The Road to Traffic Decongestion

With the procedural defeat of congestion pricing last week by New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, it appears that the livable-streets movement has suffered a political and practical setback. Regardless, 2008 is shaping up to be a watershed year for forward-looking transportation policy in New York. In a few years, the defeat of congestion pricing may prove more painful for the tiny minority of New Yorkers who commute to Manhattan by car than for the other 95 percent of us.

By now, most are familiar with the proposal to charge car drivers $8 upon entering Manhattan below 60th Street on weekdays at peak times. It would have been a bargain—the fee plus a half-gallon of gas is equal to the round-trip express bus fare, and about $350 million from the Federal Department of Transportation would have gone right into more subway service and new express bus routes in the outer boroughs. The deal offered a carrot and a stick to car commuters to switch to transit, and at least some would have switched modes or carpooled to save a few bucks. That was an achievable and worthy goal.

But last week, the plan was killed when Sheldon Silver refused to allow a vote on the authorization bill. He did so even though—or perhaps because—the bill would probably have passed if a vote had been allowed. The City Council had already approved it, and the State Senate as well as the Governor supported it. It’s definitely time to change the way things are done in Albany—but that’s another op-ed piece.

Five years from now, the motoring minority will wish that pricing had passed, because the things we can do now to achieve the desired shift in modes will require making transit faster, making driving slower, or making parking costs higher. This last one is important. By putting a realistic price on street parking, the city can encourage people to take transit to busy areas, and it will be possible to actually find a spot when it’s really needed. That means less circling, fewer emissions, and fewer crashes. The money could be used by local organizations for improvements to the streetscape—things like wider sidewalks, trees, and benches. There are local groups working around the city—from Kensington to the South Bronx and from Williamsburg to right here in the Upper West Side—to make streets better places for pedestrians and other living things. (Check out the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District online to read their remarkable plan.) With parking money, they can accomplish great things. To speed up buses, lanes on bridges and avenues will have to be dedicated to them, as has been done very successfully in the Lincoln Tunnel. To speed up trucks and get them off local streets, FDR Drive and the Belt Parkway could be opened to small trucks.

These are things that can be accomplished without Speaker Silver’s special permission, and they are things that will make it harder to drive into Manhattan. Without pricing, the city will simply need to take away space from cars and give it to people, or businesses, or buses, or parks, or just about anything else that makes New York a good place to live, learn, play, and work. We transit riders will still get what we want and need, but drivers won’t get their time savings. So I think the drivers will be the ones who come around to pricing, when they realize that it was truly a win-win: faster commutes and safer, healthier communities are benefits we can all appreciate.

But we still need a way to pay for the transit system. We’ll have to deal with fare hikes in a way that doesn’t hurt the poorest New Yorkers. How about a general fare of $3, with discounts inversely based on income level? What about cheaper off-peak travel, so that there is a good reason to not take the train during rush hour?

Much still needs to change. Too many New Yorkers think that traffic is like the air in a balloon: squeeze it here and it just moves elsewhere. This attitude inspires Not-In-My-Back-Yardist fights over the smallest changes in street design. But for planners who are in it for the long haul, that’s okay—every project is a new chance to explain why traffic calming on one street won’t hurt residents of another street, and why eliminating some parking spots won’t mean more cars circling—it will mean fewer total cars on the road. What’s really needed now is old-fashioned chutzpah, or, to politely paraphrase The Wire, the desire to give a damn when it’s not your turn to give a damn. Or we can just move downtown to Silver’s district, and vote for the Other Guy this September.

The author is a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.