Anyone who has seen the horror movie "Carrie" knows that you can't turn your back on the screen until the credits have finished running. It is only with that reservation that I am willing to even consider life after the death of the mayor's proposal for congestion pricing.
On the day after the obituaries were written in New York's papers, word filtered down from Albany that the three men were still in a room and so the proposal could reach its bloody hand up from its grave. Despite such reports, it is my fervent hope that this bad idea has been laid to final rest by both houses of the legislature. Indeed, while the editorial writers rant at Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, it is clear that neither the State Assembly nor the Senate had enough votes to pass the plan.
Nonetheless, the problems that this plan sought to address remain very real. Though in the end congestion pricing morphed into a plan that was just about the money, the initially stated goals were all laudable: reducing traffic congestion throughout our region, cleaning our air and raising the critical revenue to support regional transportation. That's how I define the goals, in any event.
As we roll up our sleeves and put some thought into these problems -- before we put the necessary energy into solutions -- we ought to acknowledge at least three critical truths about moving people in our area. The first is that it is a regional issue requiring a regional solution. We move people from both the city and surrounding counties to New York's central business district and to other places of business. The solutions -- and the burdens -- ought to be regional as well. And it would be nice if we didn't trip and fall over a state line and could include our neighbors from New Jersey in the process.
Second, until we reach the days of the Star Trek transporter, people will move about -- and need to move about -- by bus, by train and by car. The absence of any one of these three would cause the other two to collapse. No one of them alone can shoulder the burden of moving millions of people to diverse locations.
Third, someone has got to pay for it. The needed infrastructure for all buses, trains and cars is massive and in constant need of upgrading and repair. The corollary of that is that the method of paying for it has to be both fair and effective.
In the spirit of the musical "Oklahoma," now is the time for the cowmen and the farmers to be friends. Whether you commute by car, bus, train, ferry or bicycle, a sense of mutual goals has to emerge. And whether you were for or against congestion pricing, a sense of mutual cooperation and respect needs to develop, together with a measured sense of urgency.
There have been many alternative proposals that address the city's traffic and transportation problems that do not involve the objectionable practice of allocating access to the core of our city according to who can and who cannot afford it. I have offered mine, and it is a proposal with a decent level of support from my colleagues on the City Council. It might be a good starting point for discussion. It has nine key elements. Let me give you the highlights.
I am proposing a one third of one percent tax on business payrolls, to be paid not only by businesses in the City of New York, but by those in Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland counties as well. (If only we could include suburban New Jersey...) That means that a business with an annual payroll of half a million dollars would pay an additional sum of $1,667. This tax -- and yes, I know that tax is a dirty word -- would raise over a billion dollars in its first year, more than the projected revenues from congestion pricing and the $354 million in promised federal aid combined. The money would go to support transportation infrastructure of all kinds, including our subways, buses and commuter rail, and would have to include a guarantee that it be used fairly in the nine counties paying it.
Other broad based taxes could do this as well. For example, the Assembly Democrats have proposed a millionaire's tax. The key is that the tax be regional and broad-based, be effective and be borne fairly throughout the region.
There are creative ways to attack congestion, both long and short term, by looking at its root causes. In the short term, we can move some city agencies out of the central business district to outer borough neighborhoods along train lines. We can change the culture of the taxi cab industry -- cabs account for 39 percent of the vehicle miles traveled in the business district are traveled by cabs, with a third of all those miles being racked up while the taxis are empty and cruising for passengers. Let's put a taxi stand on almost every block of the central business district. Let's make them more attractive by blowing in some hot air in the winter and cool air in the summer- and then require that cabs only pick up passengers at taxi stands except in inclement weather and at night.
Let's finish the subway link to Staten Island that was begun in 1923, so that Staten Islanders can actually opt to take a train to work in lieu of a gasoline guzzling car or bus. And let's finally finish the mission for which the Port Authority was originally created: the construction of the Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel, which would take a million truck runs off the roads of our City each year. And yes, Maspeth, we can find a way to make that work for your neighborhood too.
Finally, we need to take the absolute world leadership in developing the infrastructure to support the use of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles. These zero-emission vehicles could be in our marketplace as soon as next year. But who would buy one if there is no place to re-fuel with hydrogen? White Plains has just signed on to an experimental program, but our city can truly lead the way.
For the past year, congestion pricing was the Holy Grail, but it turned to be a false prize. We still confront the goal of sustaining our transportation system, cleaning our air and reducing traffic congestion. There is much to do.
I am ready. Are you in, Mr. Mayor?
Lew Fidler, a Democrat, represents Brooklyn's 46th district on the New York City Council.Â
Last Monday, the New York State legislature declined to vote on congestion pricing and let the deadline for $354 million in federal transit funds run out. The grant may be gone, but the challenges of unhealthy air, poorly funded mass transit and traffic-choked streets remain very much with us. Thankfully, they are now front and center in the public debate about the future of New York City.
Yes, charging people to drive in Manhattan is controversial. However, as a solution to our immense traffic and transit problems, congestion pricing is also effective and fair. It is the only solution that will both cut traffic and expand transit. That's why I believe that our leaders will return to it on its merits.
In fact, congestion pricing has come a long way in a remarkably short time. A year ago, it was scarcely on the political radar at all. Today, there is a specific proposal, put forward by a commission organized in collaboration by state and city government and vetted in dozens of public hearings.
And there's extraordinary public support. Two out of three (67 percent) of New Yorkers, including a majority in every borough, support congestion pricing when the revenue is dedicated to transit improvement. The City Council, in a strong act of leadership, voted 30 to 20 in favor. Labor, community, environmental justice, public health and business leaders stepped forward in support. Small businesses spoke in favor of less traffic, less wasted fuel and being able to reach more customers faster.
The debate has moved this far because we all know that less traffic and better transit are keys to New York City's economic growth and air quality. In the next 25 years, New York will grow by about a million more people. To be ready to serve this population, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority must have a well-financed capital plan immediately.
Our children must be also able to grow up in this city without being exposed to high levels of traffic pollution. The effects on asthma attacks, brain development, lung function and heart disease are just too strong to ignore. A recent study shows that the exposure to high levels of vehicle pollution can have a similar impact on children's IQs as exposure to lead or their mother smoking during pregnancy. How can we not act?
The congestion pricing proposal itself improved over the last year. The commission modified the mayor's original proposal: The northern border moved to 60th Street; the number of cameras was slashed from 300 to around 25; operating costs were cut close to $100 million; detailed environmental review was spelled out. The State Senate bill added relief for low-income drivers and demanded that New Jersey pay its fair share. Finally, individual legislators raised ideas that could easily have become amendments, including, for example, a three-year pilot program; expanded environmental review during the pilot; and exemptions for cancer patients needing to drive to medical care. Unfortunately, these proposals were never incorporated into an amended bill, and state legislators never got a chance to vote on them.
It is not surprising that asking people to pay more to bring a car into the central business district at peak business hours will be controversial. Every city that has tried congestion pricing, including London, Singapore and Stockholm, faced similar controversy. In each city, as people begin to see the benefits of congestion pricing, public support grows. Better transit. Less traffic. Cleaner air. Faster commutes. It is no wonder that public support in New York City is so high and that the City Council voted "yes."
On April 7, we learned that Albany was not ready to vote yet. As a result, New York City missed out on a federal grant that would have brought expanded subway, bus and ferry service to every borough this year. We missed out on a 39 percent drop in gridlock in western Queens, a 22 percent drop in gridlock in northwest Brooklyn and a 20 percent drop in gridlock in Harlem. We missed out on $500 million in net annual revenues from the fees that would have delivered bus rapid transit, improved subway service and faster commutes.
We must continue to work together to find innovative solutions. There are important steps that can be taken now, including:
* Better traffic management. Slashing abuse of placards, the permits that allow many city employees to park for free. (Last week's crackdown in lower Manhattan is encouraging.) Better enforcement of traffic laws. Less double-parking. These simple steps can be taken with limited resources. However, they are not enough. Without congestion pricing, their benefits may not be long lasting, as freeing up more road space inevitably attracts more cars. We should take these steps but not stop there.
* Focus on transit that can be improved quickly. Bus-rapid-transit lines (especially for neighborhoods that lack subway access now). More ferries. Extra subway cars and buses. The lost federal grant would have paid for exactly these kinds of improvements. Now we will have to find the money elsewhere -- not easy, in a time of declining state and city revenues.
* Encourage clean vehicle technology. Diesel filters for the dirtiest trucks and buses, incentives to switch taxis and livery cars to hybrids, clean fuels for ferries -- these are all important. But with traffic volume on the rise, technology alone won't unclog our streets or speed commutes.
Many large-scale infrastructure solutions face uncertain financial futures. For example, Environmental Defense Fund has long supported the rail-freight tunnel and the full Second Avenue Subway, but there has never been enough federal, state or city money to get them built. In a time of declining state and federal revenues, where will the resources come from? Ideas for new income taxes, like the millionaires' tax, may well gain traction. But with state revenues declining, it may well be easier to dedicate a congestion charge to the MTA "lockbox" than to fight off competing demands on general tax revenue.
Congestion pricing is an idea that makes sense for New York, and we're tantalizingly close to a version that fits New York City's needs. New York City should have the chance to try congestion pricing.
Andrew H. Darrell is the New York regional director of Environmental Defense Fund and a former member of the New York Traffic Mitigation Commission. EDF works on economics-based solutions to environmental problems and has been active on congestion pricing both here and in other cities for many years.Â
"If they want to come here with their engineers and bulldozers, we'll be at the barricades with balaclavas," said Sean Sweeny, director of the SoHo Alliance. For Sweeney and his supporters, the Department of Transportation's plan to close Prince Street in between Lafayette Street and West Broadway to automobile traffic from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. for 14 consecutive summer Sundays constitutes an assault on their neighborhood.
Last month, when the department presented the plan to Manhattan Community Board 2's Traffic and Transportation Committee, some people let the agency know as much. "The whole room erupted in boos. It turned riotous," Sweeney said. "I've been on the Community Board for 18 years and it was one of the most cacophonous, riotous, calamitous meetings I've ever been part of. SoHo has been ruined in the last 10 years with commercialism. This would have been the nail in the coffin. The meeting was our Little Big Horn, our last stand. We're not becoming a mall."
But other SoHo residents, like Ian Dutton and the rest of Community Board 2's Traffic and Transportation Committee disagree. "If you think that closing Prince Street on a couple of Sundays will turn it into a mall, you haven't walked in SoHo in 10 years," said Dutton. "What you have now is a very uncomfortable pedestrian experience for everyone ( the people who live here and the tourists) so why not see what can be done to make it better. There is no point in cutting off our nose to spite our face."
And so the battle lines were drawn.
Despite the almost immediate acerbic reactions to the plan (the Streetsblog.org post that broke the story received 75 comments , 10 of which were, to put it mildly, vehemently opposed). The Department of Transportation did not propose a temporary closure on Prince Street simply to flex its muscles. The idea probably had root in London's highly successful temporary street closures, called "Very Important Pedestrian days," on Regent and Oxford streets, two of the West End's premiere shopping corridors. The work of world renowned urban planner Jan Gehl, who conducted pedestrian counts and street life surveys for the city along Prince Street in 2007 may have also encouraged the proposal, along with a 2006 Transportation Alternatives's study conducted by Bruce Schaller, now a deputy commissioner at the transportation department.
All of these efforts point to a way of creating districts where pedestrians greatly outnumber vehicles. In some locations, the reasoning goes, a street has more value as a place for pedestrians than solely as a means of automobile transportation. This kind of thinking no doubt guided the transportation department, along with a desire to create a more pedestrian friendly city, an explicit aim of both Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC2030 and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan
Of course, temporary street closures are nothing new. New York City has a long history of them, most far less contentious than the recent Prince Street hullabaloo. In 1970, Mayor John Lindsay decreed that portions of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street be closed to cars in honor of Earth Day. The plan was so popular that Fifth Avenue was made car-free four times that July. A Department of Commerce and Industry survey concluded that 77 percent of the visitors stopped to shop on car-free days. "Suddenly the avenue was full of baby carriages, bicyclists, street musicians, smiling couples, all reveling in the car-free quiet and safety of what had become wall to wall sidewalk," Time magazine reported later that summer.
For five years in the early 1990s then-Bronx Borough president Fernando Ferrer closed the Grand Concourse from 161st Street to 198th Street every Sunday from July to November. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani put an end to that, but in 2005 Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr. brought Car-Free Sundays back to the Grand Concourse where they remain a summer attraction.
Even small-scale temporary street closures, like the one on Sundays on the Lower East Side's Orchard Street, which has been happening since the mid-1960s, have proved popular over time and largely without a deleterious impact on area traffic. "Disappearing Traffic? The Story So Far," a paper by Sally Cairns and others, examined over 70 road closures and surveyed more than 200 transportation professionals on the subject. It found that "predictions of traffic problems are often unnecessarily alarmist, and that, given appropriate local circumstances, significant reductions in overall traffic levels can occur."
Still, when the idea of closing a street, even temporarily, is first proposed, many local businesses and residents object. "Communities tend to be resistant to any city-sponsored street closing. They claim that it's people in cars who are shoppers," said "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, president and CEO of Sam Schwartz PLLC and a former first deputy commissioner at the city Department of Transportation. "It's kind of like a Yogi Berra-ism, trying to convince people that 'nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."
Few would argue that Prince Street isn't already crowded. There are narrow sidewalks, scores of vendors, cars, bikes and subway entrances between Lafayette Street and West Broadway. According to the transportation department's "Prince Street Pedestrian Project" presentation, about 4,500 people per hour walk on Prince Street's sidewalks on Saturday and Sundays between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., while 200 cars per hour use the street during the same time period.
Those in favor of the plan see it as a sensible and proportionate allocation of street space, a precious commodity in downtown Manhattan. They emphasize that a trial closure one day a week will determine whether creating more room for people will make the street safer, the vending less intrusive and easier to regulate, and the neighborhood a more pleasant place to live, work and shop. They point to Schaller's study of Prince Street, which showed only 8 percent of people surveyed arrive there in a private car and 80 percent perceive the street as being overcrowded.
The Schaller Consulting study also found that "by a ratio of five-to-one, expanding pedestrian space would attract people to come to Prince Street more often, even if that meant taking away space to park. Results are almost identical for visitors and those who work or live in the area."
Many of the SoHo residents who oppose the Prince Street pilot program object for precisely that reason. They do not want more were people on their neighborhood streets. Many point to what Sweeney describes as the "garbage, traffic congestion and crowds of strolling tourists who think they own the street and stare at the residents in their windows like they are curiosities" brought annually by the Feast of San Gennaro, which runs for 11 days on neighboring Mulberry Street. "We don't like tourists," Sweeney said.
For its part, the transportation department has insisted that the temporary closure will not turn Prince Street into a permanent street fair. Representatives showed a slide at the Community Board meeting emphasizing "no stalls, no food kiosks, games or rides," and promised to address concerns about the street vendors by increasing enforcement. Many at the meeting, though, remained skeptical.
Ethan Kent, a vice president at the Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit group that works with cities all over the world to create engaging streets and public spaces that serve communities, said, "If I thought that temporary closures meant a street fair every Sunday, I wouldn't want it either, but that's just not the case. There are ways to make streets work for everyone, but you have to plan and manage. The best way to prevent a neighborhood from changing for the worse is planning for the best."
Kent, who has consulted on pedestrian projects from Hong Kong to Poughkeepsie, emphasized the importance of involving all the stakeholders as early as possible in any planning project. "Maybe if the DOT had gotten some businesses on board and partnered them with the supportive residents and then asked, 'what can make this street work better for you?' there would have been a different outcome. I'm sure all the naysayers weren't in favor of speeding cars and honking horns and exhaust fumes, but were afraid of a plan they had no part in," he said in response to the controversy in SoHo
"Planning" and "community involvement" have become buzzwords in the wake of all that has happened in SoHo. On both sides of the debate, people point to the need for community involvement in the planning of any temporary street closure. Shirley Secunda, a retired urban planner and chair of Community Board 2's Traffic and Transportation Committee, who supports the street closing plan said, of the administration "they came before us with a fully developed program ( before people had a chance to give input and even if it's a good plan ( that's a limitation right there. If they gave us more time we could have worked with them to make sure it was as good as it could be for everyone."
Sweeney, more colorfully concurred saying, "The process was so skewed and plutocratic and autocratic. The DOT tried to bulldoze SoHo."
And so despite their differences, the two camps of SoHo residents fighting over 14 summer Sundays on Prince Street agreed on the need for an open process. Community Board 2, at the behest of many area residents, eventually passed a resolution declining the transportation department's proposal that reflects as much. It reads: "CB2 also appreciates DOT's willingness to monitor and modify this test project based on community criteria and input and to sunset it if not affirmatively reviewed, but regrets the absence in this case of a true community-based process in which the neighborhood has been consulted from the start about its problems, concerns and improvement ideas."
For now the future of the Prince Street plan is murky. Now that the Communty Board has come out against it, the transportation department seems disinclined to go ahead with it in its current form. But the idea of street closings remains very much alive. Some people in SoHo would still like to see pedestrian imporvements in the area, and the department, without specifying any locations, confirmed that it is looking at similar proposals in different neighborhoods around the city.
Its statement about Prince Street implies that the department has learned a bit from what happened: "We have listened to the concerns voiced by SoHo residents and will find ways to address our shared concerns about traffic, street vendors, and congestion," said department spokesman Seth Solomonow. For their sake, and for the future of temporary street closures, that seems like a sensible course of action.
Graham Beck is the managing editor of StreetBeat, the biweekly newsletter of Transportation Alternatives and a writer. He lives in Brooklyn.Â