Bridge and tunnel

[dennis_obell]

I was going to send this just to bradamant, but since everyone's complaining lately of a dearth of LJ posts, I figured I'd throw it up here. (Sorry, online_stalker, but this subject might not interest you.)

Anyway, the news from New York City authorities is that bridge and tunnel traffic is down across the board. Here's the part that interests me:

“Less Manhattan

Comments

Clearly congestion pricing should've been the topic of this post

[dennis_obell]

...if only because it guarantees impassioned posts from you and your roommate! (See above.)

At the risk of sounding naïve and assuming Bloomberg wants to do more than raise money, isn't part of the point of congestion pricing the environmental one: severely discouraging people from driving into the city? I mean, I totally buy your revenue analysis, but would a permit system have the same desired negative effect on drivers choosing to enter the city that congestion pricing would? I realize you're addressing the "politically palatable" point above-i.e., Bloomberg is now going to try to sell this not as a good-works project, but as a moneymaker. But the good works still matter, no?

As a carless person, I don't have a dog in this fight, and I could be persuaded that permit parking would do more to achieve the traffic reduction than congestion pricing would. But if the main advantage of the permits is added revenue, then I don't see why we shouldn't go for CP-that way, they get a somewhat smaller amount of revenue plus a clear reduction in traffic/pollution.

Re: Clearly congestion pricing should've been the topic of this post

[kdot]

Lowering emissions is good, obviously, but I don't really buy that as a primary motive here. Looking at the PlaNYC site, environmental benefits are mentioned as a side-effect but the main point, it's made clear, is managing traffic. (And ringing the city with spy cameras, as someone else suggested.)

This is one reason why congestion pricing in NYC seems so nonsensical to me. Midtown Manhattan, while bad at times, is never nearly as slow as London, thanks to having streets on a grid rather than the nonsensical mess you find in London.

There are statistics on the number of vehicles on the road in this city that are simply looking for parking. I will try to find them later, but it is a goodly number. Using myself as an example - at least twice this summer, I spent over an hour looking for a place to park my car for the day for the day, working my way up from Chelsea to the Columbia campus. It was a nightmare, for myself and those around me.

Driving while looking for a parking spot entails going slowly, stopping frequently, and generally impeding the flow of traffic and spewing out fumes while doing it. Residential parking would get the parking-trawlers off the streets by giving them a better shot at finding a spot within their neighborhoods, and would let the legitimate traffic - people trying to get from A to B - move that much faster.

Knowing that there's a smaller number of on-street spots available for their use would probably discourage some people from driving in to Manhattan, as competition for the non-resident spots increased. The rest would hopefully suck it up and pay to put their cars in a garage. Both would reduce traffic and emissions.

Re: Clearly congestion pricing should've been the topic of this post

[bradamant]

The guy who wrote Traffic talks about this quite a bit. A fairly huge amount of traffic is just people driving around looking for parking--whether you're looking at traffic from the point of view of congestion OR emissions. One of the people he interviews suggests that the solution is to price parking such that only 80% of spots are filled at a time. That way people can reliably find a spot without driving around forever. The thing is, I imagine that the price you'd have to demand to achieve that in Manhattan would be quite high--and not even across all the neighborhoods. (How much would Jerseyites in SUVs pay in Soho on a Saturday??) And isn't that just as regressive a tax on the middle class as congestion pricing supposedly is?

Re: Clearly congestion pricing should've been the topic of this post

[kdot]

I haven't read Traffic though it looks like I should put it on my list.

The crowding on unmetered blocks in the city gets worse as they hike the rates at parking meters - the meters closest to my apartment now charge $4/hour. There's also a huge incentive to find an unmetered spot so you don't have to keep running back to feed the meter every 60 minutes.

The problem is that they can't really meter every spot in the city - it would be extremely expensive to install a muni-meter on every block, and would force anyone with a job to park in a lot, unless you were able to pay for several days' worth of on-street parking at a time. A $200 annual parking permit and 25% of spots on residential blocks reserved for residents would function a lot like this expensive-meter plan, I'd argue. As far as it being a regressive tax, parking in an off-street lot is north of $400 a month most places now. A permit - at whatever price - looks like a steal in comparison.