Early reports claim that New York City’s so-called congestion pricing program is a great success, reducing the number of vehicles driving into lower Manhattan by 5 to 6 percent. However, because it really isn’t congestion pricing — that is, it doesn’t price roads by how much congestion there is but just charges people for crossing a line — it is likely that traffic will bounce back just as it did when London imposed a similar cordon pricing scheme.
Manhattan traffic before cordon pricing. Photo by Rachel Maddow, yes, that Rachel Maddow.
Worse, the traffic monitors at INRIX have found that cordon pricing effectively exported congestion out of lower Manhattan and into other parts of the New York urban area. The result has been a net overall slowdown of traffic. The region’s travel speeds were 3 percent slower during morning rush hour and 4 percent slower in the afternoon. People working downtown benefitted from the program; everyone else was hurt.
Like so much about urban transit, cordon pricing — which in New York is really just another subsidy to the money-pit subway system — is really just a program to support downtown property owners at everyone else’s expense. Plus, to the extent that the 5 to 6 percent reduction in downtown traffic represented people who rode transit instead of drove, those people suffered a great inconvenience that isn’t counted when measuring downtown traffic.
This chart is from my report, Ending Congestion by Refinancing Highways. Though the numbers are for a typical freeway lane, the same principle applies, with different quantities, to other roads and streets.
Normally, traffic flows peak in the morning and afternoon rush hours. Congestion happens when the number of vehicles on a road exceeds that road’s flow capacity. Usually, the congestion continues for some time even after traffic falls below the theoretical flow capacity because it takes time to work itself out. True congestion pricing seeks to keep peak-hour flows below capacity so that traffic never gets congested and never slows down.
Note that the traffic never really gets to be much greater than capacity because, by definition, there simply isn’t room for more traffic. Note also that there is a lot of excess capacity during much of the day. Congestion pricing works by getting some of that peak traffic to travel during the times when traffic is below capacity. Since most traffic, even during rush hour, is not commuter traffic, this can be done without necessarily disturbing anyone’s work schedules.
New York City’s cordon pricing charges the same amount to enter lower Manhattan at any time from 5 am to 9 pm. That means there isn’t really any opportunity for people to move to the less congested periods of the day. Instead, traffic moves to other parts of the city. Among other things, that’s leading to parking disputes outside the downtown cordon.
True congestion prices vary dynamically with the amount of traffic. Ideally, they would also vary by road rather than for an entire district. Finally, the revenues raised through congestion pricing should be used to maintain and improve the roads that are generating those revenues, not to support obsolete transit systems.
What evidence does AP provide to support the claim that traffic in central London wasn’t reduced after the implementation of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ)? The article you referenced lacks data to substantiate this assertion and instead relies on anecdotal quotes from drivers. Every study or report I’ve reviewed indicates that traffic volumes decreased in Central London along with several air pollutants following the introduction of ULEZ.
The MTA abuses 1 BILLION dollars a year on overtime for employee’s who don’t show up.
https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=19445
I said it before The NYC Subway has 50 thousand employees, the MTA as a whole employs 70,000. All-in cost of MTA employees = $130k per year. Meanwhile; Tokyo ( whose subway has similar track miles & ridership) has just 10,000 employees, but it’s system move 3x as many people with none of the infrastructure problems.
Not treating public transit as an employment agency would save $5.2 Billion per year. Fares to ride the subway could be lowered to $1.50 and would still have over 3 Billion dollars per year for improvements and maintenance.
Make them use finger print scanners and suspend overtime so it terminates past 40 hours per week.
NYT:
Trump Administration Considers Halting Congestion Pricing
New York City’s tolling program began this month after defying obstacles for decades. A move to stop it could touch off a legal battle between the state and federal government.
The city of New York should have sufficient autonomy to enact a congestion fee on their city streets no reason feds to intervene.
Just wait for jobs to migrate to New jersey.