New York City’s Traffic Crisis as Congestion Pricing Begins

Congestion Pricing is finally here. Here is how the city created the traffic congestion they are now charging you for:

Step 1: Manufactured Congestion

1. Parking Scarcity by Design: Overdevelopment increases the need for parking. Municipal parking lots are replaced with buildings increasing demand while eliminating parking spaces. Next, abolish parking requirements for new developments, ensuring even less availability.
2. Vanishing Parking Spaces: Citi Bike docks, dining sheds, bus lanes and garbage bins swallow up parking, removing perhaps a hundred thousand spaces. Some bus lanes are in effect when they are not needed. There are fewer parking garages and future vacant sites to be developed no longer are turned into temporary parking lots offering relief. They eliminate more than the required number of parking spaces for daylighting. Fewer spaces mean driving longer to find one.
3. Open Streets Chaos: The city Department of Transportation closes streets permanently or temporarily, diverting traffic to already congested streets and disrupting bus service. 
4. Shrinking Lanes: The DOT further reduces road capacity by eliminating many traffic lanes on major streets with 24-hour bus lanes, bike paths, pedestrian island  and planter installations, or simply striping them off. Turning restrictions force you to drive further. 
5. Unchecked Double Parking: Deliveries clog streets with no regulations requiring off-peak hours, as other major cities have.
6. Ride-Share Saturation: For-hire vehicles flood streets unchecked, accounting for over half of passenger cars in congestion zones.
7. Slowed Traffic Flow: Speed limits drop on arterial roads turning them into local streets. Green lights are shortened, and throughput at intersections is reduced. These changes are made in the name of “safety,” but instead slow emergency response times and paradoxically increase accidents and result in more fatalities.
8. Signal Sabotage: Unnecessary all-way stop signs and traffic signals, deliberately misaligned traffic lights, signals in front of schools which do not need to be in effect for 24-hours, slow vehicles further. DOT admits that slowing traffic is one of its goals, again in the name of “safety” which is not even a priority. If it were, lane markings would not be replaced months after they wear out and dark sections of highways would not remain for years.
9. E-Bike Anarchy: Unlicensed, uninsured e-bikes and scooters weave dangerously through traffic, unregulated and unchecked by the city. Where they are prevalent, it is prudent to not exceed 15 mph. 
10. Fewer Traffic Agents: With fewer officials directing traffic, gridlock becomes inevitable.

Step 2: Do Not Increase Public Transit

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority does not increase existing transit frequency, make it more widespread or more reliable. (They recently announced extra service on seven Brooklyn routes, but did not indicate the amount of the increase or if service is being reduced on other routes to compensate.) Instead, they reduce the number of bus stops to make buses less accessible. They falsely claim buses will move faster because of this. They do not reopen subway entrances closed 50 years ago (when conditions were very different) to increase accessibility. Yet they expect 11% more people to use the subways and less people to drive without increasing subway or bus capacity.

Step 3: Mismanaged Transit Funds Compound The Problem

• Congestion pricing money goes to the  MTA, a model of inefficiency, which has having the highest subway construction costs in the world; 
• An agency that constantly raises fares and tolls makes no attempts to end the inequities of double fares and expect drivers to pay for fare beaters; 
• An agency that is full of waste and makes poor decisions. NYC Transit and MTA Bus have not been combined after 20 years. That would reduce wasteful non-revenue bus mileage, which is now perhaps ten times what it was fifty years ago. Buses used to return to the depot every 48 hours only to refuel and for maintenance. Now they make trips back and forth to the depot with each change of shift every eight hours and no longer carry passengers on these partial trips. Their decision to lease their main headquarters at 2 Broadway for 99 years rather than purchase it outright was scandalous because they still had to pay for all renovations.
• An agency that does not take advantage of funding opportunities. Why have there not been any ads inside buses for the past 40 years? What happened to its Employee Suggestion Programs that used to save tens of millions of dollars annually? One simple procedural change can save up to $100,000 annually.

• The MTA seeks to increase non-revenue bus miles rather than decrease it, believing it is more efficient to operate buses without passengers than with them because the buses can travel faster when empty. They have completely lost sight of why they exist in the first place, to serve the public. 
• Service reductions are made because the MTA believes their primary mission is to improve its bottom line.  Bus stops are removed, making transit less accessible, while direct routes become time-consuming transfers under "Bus Network Redesigns."
• Bus Network Redesigns reduce in-revenue mileage. Instead of filling service gaps and reducing the number of transit deserts to make transit more accessible and reducing passenger trip times to attract more passengers and trips, which should be the real goals of these studies, trip times are increased. In at least one instance, a direct ten-minute bus trip will become a 45-minute indirect two-bus trip if the MTA does not modify or abandon a proposal which they call an improvement. They refuse to publicize their Bus Network Redesign studies on the buses or at bus shelters, resulting in fewer than one percent of the bus riders being aware of them.

The Ripple Effects

Drivers pay the price—not just financially, but in time and frustration—while businesses and consumers bear the economic burden. Congestion pricing merely moves the congestion from one place to another, for example from the FDR to the BQE. 

The Solution

Before demanding more money from drivers, the DOT and MTA need to:

• Change their misguided missions;
• Be honest, transparent, responsive and meaningfully engage with the public;
• Address inefficiencies in transit funding, such as fare beating and operations;
• Invest in improving public transit accessibility, capacity and reliability, not the opposite;
• Stop treating congestion as a problem to profit from and start addressing its root causes.

Congestion Pricing isn’t the answer to New York City's self-created traffic nightmare—it’s just another tax. 

Allan Rosen, a Brooklyn resident,  is a former Director of Bus Planning for the MTA. Now retired, he has over 30 years of experience in transportation. He can be reached on X @BrooklynBus.