Nicky Gavron, the City of London's Deputy Mayor speaks out on the politics of implementing congestion pricing there. Mayors from 40 of the World's Largest Cities were in New York this week for the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. Here they and their aides spent 4 days comparing notes on policies and their implementation to deal with the challenges of climate change, sustainability, jobs & population. The majority of the World's Population now lives in Cities and they consume 75% of the world's energy and produce 85% of its greenhouse gas emissions. Mayor's of the World's largest cities now find themselves at the forefront of designing and implementing policies that may set the standard for the rest of their respective nations.

Who Came

It would be nice to see something new for a changeHow will we deal with congestion pricing in New York City?
Most likely they will choose not to deal with it since car commuting
is such an issue. The commuter suburbs in Westchester, Connecticut,
Long Island & New Jersey have excellent scheduled train service directly into the city. Outlying sections of many New York City boros are linked only by bus routes that can hardly be called 'scheduled' to midtown and to the subway termini. Waiting and changing from bus to subway and back again can make this an arduous and lengthy trek especially in inclement weather, its easier to drive. Commuters from within New York City who drive thus constitute a significant proportion of city drivers who would be understandably distressed by a usage or congestion tax.Current scheduled bus service is dysfunctional and probably will never work well again no matter how much money is spent on it. The bus service replaced an interlocking grid of light rail streetcar systems so dense it went almost everywhere in the city and so
widespread it was possible to almost reach Chicago by light rail (except for a 20 mile gap near Buffalo NY) from New York City. Many
of those rights of way are still embedded in the streets and could be
restored to light rail services. Most of the lines serviced areas that were until recently considered 'remote' and 'abandoned.' These locations have now become hotspots of real estate development much of it highly desirable waterfront property that are literally off the public transport grid.
Light rail would re-integrate these areas back into the urban fabric.
Certainly real estate developers understand this particularly the
Durst Organization which is developing a number of waterfront residential properties in NY
and the BoA Tower.Realizing the that its unlikely that city will build light rail
anytime soon the Durst's invested in a company which has a fleet of water taxis
which go straight from quais near his buildings to midtown. One of
these water taxi stops even has a beach bar next door with a great view of the United Nations and 5 minutes away from midtown Manhattan by sea. Definitely a better way to commute than being stuck on a bus to nowhere for an hour.Its time to put some useful and clean public transportation projects back on the drawing boards. These require the kind of large scale capital investments that are too big for private developers to go alone. In spite of his mixed legacy it would be nice to a master organizer and builder like Robert Moses step up and take charge of some long term infrastructure planning and funding.

Rober Moses, he built big...In the meantime until something better gets built lets try parking and commuting taxes based on a sliding scale according to how much carbon your vehicle emits. Enforcement and legislation is local, you prepay your EZ Pass based on the car model you drive. No carbon signature, a very low or no fee. Hybrid a lesser fee. High carbon output a very high fee. Drivers will immediately recognize the advantage of low or no emission vehicles. A plan like this is being discussed for possible implementation in London's Borough of Richmond right now. According to Peter Goldmark of the Environmental Defense Fund, mobile sources account for a lot more of New York City's carbon signature than 20% and the 'traffic problem must be compared to the Mayor's initiative on smoking' which is I think not a bad way of putting it. It is a health as well as a traffic issue, if we can ban the use of trans-fats in food preparation and cigarette smoke why not noxious carbon monoxide fumes from our city streets?If not ban at least make it expensive enough that people carpool using existing HOV lanes and put pressure on their elected representatives to extend and improve the transportation grid.