New York Experiments with a ‘Holy Grail’ to End Gridlock

Via Politico

Sam Schwartz knew that New York’s crippling traffic jams were bad for the city long before he coined the term that would become synonymous with urban automotive nightmare. As a young New York City traffic engineer in the 1970s, Schwartz worked on never-implemented plans to close midtown Manhattan to cars at midday and charge tolls on 14 bridges that connect Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Schwartz’s “grid-lock prevention program” during New York’s 1980 transit strike, which earned him the nickname “Gridlock Sam,” kept traffic flowing by banning driver-only cars during rush hour in most of Manhattan.

For 48 years, Schwartz has pursued his holy-grail solution to gridlock: congestion pricing. He wanted to charge drivers a fee to drive in the busiest parts of Manhattan. “I knew it was inevitable,” says Schwartz, now 71, “but would it be inevitable in my lifetime?”

Now it’s coming. In 2021, New York will be the first American city to charge drivers a toll to drive downtown. Congestion pricing has been deployed successfully in recent years in cities such as London and Stockholm, but in the United States, charging car owners to pay extra to get to where the action is has always seemed like a reform too far.

Last month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators agreed on a plan to make all of Manhattan south of Central Park—the business-dense end of the island—a congestion-pricing zone. The tolls, estimated at $12 to $14 per car and $25 per truck weekdays (lower on nights and weekends) and levied using EZPass devices and license-plate cameras, will raise $1 billion a year to improve New York City’s transit system.

“You have traffic being the worst it’s ever been in the central business district,” says Robert Mujica, budget director for Cuomo. “The other cities that have done this internationally have done it at a point when the traffic has reached a tipping point. And that’s where we are here.”

Ironically, it was a New Yorker who invented congestion pricing—the late Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate William Vickrey. (Schwartz says Vickrey used to pester him about the idea at community meetings.) But until now, it’s been most widespread overseas. It has reduced central-city traffic in Singapore by 44 percent and in Stockholm by 10 to 15 percent, and it’s cut traffic delays in central London by a quarter.

In the U.S., however, it is highways, not downtowns, where Vickrey’s concepts have been deployed. In several states, such as Virginia, dynamic tolling charges extra to use express lanes during rush hour or when traffic gets heavy. In Manhattan, despite the interest of civic leaders, congestion pricing proposals failed again and again, the most recent in 2008 during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure. Drivers in New York’s outer boroughs protested having to pay to get around the city, and getting hard things done hasn’t always been easy, given the rocky relationship between city pols and their counterparts in the capital upstate.

Meanwhile, congestion grew. About 800,000 vehicles enter Manhattan every day. Average traffic speeds in midtown Manhattan dropped from 6.5 mph in 2012 to 4.7 mph in 2017, says Schwartz. Subway delays tripled from 2012 to 2017. “You had a crisis above and below ground,” Schwartz says. A rider-led campaign deluged the governor’s Twitter feed with subway horror stories bearing the hashtag #CuomosMTA. “Every delay was being reported,” says Danny Pearlstein, policy director for Riders Alliance. “The governor could not escape.”

Once Cuomo endorsed congestion pricing in 2017, Riders Alliance joined a “fix the subway” coalition to push it through the Legislature. “Bus and subway riders are paying to get to work in Manhattan, and drivers are getting in for free,” says Pearlstein. Congestion pricing, he says, “is correcting a failure in the market for a very scarce resource, which is New York City streets.”

A state panel will set tolls and decide how to treat taxicabs and ride-share vehicles, who had congestion-pricing fees of $2.50 and $2.75 levied on their trips in southern Manhattan earlier this year. Truckers, motorcyclists, bus companies and even New Jersey residents want relief, too, which Schwartz warns could drive up tolls for everyone else. The state has already decided to exempt residents of the central business district who make less than $60,000 a year.

Economist Charles Komanoff estimates that the governor’s NYC congestion pricing plan will save drivers and bus passengers 140,000 hours a day on average, or 50 million hours a year. Also, once the congestion pricing revenues are invested in better transit, he predicts faster and more reliable transit trips will eventually save another 367,000 hours a day, or 134 million hours a year.

Despite a track record of success elsewhere, congestion pricing will have to win over a skeptical public. New York City voters opposed it, 54 to 41 percent, in an April poll, with 52 percent saying it won’t reduce traffic. Support for congestion pricing could become a political vulnerability for leaders—probably one reason the state panel’s decisions on tolls aren’t due until after the November 2020 election. In European cities, congestion pricing’s popularity grew once it was implemented, a shift Cuomo and other New York pols are banking on.

“Our challenge is going to be to make sure people see that the revenues that come from this are going to improve the mass transit system,” Mujica says. “People don’t want to pay a toll when they don’t see what the benefit is going to be.”

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