase medallion fees and meter rates instead.

You can eliminate taxi drivers’ incentive to cheat (at least through off-meter customers) by changing the tax structure from a per-customer fee to a per-taxi fee. In the aggregate there should not be a difference, but on a per-customer basis, it creates an incentive to serve rather than an incentive to cheat. In particular, what I am suggesting is a tax on taxi medallions and a coresponding increase in permitted taxi fares.

Right now owning a taxi medallion is valuable because it grants the owner a share in the NY taxi oligopoly. Without the medallion system, there would be more cabs in the city than there are now; the extra profits from those cabs that are not operating are instead passed to medallion owners. This has been going on since the 30s, though the value of the oligopoly interest varies depending on taxi fares. It goes without saying that the right to operate a cab is worth more as cabs become more profitable.

This status quo is indefensible, because the state creates this oligopoly system but then grants the benefits to private parties (medallion owners) rather than to the public. The right way to mend this would be to phase out existing medallions and then auction new annual permits on an annual basis. The phase-out can be accomplished through an ever-increasing property tax on medallion ownership, say starting at $25,000 and increasing by 30% per year until there are no remaining medallions. After 9 years, the tax would be equal to to the current medallion value of $250,000 per year. Of course, any medallion with unpaid tax reverts to the city.

Now, under this new system, if you want to collect more money from taxis, just increase the statutory fare. Within a year, taxi drivers will pay most of their increased profits to the city through renewal fees. If they don’t, then someone else will outbid them at permit renewal time.

I’m not suggesting that you’d have to integrate the above-named system in its entirety, but you can take a piece of it: Instead of asking taxi drivers to collect taxes on the government’s behalf, just increase the statutory fare and then charge drivers a flat annual fee. The annual fee can match the estimated new income from the higher fare.

If you’d like to discuss this more privately, feel free to get in touch. I think Messrs. Naparstek and White have my information, among others.

Miketivist — I fully share your relative sympathy toward truck traffic vs. auto traffic. I trust it’s clear that trucks pay a variable toll in Kheel Plan II, at twice the auto rate for that time period. We would certainly support weight- or size-differentiated truck tolls; we didn’t include that in the spreadsheet due to complexity but we should mention it. That said, freight movement is full of potential economies and there would be a wide spectrum of benefits from internalizing the costs of that movement. One little example: bottled water, an ecological as well as social absurdity in NYC, would rise in price, nudging users and the larger culture back toward tap water.