Decongest Yourself

Thoughts on New York City's (possibly?) scrapped congestion pricing plan

I’ve been casually following the New York City congestion price plan for awhile. Mostly, I think it’s nutty how many years and reams of paperwork and studies have had to go into it. I’d like to live in a country where a mayor of a big city can trial run something like this for a month after a couple of weeks of deliberation and an affirmative city council vote, and then see how it works, iterate, tweak, scrap it, scale it up, etc. We lack that sort of flexibility and room to move, for a number of reasons, and every proposal feels like an earth-shattering event and a last stand for everyone involved.

When Strong Towns talks about doing the easiest thing you can do right now to improve a place, and iterating on the results, they don’t mean play small-ball, pick the low-hanging fruit, and then shrug and go home. They mean, don’t spend the better part of two decades putting together a big comprehensive perfectly engineered scheme and then throwing it in the shredder at the last minute.

I’ve had a couple of discussions with folks back in New Jersey about this. Most of the people I know there who ever commuted or day-tripped to Manhattan did so by car at least some of the time. We used to drive into Manhattan (and Philadelphia) on weekends all the time. I don’t think I ever took the train in (though my parents sometimes did, even in the 1980s), and once we were in the city, we’d use a cab instead of the subway most of the time.

Some of that may have been fear of crime, but New York was pretty clean in the early 2000s, and I think it was more about having a young kid and reducing the chances of anything going wrong (me getting stranded in a station, or pointing at a weirdo and yelling “Mommy why is that man doing that?!” or what have you.)

So for a lot of New Jersey suburbanites, driving into Manhattan is just something you do. And the idea of having to pay for it just feels wrong. It’s difficult and unpleasant to convince yourself that your initial feeling is incorrect.

During one of these conversations, the other guy said, “I don’t know, why don’t we do something good for business in the city?” I think what he meant was—I hope I’m not taking too many liberties—“people come into Manhattan to go to work and spend money, lots of businesses rely on that traffic, why does the city want to reduce the number of people entering the city? They’re squeezing businesses in their vendetta against cars and motorists, because they’re liberals.”

And frankly, that’s the intuitive position for most conservatives and center-right folks. It’s just kind of axiomatic that “cars” slot into a vague “pro-business” category, and that “the left” “hates” cars and business alike, so of course an attempt to squeeze out cars is also anti-business. If that doesn’t ring true for you on a gut level—if you don’t feel that and realize that you have to consciously unlearn it—well, I guess you’re not a conservative! Which is fine! But I’m always thinking about how to make this stuff intuitive to people who have never really thought about it much and whose default position is against it.

The first thing I’d say is, some modes of transportation are more appropriate than others in certain kinds of built environments. This is a point that often gets lost in the culture war over “banning cars” and all that. I always mention that on most stretches of Interstate Highways, pedestrians and bicycles are not allowed. Why? Because the Interstate Highway is a landscape explicitly designed for cars and driving. That’s fine. In the same exact way, the urban core of one of the densest cities on the planet is a landscape explicitly not designed for cars.

In other words, I think if you strip all politics and preferences and judgments away, it basically makes sense to reduce automobile traffic in the urban core, in the same exact way it makes sense to privilege automobile traffic on a limited-access highway.

The second thing I’d say is, people aren’t cars. This is one of those logical leaps that suburbia instills in you: because almost all mobility is car-dependent and almost all customers arrive by car in suburbia, you forget they’re separable. So when a suburbanite hears “We’re going to toll people driving into Manhattan,” what they understand that to mean is “We’re going to charge you to enter Manhattan.”

Do you know how many Manhattan commuters drive in? One set of numbers puts it at five percent. How many Manhattanites don’t even own a car? Three quarters. You can reasonably assume that most tourists are also not driving in. In other words, motorists are an extreme minority in Manhattan. The smallest share of transportation takes up the most space and makes the most noise. That constant car traffic and noise is one of the things that makes Manhattan streets less pleasant. It might even be the case that reducing the car traffic would bring in more people. Which is to say, more dollars for more businesses.

I know that as a kid I always thought I didn’t like New York. I associated the city with the honking horns and the screeching tires and the auto exhaust and the constant din of motor noise. It was not until a few years ago that it struck me, almost everything I didn’t like about the city actually came down to cars. That was a real aha moment for me. I’d like to think there are people out there for whom that just hasn’t clicked yet.

So what happens instead of congestion pricing? To make up for the lost revenue that was projected from the congestion toll, the city has proposed raising taxes. Previously, the small number of (disproportionately wealthier) people driving into Manhattan were paying a relatively small daily tax on an activity they could choose to avoid. Is it really better to tax everyone? How is that not unfair? How is that good for business? It’s replacing a behavior-based progressive tax with an unavoidable and de facto regressive tax.

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The elephant in the room here is whether or not transit is a viable alternative to driving. For some narrow categories of workers, it might not be. Maybe they should be exempted from the toll. For a lot of people, the subway is too dirty/too dangerous/too unreliable, and it isn’t an option in their minds. So they perceive a tax on car entry as basically a ban on their right to visit the city unmolested.

Of course, millions of people ride the subway every day without incident, so it can’t be that bad. (Being the victim of a crime is like winning the lottery: it’s statistically unlikely, and it can ruin your life.) There’s a certain risk aversion ad absurdum in the way a lot of suburbanites talk about this stuff, like it’s still the 1970s and cities are bombed-out wastelands.

But it’s also true that the default reaction of a lot of urbanists is to mock or be sarcastic when people raise questions about safety on transit. Let me say this: I’ve spoken with women my age who also express reservations about transit. It’s not a “Boomers are still afraid of the subway!” thing. Forget the Boomers who are afraid of the subway: if a young single woman, or a family with a young child, or an elderly person, can’t feel safe and secure on transit, we’re screwing up.

There’s a tendency among some young, progressive urbanists to treat your street smarts and your ability to put up with a little bit of potential danger and disorder as a kind of valiance or tolerance. But in doing this, we valorize a certain kind of personality. It’s almost a kind of hazing—treating putting up with urban problems as the price of entry, treating it with a kind of perverse hometown pride.

I don’t think this implies tackling and imprisoning fare evaders, or whatever overly tough-on-crime policy progressives might rightly look askance at. But it implies something. Of course, simply getting a consistent critical mass of regular riders also helps to squeeze out antisocial behavior. And the congestion pricing revenue was meant to create a reliable income stream for the MTA, which in theory would lead to service improvements.

The fact that a lot of people find that laughable on its face—“more money is gonna make the subway better or the MTA more efficient? Well, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!”—just speaks to a really sad sense of impotence and stagnation in this country.

Of all the many comments I saw on social media about the scrapping of the congestion pricing, one of them really hit home for me. It read:

A little surprised by how bummed I am at the decision to scuttle congestion pricing at the last minute. I’ve covered the twists and turns of the policy for a long time, so I’m not surprised that it happened; but more than anything this feels like part of a real “we can’t try big things in this country anymore” story, which is kinda the story of my lifetime.

That really distills a big part of my feelings too. People think of congestion pricing or housing advocacy or YIMBY as these novel, newfangled, technocratic things, but there’s really a reinvigorating of the old American spirit here, a yearning for a country that can say “Let’s do this thing” and then actually do it. It feels like there’s some invisible barrier, some force, that just stops it all. And over time, people absorb that spirit—nothing ever gets done, nothing ever gets completed, everything is delayed and over budget, big things always get bargained down and cut back or scrapped—doing things gets filed away in your brain in the same slot as not doing things.

I can’t help but think about the other big things people are increasingly not doing—getting married, having kids, buying houses, building houses—and I can’t help but wonder how much of our cultural malaise could evaporate if a few big things could just get done.

That’s how I “get” to supporting congestion pricing for Manhattan.

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Related Reading:

Ban Pedestrians

Traffic Report

“Streets Closed to Vehicular Traffic”

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