(photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
New York City can achieve the goals of a long-vanquished congestion pricing plan through the management of its own parking property – all without making a single call to Albany.
New York is famously a city of contradictions and contrasts. Perhaps the most fundamental duality is its status among the world's most important cities and the fact that it yields much of its own governance to a hamlet up the Hudson River. Battling Albany is the oldest pastime in New York City politics. However, as Mayor Bill de Blasio continues to lobby for home rule and maneuver legislative alternatives, there already exists a latent opportunity to turn around one of the major defeats of the previous mayoral administration: congestion pricing.
A rare crushing defeat of the Bloomberg Administration, congestion pricing is a policy that attempts to lessen congestion in central urban areas by charging a fee to enter a demarcated zone. Following the lead of other major world cities, Mayor Michael Bloomberg sought to enact a congestion pricing plan in 2008, but Albany brought the mayor's plans to a halt when Speaker Sheldon Silver could not secure enough Democratic votes to bring the plan to the floor of the Assembly - where Democrats have long-held a wide majority - before the legislative session expired.
Other professionals and advocates have renewed efforts at securing more measured transportation policy from Albany. But in the meantime, New York City can pursue many of the same goals of congestion pricing through the administration of its own property: parking spaces.
At its core, congestion pricing operates with one simple mechanism: attaching a higher cost to the activity of driving into the city center. Parking is an inherent cost associated with driving – and not just a monetary one. While the City may not have comprehensive power to demarcate congestion zones or raise tolls on Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) bridges and tunnels, parking is still inevitable at the end of every trip, and can serve as an effective proxy for raising prices on the activity of driving.
There are three main ways that New York City can lower congestion, stop subsidizing personal car ownership, and raise revenue through the management of its own parking spaces. While I go into further detail on all these reasons, and the data behind them, in a white paper published by the Roosevelt Institute, here is how the City should do so in brief:
Raise parking meter rates, and ideally enact "smart" demand-responsive pricing systems
In New York City, parking simply remains far too cheap, way below market price for how valuable a resource it is. While the rate for one hour of parking in a private garage in Manhattan can easily hit $30, the most expensive street parking in the city is $3.50 an hour. This discrepancy encourages drivers to cruise around in search of dirt-cheap street parking, and constitutes a surprisingly large portion of overall congestion. Correcting the underpricing of metered street parking has proven effective at removing this particular source of congestion in other cities, in addition to raising revenues.
The most thorough manifestation of this concept is the dynamic pricing system put into effect in San Francisco, where a "smart" grid of electronic meters allows prices to be changed based on demand in nearly real-time. New York City already administers a less precise, lower tech version of this with its "Park SMART NYC" program, which raises prices during business hours based on demand in certain neighborhoods. The Department of Transportation should expand such pricing schemes until installing the kind of infrastructure in San Francisco is viable.
Residential parking permits
While metered parking is a great illustration of how parking is subject to supply and demand pressures, it ultimately constitutes a very small percentage of all parking spaces in New York City – by some estimates, a maximum of 2 percent. The vast majority of the parking stock is completely free parking spaces on residential side streets. Such an egregious underpricing of residential spaces represents a de facto subsidy for personal car ownership within the city. In addition to removing this subsidy, a residential parking permit would raise revenue from an untapped source of rentable city property, and offers residents increased certainty that a parking space will be available when they return home – a crucial factor that helps gain support from residents.
Dedicating public spaces for car-sharing vehicles
A final solution involves careful public-private partnerships to dedicate on-street parking spaces for the exclusive use of vehicles in a car-sharing service, such as ZipCar or Cars2Go. Car-sharing services provide many benefits that have already proven popular in New York. For those who cannot afford the high costs of purchasing, insuring, and fueling a car, paying a small subscription rate and hourly fee for when they actually use a car is a viable alternative. Car-sharing can also ease the decision to move to a carless lifestyle - which should be encouraged - by providing an alternative for bigger trips such as errands to big box stores or moving.
Traffic congestion remains a critical problem in New York City. In addition to the dangers of pedestrian casualties, environmental emissions, and low quality public space resulting from car-centric design, traffic congestion is estimated to have cost New York City $1.9 billion in logistical, inventory, and personnel costs, and up to $4.6 billion in unrealized business revenue.
A comprehensive congestion pricing plan should remain a goal for anyone interested in a better New York City. But while Albany continues to seethe and combat its own corruption, there is nothing holding back a self-described progressive mayoral administration and City Council from managing the city's own public space in a smarter way.
***
Brit Byrd is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a Columbia University student.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? E-mail editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
