As Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan rose and fell in inglorious fashion, another congestion pricing plan has lingered on the horizon, not quite dying but not quite getting the attention it deserves.
That plan is, of course, Ted Kheel’s plan to make the subways free while implementing a high congestion fee and delivering all the revenue to the MTA. When I first wrote about Kheel’s plan in January, it generated 20 comments worth of discussion, and the Kheel Plan still stands as something of a Holy Grail for congestion pricing advocates.
On the one hand, this plan solves a lot of the problems inherent in Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC2030 proposal. All of the money from the plan would go toward improving mass transit. If you accept the baseline assumptions inherent in the plan, the proposed fees — $16 for cars and $32 for trucks at all hours — would generate a significant surplus for capital expansion and infrastructure maintenance, and the subways and buses could be free. The extra money generated by the high fees would also allow the NYPD and the MTA to increase police presence to counter fears of unsafe subways if the barrier to entrance — in this case, the fare — is dropped.
When congestion pricing died at the hands of Sheldon Silver and the New York State Assembly Democrats, Ted Kheel vowed to make his plan an issue in the upcoming mayoral race in New York City. Kheel has commissioned Charles Komanoff, the research director and lead writer of the original plan, to refine the original Kheel plan. Yesterday on Streetsblog, he outlined the goals of the second version of the computer model for the Kheel Plan. In his words:
- Time-variable congestion fees: instead of being locked into a straight $16 fee 24-7, we’ll assess higher peak-periods fees along with offsetting, lower fees when traffic is light.
- Time-variable subway fares: we’ll test retaining the fare during the a.m. peak as a possible transition strategy to ease subway crowding and improve system efficiencies (buses will be free 24-7, regardless).
- Closer integration of parking pricing with road pricing.
- Possible differential tolls into the Central Business District by “portal” (New Jersey vs. Long Island vs. Bronx/Westchester).
- Intra-Manhattan congestion charging: according to some GPS developers, it may soon be possible to charge per-mile or per-minute for driving within the CBD; this would open the door to even more revenue and less traffic and further dispel the rap on congestion pricing as a giveaway to Manhattan.
I, for one, am intrigued by these tantalizing glimpses into the future of the Kheel Plan, and I’m glad to see Kheel, 94, pushing to make this plan a central issue during the next election cycle. I also think this plan is the key to the future of congestion pricing in the city. As Komanoff wrote, “In retrospect, it seems clear that Bloomberg’s plan appeared to too many people to be ‘all stick.’ There wasn’t enough direct and concrete payoff, for anybody, to attract wide public support. The Kheel Plan remedies this defect with the very considerable, tangible, obvious ‘carrot’ of free transit.”
This is a plan that clearly benefits every subway and bus rider in the city. With these additions, the plan can be refined further with adjustments in how and when to charge what prices for driving and what fares for mass transit. While drivers and die-hard civil libertarians will not be too keen on using GPS devices to charge by the mile within Manhattan, this part of the proposed Kheel Plan 2 would ensure that the groundbreaking plan would not discriminate against the outer boroughs.
Later today, Komanoff will host a brown bag lunch at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. He’ll discuss the current model and elaborate on his goals for the future plan.
In the end, this plan — and whatever comes out of Kheel v. 2 in the fall — holds up to scrutiny pretty well. Economists and city planners may challenge the traffic assumptions of models, but the biggest challenge Kheel and his supporters face is in the political arena. If they can turn the Kheel Plan into a populist cause and really drive home the point of free and good public transit in exchange for the congestion pricing, a candidate supporting this plan could garner enough support to win. Otherwise, it will forever remain just another good idea that never saw the light of day.
9 comments
If congestion pricing is a complete success and has its desired effect — deterring people from driving — it will end up providing zero dollars for transit. Then how does Mr. Kheel propose to pay for his free subway system?
There will never be no drivers in the city. In fact, the vast majority of drivers will continue to drive, but with congestion pricing, those who chose to drive will be paying for it. I don’t think any congestion pricing advocate expect there to be no drivers with a fee; that’s just not the way it works.
I wasn’t being completely serious 😉
I used to support congestion pricing, but then I read the College of Staten Island’s 2004 report on Staten Island transit. Right now, we have congestion pricing in Staten Island- it costs money to enter it by car. The agencies that profit from the tolls take this money and use it to subsidize their other projects. They do not use it to fund public transit in and out of, or within, Staten Island. The original idea, of course, was to “tax” out-of-towners who drive through from the mainland to Long Island, but in reality it is the locals who suffer the most. If congestion pricing were to be implemented in Manhattan, the same thing would happen.
Also, there is a number of other problems with congestion pricing:
1) Putting the cart before the horse. It may cost $16 to enter Manhattan tomorrow, but real transit improvements are not going to appear for decades.
2) NYC may be the Capital of the World, but it’s not the center of the world. People who live in the five boroughs may sometimes need to leave the city, and people need to come visit. I live in Staten Island but work in Central Jersey, and I have zero public transit options. Our current Manhattan-centric system does not work very well, and continuing to focus on Manhattan is detrimental to those of us who live in the outer boroughs. Plus, if you don’t want people to drive to work, let them work close to where they live. Establish office parks in each of the five boroughs. Manhattan is not the be-all end-all.
3) Adding tolls on the East River bridges will simply remove a historic injustice, wherein all ways out of Long Island are tolled, except for a few leading into Manhattan. Congestion pricing will, indeed, balance this out, but this solution leaves people with no way of getting to the continent without shelling out some big bucks. Again, the problem is a larger one- lack of mass transit connections between the disparate systems in the metropolitan area and a lack of a true bypass highway that goes around the city.
I can probably go on, but my main point is that you can’t trust the MTA to solve our problems simply by throwing money at it, especially if it fails to work together with the other regional transportation agencies.
boris raises some really good points!
as a native brooklynite i agree that nyc transit is manhattan centric. I think the primary problem with that is development possibilities. Seriously. The rest of the country is full of very low density commercial/residential land, while manhattan developers are tearing down 20 story buildings to make 40 story buildings! I think development would go much smoother if someone decided to move the manhattan density into one of the boroughs (or even NJ) where there is relatively more space. In order to do so though, we need increased transportation. Currently, all but 1 subway line feeds into manhattan at some point, and that’s where the connections are best. Such transit density needs to occur in the other boroughs. In particular, the G train,and 7 Trains should be expanded. I also think light rail needs to be an option. Light rail lines running perpendicular to the current BK lines would add huge transit density.
Staten Island especially is a site for great growth. The Staten Island Light rail needs to be built today, all branches, including the one that connects to NJ!
Still, although Boris makes some good points, I think congestion pricing failed because our state congress people are cheap, feeble minded imbeciles who probably don’t want to have to pay the fee themselves, and cannot imagine their way to a better NYC.
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I do not completely support the Kheel Plan-sure, there will not be absolutely no one driving into/out of Manhattan, like Benjamin Kabak said, but driving the price up severely would likely cause a large drop in revenue. And making mass transit free? That would deprive the MTA of even more money!
If you read through the entire Kheel Plan, making mass transit free and institute a large contestion fee in which all the revenue goes to the MTA would actually result in more money for the MTA and not less.
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