New York Governor's commission for tolls on Harlem & East River bridges - $600m/yr

As widely leaked the Governor's commission to find new revenues for the New York area transit system is recommending tolls on all the presently untolled crossings to Manhattan. These are four big bridges over the East River to Brooklyn and Queens, and nine smaller bridges along the Harlem River providing connections with Bronx borough and Westchester county (see map nearby).

The Commission says tolls on the East River bridges should match those on the existing East River MTA's toll crossings while the Harlem River bridges toll should match the cost of a subway trip. They would generate a net $600m, the Commission says.

Toll collection would be "cashless" or all-electronic - by transponders and license plate cameras.

Governor David Paterson said today he supports the proposal.. Legislation will be needed to implement it, and its fate in the state legislature is uncertain.

The "Commission on Metropolitan Transportation Authority Financing" was led by Richard Ravitch, a longtime New York transportation official and is known as the Ravitch Report. It was apppointed by Governor Paterson June 10. MTA runs virtually all the subways, buses and commuter trains in New York City which lose billions of dolalrs and which also has control of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel (Toll) Authority's toll crossings which make about $1 billion in profits. 

As well as the new tolls the report also proposes a new regional payroll and self-employment tax called a Mobility Tax. It would apply in 12 counties comprising the MTA commuting service area at a rate of  one third of a percent of wages as reported in the current FICA tax forms. It would raise $1,500m/yr.

The revenues of the Mobility Tax would go to a newly created MTA Capital Finance Authority to ensure it was used for the capital program.  The Commission says that the MTA has been overborrowing relative to its revenues and will leave an operating budget with debt service roughly equivalent to depreciation allowance, while shifting the growing burden of new debt to the CFA.

The Commission said that unltimately there should be a "fully coordinated tolling strategy, incl;uding implementation of variable picing and one-way tolling" for traffic management efficiency. They think this would offer most of the benefits of the City's proposed central area congestion pricing without many of its complications and costs.

Other recommendations are for changes to the governance of the MTA:

- that chairmanship fo the MTA be altered to make the chairman a fulltlime job for a fixed term providing a degree of independence of elected officials

- that board members not be held over at the expiry of their terms agt the pleasure of the goverrnor but that new members be appointed

- all new members to be required to have expertise in one of more of transportation, business managdement, finance, labor relations or capital projects (engineers, sorry, the commission doesn't recognize any expertise there)
- greater use of design-build

The Commission recommends that state law be amended to allow the MTA board full power to increase fares and tolls on a bi-annual basis in line with a price index. Only larger increases would require notice and public hearings.

Major improvements in bus service are recommended to coincide with the new tolls.

The Commission suggests that if its recommendations are adopted by the legislature then the recent 23% fare and toll increase can be "significantly mitigated" (reduced). With the new Mobility Tax in place these increases could be 8% in July 2009.

COMMENTS: Tolling these bridges will be good for New York. They provide a valuable service for which it is only fair and proper to charge a toll. Most of them started as toll bridges. Opportunistic, short-sighted political decisions did away with those tolls, and it is high time tolls were reimposed.

The recommendation for one-way toll collection is a serious error. With all-electrionic tolling the cost savings will be trivial while it would degrade by 50% the ability of variable pricing to manage traffic. PANYNJ is expected to go from one-way to two-way tolling at the Hudson River and Staten Island crossings when it goes to all-electronic tolling.

We'd prefer to see the City DOT toll the bridges. The City has shown much more capacity to innovate and manage challenging projects than MTA Bridges & Tunnels, which spends most of its creative energy in industry fora explaining why it alone has to retain stop-to-pay, gated tolling.

It mistakenly treats variable pricing as a passing fad.

Besides some competition between MTAB&T and the City would be beneficial. We don't buy the notion of a "fully coordinated tolling strategy."

Dispersed control and competition provide the best coordination, not monopoly.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-12-04