Washington DC’s famous — or should I say infamous? — ex-mayor and Council Member Marion Barry proposed a plan this Tuesday to explore the possibility of implementing a congestion pricing scheme for the Capitol. So far Mayor Fenty has equivocated, saying that London-style congestion pricing is a “good idea,” but that its not time to rush into things. “It’s something that we would have to study, but we are very adamant about letting the public know that this plan is not even close to being a proposal,” he told the Washington Post.
Why congestion pricing? “We have at least 400,000 commuters coming to the District every day and at least 200,000 cars coming into the city, beating up our city, polluting our air, using our police and fire services when necessary, and not paying a nickel,” Barry told the Post, referring to commuters from Virginia and Maryland who pour into the city during rush hour and leave at the end of the day. Almost all of these commuters do not pay DC taxes.
Because Congress and the courts have made a commuter tax unconstitutional, a congestion pricing scheme may be one way to reduce congestion in the region and raise money for alternative modes of transport like bicycles, rail, and buses.
Bloomtown: The Mayor plans to boost spending on public transport.
(Photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
This week’s Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker features an opinion in support of congestion pricing for lower Manhattan. Written by climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, the piece makes two important points. The first is a response to people who claim that congestion pricing is an affront to the poor and the middle class who can’t afford to drop the $8 required to drive a car into any part of Manhattan below 86th street. Here’s what she has to say:
…the poor don’t, as a rule, drive in and out of Manhattan: compare the cost of buying, insuring, and parking a car with the seventy-six dollars a month the M.T.A. charges for an unlimited-ride MetroCard. For those who do use cars to commute, eight dollars a day would, it’s true, quickly add up. And that is precisely the point. Congestion pricing works only to the extent that it makes other choices—changing the hours of one’s daily drive or, better yet, using mass transit—more attractive. One of the Mayor’s proposals is to put the money raised by congestion pricing—an estimated four hundred million dollars a year—toward improving subway and bus service.
The second point she makes is about the cost of congestion:
…it’s naïve to suppose that congestion isn’t itself costly. Sitting in traffic, a plumber can’t plumb and a deliveryman can’t deliver. The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually. When expenses like wasted fuel, lost revenue, and the increased cost of doing business are added in, that figure rises to thirteen billion dollars. The question, Bloomberg observed, is “not whether we want to pay but how do we want to pay?”
To be sure, decreased productivity is not the only cost of congestion. Global warming, caused in large part from greenhouse gases emitted by cars, is another cost that Kolbert mentions in her article. However, she fails to mention other problems like asthma and respiratory disease associated with particulate matter that the tailpipes of cars spew out. This alone should be enough for New York to support congestion pricing and encourage other modes of transport
On Monday, The New York Times reported that Ford Motor’s chief executive acknowledged the link between greenhouse gases and global warming and vowed to respond to the threat of a heating planet by creating a new post at the company, vice president for sustainability, environment and safety engineering. According to The Times, this is the first time that the executive of a Detroit auto company has the word sustainability in her title. Susan M. Cischke, who will fill the new position, will be tasked with “creating a long-range strategy on sustainability matters.”
Is this just lip-service to the environmental movement? Some of the representatives of enivornmental groups interviewed in the article think so. Dan Becker of the Sierra Club told The Times that Ford has a strong track-record of making promises to help the environment, but “when it comes to doing them they seem to forget or fall down on the job.”
Will things be different this time? Let’s wait and see.
A more peaceful New York? Photo from http://wwp.new-york-usa.com/ The New York Times reports today that Mayor Bloomberg will announce on Sunday an ambitious proposal to give New York City a much needed face lift. Among the undertakings included in the Mayor’s proposal is — drum roll, please — congestion pricing! As the Times reports:
What will almost certainly be the most contentious idea, however, involves charging drivers to enter the busiest sections of Manhattan. The proposal being formulated calls for money raised from congestion pricing, which could reach hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to go into a fund for large-scale transportation investments. Those would include projects for the boroughs outside Manhattan, where drivers would be most affected by new fees that could reach $8, minus a credit for any tolls already in effect.
Cities like London, Stockholm, and Singapore have already experimented with congestion pricing with varying degrees of success. Now, if the mayor gets his way, New York will be added to a growing list of cities bent on making downtown areas less congested. One can only imagine Robert Moses, New York’s late planning czar who advocated ripping a freeway through Greenwich Village, turning in his grave.
But in a glaring omission, the article never mentions how cheaper cars will effect the quality of life in burgeoning cities throughout the developing world. Already in places like Bangkok, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Delhi - to name a few - personal automobiles are a force to be reckoned with as they clog the streets and foul the air. It doesn’t take an economist to figure out that cheaper cars mean more cars. And more cars on the road mean more traffic and less clean air.
In an Earth Day special, MTV’s Pimp My Ride will feature the greening of a ‘65 Chevy Impala. During this very special episode of Pimp My Ride the crew will be replacing the original engine of the Impala with a 800 horsepower diesel engine that will run on biodiesel. While this should be entertaining, chances are it won’t touch EMBARQ’s Mexico City Diesel Retrofit videoRead the rest of this entry »
When it comes to making a city bike friendly, the simple bike lane is not enough. Check out this video featuring Transportation Alternatives, The Project for Public Spaces, and The Open Planning Project, which calls for a system that segregates bikers from traffic. This is BRT for bikers!Special thanks to Erica Stephan for the hot tip.
On Monday, Marcelo Ebrad, the Mayor of Mexico City, and other high-ranking officials cycled to work to show their support for a cleaner, more humanized city. Although it was a time of relatively low traffic – they made their trip at the beginning of Holy Week – the officials braved rain and cars to make a powerful point about reclaiming Mexico City’s streets. A flat city originally built on a former lake, Mexico City has the ideal landscape for cycling; bikers can pedal for miles without ever breaking a sweat. Yet since the 1950s, “Chilangos,” as inhabitants of the city are affectionately known, have put the bicycle aside in favor of motorized transport. Since then, the precipitous growth of the city, along with the number of automobiles, has left the streets clogged with cars and the air fouled by pollution. Read the rest of this entry »
On March 30, Monica Bansal, a graduate student at Colombia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation visited EMBARQ’s offices and presented her research on Delhi’s auto-rickshaws. These three-wheeled vehicles carry thousands of city residents each day, providing an alternative to private car trips and an important source of jobs in the region.
Unfortunately, auto-rickshaws are also major polluters. In Kolkata, for example, auto-rickshaws comprise 5% of the fleet, but an estimated 35% percent of vehicle-related pollution.
On March 30, Monica Bansal, a graduate student at Colombia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation visited EMBARQ’s offices and presented her research on Delhi’s auto-rickshaws. These three-wheeled vehicles carry thousands of city residents each day, providing an alternative to private car trips and an important source of jobs in the region.
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