Congestion Pricing and Parking Fees Are Linked

NYC Mayor Bloomberg's Traffic Congestion Mitigation Committee met on September 25 and the connection between parking and congestion pricing was immediately put on the table. The meeting was reported on by the NY Sun and Gotham Gazette. The Committee, which expects to hold forums in all five boroughs and Nassau and Westchester counties before wrapping up by January 31 next year, was informed that average speeds in Manhattan's three central business districts drop the speeds as slow as 6-10 mph.

Assemblywoman Vivian Cook, a committee member, worried that parts of her district in Queens could be heavily used for parking by those avoiding the congestion charges and taking subways into Manhattan. The director of NYC's Long-Term Planning and Sustainability Office, Rohit Aggarwala, responded that this problem could be remedied with a review of parking permits and meters in the area.

Her concern and the City's response show the far-sightedness of the late Columbia Professor William Vickrey, whose 1992 plan (http://preview.tinyurl.com/yv33ed) to address congestion in NYC linked congestion pricing to a review of parking permits and fees.

Bravo MTA

The MTA is thinking of having an off-peak fare, a discount for bus and subway riders in New York City. That's a good move - use the market and consumer choice to help solve the growing congestion problem on the roads and on public transit.

The problem with the discount is that it is being discussed in the context of higher subway and bus fares. The Straphangers Campaign would like to see less of the fare paid by riders and more by property-owners, and the late Professor Vickrey has argued that property-owners in NYC will benefit from cheaper public transit fares.

On the other hand, New Yorkers are paying one-fourth of the $8 fare on the London Tube for a single trip. The fare drops to $3 per trip in London if one buys an "Oyster" Card, which requires a one-time fee of $6. The structure of the fares appears to make tourists pay more.

FILE SHARING | Evil or Harmless?

Sept. 22, 2007–Used to be a lot of tape and record stores. Now few survive. Hot CDs and DVDs are now sold in sections of discount supermarkets (the hip-hop CDs du jour are 50 cent and Kanye). For a full selection one must go to quasi-museums in bookstores or computer stores that retail classic albums to older listeners without the technology to search for and download music from the internet. The reason for the decline of the old record stores is, in a word, file-sharing.

The Recording Industry Association of America has tried to fight back against people–especially younger people, who grew up finding free music–using Napster-like peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. Reportedly the RIAA has filed 30,000 lawsuits against downloaders. But the tape and record stores still languish. Should the government be intervening more strenuously on behalf of the intellectual property of music recordings? Or is this a victimless crime? Evidence of victims includes the shortage of opportunities for younger wannabe musicians with many fewer record-company agents ready to sign them up for big bucks.

The clothing industry has an analogous problem–knockoffs, i.e., items of clothing that are copied from well-advertised brand-name items. Some argue that knockoffs, like Napster devices, are harmless and have no victims. Possibly some knockoffs are "complements" to brand-name goods, i.e., they don't compete with them (Mom buys the real thing from Bergdorf's and as she emerges from the store she buys a copy for her teenage daughter on the street outside). But some knockoffs are substitutes, i.e., they interfere with sales. Also, the supply chain for knockoffs is unknown, raising safety and sweatshop questions, not to mention evasion of taxes for goods sold on the street or in stores that don't collect or pass on sales taxes. Any comments?

Congestion Pricing

There is wide agreement about the high costs of congestion in big American cities. What should be done about it?

On the side of inertia is the former Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York, George J. Marlin (no relation). In a July blog he says he was once approached by some good-government Manhattanites about introducing peak-pricing tolls on the Hudson River bridge and tunnel crossings. The idea is that tolls would rise at peak hours and fall during off-peak hours, just as they do for commuter train tickets. Marlin dismayed his visitors by advising them that peak-hour pricing is just another tax and he was against it. But if tolls are reduced in non-peak hours to offset the higher revenue from peak-hour tolls, the new pricing can be revenue-neutral. The two people who commented on Marlin's blog - Ed Unneland and Erik Engquist - both agreed with the goo-goos that peak-hour pricing might be better than the alternatives.

I spoke in favor of congestion pricing twice in July - once before a public hearing of Manhattan Community Boards 4, 5 and 6 and once before a hearing of the Borough President of Manhattan, Scott Stringer. I noted that congestion is a symptom of popularity and therefore a good thing up to a point. In the 19th century, smokestacks were proudly shown on British city postcards as evidence of their prosperity. Better to be congested than to have boarded-up and deserted buildings downtown, as do some upstate NY cities. Hostility to the City’s congestion pricing plan in Albany might stem from upstate congestion envy. Traffic congestion also keeps down the speed of cars to levels where fatalities are less likely in the event of an accident.

The problems with congestion become very serious when traffic slows to speeds of 20 mph or slower. This wastes gas, increases pollution and creates serious stress for people stuck in traffic. Worse, it is dangerous because ambulances, fire engines and police cars can't get through to where they are needed.

Time is money, so we are already paying a tax for congestion - in unpredictable and inefficient ways. One person understood this many years ago, Bill Vickrey, a Columbia professor whom I got to know through the City Club of New York when we were both active members. Bill received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1996 and looked forward to the increased influence the award would give to his policy prescriptions. Alas, he died within a few days after the announcement of his award, in a car on his way up to a conference of like-minded economists.

Bill was keenly interested in giving advice to policymakers in the City and testified at an economic hearing I organized in 1992 as Chief Economist to the City Comptroller, Liz Holtzman. A summary of his 12 principles of congestion pricing is posted at http://tinyurl.com/29vz7n. More of his principles are technologically manageable now than when they were first proposed, and all of them promote an efficient city. When people said that the MTA can't handle the additional burden on the subway system created by those who leave their cars at home or park outside the city, Bill Vickrey answered that the signal system could be upgraded to permit shorter headways between subways and that a skip-stop system for the local trains would shorten travel time without great inconvenience.

The City of New York has won a $354 million grant to implement some of the recommendations for congestion pricing. A State commission is also reviewing other proposals to reduce City congestion and pollution. Their work is important because the existing free-for-all cannot continue. I hope the City and State will take into account the ideas of Bill Vickrey early on in their thinking and implement what is administratively feasible.

CONGESTION | LA and NYC - Huffington Post

"The Los Angeles and New York City areas have suffered the highest total annual costs from traffic delays since 1982. And the delays are getting worse. It's no surprise that the LA-Orange County area ranks worst... The NYC metro area does much better but is deteriorating. The big surprise is that snarls at the report are not for rating LA and OC worst again, but for understating the magnitude of the local problem. ..." Read more.

NYC | Traffic Congestion Gets Worse

Sept. 19, 2007–Time travel would cut down on travel time. If New Yorkers could turn the clock back to 1982, their average travel time might be cut by 70 percent. But meanwhile, things are getting worse. The NYC metro area average congestion delay (per peak traveler) jumped to 16th worst in the nation in 2005 (the latest year) at 46 hours – a deterioration from 23rd worst in 2004. The cost of delay is estimated at $888 per peak traveler, 18th highest – again, a deterioration from 22nd worse in 2004.

It’s no surprise that Los Angeles is the most congested, with 72 hours per year in wasted time per traveler. On traffic-congestion delays, New York City ranks with Chicago and Boston among U.S. metro areas according to the just-released 2007 Annual Mobility Report by the Texas Transportation Institute (part of Texas A&M University). The rankings are overall but are grouped by size of each urban area.

The report provides complete information on the New York City region trend since 1982. The total delay has risen eight-fold from 68 million hours in 1982 to 384 million hours, reflective of the area’s size and growth. However, the growth in delay per peak traveler has grown more slowly than the average – reflective of the large number of people in the area who use public transit.

In the absence of a time machine, government officials at all levels need to consider the high cost of traffic congestion – a total of 4.2 billion lost American hours in 2005, the cost per city varying based on size, availability of public transit and local policies.

The report attributes two-thirds of the delays in the NYC area to incidents on the highways that delay traffic. It gives most credit in delay-reduction to “freeway incident management”–e.g., use of cameras and service patrols to incident prevention and response.

The other bright spot is NYC’s strong public transit network. If there were no public transit, the annual delay per peak traveler would jump in the NYC area by 26 hours, from 46 to 72 – ahead of Los Angeles.The total cost of congestion in the NYC area has grown, according to the report, from $649 million in 1982 to $7.4 billion in 2005. Although NYC is not nearly the most congested on an average traveler basis, its total cost remains in second place throughout the 1982-2005 period. Congestion pricing and other options deserve the attention they have been getting from Washington and New York City officials.