What do low Tappan Zee Bridge tolls mean for you?

• Do you drive to work across the bridge? Hooray! Your commute from your house in Rockland with the big yard to the office park in Westchester will continue to be affordable … for you, at least.
• Do you drive across the bridge for shopping or socializing, or to get to a vacation home? Woo hoo! You will still be able to spend long hours driving to and from the mall parking lot. Enjoy your time off!
• Do you drive a truck across the bridge? All right! Your business will continue to make a profit, until gas prices get too high.
• Do you sell things in a mall or strip mall in Westchester or Rockland? Yowza! Your parking lots will still be full, and you may even recoup your investment.
• Are you a politician or bureaucrat representing the area? Yippee! Pandering opportunities galore!
• Do you take buses across the bridge, or in Westchester or Rockland? Not so good. People will continue to drive and to pressure their politicians for more roads and parking. Transit agencies will keep struggling for riders and subsidies.
• Do you sell things in a walkable village in Westchester or Rockland? Sorry! The downtown resurgence you bet on is still a long way off. Hope you've got plenty of seed money to burn through before your gastropub gets out of the red!
• Do you walk in Westchester or Rockland? Yeah, welp. The sidewalks, trails and density you need will continue to be neglected by elites who drive everywhere.
• Do you breathe in Westchester or Rockland? Whoops! Why don't you take a nice drive up to New Paltz and enjoy the fresh air up there?
• Do you take trains or buses in New York State? Oh, gee, sorry! We have no money for new transit. And look at that, we have no money to maintain the subways and buses you currently use. Wonder where all that money went?
• Do you pay taxes in New York State? Wow! Those services you used to get for your tax dollars, like schools and low college tuition? Sorry to tell you, but the state is broke! We just can't afford luxuries like that any more. It's a new era!

The defeat of the power broker

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is one of the all-time classics of urbanism, assigned in many courses and read even by casual students of history. Caro intended his biography of Robert Moses to be an examination of the nature of political power, and how powerful people rise and fall, as evidenced by the title and by his follow-up multi-volume study of Lyndon Johnson.

What is surprising to me is how often people pair Moses with Jane Jacobs and talk about their conflicts over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. You could even get the impression, from the way that some people tell it, that it was Jacobs who brought Moses down. It’s true that Moses and Jacobs showed a striking clash of ideologies and worldviews, but Caro spends very little time on Jacobs, focusing instead on the conflicts that Moses had with the mayors (LaGuardia, Wagner) and governors (Smith, Roosevelt) that he nominally served.

Chase Manhattan Plaza. Photo: Ken Lund / Flickr

I am also surprised by how few people got through The Power Broker with any understanding of how Moses was eventually overthrown. I found that to be one of the most captivating parts of the book, like the way the Ring of Power met its fate in Mount Doom. I was in awe once when I got to visit the Chase Bondholder Services Office (not in the same location, but still). And yet I have not heard anyone else mention that part of the story.

I think the main reason nobody talks about how Moses fell from power is that nobody wants to think about it, and that’s because it’s not fair. Moses was not brought down by Jane Jacobs – although she may have helped to finish him off. He was not destroyed by a hobbit, or even a Gollum.

The people who were finally able to take away Moses’s source of power – his Ring, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority – were two of the most powerful people in the country. Heirs to a multi-million dollar oil fortune, David and Nelson Rockefeller controlled, respectively, one of the largest banks in the country and one of the wealthiest states. Nelson would go on to be Vice President a few years later. And yet, neither brother could have defeated Moses by himself: it was only by combining their powers and working together that they were able to create the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and swallow Moses’s TBTA.

On the face of it, this is not a very inspiring story. Want to defeat a despotic, unelected, arrogant man who is destroying your cities? Sorry, you can’t do it yourself. You have to trust in two plutocrats, one elected, one not, each responsible for his own Corbusian excesses (Chase Manhattan Plaza and Empire State Plaza, respectively). You have to trust them to be strong enough to make it really work (instead of, say, leaving a bunch of free alternatives to the bridges and tunnels funding the subway system), and not to fuck it up (by, say, leaving its funding at the mercy of the notoriously corrupt and undemocratic New York State Legislature). It’s less like Frodo and Gollum, and more like Eärendil calling in the Valar, if the Valar were a bunch of Republican bankers.

But as I think about it, it's not like there was even an Eärendil. From what I can tell, the Rockefellers never talked to a single subway rider, or anyone whose home or business was displaced by their projects or those of Moses. As Bob Fitch explains it in The Assassination of New York (which everyone should read; you can get a taste from this Doug Henwood tribute), the Rockefellers were mainly motivated by their failing real estate investments in the West Side (particularly Rockefeller Center). Getting the Chrystie Street Connection and the Sixth Avenue express tunnels built was a priority, at least for David, so he needed to see the subway capital plan funded for a few years minimum.

I think that’s the true lesson of The Power Broker: sometimes the thing that gets rid of one tyrant is just another tyrant. Sometimes the interests of the new tyrant align with your own enough that you can get something decent going. Sometimes the new power is not a single tyrant but a junta, and its power is diluted by that fact, making it slightly less dangerous. This leaves an opening for smaller powers to come in and get a piece of the action, further diluting the power. It ain't democracy and it ain't fair, but it's better than having Bob Moses screwing everything up.

Any way you slice it, it's not very inspiring for those of us who aren't Rockefellers. And that's why people prefer to talk about Jane Jacobs's minor victory over Moses.

The return of the mixed-traffic streetcar

I wrote before that mixed-traffic streetcars no longer make sense in this country, because whenever a corridor has enough walkable destinations to support the service, it attracts too many private cars. Those cars slow down the streetcar so much that it no longer provides enough value to draw passengers. There is a way to make them work, however: drive the cars away.

Trolleys in Times Square, 1920s. AP via NPR.

Drivers are currently drawn to Manhattan under today's heavy subsidy levels, but if the subsidies are decreased it will attract less drivers. Cordon pricing is the most obvious way to do this, but it could also be accomplished with high enough prices on parking or fuel.

Imagine Manhattan one day in the Future. As it did a century ago, a streetcar again connects Greenwich Village with Soho, Chinatown, Tribeca and the Financial District along Wooster Street and University Place. It runs smoothly and quickly, even at the height of rush hour or the hottest club time on Saturday night. The reason is that, thanks a combination of bridge tolls, parking pricing and ten dollar a gallon gas, nobody wants to be driving. There are cars on the streets, but never enough to slow down the trolley.

That's the kind of environment where a mixed-traffic streetcar can work. Without something to keep private cars out of the way, streetcars are just buses with a smoother ride.

Getting into Manhattan

I've got a whole bunch of ideas for subway and bus expansions in the boroughs, commuter rail and bus expansions in the suburbs, and even intercity rail and bus connections. They all wash up against one big problem: the capacity of crossings into and out of Manhattan is almost maxed out at peak commuting times, the few big expansions in the works are proceeding slowly, and there doesn't seem to be political will to do much more.

Passenger capacity estimates on the East River Bridges. US DOT, updated by threestationsquare.

Of the subways that cross the East River and the PATH trains that cross the Hudson, almost all the bridges and tunnels are packed with trains at rush hour, and those trains packed with passengers. The one exception is the Williamsburg Bridge, which is constrained by technical challenges, by the depopulation of South Side Williamsburg, Bushwick and East New York, by zoning restrictions on building, and by the fact that the J and Z trains only go to lower Manhattan. Since the MTA rerouted the M train to Midtown, ridership has gone up, and so have rents in Ridgewood, but that is the only line that is not at full capacity.

The only new subway crossing that has been given serious consideration recently, the Subway to Secaucus, has been stuck on a shelf somewhere.

MTA Capital Construction has installed an improved signalling system (CBTC) on the L line, which has allowed them to run more trains through the Fourteenth Street Tunnel. This capacity has been rapidly filled by an increase in ridership. They are rolling out CBTC to other lines, as the Port Authority is doing with the PATH trains, but funding limitations have stretched the rollout over years. As with the L train, the increased capacity is not expected to be enough to handle an additional branch on any line, only to allow neighborhoods near the existing branches to add population and to give some breathing room to passengers.

With commuter rail, the constraints are the platforms at Penn Station and the Park Avenue Tunnel. Alon Levy pointed out years ago that the constraints at Penn Station are not technical, but due to the three government-run commuter rail agencies' insistence on terminating all trains there, and our politicians' inability to force them to implement through-running arrangements.

For years the MTA has been pouring billions of dollars into East Side Access, but that will not be finished until 2023 at the earliest. The ARC Tunnel from New Jersey and its successor, the Gateway Tunnel, are being blocked by Governor Christie, who has used ARC funding to pay for road expansions.

Bus capacity into Manhattan is similarly constrained. Buses crossing from New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel can terminate at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but that is also full. Proposals to build garages with public funds have faltered, and no private company seems interested in building a garage or terminal. The Port Authority is renovating the George Washington Bridge terminal, but that is too far north, and connects to a downtown A train that is also very crowded.

Any buses that can't fit into the Port Authority use city streets to pick up and drop off, as do buses from the other crossings. A backlash from NIMBYs, mostly drivers and business owners but aided by misguided pedestrian advocates, has put a lid on any expansion of curbside bus access.

As with commuter trains, there is a potential for through-running with buses along 34th or 42nd streets or Church Street that could relieve some of these constraints, but the bus operators have shown little interest, and political leaders have been too busy pandering to the backlash.

One reason bus operators may be uninterested in through-running or building terminals or garages is that there are also capacity constraints for buses on the bridges and tunnels. Anyone who's tried to take the Q32 into Manhattan in the morning knows what happens to bus travel times when a bridge is free for any vehicle. Passengers on the inbound QM5 express bus know that things run a little smoother when there is a toll and a bus lane, and people who have ridden the Red and Tan number 20 know that congestion pricing makes it even better. But even those passengers say that the bus lanes are too short, and those crossings with lanes and tolls are at capacity as well.

So that's the dismal state of getting commuters to Manhattan. What should we do about it? I'll talk about that in future posts.

Expensive commutes through the XBL

The transit commuting tax benefit parity is expiring tomorrow, and Tri-State has a list of 24 "transit systems" where a monthly ticket can cost more than $130. In addition to the publicly owned transit operators they name, there are several private ones here in the New York area:

Company	2012 trips	Commuter ticket	Most expensive	Max cost	Least expensive	Min cost
New York Trailways	528,550	10-trip x4	Kingston	$ 765.00	New Paltz	$ 660.00
Martz	1,004,651	44-trip	Wilkes-Barre	637.25	Panther Valley	514.00
Carl R. Bieber Tourways (PDF)	Unreported	40-trip	Kutztown	617.00	Hellertown	509.00
Trans-Bridge Lines	1,237,309	40-trip	Allentown	552.00	MetLife	404.50
Lakeland Bus	1,613,368	10-trip x4	Andover	467.60	Montville	340.00
Short Line (Stagecoach)	4,314,784	40-trip	Monticello	460.90	Paramus	225.95
Academy Lines	4,121,596	Monthly	Forked River	445.00	Sayreville	305.00
Suburban Transit (Stagecoach)	2,810,885	Monthly	Plainsboro	435.00	East Brunswick	320.00
Community Coach (Stagecoach)	587,935	10-trip x4	Morristown	338.40	Meadowlands	200.00
Red and Tan Lines (Stagecoach)	2,908,274	20-trip x2	Tomkins Cove	286.20	North Bergen	115.60
DeCamp	1,977,041	40-trip	West Caldwell	267.00	Rutherford	174.00

While many of these are owned by Stagecoach, with profits presumably flowing to Scotland, some of the other companies like DeCamp and New York Trailways are locally owned. Even if the owners take some personal profit from the transit benefit, they have been spending a lot of it here in the Tri-State area.

It's important to point out here that a large number of these "commuters" work from home at least a day or two a week. Many are small business owners, including artists and craftspeople, who travel into the city a few days a week to sell their goods.

Will these people still spend over $400 a month to sit on a bus on the Garden State Parkway or Route 80 for an hour and a half each way? Probably. They get to live in the Catskills or on the Jersey Shore and work in Manhattan.

And yes, the XBL and congestion pricing make it more worthwhile for them to sit on a bus than to drive in to the city.

The difference a lane (or toll) makes

Stephen Smith has a great piece in the Observer showing how the Bloomberg administration has adapted its development strategy to avoid clashing with long-term residents, many of whom live near subway stations. The resulting disconnect between housing capacity and transit has encouraged high-rise towers near the Williamsburg waterfront, far from the overcrowded Bedford Avenue L station and even further from the Marcy Avenue J/M/Z station.

In the long term, NIMBY fears of "overdevelopment" are primarily based on fears of competition for scarce car space. To overcome it, we need to allow developers to build without encouraging people to keep cars, and we need to as convince the long-term residents that parking spillover is not as likely as they think, especially now when everyone is driving less.

In the short term, many of these highrises are already built, and more are in the works, so we need to improve their transit access to keep their residents driving as little as possible. Everyone wants to run ferries because hey, waterfront, but the ferries require large subsidies to compete with free bridges. It's hard to build subway stations right by the waterfront: the fabled South Fourth Street station is still five blocks from the river at Driggs Avenue. You could build an elevated subway or a streetcar, if you could convince people to build something that hasn't been built in this city in at least eighty years. You could also run buses.

Four years ago I mapped out some possible destinations that a Midtown Tunnel bus could get to from Penn Station in ten or fifteen minutes without traffic. The idea was that the tolls keep traffic from getting too congested in the Midtown Tunnel, and the 34th Street bus lane would give the buses priority. The way the 34th Street bus lanes have been executed leaves a lot to be desired, but the principle is sound.



What if we put an Exclusive Bus Lane on the Williamsburg Bridge and down Delancey and Chrystie/Forsyth streets to the Grand Street station? We could run the Nostrand Avenue Select Bus across it, and the Chinatown vans would be significantly faster.

But you could also run buses down Broadway to the waterfront. I agree with Jarrett Walker that loops are generally a bad idea, but Kent Avenue is now one-way, so you could have a South Kent Avenue loop going down to Flushing Avenue, and a North Kent loop going up to Greenpoint. In ten minutes (without traffic) from Grand Street in Manhattan, you could get to Morgan Avenue in East Williamsburg, either along the BQE or along Grand Street. You could go down Broadway to Flushing Avenue, or down Bedford and up Nostrand as far as Myrtle Avenue. And in fifteen minutes you could go further.



This is no longer serving existing high-rises, but rather improving service to long-established neighborhoods. That in turn could lead to people in those neighborhoods no longer thinking that cars are the only route out of poverty. But its usefulness lies in the dedicated lane for buses on the Wiliamsburg Bridge. That's what allows these buses to be competitive with driving.

The Pulaski Skyway, a different "freeway without a future"?

Earlier this year the Congress for the New Urbanism released a new version of its "Freeways without futures" list. I wholeheartedly agree that all twelve of the highways in question are disgusting blights and should be removed. I've seen the Claiborne Expressway, the Sheridan and the Alaskan Way up close, and I have a special loathing for I-81 in Syracuse and Route 34 in New Haven. But there are a few roads that I think deserve to be on the list but aren't.

Typical evening congestion, seven blocks north of the Holland Tunnel. Photo: Brooklyn Spoke / Instagram.

It's a bad thing when a highway cuts neighborhoods in half, like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, or cuts a neighborhood off from access to jobs and services, like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Red Hook, or cuts the waterfront off from meaningful recreational or commercial use, like the FDR Drive. Converting these highways to boulevards is a good thing, especially when the boulevards are designed to be walkable and livable. There are other criteria missing, though.

Think of a walkable urban area that's already well-served by transit. The streets are congested with cars for too many hours of the day. You don't need that many cars to bring customers to the businesses, and they're ruining the pedestrian experience. So why do you have a highway terminating there? That highway is basically pumping cars into an area that doesn't need them.

These highways may not be visibly blocking a cherished view or oppressing a street, but by aiming a firehose of cars into a compact urban area they are a major factor in the deterioration of walkable urban environments. When possible, they should either be torn down or turned over to transit.

The most obvious case is Congress Parkway in Chicago. It's six lanes of nasty urban traffic fed by an eight-lane highway. It doesn't need to be there, and it makes the South Loop feel oppressive. It should be narrowed and given sidewalks befitting a grand urban boulevard, from the Circle to the Lake. The District of Columbia is full of these; 12th Street NW is probably the worst. University Street in Montreal is not much fun, as I recall.

Here in the New York area, we have four highway tunnels and five highway bridges that empty directly into the streets of Manhattan. You could get rid of any of the highways (495, I-78, the BQE, the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, the Bruckner Expressway and the Major Deegan Expressway) and it would make a huge improvement.

It's hard to choose among these firehoses of cars, but one of the worst is the Holland Tunnel. This is because it combines two four-lane expressways, the Pulaski Skyway and the Newark Bay Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike, into a single stream. It's even more powerful in the other direction due to the Verrazano Toll Pump, sucking cars and trucks from all over Manhattan and Brooklyn through Chinatown, Soho and Greenwich Village.

The Pulaski Skyway. Photo: Jack E. Boucher, National Park Service, 1978.

Fortunately, we are coming upon a historic opportunity to turn down this firehose. One of the four-lane expressways that feed into the Holland Tunnel, the Pulaski Skyway, is nearing the end of its life. This expensive steel structure has contributed to the destruction of the sensitive Hackensack Meadowlands since 1932. Naturally, there is a plan to rebuild the structure, and lots of rehabilitation in the meantime. Remember the ARC Tunnel that Chris Christie killed? $1.8 billion of the money is paying for that rehabilitation.

Some people like the way the Skyway looks - from a distance, or from the inside of a moving car, at least. I admit that it has a certain beauty to it. But its function is destructive. If there were some way to turn it into a dedicated busway, that might be nice, but I don't get the impression it would work. If we like the look, let's keep a small piece of it up somewhere for posterity's sake, but don't hold people's lives hostage to aesthetics.

In sum, we're diverting more than a billion dollars from critical transit improvements to maintain a road that blasts 30,000 cars a day (yes, only cars) into one of the densest, most walkable business districts in the country. If this thing were towering over a neighborhood instead of a swamp, it would definitely be on the CNU's list. Is it any less deserving of a teardown because it only saturates the area with cars?

Can transit save the environment? Not without riders

The latest Eric Morris Freakonomics post, which I hate, got picked by Stephen Dubner for Marketplace Radio's weekly Freakonomics segment. Kai Ryssdal's interview, and whoever wrote the Marketplace headline, trashed Morris's carefully constructed pox-on-both-houses framing and turned it into a standard Tom Rubin muddle-headed transit advocates attack.

As I said last week, the funniest thing is that Morris's general thrust is actually the main point that I've been hammering at for years. That said, given his earlier writing, I'm not sure that Morris didn't want all along to write a muddle-headed transit advocates attack, but then ditched it for the pox-on-both-houses frame. If his point was really that we should have congestion pricing, he sure buried it. So here's the article Eric Morris should have written - or at least what I would have written.

A major reason for supporting transit expansion is that increased transit use will draw people out of their cars and thus reduce pollution and help save the environment. That part is true, but we have to be very careful how we do this, because transit expansion will not automatically lead to increased transit use and decreased car use.

Increasing transit service without increasing its use can even be counterproductive: today in the United States, the average bus trip requires more energy than the average car trip, because the average bus only has about ten passengers. If the energy powering transit comes from a dirty source, like coal or diesel, it can compound the problem. Environmental advocates not only need to get more transit, but they need to make sure people ride it.

The key to this is realizing that if transit is going to get people out of their cars, they have to choose it over driving. When people choose to make a habit out of taking the bus or the train, it's because it provides a greater value than driving. When people choose to live in a place with convenient transit access instead of choosing to buy a car, it's because they want that transit-oriented lifestyle. Instead of just building transit, environmental advocates need to make it a greater value and a more attractive lifestyle. Here are five ways we can do that:

1. Stop building roads that compete with transit systems. Last year a faithful reader wrote a post about disappointingly low ridership on seven new commuter rail lines. For each of these lines I was able to find a parallel road expansion that had been built at roughly the same time, increasing the value of driving and keeping people in their cars.

2. Give transit its own right-of-way. Transit systems that operate in mixed traffic - buses and streetcars, typically - have very little advantage over driving. When transit can get through a bottleneck quicker than private cars, it offers greater value. The highest-ridership bus systems in the country all make use of a single high-capacity queue-jumper, the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane.

3. Charge market prices for driving-related expenses. Those Lincoln Tunnel buses are all competing (and winning) against high tunnel tolls. There is no easy way to drive from New Jersey into Manhattan without paying the tolls. Similarly with heavily subsidized purchases of gas and parking. You'd be surprised at how much better the bus looks if you have to pay five dollars for an hour of parking.

4. Sunset your park-and-ride lots. Having people drive to the bus or train may bring down the "cost per new rider" numbers, but the longer people drive to transit, the more pollution they emit. They will also probably drive for most evening and weekend trips. It may be strategically appropriate to build a park-and-ride to get people riding the new line right away, but the plan should be to get rid of the park-and-rides as soon as possible.

5. Legalize true transit-oriented development. The best way to keep people from driving to the station is to make it so that they can live near the station and walk to all their daily shopping needs. Sadly, in most of the country it is illegal to build an apartment building with a supermarket on the ground floor a block from a train station. We need to change that.

Of these five principles, Morris focused on number 3, charging market prices. That makes sense, since Freakonomics is mostly about prices, but at least three of the other factors are also Freakonomics-worthy. Number 1, keeping the road supply down, and number 4, keeping the parking supply down, are central to economic theory. Market prices tend to be lower when supply is higher. Number 5, legalize transit-oriented development, fits with Steven Levitt's libertarian leanings. Number 2, giving transit its own right-of-way, is the only one that requires substantial state intervention.

The main reason you didn't see these factors on Freakonomics, I'm guessing, is because they're not condescending or snarky enough for them. Sorry, guys.

A grand bargain for walkable streets

As I wrote before, after the failure of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing campaign in 2008, advocates realized that the plan had failed to capture the interest of drivers. "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz then came up with a plan that offered "something for the drivers" to overcome their resistance. The problem is that it offers them too much. The proposed toll reductions and highway widenings would encourage a huge amount of driving, offsetting a large percentage of the reduction in driving encouraged by the added tolls and bus service.

The key failing, which I've also observed in other politicians who claim to be pro transit, is the practice of dividing the world into drivers, transit riders, cyclists and pedestrians, with the assumption that there is never any overlap or change among these categories, and that all people care about is their own transportation. This may be a good simplifying assumption to start with, but when it leads you to disasters like widening the Van Wyck, it's time to step back and revisit your assumptions.

So let's go back to what we actually know: that a significant segment of the opposition to congestion pricing came from people who currently drive. These people will probably not be driving much longer, however. I've been to the congestion pricing hearings. Most of the active opponents are over fifty. In thirty years, most of them will be dead, and many of those who are still alive will be too infirm to drive.

There are of course plenty of people under fifty who love driving, hate paying for transit, and fear that losing their status as drivers will infantilize them and drive all the chicks away. But they're a much smaller proportion of younger generations than they are among the Baby Boomers, and even the diehard motorists will think twice about driving when gas gets up over ten dollars a gallon. We shouldn't be building big highways for them.

The question becomes, then, how do we structure it so that "we" don't wind up taking "their" money? What can we do for the people who are currently drivers, and don't see any benefit to decreased Midtown congestion or increased transit funding? Something along the lines of Donald Shoup's parking benefit districts?

Many streets in Riverdale have no sidewalks. Photo: *Bitch Cakes* / Flickr.

I have one idea. Let's take the sidewalks off their hands.

Although the City Department of Transportation oversees sidewalk maintenance, they report that 99% of the 12,750 miles of the city's sidewalks are the responsibility of whoever owns the adjacent property. The only thing the DOT has to do is send out inspectors and then fine the property owners whose sidewalks aren't up to standards. In practice, they have a program where they repair the sidewalk themselves and send the owner the bill.

From a pedestrian's point of view, that sucks. It means that the sidewalks quality is inconsistent from one property to the next. The city is constantly tempted to cut the sidewalk inspection budget, which provides a huge incentive for the property owners to skimp on sidewalk maintenance and hope that the inspector won't notice. When the inspectors do their job the property owners complain, hence the endless stream of kvetching to elected officials, community boards and the media in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

It actually doesn't make sense for the property owners to be responsible for maintaining sidewalks. Most of the sidewalks are on city-owned right-of-way, not private property. The city sets strict standards that leave property owners hardly any room for self-expression. While the city DOT can take advantage of economies of scale to save money, small property owners have to pay regular market rate. On the few streets that are missing sidewalks, it is politically difficult for the DOT to force property owners to pay to build them.

Of course, it costs money to maintain all those sidewalks. According to this article, it cost the City of Los Angeles $172,727 to replace a mile of sidewalk. Sidewalk only needs to be replaced at most every ten years, for $17,273 per mile per year, or $220 million. This is a small portion of the $1.4 billion that Gridlock Sam's plan would raise in bridge tolls, leaving almost $1.2 billion for other projects. If enough of "the drivers" are satisfied with this arrangement, then we don't have to widen the Belt Parkway, and we can put all that money into transit projects.

Would "the drivers" like this? The Census website isn't cooperating with me, but I'm pretty sure that most drivers in Brooklyn and Queens own their homes, and a lot of those, especially the vocal ones who show up at meetings and call their city council members, live in single-family or two-family houses. For them, sidewalk maintenance is a big headache that they don't need.

The best part, of course, is that this benefit will accrue to "the drivers" even if they never drive again. Even if they sell their homes, they will still have well-maintained sidewalks to walk on. And so will the rest of us.

How to stop them taking our money

Okay, so what do you think all these things have in common?

1. Bridge tolls
2. Parking meters
3. Traffic tickets
4. Gas taxes
5. Wealth taxes

That's right, they're taxes, fines and fees that people resent paying to the government. And sometimes politicians and bureaucrats have noticed that they can get a substantial revenue stream from these taxes, fines and fees. They've gone beyond simply collecting these taxes, fines and fees and resorted to chasing them, by overzealous enforcement, imposing unnecessary fees and keeping taxes too high. Worse still, many people accuse government officials of chasing revenue in this way, whether or not they're actually doing it.

Now, what do these things have in common?

1. Bridge tolls
2. Parking meters
3. Gas taxes
4. Cigarette taxes
5. Alcohol taxes

You got it, they're Pigovian taxes, named after the English economist Arthur Pigou, who argued that when an activity creates a "negative externality" - a cost to society beyond its cost to the individual - a tax can discourage people from engaging in that activity. Tax cigarettes, and the number of people who smoke goes down.

The thing about Pigovian taxes is that people are already prone to resent them. They want to smoke, or drink, or drive over bridges, and here the government is slapping a tax on it. Now suppose that you have a Pigovian tax that the government also happens to get lots of revenue from. Well, first of all it's an incentive for the bureaucrats and politicians to discourage people from stopping the activity. Why would you want to stop people from driving over your bridge, if you'd lose that revenue and maybe default on your bridge bonds?

Secondly, relying on Pigovian taxes for revenue is a bad idea because it creates the suspicion that the government is chasing revenue. That provides the people who already resent the tax with an ready-made scrap of populism to cloak their selfish resentment in.

Now what do all the following have in common?

1. Buses
2. Sidewalks
3. Public schools
4. Bike lanes
5. Trains

Yup, they're things that the government usually funds with the taxes, fines and fees listed above. Critically, of the people who pay the taxes, fines and fees above, many don't see these things as being for them.

So imagine I'm a car owner. I park my car at the curb, or in a municipal lot. I see my parking fee (me!) get collected by the government (them!) to spend on buses (them!). The source of the money is separated from control over the money and benefit from it. Who wouldn't resent that?

Of course I'm not the first to observe this. Matt Yglesias has been talking about it for years, as I wrote in 2010. Yesterday he had a particularly apt critique of a plan by Bill deBlasio to tax the wealthy to fund school improvements. Donald Shoup has long argued that his Pigovian parking fees should be returned to the parkers in the form of "parking benefit districts." On Wednesday, Stephen Smith argued on Twitter that allocating toll funds to transit leads to overspending. "Toll money is unearned, economically or politically, and thus is ill spent. Easy come, easy go."

So what's the solution? Something along the lines of Shoup's parking benefit districts. Yglesias writes, "We'd start out with things like congestion fees and carbon taxes that serve non-revenue policy goals but do raise money. Then we'd add on some land taxes and VATs and such to fun public services. Once that's squared away, you can do redistribution with a progressive payroll tax, a small wealth tax, whatever."

The point is to get it from "They're taking my money and giving it to those people" to "We're getting our money back in a form we can use." The trick with Pigovian taxes is to give it back to people in a form that doesn't further encourage that negative externality. You don't want to use parking fees to build more garages. You want to think, "What did the people park here for?" and use it to fund the things they like - ideally an alternative to parking there that they will find acceptable.

This brings me back to the congestion pricing disaster. People resented congestion pricing because it felt like "them taking our money and giving it to those people." Gridlock Sam is thinking along these lines with his something for the drivers, but by building more highways he gets it drastically wrong. Bridge toll money needs to go into something that the drivers will appreciate, but not driving.

Incidentally, the MTA payroll tax was a disaster despite being a broad-based tax just because it was so badly handled that it pissed everybody off, having to file a bunch of forms just to pay thirty dollars a year. I'm sure it was designed that way from the beginning.

Where to put more buses

Recently I raised the question of what it would take to get car and plane travel on the Northeast Corridor down below 24 million trips a year, which is fourteen percent of the current total. Some commenters, notably Alon Levy, argued that it could be done by increasing capacity on current Amtrak trains particularly by adding more cars and improving the signaling system. A new tunnel under the Hudson would be a big help, and this week Senator Schumer made the case for funding preliminary investments in the next budget.

Boarding a Bolt Bus at Newark Penn Station. Photo: Polina R / Wanderu

In a follow-up post I argued that while we should definitely be pushing increases in rail capacity, we shouldn't ignore the fact that most of the recent increase in Northeast Corridor transit ridership has been by bus, notably using practices imported from China and Scotland. We definitely shouldn't take the simplistic approach of abandoning train advocacy and "loving the bus, but we should ask ourselves how much bang for the buck we get per hour of advocacy on trains as compared to buses. At this point it looks like we have the advocacy resources available to work on both.

So how can we get more buses on the Northeast Corridor? Well, the two big capacity constraints here in New York are the city streets and the bus terminals. The Port Authority Bus Terminal is full, and the only way that Bolt, Megabus and the Chinatown buses have been able to run more buses is by picking up passengers at the curb. Now that's being squashed.

I've talked quite a bit about frequent service in local transit, following some of Jarrett Walker's excellent posts, and building on the assumption that a train or bus line that comes reliably within ten minutes gives you "freedom" to not worry about the schedule. For intercity buses, the time frame is a little longer, given how long it takes to get a ticket, get your meals and snacks, get on line and board the bus. If there are buses coming every half hour, with enough seats for everyone who wants one, most people would be satisfied.

As I wrote back in 2008, once you're providing satisfactory service, the thing to do is to pick up somewhere else. The Port Authority Bus Terminal is convenient for people who live along the Eighth Avenue line or in Hudson County. It's kind of convenient for people who live a short distance from Times Square, but after thirty-five years I'm really coming to loathe that one-block tunnel.
Chinatown is convenient for people who live there, and for people who live near one of the Chinatown vans. It's also relatively convenient for the Sixth Avenue and Centre Street trains, but not for any of the Broadway or Lexington Avenue lines. In 2008 Megabus and Bolt Bus started picking up at Penn Station, and that was convenient for LIRR and New Jersey Transit riders. Peter Pan Bus Company, one of the co-owners of Bolt, approached Manhattan Community Board 6 about setting up a bus stop on Lexington Avenue across from Bloomingdale's, but were met with resistance.

In contrast, the George Washington Bridge bus station has been underutilized, and I think that's because it's not very convenient to get to. The tunnel from the subway is nicer, but that subway station is only served by the A train. To get to the terminal from the #1 train, you need to walk several blocks through the crowded streets of Washington Heights.

In the comments to my last post, Alon Levy wrote, "I'm implicitly assuming a distribution of New York-area stops that includes a variety of major destinations and origin clusters: Midtown, Chinatown, Fort Lee, Newark, White Plains, and so on. The problem with this is that whatever you do, the buses slow down dramatically once they need to use city streets. The more distributed the destinations are, the worse this problem is. Want to travel from the south to Flushing? Enjoy your hour-long slog through Manhattan and western Queens traffic. Really, any destination in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island is a nightmare. From Boston, Jersey is also a nightmare."

I don't think Jersey is a nightmare from Boston, particularly Fort Lee and Secaucus, because many of the buses that go from Manhattan to Boston actually travel through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey before crossing the George Washington Bridge, passing right through Fort Lee and Secaucus. White Plains, Flushing and Parkchester are are a shorter drive from Boston than Manhattan is.

On Twitter, John Morris pointed out that Bolt Bus already serves Newark Penn Station, a major train and bus hub. I discovered that they also have a stop in Soho just outside the Holland Tunnel. Megabus also serves the major New Jersey Transit transfer station in Secaucus. White Plains has long had intercity bus service through Greyhound, Shortline and Trailways.

The obvious locations for additional bus stops are close to major transit stations and highway offramps. My top nominees are Flushing, Jamaica, Jackson Heights, Parkchester, Fort Lee, Williamsburg (Lorimer Street), Elmhurst (Woodhaven Boulevard), Sunset Park (36th Street) and Bay Ridge (59th Street). I'm frankly puzzled that Chinatown bus companies aren't already running intercity buses from Sunset Park, Elmhurst and Flushing, but I've seen no evidence.

What can you do to make these bus stops more likely? Write to the DOT and the bus companies to suggest them. Lobby for bus lanes on the BQE and the LIE to speed the buses out of the city. Tolls on the BQE, the Cross-Bronx, the Major Deegan and the Bruckner Expressway would make room for buses to go faster.

Queue myopia

Benjamen Walker has a new radio documentary out for the BBC (MP3), all about waiting on line. It's definitely worth a listen. I especially appreciated the distinction between "serpentine" first-come first-served queues of the kind you get at banks and airports, and separate queues of the kind you get at most supermarkets. It always drove me nuts when Duane Reade drugstores had the separate queues, because I kept getting stuck with a tube of toothpaste behind someone with a cart full of stuff, watching people fly through the next register. I'm really glad they've gone serpentine.

I have to say that while I share Walker's concerns about inequality, I have a problem with the overall thrust of his thesis. I'm aware that people generally don't like being called "myopic," but I can't think of a better word. Let me know if you have suggestions.

Photo: Jason Getz / Atlanta Journal-Constitution

My problem with Walker's approach to "priority queueing" is the same as my frustration with Richard Brodsky's arguments against congestion pricing, or the Free Public Transit campaigns, or the typical liberal opposition to raising the price of just about anything. It's based on a limited view of its subject, in this case queuing, and focuses in on a local pattern of inequality while ignoring the wider inequalities that exist.

In all of Walker's examples, he presents an existing system without inequalities, and describes a "priority queuing" that allows people to get what they want faster by paying more. But in all those cases, if you zoom out you find that there was always inequality; it has just been realigned on a finer scale, or perhaps in a more blatant way.

Before I get into the exact examples, there's a clear inaccuracy in Walker's story, one that shouldn't have gotten past the fact-checkers. In a segment on the I-85 Express lanes in Atlanta, one of his sources claims that "they kicked the carpools out of the hot lanes, slowing down all the other lanes." Walker himself repeated this in an interview with Mike Pesca on the Brian Lehrer Show. It's not true, and it should be corrected.

It seemed funny that they would be called "hot lanes," since "HO/T" stands for "high occupancy/toll," meaning that you can use them if you either have high occupancy or pay a toll. And in fact the PeachPass FAQ says, "Three person carpools, vanpools, motorcycles, Alternative Fuel Vehicles, and transit will be able to use the HOT lanes without paying but are still required to register for a Peach Pass account prior to using the roadway." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution confirms, "Three person carpools, vanpools, motorcycles, Alternative Fuel Vehicles, and transit will be able to use the HOT lanes without paying but are still required to register for a Peach Pass account prior to using the roadway."

These "hot lanes" in Atlanta have been inserted into a system where the very rich have had helicopters for decades and chauffeurs for centuries, and the very poor have no cars. Airplanes have boarded first class passengers before coach for as long as I can remember. Was it ever any different? Maybe back when the middle class couldn't afford air travel at all. Atlanta, remember, is the place that gave Raquel Nelson a higher penalty than the driver of the car that hit her son.

Amusement parks? There are multiple amusement parks in a given area, and they probably already practice some kind of price discrimination. I'm sure that wealthy people who don't want to wait on line at Six Flags can pay for other options, like jet skis. And community colleges - people with more money can get an education at a private college without waiting. Before you could buy Gold Tech Support, the support was always better for IBM customers than for Emachines customers, and people who assembled their computers from parts got no support at all.

That's only scratching the surface. People with money have long been able to jump the queue in nightclubs and restaurants, and shop in stores with shorter lines. Just compare the lines in Brooks Brothers or Ann Taylor to those at Marshall's, Conway or Ross's. If you're prepared to bribe someone you can get all kinds of special treatment; in 2003, Esquire ran two great articles by Tom Chiarella on what you can get for a twenty dollar bill. Usually you don't even have to do anything as crass as bribery, you just have to look like you're going to spend some money.

In the end, I am just as disturbed as Walker at the idea that something can be so much easier for people who have more money. But I recognize that it's always been that way. These new high-tech "priority queues" are just a rearrangement of that inequality, not creating something new. There may be problems with that rearrangement, but you'd have to dig deeper to find them.

A superficial charm

The guest author for tonight's post is Robert Moses, Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. I have access to the New York Times archives, and tonight I was poking around and came up with this gem: a letter from Moses to Mayor Vincent Impellitteri, delivered March 9, 1952. I looked for another copy online, but didn't find one. Since it's a letter from one public official to another, conducting official business, I believe that it is freely reproducible. I have removed the headlines, which definitely seem like the Times house style, and are the only things that could constitute the intellectual property of that newspaper.

The main reason I'm sharing this with you is contained in the very first paragraph: the proposal that Impellitteri made to Moses. In his reaction, Moses was wrong in several respects, including his ideas that the construction of off-street parking would constitute a "solution of the parking problem" and that tolling the four "free" East River bridges would "serve no immediate purpose, at least so far as the current rapid transit deficit is concerned." He also shows his characteristic double standard where it is expected that the government will subsidize roads and parking, but transit is expected to pay its own way.

On the other hand, I think he's right that the demands for transit expansion, fare stability and high wages in the context of heavy public investment in the competing road network were as hard to reconcile then as they are now. Turning everything over to an autocrat is not a way to build long-term consensus.

You'll find the letter below. Bonus: I also found an interesting television interview with Moses, "the nation's foremost city planner," from 1953.

Moses and Impellitteri inaugurate the Central Park Carousel in 1951.
Photo: New York City Parks Department.

Dear Mr. Mayor:

You have asked us to comment promptly on a suggestion that a substantial part of the city's financial problem might be solved by expanding the functions of this authority to include all rapid transit, all private and publicly owned bus lines, all automobile parking (including parking meters and parking garages as well as overnight parking), the Staten Island ferries and all existing East River and Harlem River bridges on the assumption that these will become toll structures. The present rapid transit debt would continue to be serviced by the city, along with future improvements and extensions.

We pointed out in a report to Mayor O'Dwyer, dated Oct. 7, 1949, in answer to a request from him for a frank analysis of the proposal of former Corporation Counsel Paul Windels to establish a Transit Authority, that we did not believe such an authority, which it was proposed would finance improvements and extensions of the rapid transit system as distinguished from the existing debt and operate on a completely self-supporting basis, could sell bonds and remain solvent unless it had a free hand to raise fares at will, without public debate and popular approval. Our final conclusion was that the authority device was not the answer to the city transit problem at that time.

The present suggestion differs from the Windels proposal in other respects beside the fact that it does not involve the assumption of any responsibility by the authority for any construction work or for the deficit for the coming year. The suggestion also differs materially from Mr. Windels' proposal in that back of it is the idea, in our judgment without validity, that a huge new solvent and successful quasi-public structure can be established by placing the credit of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority back of rapid transit and related operations, adding tolls from presently free bridges, throwing in revenues from parking, and finally establishing substantially higher rapid transit and bus fares.

Let us analyze this plan in somewhat greater detail, and give the facts for our objections to it. To begin with, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority represents a consolidation of toll crossings and their approaches and related facilities, only recently refinanced on exceptionally favorable terms, which, among other things, will enable us to complete essential approaches, connections and extensions, the cost of which otherwise would fall on the city, state and Federal governments as part of the metropolitan arterial program.

The proposed Columbus Coliseum is the only project we are undertaking which is not directly connected with the main arterial toll system. This authority has established a first-rate reputation because its program is definite, limited and financially sound. We propose to keep it that way.

Under our recent financing, all our future revenues are pledged to our bondholders up to and including the year 1969. We cannot divert any of these revenues. We are trustees. No purpose would be served by discussing in this memorandum the possible use of revenues of this authority after 1969. Certainly this credit cannot be used now for other purposes. Moreover, it should be pointed out that long before our present debt is paid off, there will be other crossings and approaches required, which it will not be possible to finance in any other way than through the issuance of additional bonds.

It is only necessary to refer to the fact that the state has a highway program of over $3,000,000,000, more than a billion of which is urgently required, which it has been unable to finance, and that the toll principle for arterial construction has now been established by the state in connection with its Thruway system. Similarly, Federal highway funds have shrunk as costs of construction have risen. In any event we must assume that no margin of credit derived from our present toll structure can be used to rescue less successful enterprises in other fields.

Similarly, we do not support the idea that the rapid transit deficit can be reduced by parking revenues. Parking revenues from meters, parking fields and public garages, overnight parking, etc., are required for the construction of off-street facilities, and there would be no conceivable surplus available to sweeten the rapid transit situation. If the parking revenues are used otherwise than for off-street facilities, there will be no solution of the parking problem, which is if anything more serious at the moment than the rapid transit deficit.

The addition of the Staten Island ferries as a function of this authority would simply add another headache. Even if the fares were doubled there would still be a substantial deficit in the operation of these ferries.

The transfer of existing East River and Harlem River bridges to this authority as toll structures has a superficial charm which upon closer study is very quickly dissipated. Even if we assume that the public would go along with such a proposal, which we greatly doubt, and if it were in the merest of free movement of traffic to do so, which is also highly debatable, the cost, delays and inconveniences of this conversion would be enormous. We have estimated this cost at between $80,000,000 and $100,000,000. It would take at least three years to bring about. A recent careful estimate of the costs of converting to tolls the most heavily traveled of these bridges, namely the Queensboro Bridge, was $10,000,000. It would be necessary to provide additional ramps and levels, toll booths, and other facilities, and extensive land is required for these purposes. Twenty-year bonds would be needed for this purpose. Certainly this dubious and unpopular device would serve no immediate purpose, at least so far as the current rapid transit deficit is concerned. During the period of conversion and reconstruction of the free bridges, there would be many other additional expenses including the entire replacement of one bridge, namely that carrying Broadway over the Harlem Ship Canal.

It must be apparent that the real purpose back of any such expansion of the functions of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority is to raise rapid transit fares. This is the only device which will produce really substantial additional income. The statements which have been made regarding savings in operation through superior management by this Authority are no doubt flattering to its members, but cannot stand impartial analysis. We must bear in mind that it is both a state and city policy to establish a general forty-hour week, to grant increases in pay to meet the increased cost of living, and also to provide new and better facilities especially at rush hours.

The expenditures required for the new Second Avenue railroad and the other extensions of the agreed city program in the several boroughs, which will cost at least $550,000,000 not including rolling stock, will not produce substantially higher net revenues, no matter what is the basic fare. In other words, there will not be proportionately more riders as the result of these improvements, although riders will travel much more comfortably and not under present inhumanly overcrowded conditions. To put it another way, this expansion will represent a redistribution of present riders rather than large additions to the total.

No doubt economies can be made in the operation of the rapid transit system through better, tougher and more businesslike administration, but these economies will be relatively small and will not materially change a picture involving a $70,000,000 deficit for the year 1952-53. We must add to this figure also an additional $10,000,000 loss if the private bus lines are put under public operation. There must also be under prudent management a depreciation fund to keep equipment up to date and make normal replacement in the system, totaling some $40,000,000. Finally we must add in the $3,000,000 from ferry operation, which brings the grand total of present deficiency up to $123,000,000. We figure that to make up this deficit would require a subway fare of 17½ cents and bus fare of 17½ cents with no combination rides. At the same time this authority would be faced with the same clamor for extension of rapid transit and bus lines (whether or not they were economically sound) as is the present Board of Transportation.

It must be quite obvious, aside from the many political implications, that the determination of any such large increase in fare is one of policy to be decided directly by the people of the City of New York, and not one which can be brought about by the device of expanding the functions and responsibilities of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, even assuming that its present members could be induced to be parties to any such arrangement.

As to more economical operation, there are no figures available, nor has there been an study made, which shows just what could be accomplished. The authority would have to deal with the same Civil Service rules and regulations and Civil Service employes as does the Board of Transportation. The authority would be faced with the same demands from the same unions as is the Board of Transportation, some of which we pointed out in our last report must, as a matter of simple justice, be granted.

It is therefore our conclusion that the suggested expansion of the functions of this authority is unsound and that other more practical, more direct and more immediate means must be found to solve the city's present financial problem.

Very truly yours,

Robert Moses, chairman,
George V. McLaughlin,
William J. Tracy.

Escaping the Tappan Zee bridge toll death spiral

In January, Charlie Komanoff warned of a "Tappan Zee Death Spiral," similar to what happened to passenger rail in the middle of the twentieth century. Without taxpayer money, Charlie doesn't see a way to pay for a $5 billion bridge that doesn't involve tolls at least as high as $9 and more likely $16.

Charlie is not the first person to note this paradox. As a Merrill Lynch-led consulting team reported to the State in 2009, with any toll increase, some drivers will choose to take transit to work instead, or to work somewhere else, or both. If the tolls go over $13, Charlie predicts that so many people will avoid driving over the bridge that total revenue will not be enough to pay for bridge maintenance plus loan repayments. If the State raises the tolls again to cover those payments, that will drive more people away, which will bring total revenues down further, until the state is forced to default on its loans.

As I've written before, in any rational universe you actually want people to work closer to home and take transit more. You definitely don't want to put the state in the position of being more dependent on ever-increasing volumes of car traffic to make these payments. That's like getting your family addicted to cocaine so that you can support your own habit by dealing to them. Talk about a death spiral.

Nicole Gelinas at the Post echoes a point I made last year: that not only are the State's traffic projections bullshit, but we will probably see a decline in car volumes independent of the bridge toll levels, especially if the price of gas continues to rise.

So what would be a rational solution? Both Gelinas and Ben Fried at Streetsblog seem to be inching towards the one that I proposed back in November. What if we doubled the tolls and didn't build a bridge? Here's what seems likely:

1. Car traffic would go down. Charlie Komanoff's spreadsheet suggests that if we double tolls, we'll see a 30% reduction in car volumes.
2. Maintenance costs would go down. I haven't been able to find a breakdown, but three of the biggest maintenance cost items are wear and tear from the sheer number of vehicles, crashes from the narrow lanes, and running the machine that flips the center lane from eastbound to westbound and back. A 30% decline in car volume would let us restore the earlier, safer, more sustainable configuration.
3. Bus fare revenue would rise. Gelinas, ever the libertarian, worries about the subsidies required to run buses over the bridge, but if she just remembers her supply and demand she can stop worrying.
4. The state would have more toll revenue. If we can avoid death spiral territory, the toll increase will bring in more overall revenue, which can be used for bridge maintenance or bus subsidies.

Last week Cuomo's chief of staff Larry Schwartz gave some scary numbers about how tolls would have to rise to $12 even if the bridge is not replaced. As with transit, Cuomo and his staff are inflating the costs of alternatives they don't like and lowballing the costs of their preferred alternative. Their cost estimates include the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's outdated and laughable projections for population, job and driving increases in the area, as well as continuation of the inefficient, homicidal seven-lane bridge configuration. Notably, the projections don't take into account the effect that tolls can have on traffic volumes.

The best thing to do would be to tear down the bridge. It's a cancer in our midst. But if nobody is willing to support tearing it down, the next best thing is to raise tolls without rebuilding the bridge.

What's going to be cut to pay for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement?

I've been asking this question for a while. Remember that this is a bridge that shouldn't exist, and should be torn down and not rebuilt. But Andrew Cuomo wants to rebuild it, twice as big, and at a huge cost. Who is going to pay for it?

Remember: it has long been established that it is economically impossible to cover the budgeted cost of $5 billion through tolls. If everyone who crosses now paid $15-20 round trip we could do it, but when the tolls get that high, people start doing what they should be doing anyway: working close to home, living close to work, or taking transit. In the topsy-turvy world of road tolls this is a bad thing, because then total revenue declines and the Thruway can't pay the bonds.

Charlie Komanoff has argued that the solution is just to build a smaller replacement bridge, but Cuomo seems to have decided that any plan that doesn't double the width of the bridge is not big enough for his legacy. There's a chance he's expecting that the second span will be cancelled, but not until he's safely elected President.

What's more likely is that there will be some component that is directly paid for out of taxes, like the gas tax, the income tax or the sales tax. It will be paid by the Federal or New York State governments, but either way it will come primarily from people who don't drive across the bridge - and from significant numbers of people who don't drive at all. If we estimate that amount to be $1.4 billion, it will bring the tolls down to $10-12 round trip, as you can see in this modified version of Komanoff's spreadsheet.

As long as the bridge is getting built, there will be some component paid by other taxes; the question is simply how much it will be. The smaller the toll increase, the bigger the share that will have to be borne by taxpayers. Right now, through his unofficial press secretary Fred Dicker, the Governor has signaled that any toll increase will be minimal.

The tabloids have stoked a fierce backlash against toll increases following the most recent Port Authority bridge toll hike. The Governor has been saying, "the bridge will be paid for with tolls," but like his earlier insistence that he won't raise taxes and that he'll veto any redistricting bill that doesn't include an independent commission, it's pretty clear that this is just for show.

What is most disturbing is that, according to Dicker, Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Minority Leader Skelos have come out against any Thruway toll hike. Silver thinks that more cars and trucks on the Thruway is good. Skelos wants government to be more efficient, but not so efficient that it doesn't replace the bridge. These quotes are about a toll hike that's independent of the bridge financing, aimed at keeping the highway solvent, and they're against that. It's possible that they could change their tune once it comes to paying for the bridge replacement, but it's also possible that they'll repeat these same platitudes.

If Silver and Skelos support rebuilding the bridge but oppose raising tolls to pay for it, and also oppose raising taxes (as Skelos at least is signaling), then there will have to be cuts in other things. I would actually love to see the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement cut, but I'm guessing it will probably be the transit budget that gets cut again. At which time expect to see Silver and Skelos's minions like Hakeem Jeffries, Jeff Klein and Marty Golden come out with the usual protests against transit cuts and fare hikes, all the while decrying the waste at the MTA.

Community boards would stifle transit innovation

Recently I expressed doubt that the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority could create an innovative bus service like the Koreana van between Flushing and Fort Lee. Commenter Three Station Square gave a couple of counterexamples: the M60, introduced in 1992, connected 125th Street in Manhattan with La Guardia Airport, and the S89, introduced in 2007, connects the West Shore of Staten Island with the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. George K pointed out that the S89 followed part of the route of Joel Azumah's 144 bus, but that in turn had taken over the route from Red and Tan in Hudson County.

Most of the innovations listed by Three Station Square are tweaks, including the extension of the Q5 and Q85 across the city limits to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream. And they're good tweaks; we like them, right? Well, you can expect even those to go away if one of "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz's proposals is adopted.



Schwartz's "equitable transportation formula" includes this point: "No service reductions on local buses for three years without Community Board approval." Sounds great, right? We hate service cuts, and we like community. More power to the community! What could possibly go wrong?

Any transit expansion advocate who's ever been to a New York City community board meeting knows exactly what's wrong with that. Many of the people who are involved in community boards are nice people who really want to do what's best for their city and their neighborhood. But the boards themselves are undemocratic and tend to be dominated by drivers and obsessed with increasing the supply of free parking. Their proceedings are almost always reactive and usually reactionary. They tend to stifle and oppose growth and innovation.

Some of you may be familiar with London's borough councils (elected by district) or Paris's district councils (elected at large). The community boards are nothing like that. Prospective members must be nominated by either their City Council member or the Borough President, and then approved by the Borough President's office. Some councilmembers and borough presidents value inclusiveness and a diversity of opinion, and some don't. Community board members are all volunteers, and the significant time commitment makes it difficult for people with day jobs to attend.

As a result, the boards tend to be dominated by people who are older and wealthier than the average for the district. In 2012 that means that they tend to own cars and drive them, to see driving and parking as an inalienable right, and to identify more with drivers than with pedestrians, cyclists or transit riders. The top issues they care about seem to be: (1) getting developers to provide more parking, (2) preventing anyone from interfering with double parking, (3) preventing traffic changes that they fear would overwhelm the neighborhood with cars, and (4) doing something about those damn bikers that almost ran over poor Connie.

Older and wealthier people also tend to be more interested in protecting what they already have than in getting more that they might use in the future. As a result, transportation discussions at community boards tend to be about preserving existing rights and privileges. There is very little interest in innovation. When they do support innovation, it's usually ornamental initiatives that present no threat to the car-oriented status quo. Why risk what you've worked so hard to get?

I have a number of friends who put in a lot of time and energy on community boards around the city. This is not to denigrate their efforts; it's important for someone to show up and make it clear that these aren't the only people in "the community." But I think they'd all agree that giving more power to community boards is a bad idea.

Basically, if you want to kill an idea, the best way to do it is to require community board approval. Which is why I'd be fine with requiring community board approval to buy leaky headphones, or to walk up the down side of the staircase, or to split a line at the Duane Reade. But transit cuts are not like that.

So why wouldn't I want to kill transit cuts? Because you can't have transit expansion without transit cuts. As I wrote on Sunday, for an agency to try something new, it needs to be able to cut it if it isn't working out.

In the case of across-the board reductions like we saw in 2010, community boards can't prevent the State Assembly from cutting the transit budget. They can only tie the MTA's hands as they try to deal with those budget cuts. Schwartz's proposal would not make the cuts go away. It would either force the MTA to borrow more or raise fares, or it would hold back service reductions on routes that are popular with influential community members, usually the elderly. Other routes would have to be reduced even more to compensate.

As with the bogus fairness, the elevated busways and the dollar fare reductions in neighborhoods with no subways, this is an idea that may sound nice to people who don't know that much about transit. But under scrutiny, it falls apart.

Yes, we need tolls on the East River bridges, and I agree with the many people who have argued that it will happen sooner or later. It's not worth all these bad things to make it happen sooner. Almost all of the elements in Schwartz's plan would lead to a net increase in driving citywide, and that's not what we're in this for.

The empty promise of Gridlock Sam's dollar buses

As I wrote last week, the transit portions of "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz's transportation proposal just feel kind of bizarre and divorced from reality. Sometimes it seems that the entire city's transportation advocacy discourse is dominated by drivers and cyclists. If occasionally a transit rider like Jay Walder may get a little bit of influence, they still don't get the support they need when the chips are down.

When drivers and cyclists make big plans that include transit, as in the current proposal from Gridlock Sam, the transit component runs the whole range of uninspiring, from mediocre (we'll consider restoring the 2010 cuts, but only on local bus routes) to other people's fads (elevated busways!) to WTF. The WTF in this case includes reducing the fares on buses "in neighborhoods with no subways" by a dollar, i.e. from $2.25 to $1.25.

Part of the problem here may be due to Powerpoint. It's possible that this is better thought out than it sounds, and it was edited into inanity to fit in one bullet point. But honestly, if your bus proposals don't get their own slides, what does that say about your priorities?

Anyway, so what's wrong with reducing bus fares to a dollar twenty-five in neighborhoods with no subways? In principle, nothing. But there are costs, and unforeseen consequences, and it's not clear what it will accomplish, if anything. The main cost is the opportunity cost: what else could we do with that money? Increase frequency on the buses; build bus bulbs or physically separated bus lanes; implement traffic signal priority or offboard fare payment. Or we could even use it to extend the E train to Valley Stream. With all these possibilities, why did Schwartz choose to spend the money lowering the fare?

Then there are the unforeseen consequences of lowering the bus fare. Many years ago I bought an "Apollo" inkjet printer for a hundred dollars; the sales people told me that it was made by Hewlett-Packard, and had the same technology as HP-branded printers. Why did HP go to the trouble of creating a separate company and brand for this printer? Because they didn't want anyone to see a brand new HP printer selling for a hundred dollars. They didn't want anyone to associate "HP" with "cheap" in their mind.

Buses already have a reputation in Staten Island, eastern Queens, southeastern Brooklyn and the eastern Bronx as cheap, crappy transportation for people who can't afford cars. A $1.25 bus fare will just reinforce that image. That's something that Schwartz seems to have no problem with - but it means giving up on the possibility that these areas will ever increase their transit mode share. I have a problem with that, and I hope you do too.

So reducing bus fares would spend money that we could instead use to expand the system and make it better, and it would probably reinforce the reputation of buses in the outer boroughs as cheap, crappy transportation. But is it worth that?

Well, is what worth that? Schwartz doesn't say what he expects to accomplish by reducing bus fares. On one level it seems obvious: save people $40 or more a week! But why save those people money, and not lower the fare for subway riders, and for people riding the buses in neighborhoods where there are subways? The answer can only be to encourage more people to ride buses in the outer boroughs. Presumably this is instead of driving, but it could be that Schwartz wants to encourage people to make bus trips that they wouldn't otherwise have made, or that they would have made by walking, but it's not clear to me what the value of that is. Mobility for mobility's sake?

It's not clear, anyway, that lowering the fare will do either of these things. To begin with, take a look at this chart from the most recent MTA Transit Committee meeting:

That's right, almost half the fares are paid with unlimited-ride Metrocards. There's no way to take a dollar off if you're not paying per ride!

Now, it's quite likely that the percentage of people paying with unlimited Metrocards is lower in the outer boroughs than in Manhattan, but I'll bet it's still pretty high. But beyond that, a lot of the people riding buses in "the two-fare zone" are transferring to subways, or even to buses that go to "neighborhoods with subways." A rush hour visit to Kew Gardens, Pelham Bay Park or Flatbush Avenue will give you a sense of how many. Presumably, when they make the transfer, and when they come back, they would spend that dollar anyway. Thus, the discount would only apply to trips that begin and end in neighborhoods without subways. How many is that, really?

For that tiny number of trips, the $2.25 fare is already lowered by the 7% pay-per-ride bonus if the passengers pay with Metrocards and not cash. Many of the people riding those trips would be disabled and senior citizens eligible for the 50% discount on top of that. Whether the fare is $1.10, or $2.05, how often is that really a deterrent? Keep in mind that many of these people already pay a market price of $2 for "dollar vans."

Finally, if we're talking about getting people out of their cars, we know how much people pay to own and insure a car, and drive and park it on the streets of New York City. How many of them are sensitive to a few dollars in bus fare?

As you can see, I've tried mightily to make sense of this. I probably spent a lot more time on it than it deserves. And I'm pretty damn sure that I put more time and thought into it than Sam Schwartz or anyone who's working for him on this plan. A dollar reduction in fares in "neighborhoods without subways" is hard to implement, would accomplish very little, would probably be counterproductive, and would take money from more worthy uses.