On a separate angle of the demise of congestion pricing, suburban triumphalist blogger Brian Beutler is crowing about New York's minor, and hopefully temporary, environmental setback. He sneers, "Mark my words, California, land of big cars and suburbs beyond the horizon, will someday have a more impressive environmental record on a per capita basis than your precious, much vaunted boroughs."
That's cute. But that doesn't make it so. While California has every right to brag about its smart steps on raising auto emissions standards, New York, by virtue of its density, walkabiilty, and extensive mass transit system, will stay way below California in emissions per capita, whether or not New York ever passes Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal. And do you think congestion pricing is coming to L.A. any time soon? Somehow I doubt it.
I've long thought of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg as his predecessor's doppelganger. While Rudy Giuliani notoriously politicized policy-making by appointing cronies and polarized the city with his vindictive attitude, Bloomberg has appointed capable civil servants and pushed mostly technocratic, if sometimes ill-conceived, plans.
But Bloomberg shares Giuliani's megalomaniacal streak. (I mean who titles their autobiography Bloomberg on Bloomberg?)
Case in point: Bloomberg failed to marshal support in the New York State Senate to pass his congestion pricing plan. And The New York Timesreports that his high-handed attitude in meeting with legislators only decreased the chances of it passing:
In a tense meeting on Monday, testy exchanges erupted between the mayor and the Democratic state senators he was trying to win over. At one point, according to several people present, Mr. Bloomberg told the senators that his administration had sent plenty of information about his plan in the mail, and that it was not his fault if they had not read it.
“If the mayor came in with one vote, he left with none,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat.
“His posture was not ingratiating,” he said. “He says he doesn’t know politics, and he certainly bore that out by the way he behaved.”
It's too bad that Bloomberg let his ego get in the way of passing his sensible proposal.
A neat little story from The Washington Post today points to an alarming phenomenon: the lack of sidewalks throughout growing American communities. The Post focuses on Loudon County, Virginia, a D.C. exurb that is one of the fastest growing counties in the country. The Post reports that,
A survey of 840 miles of roads in Loudoun found that 14 percent had sidewalks.... The result is a piecemeal network of sidewalks and trails that begin and end haphazardly, influenced by the date or parameters of developers' contracts. Many times, there are no formal paths between neighborhoods and nearby shopping centers, parks or schools.
Consequently pedestrians find themselves undertaking perilous journeys across six-lane roads without the benefit of a crosswalk, traipsing along narrow road shoulders and other dangerous endeavors to go even the shortest of distances. Although many local governments have begun to address this issue (Loudon started requiring sidewalks or bike trails in new developments in the 1990s), it shouldn't be left to the whims of local officials. The necessity of reducing the auto-dependence built into our landscape for safety reasons (in addition to environmental concerns, among others) is a national issue. Just as the federal government has used its considerable spending power over highway budgets to impose other rules on states, like raising the drinking age to 21, it should make pedestrian-friendly requirements for all developments (including retrofitting older ones) a requirement of receiving federal transportation funding.
Matt brilliantly defends new urbanism from the tautological rightwing criticisms of pundits like Ross Douthat and Joel Kotkin (they argue that people move to suburbs because inner-cities are too expensive, we argue that we're well aware of that, which is why we seek to change the government incentive structure to make urban living more affordable and suburban living more expensive.)
I just want to add one area of pubilc policy to the transportation issues Matt discusses to this debate: public schools. A major reason the middle-class flees to the suburbs is the decrepit condition of inner-city public schools. Suburban triumphalists like Douthat and Kotkin pretend that the middle-class flight to the burbs proves that everyone wants a lawn, a garage and to have to drive anywhere to buy anything. In fact, a large minority of those people would have been happy to live in an apartment and take the subway to work, but their local school district would be too under-funded and they couldn't afford private school so they reluctantly moved to the suburbs for their kids. Thus, one essential part of any plan to re-urbanize America must include an agenda to improve inner-city public schools and equalize funding between them and their suburban counterparts. You can get at this problem from a number of angles such as a federal plan to subsidize city schools or creating regional governing bodies that distribute school funding from a common pool instead of financing through unequal local property taxes. The point is that we currently incentivize moving to the suburbs in a variety of ways, and we will have to undo all of them to let the free market work its magic and re-create the urban vitality of pre-war America.
Matt provides a useful addition to my post on congestion pricing. He notes, "It's absolutely impossible to discuss transportation or planning issues in the Greater Washington area without pointing out that it would be a really, really good idea to facilitate higher-density construction in the District." Absolutely. While increasing density would not necessarily mitigate congestion on its own, it would make mass transit a more viable alternative. And, for a variety of reasons, higher density is more energy efficent and causes less environmental damage. It also seems to be good for economic development (hence all the high-rises springing up across the river in Arlington.) While not every city is bound by D.C.'s height restrictions, many have zoned for lower-density by instituting parking requirements and such. Changing this would be at least as valuable in reducing harmful emissions and the stress of long drives as introducing congestion pricing.
After New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg released a forward-thinking proposal to counter global warming that included congestion pricing for Manhattan below 86th Street, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty raised the possibility of doing the same for Washington, but has not actually endorsed it. Marc Fisher, in his washingtonpost.com blog, argues vociferously in favor:
The need in Washington is clear: The D.C. suburbs have the second-longest average commuting time in the nation, after New York.... Unlike London or New York, a congestion tax here would serve more than one purpose; it would not only control the flow of traffic, but it would also be an answer to the single greatest fiscal frustration facing the District: its inability to impose a commuter tax on suburbanites who earn their living in the city.
I couldn't agree more, and would only add that I would like to see congestion pricing introduced far and wide. As Nick Paumgarten's wonderful recent piece on commuting in the New Yorker illustrated, Americans are losing their time, money and sanity to ever longer commutes. The environmental impact is obvious as well (especially because cars emit more pollution in stop-and-go traffic.) The policy has worked wonders in London, with traffic down and the fees collected going to improving bus service. We need multi-pronged strategies to reduce driving at every level of government, and at the local level congestion pricing seems like a very sound policy to include.
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