Bridge Tolls: Best Remedy for What Ails City
By Charles Komanoff and Brian Ketcham
November 19, 2003
Three billion dollars in new taxes, and New York City's budget gap still
gapes. Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg are in court over the mayor's
bid to salvage this year's budget by refinancing leftover 1970s debt. Yet
both men doggedly ignore a rich and socially constructive source of
revenue: East River bridge tolls.
Current technology allows for electronic tolling of the Brooklyn,
Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges without making drivers slow
down. City traffic's perennial Mission Impossible - reducing gridlock
without impeding commerce or overburdening drivers - is now a no-brainer.
We estimate that a one-way toll of $3.50 on these bridges - the same
price the Metropolitan Transportation Authority charges E-ZPass users on
its Triborough Bridge and Queens Midtown and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels -
would eliminate around 5% of auto trips between Manhattan and Brooklyn or
Queens. Tolls would also end traffic "traffic gaming" in which drivers
detour from a tolled MTA crossing to a free city bridge.
But reduced traffic is just the beginning of the story.
- The lighter volumes would speed traffic by more than 30% on the East
River spans, and by several percent through large areas of Brooklyn and
Queens that feed the bridges.
- Two to three minutes would be shaved from a typical 45-minute trip
across a free bridge - a 5% time saving. Local trips now impeded by bridge
traffic would move faster as well.
- As much as 9% of citywide traffic-congestion delays would disappear,
yet total vehicular travel would decrease less than 1%.
- Drivers, passengers and truckers would save a combined 37 million
hours a year they now lose in traffic. The vast majority of these savings
would occur in Brooklyn and Queens.
Notoriously, time is money. Add up the time savings for truckers,
tradesmen, commuters and seekers of entertainment, and it comes to a
walloping $650 million a year - almost equaling the estimated $700 million
to be paid in tolls.
In other words, even for drivers, tolling the East River bridges is very
nearly a break-even proposition, while for the city, it's 700 million real,
and badly-needed dollars.
Toll opponents warn of economic damage from reduced travel. But it
strains credulity to predict deep harm from a less than one percent
reduction in car travel, especially considering that many of the foregone
car trips would still be made via transit or carpools.
Nor are East River tolls inequitable. Census data indicate that regular
bridge commuters earn an average of $14,000 a year more than their
neighbors - enough to cover their annual toll cost almost ten times over.
The other 98% of New York City adults - those who don't now use a free
bridge daily - will cough up less than $50 a year for the tolls, on
average. In fact, out-of-towners will pick up more than one-fifth of the
tab, enough to make up at least a third of the revenue the city lost in
1999, when Albany repealed the commuter tax.
It's going to happen, sooner or later. Someday, all vehicular traffic in
New York City will be tolled according to the level of congestion and the
size of the vehicle. The result? Goods and people will move more freely,
and the billions in revenue will stave off further cuts in city services
and help make down payments on vital transit improvements - and maybe even
allow our crippling property and sales taxes to be rolled back.
East River bridge tolls are the obvious first step. Our city can't
afford any longer to let almost $2 million a day in toll revenues slip
through our fingers, along with 100,000 hours that drivers lose in
gridlock.
In London, a similar scheme implemented earlier this year has slashed
gridlock, improved bus speeds and generated badly needed revenue, without
noticeably suppressing commerce.
New York deserves no less.
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