With one dissenting vote on the 17-member MTA board (although there are two vacancies), congestion pricing cleared its last New York approval yesterday and is scheduled for a June start to collect $15 for vehicles driving south of 60th St. into Midtown and Downtown. Bravo and bring it on.
While the date of June 15 has been offered by the agency in federal court during the various nuisance lawsuits, we are proposing that the tolling begin on June 21, which is the 110th birthday of the man who started it all, Nobel laureate and Columbia economics Prof. Bill Vickrey.
Vickrey’s name wasn’t mentioned once yesterday as MTA leadership celebrated five years since the Legislature (and another man whose name is not to be said, Andrew Cuomo) made it the law of the state.
Yes, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, to his great credit, tried to implement the program, which came close, passing the City Council and state Senate only to be blocked single handedly by the criminal in charge of the Assembly, Speaker Shelly Silver, who died in prison like Boss Tweed, a deservedly convicted federal felon.
Before Bloomberg were Mayors David Dinkins and Ed Koch, who both wanted to toll the four East River bridges. And before them was another mayor, John Lindsay, who pushed the same idea when he first ran in 1965. But before all of them was Vickrey.
Following his earlier work on the structure of the subway fare, Vickrey proposed drivers be charged for access to shared public roadways in 1959, when he suggested Congress contend with the District of Columbia’s traffic problem by using electronically assessed fees. That was decades before E-ZPass was invented. Vickrey fleshed it out in his 1969 journal paper, “Congestion Theory and Transport Investment,” published in the American Economic Review.
Vickrey died in 1996, just days after getting that call from Stockholm that he had a Nobel. Starting the toll on his birthday would be more than fitting.
That is, if the courts don’t cause a delay. Those suing, including the otherwise generally wise governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, are not really complaining about more pollution or more traffic. They’re just cheapskates who simply don’t want to pay the new fee.
Their cases against congestion pricing, all five of them, center on the laughably foolish argument that the Federal Highway Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, didn’t require enough study of the plan. Not enough study? The MTA conducted an environmental assessment for the FWHA that runs 4,000 pages. There were more than 50 public meetings that generated 25,000 comments.
They all wanted exemptions, but in order to work as envisioned, discouraging driving and generating revenue for transit, there need to be as few exemptions as possible.
While 90% of people come into Midtown and Downtown by transit, some don’t have good transit from their areas. So in those cases, drive to a bus, commuter rail or subway connection, there are lots of them in all five boroughs, on Long Island to the east, in New Jersey on the west and in Westchester and points north.
Don’t drive into Midtown and Downtown. It’s nuts. We will say it again: Don’t drive into Midtown and Downtown. Keep your polluting, traffic-snarling, crash-causing cars out of the most crowded place in the United States.