← Future of Freedom
Future of Freedom
Nicole Gelinas & Diana Furchtgott-Roth: Should Congestion Pricing Be the Future of City Travel?
00:28:36
On this episode of Future of Freedom, host Scot Bertram is joined by two guests with different viewpoints about New York City’s congestion pricing program. First on the show is Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Later, we hear from Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment and The Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at the Heritage Foundation. You can find Nicole on X @NicoleGelinas and Diana at @DFR_Economics.
Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:09]
B
Welcome to Future of Freedom. I'm your host, Scott Bertram. Future of Freedom is a production of Franklin News Foundation. To support this show, go to franklinnews.org donate we bring you interviews today from different sides of the debate over New York City's congestion pricing program. In a little bit we'll be joined by Diana Firchcott Roth, Director of the center for Energy, Climate and Environment and Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage.org first we talk with Nicole Joelinas. She is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us.
- [00:50]
A
Good afternoon, Scott. Thank you for having me on.
- [00:52]
B
Talking today about congestion fees, New York City specifically, I want to begin by asking if you have an overall opinion on congest fees and how they're implemented in various places and whether or not New York's was implemented in the right way.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, of course the details matter. But overall congestion fees are a good, sound free market idea. They account for any externalities that people create when they choose to drive a car into a dense urban environment that offers them other ways to get around. And it's certainly superior to saying to people you can't drive your car at all, which some cities do. It's simply saying you are creating pollution, you're creating congestion, you're creating noise with your vehicle. And if it's more convenient for you to drive your vehicle into Manhattan than to take commuter rail or bus or subway or bicycle or walk, that's fine. That's a free market decision that you can make. But you will have to pay the congestion charge to account for these externalities. Now, the details in New York, as with many things in New York, are not quite correct. But the idea that people should have to pay $9 to drive into core Manhattan is certainly sound.
- [02:15]
B
We've had some data that we've been able to see since this has been implemented in New York City. What have been the changes thus far? How have traffic patterns and the congestion shifted or changed in Manhattan in general?
- [02:31]
A
The adjustment fee which began the second week of January has reduced traffic coming in to core Manhattan, you know, anywhere around 6 to 10% depending on the day and the time of day. It's a little bit the declines were greater in the earlier months of the program. There's some indications that people are just getting used to it and paying the fee. But we've seen, you know, as a, a person who walks around Manhattan multiple times a day, a small decrease in traffic and a spreading out of the traffic to different times can make a big difference in the livability environment where the cars used to clog up the intersections and to crosswalks at rush hour. And you know, rush hour is kind of long. I mean, you're talking like 4pm to 7pm it's kind of a misnomer. But you'd have to be threading your way in between these cars, blocking the cross walks. Kind of dangerous for people to walk in between the idling cars like that. That happens much less frequently now. I mean, you know, crossing these streets in, in midtown, you. It's more unusual to have a clogged intersection rather than just be the usual state of affairs. So even a small decline in traffic can make a big difference.
- [03:58]
B
We've seen public transit systems post Covid especially running into financial difficulties. The congestion fee here in New York City goes toward transit. It's not a user tax, doesn't roll back into roadways or anything for drivers. Is that an appropriate use for that money? Especially considering the somewhat shaky ground that public transit finds itself in these days?
- [04:23]
A
Well, the original congestion pricing ideas going back to Bloomberg administration, because Bloomberg sort of understood how to price assets. I mean, his entire business life was spent making money out of the information surrounding the pricing of assets. So it was. The idea actually predated Bloomberg. But Bloomberg was the first person to present a serious proposal for congestion pricing. And those proposals, going back close to 20 years ago now, would have devoted some of the money to the upkeep of the road. So, you know, sort of initial ideas would have been a third or so of the money going to maintaining the bridges, maintaining the roads. I think that would be better, certainly. But the idea of sending the money to the transit system is not a bad idea because the more people who are on the transit system means fewer people on the roads, which benefits the people on the roads. You know, I always tell people who say, I never use the subway. Well, you do use the subway, because if you're driving around midtown Manhattan, you know, for every person driving in, there's three people who are on the subway, bus, commuter, rail, some other way of getting around. And if they were also in their own car, you would just not have any chance of driving around Manhattan. Even at the low speed limits that we have today.
- [05:51]
B
There was a report prediction prior to congestion pricing going into effect that traffic would just move and onto other places could burden the Bronx in different ways. Do we, do we know that traffic has decreased overall or are vehicles just sliding to different areas of the city?
- [06:10]
A
It seems not to be happening so far, which is good. You know, A couple of people have done maps of the bridge and tunnel traffic, maps of the air quality data outside of Manhattan so far. And you know, now that we've been through a whole summer of does not seem to transferring traffic to outside Manhattan. It seems to be reducing this traffic.
- [06:36]
B
Something you have written about and I've read about previously is this idea of a dynamically managing streets. How does that concept differ from what's happening in New York with the, with the congestion pricing fee?
- [06:50]
A
Yeah, it would be better for New York to approach this in a way other than just a blunt fee that, you know, it's, it's $9 until 9pm and then it's for a car and then it's $2.25 from 9pm to 5am that's very, very crude way of doing it. Traffic coming in at 7am is obviously different than traffic coming in at 8.30pm There are times of year, you know, like the couple weekends before Christ, traffic is much greater coming into Manhattan than say the third week in January. And days when there are parades or street fairs and this, the amount of street space is scarcer, traffic also gets worse. So it would be better to have a system where you could say, okay, we've got the Oktoberfest parade today, so we have major avenues closed off. So price to drive in is going to be double the normal price and you know, tell people a few days in advance if they have time to plan. I mean, the MTA has everyone's information to text them and email them and everything else. Or the gridlock alert days before Christmas, it's going to be, you know, two or three times as much to drive your car in. And you could couple that with discounts on the mass transit system. So, you know, the all day price and then the overnight price is not the best way to get at this. Also, also the idea of per mile or per partial mile taxes would be better than just, okay, I drove in, I parked at the garage, maybe I really wasn't on the road very long. Whereas somebody else is taking their family on a whole tour of Manhattan sightseeing and they're going to be on the road for two hours. So vehicle miles traveled would be better. You know, we have something that kind of approximates that for the taxis and the Ubers and the lifts by charging them by the pickup, which, which sort of approximates how long spending in Manhattan. But definitely this isn't the perfect way to go about it. But New York often does the right thing the wrong way.
- [09:09]
B
Is this at core A quality of life issue. Is it better to be in this area, in these areas now with the congestion fee in place?
- [09:19]
A
It's better. I'm not going to oversell it. There's certainly still traffic. We haven't seen an increase in traffic fatalities and injuries, which is good. I think there was a concern, including by me, that with cars and trucks going faster they would have more scope to hit people at higher speeds and cause more traffic deaths and injuries. That hasn't happened this year, thankfully. On the other hand, we haven't seen a significant decline either. So the quality of life is marginally better. You know, I wouldn't oversell it and that we've become some sort of traffic free paradise. But they have blunted the hardest edges of the most congested times of day.
- [10:05]
B
One of the frequent critiques of congestion pricing is it disproportionately impacts lower income residents, those who perhaps can't afford the fee driving on a daily basis or those who, those for whom transit is not a practical alternative, that they need, need to drive in these areas. Is there a way to address that sort of concern?
- [10:25]
A
Yeah, I think the easier one is the first one. You know, studies, multiple studies by the Community Services Society and other groups have shown most poor people are not driving into Manhattan on a regular basis for work or for school or for other purposes only. Something like Twitter to 3% of poor people regularly drive into the city. And there are discounts for people making under $60,000 a year who live in the city. You get that, you know, offset on your state taxes. So this is, you know, kind of gets into the debate over who is poor. Not only people at the poverty level consider themselves poor. And it's like the Mandani voters. You know, most of them are not for their middle class and even upper middle class, but they are struggling with the high cost of living in New York City. Things treats that they used to be able to, to enjoy are. It is harder just because of the rate of inflation over the past five years. I mean the price of average basket of good and goods and services is up, you know, close to 25% over well less than a decade. So it's not so much poor people that the biggest complainers about it. It's people who might have driven in a couple times a month to go out and have dinner and see a Broadway show. And this is just an additional cost on top of the existing costs. So that's a real concern. But I guess the rejoinder to that would be the price of everything has Gone up. I mean, nobody's saying we're going to knock off $9 from the restaurant meal or $30 from the cost of the Broadway tickets. This is just, no one says, you know, we're going to pay your car insurance or the cost of repairs for your cars. You know, if you own and operate and maintain a car, this is just another cost of doing that. And the second part of the question, you know, it's for some people, it's not as convenient to take transit. That's absolutely true. But this also has to do with where people choose. If you want to live in a part of the New York City region that doesn't have easy transit service, that's fine. And you probably get a little more space. If you're living out in Eastern Queens or South Brooklyn or suburbs away from commuter rail, you can afford a little bit more house because the price of the house is cheaper because it's further away from transit. But the trade off to that is you're paying for that more space in that it's less convenient for you to connect yourself to the central city. So if you're unhappy with that, you can trade down to a smaller apartment and be closer to transit or you can pay your $9. These are all free market choices where the price signal is operating and helping to make people make these choices.
- [13:35]
B
As we continue to watch what happens, what continues to happen, change in the wake of congestion pricing is is there a key metric you'll be looking at to determine whether or not it's successful, whether or not adjustments need to be made? Is this something that's based on field or is there some hard data that you want to keep an eye on as we move forward?
- [13:56]
A
I think definitely making sure that traffic doesn't inch up to pre congestion pricing levels will be an important metric. Making sure not only do traffic deaths not rise, but hopefully we could resume the years of significant decreases in traffic deaths that we had during Giuliani, the Bloomberg and the de Blasio years. You know, that progress has stalled out over the past few years for a variety of reasons, including just much more antisocial behavior on the roads. It's not, you know, not good news, but the traffic fatalities since 2020 have largely been driven by people in vehicles getting into single vehicle crashes and harming themselves and others. We have significantly reduced the number of pedestrian deaths in part due to road design, red light cameras, speed limit cameras and so forth. But resuming that progress would be good. And I think one important metric is does the transit system use this money to make real change, or do they just use it to just continue to feed their deficits and fund their higher workforce costs?
- [15:19]
B
Nicole Joelinis is with the Manhattan Institute, where she's a senior fellow. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us here today on Future of Freedom.
- [15:28]
A
Thank you, Scott. This was fun.
- [15:30]
B
Now to hear another side of the conversation about New York City's congestion pricing program, we talk with Diana Firchcott Roth. She is director of the center for Energy, Climate and Environment and fellow for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Heritage foundation. More@Heritage.org Diana, thanks so much for joining us.
- [15:49]
C
It's great to be with you talking.
- [15:51]
B
Today about congestion pricing and specifically what's happened in New York City. I guess I begin by asking, do you have a blanket opposition to the idea of congestion pricing, or is there something specific about the New York City execution of it that that you object to?
- [16:09]
C
Yes. No, there's definitely first of all, I have no objection to congestion pricing. Congestion pricing is the right way to charge for roads. Road pricing is the right way to charge for roads. And part of it is the cost of the road and part of it is the congestion on others. The objection I have to the New York scheme is that this is not going for roads. This is a direct transfer to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which operates buses, subways and bridges. And last year the MTA lost over 200 million and it's supposed to lose about 400 million for the rest of the decade.
- [16:50]
B
This is not something that is only true in New York City. There's public transit systems that are having financial difficulties in many places. In Chicago, they're having to bail out Chicago Transit Authority at this point. But when you look at what the work environment is like, especially post pandemic, is there still a role, is there still an opportunity for public transit to play a major space in what happens in our big cities across the country?
- [17:18]
C
Well, Scott, that's a great question because there's all this fixed capital in many cities for public transit, and yet ridership is around 75% of what it used to be before. And in New York City, part of the reason is the crime. People are concerned about the crime. And so some people don't travel on the subway because of the crime. And in other cities it could be different things, but public transit has to look at reforming itself. It has to look at providing a different service. Having a series of buses on a fixed schedule isn't just 19th century, it's not just 15th century, it's Roman times. And with app based transportation such as Uber. Often it's less expensive to give a low income person a debit card to use Ubers than have a bus traveling half empty or with just one or two people in the middle of the night. We've all seen those buses on little used roads with just one or two people in them in the middle of the night. And even in the Washington D.C. area, there's the Silver Line from Dallas Airport to downtown and that is not very much used either. People like point to point transportation and it would be much less expensive for a municipality to provide point to point transportation with an Uber. And it's really interesting about public transit during the pandemic. I worked at the transportation department during the pandemic and everybody said we have to keep public transit open for essential workers. But if you're an essential worker, say a nurse, you end your shift at midnight, you would much rather have a preloaded debit card for Ubers or taxis than to have to wait around in perhaps some part of the city that has high crime to take your bus and then you take the bus to the closest point, then you have to walk home. It's expensive and it's not as efficient. If you're an essential worker, you deserve the best transportation. And sometimes the best transportation is the least expensive.
- [19:41]
B
There is an argument that if you begin to right size public transit, cutting lines, cutting locations, it simply becomes a death spiral because if people can't rely on the transportation when they need it, they're not going to take it at all. Is that a likely outcome if you begin to, as I said, sort of right size public transit lines and the way public transit operates?
- [20:02]
C
Well, I think you have to look at the time of day that they're running and it's possible that you would like to reduce lines at little used times and substitute some other service. For example, robo taxis. Robo taxis are practicing in the streets of D.C. i rode one in Phoenix two weeks ago. They're on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
- [20:27]
B
Talking with Diana Firchcott Roth from the Heritage foundation where she's director of the center for Energy, Climate and Environment and fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy. You've suggested if the idea is to is partially to reduce congestion, there are other ways to do that too. You say reducing some of the bike lanes or changing parking fees in Manhattan also could have a similar effect. What might that look like?
- [20:57]
C
Well, if you look at New York City, if you walk in New York City, you see that a lot of space is given to bike and Bus lanes. And also there's docking stations for bikes in the road. And these are not the best use of road space. They reduce the number of lanes. That means if there's a delivery van that has to park, that takes up yet another lane and the whole flow of traffic is reduced. So if cities, including New York, want to reduce congestion, they could take out some of the less used bike lanes. They don't have to have them on every street. They could also look, as in Washington D.C. at taking out the restaurant spaces that have moved beyond the curb into the street. New York City has made progress towards doing this. Washington D.C. has not done so. Then New York has a particular, I wouldn't say problem is residents like it, but you can park free in certain parts of the city almost indefinitely, unless it's street cleaning time. When it's street cleaning time, people sit in their cars, they move their car out of that particular lane, they take it over to the other side of the street, they wait in the car, then when the street is being cleaned, they move their car back. And again, people are getting this road space for free. And that is not necessarily the best use of road space. And if there was some dynamic parking charge levied for that parking, enough so that there would always be a share left for delivery vans, then that would reduce double parking in the cases of delivery and it would make traffic flow more efficiently. There's been a lot of ideas on how to make traffic flow more smoothly, and New York has implemented some of them with its grid system. Just having one way streets rather than two way streets means that you don't have these left turns that hold up traffic. But there are other ways that New York and other cities could make progress too, especially post pandemic.
- [23:07]
B
In addition to the funding of public transit, advocates say they were looking to reduce congestion, perhaps to improve air quality. We've had, what, a little less than a year of the congestion pricing in effect in New York City? Maybe not on the improving the air quality, but on reducing congestion, making traffic move more smoothly. Has there been any noticeable or any data that tells us whether or not it's been successful?
- [23:34]
C
I'm not familiar with the data for New York, but London in the UK has had a congestion charge for many years and it still ranks as one of the most congested cities in the world. So having this pricing doesn't necessarily reduce congestion. And to the extent that it brings down congestion very rapidly, it raises the price of transportation for people who cannot take subways, cannot take buses. Think of older individuals who need to get to a doctor's appointment, for example, they cannot take the subway they need to take. They need to have a point to point vehicle, a personal vehicle, either their own or a taxi or Uber or Lyft. So it can be very regressive. The cost falls much more highly on those least able to afford it. Plus there's small businesses that have to use vehicles for delivery coming into the city. The cost falls on them. Whereas if you are a banking executive that you don't have anything to deliver, you just have financial services, so you don't pay any cost of the tax. But I think one of the other areas that's problematic about using the funds to bail out the Metropolitan Transit Authority is the Transportation Workers Union of America, which represents New York's transit workers. It's one of the winners because it can continue to hire the same level of people, collect the same level of dues from its members. And you find that John Samuelson, that the Transport Workers Union president, made over 380,000 in 2024, according to Labor Department filings. And the Union spent over 3.5 million on political activities and lobbying, including donations to the governor, the New York Attorney General. They each received $47,000 in 2022 when they were running for four year terms. So this is a transfer. It's a money laundering scheme from New Yorkers, many of whom have no other option, to the Transit Authority. Then the Transit Authority turns around and gives it to the politicians, which again put in place this congestion scheme. And it's a $1 billion pilot project from the Transportation Department. One billion is very big for a pilot program. New Yorkers have already paid for the roads through their taxes. It's regressive. It hurts poor people more than better off people. It goes to politicians. So I think it's a lose lose situation and many people are going to be happy when they see it. Repeal.
- [26:29]
B
Diana, you've argued that attacks like this, and even this particular one, this fee, congestion fee, could shrink New York City's economic base, pushing people out who want to live there and perhaps pushing businesses out who might not want to operate inside the congestion zone. Is there evidence that something like a congestion tax, which is not nothing, but it's not incredibly substantial, will influence relocation decisions?
- [26:56]
C
Yeah, I think that you've seen that in areas where it's difficult to get around, such as pedestrian precincts, you find that stores that provide services to people where delivery vans are needed, they move elsewhere, they move outside the congestion zone, or they move out to the suburbs and the life of the city is dramatically affected. You can see that it becomes more tourists and other people like that, restaurants, tourists and the commerce of the city, which relies on vehicles. The small businesses, they cannot manage anymore and it's easier for them to move outside.
- [27:44]
B
Diana Firchcott Roth is director of the center for Energy, Climate and Environment and fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at the Heritage foundation. More@Heritage.org Diana thank you so much for joining us here on Future of Freedom.
- [27:59]
C
Great to be with you, Scott. Thanks for having me on.
- [28:02]
B
We thank both of our guests for joining us. Nicole Jolinas from the Manhattan Institute, where she is a senior fellow, and also Diana Firchcott Roth, director of the center for Energy, Climate and Environment and fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at the Heritage Foundation. To find additional episodes of Future of Freedom, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio. Thank you for listening to Future of Freedom, a production of Franklin News Foundation.