New York plans congestion pricing

New York: Traversing Manhattan's narrow width at midday can be an excruciatingly slow experience.

There are the delivery trucks unloading their wares. There are the taxis discharging and picking up passengers. There are the double-parked limousines, the lane-hogging tourist buses and the occasional slow-moving garbage truck, all contributing to the city's legendary gridlock.

All that congestion is not just inconvenient, it is costly. According to business experts and others, traffic congestion costs New York about 50,000 jobs and $13 billion (Dh48 billion) annually in lost productivity.

That includes slow deliveries, gasoline wasted in idling vehicles, and the repairmen who can make only a couple of stops each day. And it doesn't even begin to count the costs to human lungs from breathing in all that pollution.

"The city's the largest it's ever been," said Kathryn Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a business consortium. "There's now a million vehicles a day coming in here, and the capacity to manage it's gone."

Alliance

To address the problem, New York's powerful business community has formed an unusual alliance with environmentalists, civic groups and commuters' associations in favour of a plan, called congestion pricing, borrowed from another traffic-clogged city, London. It would charge $8 for cars and $21 for trucks to enter Manhattan below 60th Street during peak hours. The money would be used to upgrade the city's clogged and in places crumbling mass-transit system.

"There is nothing you can do to improve air quality as quickly and dramatically as reducing vehicular traffic through congestion pricing," Wylde said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg embraced the plan on Earth Day last year and made it the signature proposal of his second-term ambition to turn New York into America's greenest and most efficient city by 2030.

Just a few days ago, it appeared that congestion pricing might be close to becoming a reality. The state's new governor, David A. Paterson, signalled his support after intense lobbying from Bloomberg during a meeting at City Hall. And last week, the mayor cajoled and strong-armed a reluctant City Council to support the plan on a rare 30 to 20 split vote.

But the plan now seems to have run into serious political gridlock in the state capital, Albany, where lawmakers must also give their consent.

Wall of opposition

Paterson, a Democrat, and state Senate leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican, have backed the idea. But it faces a wall of opposition in the Democratic-controlled state Assembly.

Objections include concerns that the fee amounts to a new tax on workers and worries that the dozens of cameras needed to enforce the new restrictions might violate New Yorkers' privacy rights.

In a meeting of Assembly Democrats last week, some members from New York City's outer boroughs expressed wariness that their constituents would be charged extra to drive into Manhattan. "Many of us believe it's a regressive tax on the working class," said Michael Benjamin, an Assembly member from the Bronx. "There's no exception for seniors driving into Midtown to see a specialist."

Polls have shown that a majority of New Yorkers favour congestion pricing, if the money raised from the fees is indeed invested in mass transit. In a recent Quinnipiac University poll, support for the plan was 70 per cent in Manhattan and 61 per cent in Queens. Backing was lower in Brooklyn, at 56 per cent, and in the Bronx, at 57 per cent.

Benjamin counts himself as green-friendly; he rides a bike, has travelled on most of the city's subway lines and said he didn't even have a driver's licence until 1990, when he was in his 30s. But when he heard that congestion pricing was being pushed because of the successful experiment in London, he said, "The last good thing to come out of Britain was radar."

"I wasn't trying to bash the British," Benjamin said. But, he added: "Britain has been rationing things since 1945. In America, we don't ration things."

In other words: Americans like to drive, and sometimes they need to drive into Midtown Manhattan. Congestion pricing is also in use in Stockholm and Singapore.

The Assembly leader, Democrat Sheldon Silver, will decide tomorrow whether to bring the question up for a vote. That would mark a federal deadline for the city to receive an extra $340 million in federal transportation funds, if congestion pricing becomes law by midnight.

Debate

Much of the debate has less to do with the merits of congestion pricing than with the intricacies of New York politics. Bloomberg won election as a Republican and last year became an independent, and he has constantly met opposition to his plans in the Democratic-controlled Assembly. "There's a good deal of resistance towards Mike Bloomberg in the legislature," said Gene Russianoff, senior attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit research group.

Benjamin and others said they were moved to oppose congestion pricing after learning that Bloomberg won support for the plan in the City Council with promises of pet projects and political aid in future campaigns - campaigns that could target Democrats in Albany.

Congestion pricing opponents also have a powerful ally in New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine. A Democrat who touts a strong environmental record, Corzine was angered when the City Council made a change to the plan that he felt would unfairly penalise New Jersey drivers.

Initially, New Jersey's "bridge and tunnel" commuters, as they are called here, would have been exempt from the new congestion fees, since they already pay $8 in tolls to come into Manhattan. But the council voted to add $3-4 to that toll, unless the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the bridges and tunnels, agrees to give New York City $1 billion to fund mass-transit projects.