Another push for New York central area toll

New York state senate majority leader Joseph Bruno (Repub) is moving to have enabling legislation passed Monday for the central area toll (CAT) proposed for Manhattan south of 86th Street. He has appealed to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (Democrat) to convene a meeting of the state Assembly (or lower house) to pass the legislation. The US Government has set "mid July" - apparently Monday - as a deadline for a submission with state legislative clearance. Otherwise the offer of federal aid is off.

In a statement Friday, Bruno called the toll plan a "bold, creative measure to alleviate a major problem," and said the governor, the Senate minority and the Assembly "must step up and get it done."

Jeffrey Zupan of the New York area Regional Plan Association and a longtime advocate of congestion pricing told us Friday that supporters of the central area toll plan were making a "last ditch effort" to move Speaker Silver, but he said the prospects "look bleak." There was just a slim chance they could succeed. Getting "a rabbit out of the hat," was how he characterized it.

The CAT has wide organized support - including the Mayor Michael Bloomberg who sponsored the proposal April 22, the state Governor Eliot Spitzer, the state Senate, USDOT, neighborhood, transit and environmental groups, business, and the media. But opinion polls show public opposition, as in most such schemes before their introduction.

Speaker Silver reportedly has total control over what legislation moves in the state assembly giving him virtual veto power, which he uses to "log roll." Efforts over the last few days to move Silver on the toll have therefore consisted of discussions of completely unrelated issues.

Non-price alternatives

Some other politicians in the assembly have suggested non-price alternatives to the scheme - measures such as tax credits for telecommuting and carpooling, more money for transit, bans on daytime use of trucks, restrictions on private vehicle use depending on license plate number, and suchlike.

Zupan and two others have just published a careful and detailed analysis of the shortcomings of all the non-price alternatives – see top item at http://www.rpa.org

Various license plate rationing concepts would involve banning, on certain days, use of a vehicle with a certain license plate number characteristic - most are based on the last digit. These schemes promise great personal aggravations and throw up all kinds of unfairnesses, particularly the ability of some people to evade them with multiple motor vehicles.

The RPA paper: "The biggest single flaw in the license plate rationing schemes is (their) coercive nature. (They) curtail people's freedom to choose - to be able to travel when they want, by the means they want. In contrast (the Mayor's central area toll) allows people the freedom to choose, albeit at a price, but a price designed to ease traffic and improve the environment. The limitations rationing puts on people can go beyond onerous..."

The authors cite the case of a family living in the congestion zone, leaving the area for several days but needing to return home on a day which their license plate bans. The cost of bans on driving certain days would be devastating to business and to service in the city.

"Is the plumber supposed to say: 'It is Monday the 1st, my license plate ends in a '1' so I can't drive today. Find someone (without a 1-ending license plate) to fix the flood in your bathroom.'

"It can be expected, should this scheme ever come to pass that hardship pleas for exemptions would be widespread, along with arbitrary decisions, complex rules, and time-consuming adjudication."

To the extent that people organized to make more trips on the days their license plate allowed there would be much less reduction in trips than simple arithmetic suggests.

New transit options, they write, can help but the growth of transit services in the last fifteen years has been accompanied by continued growth in road traffic and congestion problems. There isn't any reason to believe the problem of roads can be solved by enhanced transit alone, they write. In any case the improvement of transit depends on funding that only a toll can generate.

They conclude: "None of the (counter) proposals - license plate rationing, truck measures, traffic management, transit improvements - would reduce congestion or improve air quality with anywhere near the effectiveness of the (Mayor's) congestion pricing program.... the congestion pricing program is the linchpin... Without it none of the proposed alternatives can achieve the gains in public health, economic prosperity and quality of life that all sides desire."

Rush Warning issued to New York Governor by Chairman Pete

SIDENOTE: Last week one of the more bizarre interventions against the New York central area toll came from Rep Pete DeFazio, chairman of the House of Representatives subcommittee on highways and transit who rushed to write a protest letter.

Addressed to NY Governor Spitzer the letter declared that "Congress has not authorized the (New York) congestion initiative" and said he had "serious doubts" it was eligible for federal funding.

It went on with to issue a now familiar Chairman's Rush Warning:

"Before you rush to enact legislation authorizing the establishment of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing program, I urge that you obtain all the relevant information..."

Relevant information is that the US Government has been funding road pricing programs like the New York City proposal for 16 years since a Congestion Pricing Pilot Program was introduced in 1991 under the ISTEA legislation. The pricing program has been reauthorized in each five yearly surface transportation bill since ISTEA under the name value pricing program – most recently in the bill called SAFETEA-LU.

Congressional authorization has never been required for grants to individual projects, because the law leaves that to the secretary of transportation. Rep DeFazio voted for that, we rush to report.

Read about it here: 
http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/congestionpricing/congestionpricing.pdf
TOLLROADSnews 2007-07-15