Transportation

Getting the Most from Congestion Pricing

May 07, 2007 | by Carolyn Konheim

Those who have labored a lifetime on the city's environmental fronts were blown away on Earth Day to hear our words articulated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg with more mastery and conviction than any of us have mustered. Brilliantly couching congestion pricing in the context of the city's survival, the mayor made it a moral imperative. To convince motorists there is a trade-off, the mayor shrewdly seeks to get tangible transit improvements in place before charging motorists for entering Manhattan.

But the Mayor and Governor Eliot Spitzer must act quickly if they are not to be hamstrung in their commitments to expand transit use. They must reverse New York City Transit's plan to junk 607 subway cars as new ones arrive this year and next. NYC Transit's reason for throwing away usable cars, which could also be rebuilt for one-third the cost of new ones, is that there is no yard space for overnight storage. Accepting that limit will leave NYC Transit with no spare cars, its smallest fleet ever, and unable to deliver the increase of subway service central to the mayor's plan.

The mayor cites bus rapid transit as a quick, high-visibility way to boost ridership, but even this will take too long if it relies on dedicated buslanes. What can be installed quickly is the high-tech component ofbus
Rapid transit -- a GPS tracking and radio communication system. This would eliminate much of the bus bunching that infuriates riders, and the monitors at each bus stop, posting wait times for each route, should help make waiting for a bus more tolerable, even seducing some drivers out of their cars.

Congestion pricing could be made simpler as well. A lot more funds would be available for transit users if the congestion fees were simply collected on the bridge spans and along 60th Street, rather than at dozens -- even hundreds -- of charging points south of 86th Street. Equalizing the charges on all crossings would provide a strong signal to motorists that it doesn't pay to drive out their way to avoid tolls. While the mayor's proposed adjustments in congestion charges levied in Manhattan may remove any advantage of untolled bridges, the complexity muddies the message.

Instead of capitalizing on Manhattan having just four untolled entries, the proposed multiple checkpoints, exceeding London's charging cordon, will be a lot more costly and may raise new objections to tracking motorists' movements.

Even the staunchest supporters of congestion charges in the boroughs see neighborhood parking permits as an essential element of any plan to reduce traffic. The permits would not guarantee a parking place, but would
Charge outsiders a hefty price for precious curb space. Fees and fines could be reinvested in streetscape improvements and effective traffic calming. Such measures would reinforce the quality-of-life benefits of tolls.

The old pre-E-ZPass image of bridge tolls of long spillback of traffic from toll plazas is dead. There is a growing concession in the boroughs that a seamless charging technology can unclog approach roads to free bridges from the lemming-like traffic that is drowning neighborhoods and delaying drivers. Armed with the mayor's powerful ability to change the political
equation, why not institute congestion fees in the fastest, most productive way?

Carolyn Konheim is chair of Community Consulting Services.

Future of Pedicabs Remains Uncertain

April 18, 2007 | by Bruce Schaller

Are bicycle-powered pedicabs just a diversion for tourists or are they a legitimate form of mass transit? Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto of a bill to regulate the city's pedicabs has kept alive debate about the role of the fledging bicycle taxi industry in the city.

A LEGISLATIVE COMPROMISE

The New York City Council recently passed a bill that represented a compromise between pedicab owners and powerful opponents of the industry, primarily taxi, hotel and restaurant owners.

The bill would establish a cap of 325 pedicabs in the city and require the cabs have $2 million in liability insurance, that drivers be licensed and that vehicles undergo inspection. The legislation would also ban the use of electric motors to help with pedaling and authorize the police department to restrict pedicabs from Midtown during the holiday season and from any Midtown street for up to 14 days at other times.

Pedicab owners supported insurance and other safety regulations to maintain standards and prevent pedicab owners who are not paying insurance from charging lower rates to the detriment of those owners who are insured. The owners, however, opposed the cap on the number of pedicabs, as well as the bans on operation during the holiday season and the use of electric assists.

THE MAYOR'S SURPISE VETO

Ironically, it was not pedicab owners but their drivers who prompted the mayor to veto the bill.

Drivers testified at what was expected to be a routine bill-signing ceremony that they feared losing their jobs â€“ seemingly with good reason since the current number of pedicabs, estimated at up to 500, probably exceeds the new cap. After hearing from drivers, Bloomberg surprised everyone by declining to sign the bill and on March 31 announced his veto. During his weekly radio show, the mayor commented, "Let the free marketplace decide." He suggested that a cap of 500 would satisfy him.

It is not clear whether the City Council, which adopted the bill with than the two-thirds majority needed to override a mayoral veto, will vote to do so.

The New York Sun reported that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn will force through an override, while the Village Voice quotes the bill's sponsor, Councilmember Leroy Comrie, as saying the bill's fate is undecided. An override vote - if there is one - is expected to take place at the council meeting scheduled for April 23.

If the council overrides the mayor's veto, the bill would formalize the city's acceptance of the pedicab industry as part of the Midtown landscape while limiting the vehicles’ numbers and potentially restricting their operation during the most congested -- and most lucrative -- times of the year.

PEDICABS VS. TAXIS

The council’s regulatory scheme for pedicabs is similar in some ways to the long-established taxicab medallion system. The number of medallion cabs is limited by law to about 13,000 vehicles and the industry is subject to an extensive set of requirements for insurance and driver licensing.

Yet the medallion cabs are never banned from Midtown -- in fact, they are allowed special access to some bus lanes and provided with taxi stands at key locations.

Insurance requirements are actually lower for medallion cabs than for pedicabs under the bill, an ironic contrast given that cabs can travel at much higher speeds and are thus more likely to be involved in accidents causing severe injury.

Proponents of the bill say that the cap, insurance requirements and licensing regulations are important to prevent pedicabs from further clogging traffic, to protect against unfair competition with taxicabs for street hails, and to protect pedestrian safety. This view essentially sees pedicabs as an entertainment option for tourists. It thus makes sense to limit their number and operations to prevent the pedicabs from interfering with other users of Manhattan streets.

ALTERNATIVE TRANSPORTATION

Pedicab proponents paint them as a fast, safe and environmentally and passenger-friendly means of transportation.

Gregg Zukowski, a pedicab owner and driver, wrote in Gotham Gazette last year that because of its ability to weave through traffic, a pedicab can zip from Grand Central to Penn Station in eight minutes, while a taxicab could take 20 or 30 minutes. Pedicab drivers say that many of their riders are New Yorkers who value the faster ride or who cannot find a medallion taxi.

With the exception of one accident in which a private bus struck a pedicab in 2001, there have apparently been no major accidents involving pedicabs since their advent in New York City a decade ago. With pedal power, pedicabs do not contribute to either smog or global warming.

Leaders of several city transportation and environmental groups emphasized the environmental implications of the issue in a letter urging council members not to override the mayor’s veto. “If you are truly committed to protecting our environment and heading off environmental catastrophes such as those highlighted in the Academy Award winning film An Inconvenient Truth, you simply cannot vote in favor of legislation that is specifically designed to undermine evolving green industries,” the letter said.

Perhaps the greatest appeal of pedicabs is their passenger-friendly image, created by drivers who engage in conversation and will point out the sights along the way to tourists.

Pedicab owners implicitly point to a future Manhattan streetscape with fewer cars and cabs and more eco-friendly modes of transportation. Pedicabs would be part of this, joined by pedestrians, bicycles and clean-air buses, all of which use less street space per passenger mile traveled than cars or conventional cabs. There might be additions to this new transportation list; Vespa, the manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters, recently released a study that concluded that substituting motor scooters for cars would reduce global warming vehicle emissions in the city.

The council's bill does allow for changes in the future. The cap on the number of pedicabs would expire two years after the bill becomes law, unless the council renews it. Thus, neither this bill (nor a replacement that simply increased the numerical cap) really resolves the place of pedicabs in the city. The bill does take important steps toward making sure pedicabs are safe. But it does not settle the thornier issues about who should be using the city's congested streets and for what purposes.

Bruce Schaller, who has been in charge of the transportation topic page since its inception in 1999, is head of Schaller Consulting, which provides research and analysis about transportation. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.Â

Finding A Parking Space

March 13, 2007 | by Bruce Schaller

Traffic congestion has been the focus of much recent discussion, but parking actually gets more complaints, according to a Tri-State Transportation Campaign public opinion survey , which last year found that more New York City residents consider parking to be a problem in their neighborhood than traffic. This was true even though only about one-half the survey respondents own a car. Finding a parking space is so difficult that some motorists have arrangements to sell their parking space to their neighbor or corner merchant when they leave their space in the morning.

Parking issues and possible solutions were highlighted during the first week of March by the visit to New York of UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of “The High Cost of Free Parking.” In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Shoup was hailed as a “parking rock star" by Paul White of Transportation Alternatives, the host for his visit, not the usual description for a 68-year-old professor of urban planning.

Shoup proposes that cities raise curbside parking fees on commercial strips to achieve an equilibrium between parking supply and demand, in the same way that private garages raise rates for off-street parking if they find their garages are consistently filled. Shoup says that metered fees should be set at the “lowest price necessary” to maintain a 15 percent vacancy rate at curb spaces, a rate at which there is likely to be an open space on every block at all times. The rate might vary by time of day and would certainly vary by location. Areas with high demand for parking would have the highest meter rates. Tony neighborhoods in London, which follow this approach, charge $8 an hour for parking.

Benefits Of Increased Parking Fees

What are the benefits of this proposal? Shoup emphasizes that the incremental fee revenue generated by increased parking fees should be dedicated to fixing sidewalks, steam cleaning them every other month, planting trees, installing street furniture and otherwise enhancing the streetscape. These improvements might be managed by local business improvement districts (BIDs), thus creating a powerful constituency to ensure that the parking fees are collected and the revenue spent as intended. Shoup points to Old Pasadena, California, as an example of the success of this approach. This once-derelict downtown adopted market rate pricing for its parking and is now a thriving retail district that draws visitors from throughout Southern California.

Market rate pricing for curb parking would also reduce traffic. Shoup points out that a lot of traffic is generated not by motorists going to their destination but by motorists who have arrived at their destination and are searching for a parking spot. Various surveys in New York have shown that between 15 percent and 45 percent of traffic on the city’s streets consists of cars searching for a parking space. Freeing up spaces would greatly reduce the mileage spent cruising for parking, as well as reduce double-parking by motorists who cannot find a space, and thus reduce traffic and air pollution throughout the city.

Shoup suggests that the city could use technology to help make the program work effectively. Parking meters can be networked so that city officials know which spaces are currently being paid for. Devices implanted in the pavement can detect when a vehicle is occupying the space, so that parking enforcement can be directed to areas with high violation rates. These devices can also be used to track occupancy rates so that city officials know when to adjust parking fees to maintain a 15 percent vacancy rate. Devices that motorists hang inside their car windows can be used to pay for parking, doing away with the need to stock up on quarters and enabling drivers to pay only for the time they are actually parked.

Objections to Higher Curbside Parking Fees

Shoup’s ideas expand to auto parking the principles the city has already applied to commercial parking in Midtown Manhattan. The city’s commercial parking program charges delivery vehicles escalating curbside fees for spaces that were formerly free. The program has won the support of delivery companies by making it easier for delivery drivers to find a space and by greatly reducing double-parking.

Yet despite the success of this approach for commercial parking, the idea of higher fees for cars to park on commercial strips meets with resistance by some residents and merchants. People do not exactly welcome having to pay more for something that was once free or very cheap. They are particularly concerned about the impact of higher fees on lower-income drivers and on local merchants.

Another objection involves parking fine revenue. If there were less double-parking or less illegal parking, would not this cost the city government a considerable portion of the $550 million in parking fine revenue it takes in every year?

A third objection focuses on the spillover effects of higher parking fees. Won’t drivers simply divert to side streets where parking is only subject to alternate side regulation, thus transplanting but not reducing the cruising mileage? Or won’t the availability of metered spaces attract more people to drive and park, thus offsetting the reduction in cruising?

Answering The Objections

There are counterarguments to these objections. For example, government survey data show that only two percent of shopping trips by lower-income people involve driving to the store and parking at a metered space. Shoppers are far more likely to walk or use the bus or subway than to drive; those who do drive primarily park in free off-street lots. Thus, far more lower-income shoppers would benefit through streetscape improvements than would be affected by higher parking fees.

The concern about fine revenue seems premature. This program would have to be very widely and very successfully implemented before there is any chance that parking reform turns parking enforcement personnel into the mythical Maytag repairman with nothing to do.

Since parking fees will promote turnover and thus increase the effective capacity of metered spaces, and ensure that a metered space is virtually always available, it seems far more likely to reduce cruising than increase it.

More broadly, maybe the real “problem” with Shoup’s ideas is that they seem too good to be true. Shoup claims that market rate pricing of metered spaces will be good for everyone â€“ motorists who can depend on finding a spot, merchants who will have a higher flow of customers because parking spaces turnover more quickly, bus riders and other drivers because there will be less traffic and less double parking, and everyone who walks the sidewalks because revenues will be applied to streetscape improvements.

But -- there is no such thing as a free lunch, right? Let’s find the fatal flaw: it’s inequitable, it’ll clog traffic on the side streets, the city’s treasury will suffer, the plan will attract more drivers.

New Yorkers’ sharp-witted instincts might be applied more usefully to the dysfunctional operation of the street space that we live with every day. Who in their right mind would design a system that guarantees that a substantial portion of traffic is simply from motorists driving in circles? Why give a break to people who want to park all day instead of opening up spaces to a stream of people with shopping or other errands? Why should city officials collect five times more revenue from parking violations than from parking fees? Why does it make sense for landlords to charge market rate rents on one side of the sidewalk but for the city to vastly under-price the real estate it owns on the other side? Since motorists are almost entirely from the upper ends of the income scale, why is equity trumped as an objection to market rate curb pricing?

Shoup believes that none of this makes any sense. He thinks that once people think through the issue, they will see the merits of applying market principles that are so familiar for most goods and services to the problem of finding a parking space in New York