Aaron M. Renn tells a story in the Guardian about New York City’s many attempts to control the car, and a guy called “Gridlock Sam” (Sam Schwartz). As deputy traffic commissioner, he developed highly successful contingency plans to deal with the 1979 NYC transit strike. In some ways, this reminds me of Vancouver’s success at dealing with the road and other closures during the 2010 Winter Olympics.
A failed idea from 1971
Today, we tend to think of congestion pricing as a new idea, but New York has been trying to implement some variant of it for decades. . . . The debate is only going to intensify. Traffic congestion is worsening in Manhattan, the subways are overcrowded and increasingly unreliable, and the state is struggling to pay for it all. Whether congestion pricing passes or not, the price will be paid, one way or another.
Many thanks to Todd Litman for the heads up.
And like here it is the state (province) that’s in the way.
It’s worse in NY. In BC, it’s largely a matter of a party currently in power that’s ideologically opposed to (funding) transit. In theory, this situation could be somewhat improved in 18 months. In Albany, it doesn’t matter what party controls the Assembly, Senate, and Governorship. It’s a web of personal vendettas and failure to contribute to the right senators’ ‘community non-profit development corporations’. Such a mess.
Congestion pricing is just another way to get the poor off the roads.
With ‘Compass’, GPS, camera or satellite monitoring 1984 comes closer. All monitored, all the time.
This notion that the poor are the ones driving is fascinating.
Ummm… it’s 2016! 1984 is getting farther away. I hope you don’t own a mobile phone: all monitored all the time. Besides, what Orwell missed is that monitoring is no longer only the privilege of the state for the “benefit” of the state.
The poor shouldn’t be forced to own a car in the first place. They shouldn’t be driven out of the city by cheap roads and under-funded transit.
It’s also a means of using a temporal factor – time of day – to control traffic and manage the sharing of the roadway resource.
Vancouver does that on Granville Street for its weekend nighttime closures.
The sign suggests a similar implementation, but favouring daytime use (rather than nighttime / nightclub use).
The use of time-based restrictions balances benefit and inconvenience.
In the NYC example, there is no ban on cars in the middle of the night when the street isn’t used for the closure purpose (whether pedestrians or transit) – presumably, the inconvenience of the closure outweighs the benefit.
In the Granville St. example, there is no road closure during the day because the inconvenience to road users (transit and drivers) would outweigh the benefit (since the sparser daytime crowds can be accommodated on the sidewalks)
Other jurisdictions use time of day to manage traffic with reduced or eliminated road or bridge tolls at nighttime. Seattle’s high occupancy toll lanes also have variable rates which increase with demand (and still get jammed at $9.00).