Bridge Tolls
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East River Bridge Tolls, Who Will Really Pay[Page: Previous 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next] 8. Value Pricing Up to now we have assumed a flat rate for East River bridge tolls — a single rate applying at all hours. Yet “variable” or “value” toll pricing is clearly a better idea, and the idea is gaining ground. In the New York metropolitan area, both the New Jersey Turnpike and the Port Authority charge higher rates for their roads, bridges and tunnels in peak-use periods and offer lower rates at other times. And they appear to be getting what they hoped for: drivers are shifting a non-trivial number of peak trips into less-congested off-peak times or onto other travel modes. Within New York City, however, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority still maintains a uniform $3.50 toll on its crossings, a policy it is preparing to reinforce with a flat 50˘ increase to $4.00. In a report earlier this year for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, A Value-Pricing Plan for the MTA, available at www.tstc.org, I proposed instead that the MTA hold the line at $3.50 for off-peak trips, which cover 70% of all usage, and charge $5.00 for the other 30% of trips that are made during peak periods. This arrangement would, I calculated, generate virtually the same revenue as a $4.00 flat toll, but would save time for peak travelers by shifting or deterring some peak traffic. Here, we have implicitly assumed a $3.72 flat-rate toll for the East River bridges; this is the toll rate that mathematically produces our annual revenue target of $700 million (obtained by dividing $700 million by 188 million trips a year). If value pricing were to be employed instead, then this same revenue could be obtained by charging $5.00 for westbound travel during the morning peak and for eastbound trips in the evening peak, while the rate was dropped to $3.18 for all other trips. We use this scenario here to estimate the impacts of value pricing. Table 7: County Toll Burdens — Flat vs. Value Pricing
Annual toll amounts assume $3.72 per trip with flat pricing, and $5.00 for peak and $3.18 for off-peak trips with value pricing. They are calculated from trip volumes in Table 8 with the simplifying assumption of no trip changes due to either toll system. Since the $5.00 peak rate exceeds the $3.72 flat rate by a third, it’s clear that value pricing will impact East River bridge drivers who travel at peak times — westbound during 6-10 a.m. and eastbound 3-8 p.m. Someone who drove alone to Manhattan at these times every day and year-round would pay $2,000 in tolls, a third more than the $1,500 annual cost to solo-commute on an East River bridge under a flat rate (that’s $5 for each of 405 trips a year, based on 45 weeks a year and 9 one-way trips a week). Value pricing would widen the tolls gap between Manhattan and other boroughs, since peak trips originating in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island or Long Island would outnumber those by residents of Manhattan, the Bronx and New Jersey by 50 to 1. And yet, on an overall basis, value pricing would increase the overall toll cost to Brooklyn and its neighbors just 2-3%, as Table 7 shows, due to the offsetting effect of millions of discounted trips made in off-peak hours by commercial vehicles and non-commuting motorists from those boroughs. It may appear counterintuitive that the total toll tab for Brooklyn and other areas east of Manhattan stands to rise just 2-3% with value pricing, even though commuters from these areas who drive across an East River bridge to Manhattan at peak times will pay a third more. The explanation can be found in Table 8, most notably in the fact that westbound off-peak trips by non-commuting motorists outnumber westbound on-peak commute trips almost two-to-one, 69 million to 36 million. Also helping Brooklyn and its neighbors, an estimated three-quarters of westbound commercial travel over the East River bridges takes place during off-peak hours. Table 8: East River Trips by Type and by Peak vs. Off-peak
First column, trip shares by type, is from Section 6. Second column, number of trips, is product of trip share % and total annual East River crossings, 187.9 million. Middle column, % trips in peak, is our assumptions; key one is that 90% of westbound commute trips occur in peak (allows 10% for trips before 6 a.m., after 10 a.m. or by swing-shift or late-shift commuters). Other assumptions in column were made for conservatism (designating virtually all eastbound-originated trips as off-peak) or to ensure that sum of peak trips in both directions satisfies “constraint” of equaling 30% of all trips. Note that here we assign each trip’s return leg the same direction as the first leg. Thus, even though very few trips originating in Manhattan would be subject to the peak rate — we assume less than 4% — peak trips will also be a minority of all trips from Brooklyn and its neighbors. (This isn’t an assumption but a mathematical requirement; if off-peak trips are to account for 70% of all trips at all times, as traffic counts indicate, then peak trips from Brooklyn and similarly situated areas can’t amount to more than 35% of all trips from there.) The peak rate would have to exceed $9 (a level that would “force” the off-peak rate below $1.50 to keep total revenue constant) before Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island saw their toll costs rise 10% vs. a flat toll. The five “western” boroughs and counties — Manhattan, the Bronx, and Bergen, Essex and Hudson Counties — would pay slightly less under value pricing than with a flat toll — just $14 million a year. This same small amount spread over the many trips originating in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk instead would add just a few percent to the “base” cost these areas will experience from East River tolls in the first place. |
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