Congestion Pricing

Saturday will mark two months of non-stop acclaim for Gridlock Sam’s traffic-pricing plan. The accolades kicked off on March 5 with a gushing op-ed, "Meet Sam Schwartz," by New York Times emeritus editor Bill Keller, and they haven’t let up. The Wall Street Journal, Transportation Nation, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, Channel 13, and Crain’s New York (a profile plus an editorial) have extolled Sam’s plan to overhaul New York’s tolling network and generate $15 billion over the next decade to improve roads, bridges, subways and buses across the city. By now, any New Yorker who professes ignorance of the plan has either been hiding under the proverbial rock or is flummoxed by its political implications.

Top transportation officials from three global cities -- London, Singapore and Stockholm -- shared their experiences in expanding the use of transit at a panel at the Regional Plan Association's annual conference last Friday. Eyeing those cities, it's easy for New Yorkers to get jealous.

Sam Schwartz's proposal to collect a half-a-buck per bicycle entry on bridges to the Manhattan Central Business District is putting New York cyclists in a bind. Cyclists, like drivers, don't relish paying for something they've been getting for free, particularly when they feel they're being singled out. Yet Schwartz's bike-toll idea is merely one part, and a minor one at that, of an audacious scheme to restructure bridge and road tolls across the city and revolutionize travel by car, bike, train and bus. If a bike toll can help sell the grand plan — and Schwartz insists it can — it might be a price worth paying.

New York City is coming up on the four year anniversary of a moment that will live in infamy for transit riders and sustainable transportation advocates: the demise of congestion pricing, which was put down in the state Assembly without a vote on April 7, 2008. The city lost a great opportunity that day to fund its transit system while relieving the city's most congestion-choked streets from suffocating traffic.

NYU students got a sweeping overview of NYC transpo and traffic issues from two of the city's top thinkers this afternoon, as DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt and independent analyst/congestion pricing advocate Charles Komanoff took turns on the mic at a forum moderated by NYU Law School professor Roderick Hills. I got so caught up in the moment that I completely forgot to snap a photo of Orcutt and Komanoff sharing the stage.

The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN plot!

Transportation analyst and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff is out with a piece in Reuters today that examines the traffic impacts of adding 2,000 new yellow taxis to Manhattan streets, and it's not pretty.

In 1951, Milton Friedman coauthored a paper on road pricing. It would be a mere footnote in both Friedman's career and in the intellectual history of road pricing, if not for one sci-fi flourish: The authors propose painting radioactive material alongside expressways, so that road operators can charge drivers using car-mounted geiger counters. Obviously, this suggestion was never heeded, but it says something about the economics profession’s hunger for pricing roads that a future Nobel laureate would set his imagination to Bradbury mode to advance the cause. Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, later credited Friedman with inspiring London’s pathbreaking congestion charge.