This is a very big deal.
You know the line: “If you can make it there …”
The fees are part of a groundbreaking congestion pricing plan … which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and lawmakers agreed upon early Sunday morning.
New York will become the first American city to charge such fees, though congestion pricing has been in place for years in London, Stockholm and Singapore, among other communities. The fees are expected to raise billions of dollars to fix the city’s troubled subway system and thin out streets that have become strangled by traffic.
Here’s some context … and implications for the rest of us:
Congestion pricing has the potential to significantly change how traffic flows through Manhattan streets, how commuters get around the city, how companies like Uber and Lyft operate.
But most radically, if the policy spreads it could challenge a deeply embedded cultural idea, requiring people to pay for something Americans have long demanded — and largely believe they’ve gotten— free of charge. …
This system looks to us, instead, like an entitlement — driving is an American right, and so the infrastructure that enables it should be free.
Congestion pricing is premised instead on the notion that public roads are a valuable and scarce resource. And we should pay in some places to use it not primarily to gin up revenue, but to help manage access for everyone. …
“The roads hold such a special position in our brain that we use logic around them that we would never use around everything else,” Mr. Manville said.
Other countries have socialized health care, parental leave or housing, Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant at Nelson\Nygaard, pointed out. In America, we’ve socialized driving — and housing for our cars.
“We don’t let people put their self-storage containers in public parks, but it’s just fine to store their cars on other public land for free,” Mr. Tumlin wrote in an email. …
Now the culture of limitless, cheap driving may begin to shift in some places. But it will take much longer to change the physical environment that has grown up around that culture over decades, leaving many people without good alternatives to driving alone. …
“Fortunately, congestion pricing comes with its own built-in solution,” he said, “which is that it raises a ton of money.”
For more thoughts by Jeff Tumlin, go to this PriceTalks here.
Retoll the bridges and slap a cordon wall on Boundary Rd. It’s not as equitably perfect as a per-km charge on every vehicle but it has the benefit of simplicity and actual feasibility. Rebate or exemption for HOV. All these people who claim they “can’t” take transit or carpool will suddenly find religion.
What they found out in London is that occasional folks will use it less but folks that use it a lot use it more (i.e. get more bang for the buck). Buses went slower over time as more Uber or private hire cars came in.
Now they are thinking to increase the fee by actual time spend, i.e. make the fee not flat/daily but per h. That would actually reduce traffic further as less Uber or for-hire cars would show up.
http://theconversation.com/london-congestion-charge-what-worked-what-didnt-what-next-92478
Where are we in Vancouver with this debate ? Quite doable here ?