VIEWS | 390K. Ten Most-Viewed Posts in December. Thank You for Reading.

Guadalajara, December 30, 2017 – Thank you for reading this blog.

We just passed the 390,000-view mark. Next stop: 400,000.

The top ten posts that you, reader, were looking at in December were  focused on the tax bill that was passed at the end of December. Here is the list:

Entry

TAX BILL | Details, details Dec 2, 2017 4 comments

TECH WARS | Have You Noticed? Taxis+Uber+Lyft=More... Dec 28, 2017

TAX BILL | Latest on House-Senate Conference Dec 13, 2017

NEW YORK CITY | Best Workplaces, by Type of Busine... Dec 2, 2017

TAX BILL PUZZLE | Thatcher Policies in Reverse Dec 17, 2017

TAX BILL | Sen. Heinrich Calls the Tax Bill "Immor... Dec 4, 2017

RISE OF HITLER | Mar 5, 1933 – Nazis Elected, Dest... Mar 5, 2017

PSEG | Toxic Pole March, N.J.-L.I., NY Aug 28, 2014

FOOD BIZ | Do You Think Restos Have Genders? Dec 29, 2017

STOCK MARKET | What does this look like? (2:10 pm ... Nov 30, 2017

Please let us all have the benefit of your thinking by commenting on any of these posts or contact us at info@cityeconomist.com or john@boissevainbooks.com.

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TECH WARS | Have You Noticed? Taxis+Uber+Lyft=More Congestion!

Midtown Manhattan traffic averages 4.7 mph,
down from 6.5 mph five years ago. 

Back in 2015, on this blog site, I said that Uber's putting more cars on the road  seemed to be creating more congestion in New York City, 

My friend and co-thinker David Hochman instantly chimed in to say that he had the same perception.

We got some pushback on this idea. We decided to wait for data.

If you saw the same thing, guess what? We were all seeing straight. A few weeks ago, a study concluded that Uber and Lyft are indeed creating more congestion, more trips, more miles. 

Objectively, midtown traffic speed is measured at an average of 4.7 miles per hour, down from 6.5 miles per hour five years ago. Support has grown for rules or charges to discourage cars from coming into the most congested parts of New York City. One approach is a Pigou Tax such as has been introduced for sugary soda and cigarettes.

Sure, part of the congestion problem has been growth of the New York economy. But consider that this effect has been offset by the decline of brick-and-mortar retail stores. These stores have lost out to Amazon and other on-line vendors. Consider also this:

• The lobby of my building in Chelsea is right now being torn apart to make room for packages. Residents are having to walk through the basement entrance.
• Why? Because when the building was erected in the 1960s there was no space allocated for packages and the cabinet space that was added a decade later wasn't sufficient. 
• Now the storage space is being expanded ten-fold.
• Some buildings in Manhattan just a few years old are already overwhelmed with the packages.

These package deliveries require more trucks and they are one source of greater traffic. But the biggest culprit may simply be the number of vehicles on NYC streets that are available for hire:

• The number is now up to 103,000, double the 47,000 figure for 2013, says the Taxi and Limousine Commission. 
• Of these vehicles, 68,000 are affiliated with ride-hailing app companies, including 65,000 with Uber alone. 
• Yellow taxis are capped by city law at just under 13,600, with the idea of limiting congestion. The City's intent has been circumvented. (Full disclosure: I've served as an expert witness for an association of taxi-medallion owners and an association of Airbnb owners.)

New York City now has many more police on traffic duty and is taking another look at congestion-pricing plans that were advocated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A plan of this type is being used successfully in London. (A similar plan for Paris met with more opposition.)

New York City seems to be facing a conflict between new technology attractive to many consumers, and the people whose livelihoods and assets are being disrupted:

• taxi owners, 
• drivers, 
• other drivers facing longer delays, and 
• businesses affected by the congestion of heavily trafficked streets. 

The same disruptions are taking place for retail stores, housing renters and others disrupted by the wonders of new technology. The inconveniences have knock-on effects for owners of commercial and residential property.

This conflict is not new. If you come back to this blogsite in the next few weeks, you will find more posts under this hashtag (#TechWars). You will see how the conflicts have played out in many industries where technology has changed. This may serve as a guide to what we may expect during the coming years. The general theme is that the introduction of new technology requires a period during which the technology is tested and during which natural enemies emerge.

For example, using engines on ships was fought by sailors. Railways and cars and tractors were resisted by breeders and outfitters of horses. Photography was resisted by artists. These days, Uber is fought by cities and taxi owners, and by competitors. Yet Uber has a database that could be enormously helpful in planning for new transportation initiatives.

Invention is only half the battle. Getting the technology accepted where it replaces existing industries is the other half. Marconi spent his life battling the wired-telegraph companies, and the telegraph companies were largely successful in slowing down the introduction of wireless telegraphy. Where Marconi's invention succeeded was in a whole new area that he had not foreseen, namely broadcasting.

The period during which new technologies are tested against old ones can be called one of symbiosis. Sometimes the new technology never completely replaces the old one. Gas never completely replaced wood and coal as fuel. Electricity never completely replaced gas. You may be interested in some of the implications of all this... Stay tuned.

Postscript 1 (January 2, 2018): The Wall Street Journal predicts that a plan for congestion charges will be included in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's State of the State speech.

Postscript 2 (January 14, 2018) The New York Times reviews the growing number of private transportation options for commuters.

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TECH WARS | Is Über Creating More Congestion in NYC?

Density is good, severe traffic congestion bad. Congestion wastes fuel, adds
 to pollution, lowers the quality of life, depresses retail sales and the economy.
Will anyone pay enough attention before we have a Godzilla of Gridlock? 

Über may force another look at the toll-free status of four bridges across the East River.

Traffic congestion is a costly problem for New York City residents, workers and visitors. An aspect of the Tragedy of the Commons, scarce public goods like roadways in dense cities run the risk of overuse without restrictions or pricing.

New York City has a sophisticated traffic control system to ensure that the main arteries are flowing freely. In Manhattan, that's north-south. Traffic lights in Manhattan can be shortened, through a central control system, to restrict traffic in the east-west direction.

However, some arteries are east-west - for example around the entrances to the bridges and tunnels. I have been noticing that in high-traffic periods, the east-west traffic heading for the West Side Highway or the Lincoln Tunnel is backing up onto the avenues (I see it on Ninth Avenue), creating gridlock.

Is congestion getting worse? That's my perception, despite huge resources invested in traffic police and traffic-light technology.

Could Über be adding to the problem? Something like Über was inevitable, putting passengers and drivers directly in touch. It puts to use private vehicles at peak periods to supplement NYC's yellow and green taxis and on-call limos. BUT the result is more use of the public roads, more congestion. Like the frog in the saucepan pan with the heat slowly rising, we don't notice what is happening until a crisis occurs - the frog is boiled to death, or (equivalently) we have a mile-long gridlock in Manhattan that takes hours to clear up.

Former Mayor Bloomberg tried to get congestion pricing introduced in 2007-08. A broad approach to traffic pricing and mitigation is provided in the 12 principles of the late Columbia University Professor William Vickrey. I posted them at http://tinyurl.com/29vz7n. Singapore and London have introduced congestion pricing that seems to work.

A new group in New York City has come up with a "Fair Tolling" plan to introduce incentives to direct traffic to routes that make more sense than existing ones. The principal shift seems to be imposing tolls on the four toll-free bridges across the East River. Sam Schwartz, former City of New York Traffic Commissioner,  sees a big problem in these toll-free bridges:

The term I'd borrow from my father is that we have a cockamamie system of charging people that makes absolutely no sense, and in fact encourages people to drive through our densest part of the city: Manhattan.

This coming Friday millions of workers are going to be heading out to their Memorial Day Weekend vacation at the same time. Many cars come out of garages and parking lots for the long weekend excursions. This is the first of the three biggest weekends of the summer. It could be a test of the existing system.