Charles Komanoff

During the Bloomberg era, there was no bigger backer of congestion pricing than Kathryn Wylde, director of the Partnership for New York City, a downtown business group. Wylde, a confidante of Mayor Bloomberg, spearheaded the Partnership’s 2006 Growth or Gridlock report that provided both quantitative firepower and political cover for the mayor’s congestion pricing proposal the following year. The executive summary, a powerful account of traffic congestion’s drain on city and regional job creation and business competitiveness, culminated with this admonition: “Traffic is worse every day. The time to act is now.”

Hospital records from 2014 showed that distracted walking accounted for 78% of pedestrian injuries throughout the United States.

Transit officials recently reported that 1,763,000,000 subway trips were taken last year, the most since 1948. But the rise in ridership was meager, with only 12 million more trips in 2015 than in 2014. The percentage growth rate was seven-tenths of one percent. Over the same year, employment in New York City rose three times as fast.

Evidence keeps mounting that congestion pricing can catalyze major reductions in traffic crashes. A year ago I reported on research that vehicle crashes in central London fell as much as 40 percent since the 2003 startup of London’s congestion charge. The same researchers are now expressing the safety dividend in terms of falling per-mile crash rates, and the figures are even more impressive.

Mayor de Blasio’s newest rationale for his deal to shutter the horse-carriage stables in the West 50s is that it will alleviate traffic congestion in Midtown. At an MLK Day event yesterday in Brooklyn, the mayor told reporters:

What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland is what must be said about City Hall’s new traffic study: There’s no there there.

Long-term climate prospects brightened somewhat in 2015. Pope Francis put climate care on the moral and political agenda. President Obama rejected the Keystone XL dirty-oil pipeline. Denialist heads of state were routed in Canada and Australia, and their brethren in the U.S. faced growing ridicule. To cap it off, nearly 200 nations signed the UN Paris accord, committing to cutting emissions. Meanwhile, U.S. coal use took another double-digit plunge. And U.S. electricity generation from zero-carbon photovoltaic solar cells continued to soar and has now grown 20-fold in just five years.

Two of the region's papers laid out their Albany 2016 agendas in New Year’s weekend editorials. Both led with ethics reform, but the similarities ended there. One paper boldly called on the legislature to "adopt some version of the innovative Move NY tolling-and-congestion pricing plan." The other was silent on transit and traffic, even as it spurred Gov. Andrew Cuomo to "lead on climate change.”

"Our streetwise Dionysian godhead," is how one veteran of the 1987 Midtown bike ban protests described Stephen Athineos, who died yesterday of a heart attack in Inwood, where he lived.