Congestion Fee

As New Yorkers and the MTA adjust to life in the post-rescue plan era of transit planning, it is worth revisiting and old — and contentious — proposal to fund transit. Lost in the debate over Richard Ravitch’s proposal to toll the East River bridges was another suggestion that Ravitch intentionally did not include in his report: a congestion fee.

Now, we know how this works. The city would charge drivers of all vehicles a certain amount each day to enter Manhattan’s central business district. Generally, this would include all of the island from 60th St. south. The system would be set up by a $350 million grant from the feds — a grant which is still available — and the projected $400-$500 million in revenue would head into the MTA’s coffers for the capital plan.

While many New Yorkers were willing to support this plan, politicians balked at the idea and turned it into a pseudo-populist cause. How would the lower class drivers afford to pay the fee? How would the businessman in for himself afford to pay it?

Never mind that lower class — and middle class and many upper class — residents of New York City don’t even own cars. Never mind that few business owners spend their days driving back and forth from the outer boroughs to Manhattan’s CBD. Never mind that a congestion fee would improve traffic, speed up trips into Manhattan and virtually pay for itself for those few that do. This was not an issue proponents would win with common sense.

But as that TransAlt graphic up there shows, a congestion fee makes far too much sense. It has an environmental and social component; it has an economic component; and it contributes to mass transit expansion. The benefits would far outweigh the costs.

With news that the money from the feds is still out there, a few political commentators and urban planning enthusiasts have been looking at ways to reframe the argument. At FiveThirtyEight, Robert Frank suggested reframing the debate and offer up a cookie in the form of a voucher:

Most people who commute regularly by car into Manhattan are not poor, and most low-income workers in Manhattan already use public transportation for their daily commute. The problem cases are low-income workers who must occasionally drive into the city on weekdays. For such people, congestion fees would indeed constitute a new burden.

But this burden could easily be eliminated by giving every low-income worker in Manhattan an annual allotment of transferable congestion vouchers. On the rare occasions when these workers needed to drive into the city, they could do so free of charge. And they could earn some extra money by selling any vouchers they didn’t need on Craigslist.

Ryan Avent thinks this approach is worth a shot. As Avent notes, “the crucial opposing push came from self-interested drivers, mostly middle and upper income individuals who wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the vouchers.” But there’s something else at play: Albany blocked congestion pricing. As Avent’s readers noted, the City Council, Mayor, MTA and NYC DOT all approved the plan before Sheldon Silver killed it in committee.

So maybe now, it’s time to try again. In the aftermath of the Senate package, it’s clear that the MTA’s capital plan rests on shaky ground. The money that is there will last just two years, and the MTA needs a true source of long-term revenue. Congestion pricing would do just that, and people in the city are far more willing to support it than they are East River bridges.

Soon, in the not-too-distant future, someone in Albany or New York City will have to step up to the plate for the MTA. He or she will have to assemble a group of politicians and planners willing to go out on a limb for transit in one of the most transit-dependent urban centers around the world. Why not now? Why not congestion pricing?

Yup. Chris’ image is still relevant despite what Sheldon Silver will have you believe.

Turn the dial on your Wayback Machine to April. Back then, the skies were blue, the grass was green and Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver killed congestion pricing. At the time, Sheldon Silver’s role in the demise of Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious plan was not up for debate.

Well, someone should remind Mr. Silver of this inconvenient truth. Yesterday, in an interview with the Downtown Express, Silver blamed the MTA for the demise of congestion pricing. This is a stunning revision of recent history.

Streetsblog first reported this audacious piece of news yesterday, and Brad Aaron quoted the vital parts:

This week, he repeated his reason for not bringing it to the floor — the Assembly opposition was overwhelming. He said there were about 15 supporters, and if he had applied pressure, he thinks he could have gotten the number up to 20 — far short of the 76 votes needed.

He said outer borough Assemblymembers did not support the plan because “the M.T.A. lost its credibility.” After so many broken promises, no one believed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would direct the congestion pricing revenue to mass transit expansion, Silver said.

This interview by Silver is flat-out absurd. The Downtown Express is paying attention to him right now because, for the first time in over two decades, the incumbent Assemblyman is facing a primary challenger. And that challenger came about largely because Silver allowed congestion pricing to fail. Silver now claims that, when Richard Ravitch issues his report in a few months, “you’ll see this” — the MTA’s financial woes and the fate of congestion pricing — “start to get straightened out.”

Of course, that doesn’t explain why Silver forgot that he let hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding slip through New York’s fingers or how he forgot that his maneuverings insured that congestion pricing wouldn’t even hit the Assembly floor in the first place. That he is now blaming the MTA just shows that Silver is still trying to come up with something, anything, that the public would believe. He can’t quite come out and say that he didn’t believe in the plan. So why not blame an organization many believe to be inept and financially irresponsible? It certainly sounds better that way, reality be damned.

If there were any justice in New York State politics, Silver would lose this primary, and congestion pricing would become a reality. But as this is New York State and we’re talking about New York politics, Silver will probably win, and congestion pricing — and a fully-funded MTA — will remain a pipe dream. Once again, until our politicians wake up to the reality of funding the MTA — we can’t get something for nothing — we’ll be stuck with pandering politicians who are more interested in protecting their incumbency than they are in passing responsible social, environmental and economic policies. It’s just business as usual for Sheldon Silver and New York State.

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.