The automobile has had a tremendous impact on societies and cities around the world. Beginning with Henry Ford’s development of the assembly line, the automobile rose from its humble beginning as a rich man’s toy and has seen almost uninterrupted growth in ownership rates in nearly every part of the world. In the U.S. this greatly expanded the possibility of decentralizing cities, which were viewed as crowded, polluted, and highly undesirable until recent decades. Government policies such as the National Housing Act of 1934 and the Federal Interstate Highway Defense Act of 1956 directly expanded the role of private automobiles by subsidizing low-density, car-oriented housing developments outside of cities along with the highways necessary for quick access to city centers from these new suburbs. From the beginning of car culture in the 1920’s until recent years, city space has increasingly been handed over to vehicles. This dramatic shift towards car oriented urban areas continues to replicate itself in almost every country around the world, a trend that carries grave consequences.
While the automobile has certainly benefitted many, offering new opportunities and an escape from the crowded and polluted city, many governments are paying increasing attention to the adverse health effects of private vehicles. These include diseases related to noise and air pollution, and increases in sedentary lifestyles as long car commutes replace more active forms of transportation. Most importantly, vehicle crashes remain one of the leading causes of death and severe injury, and are the leading cause of death of children in New York City. As tragic as these problems are, nearly a century of human settlement and urban development centered around the automobile has woven vehicles deeply into the operational structure of our cities, regions, and economy, rendering mitigation of the problems complex, difficult, and slow. Indeed, car-oriented urban development has proven to be a self-perpetuating problem.
The self-perpetuation of vehicle-oriented design is one of the greatest obstacles to addressing the problem. Cars require great amounts of space: both when they are being used and when they are being stored. In LA there are currently over 200 square miles of space dedicated to parking alone. The dedication of this space to vehicles has far reaching consequences. Firstly, it prevents this space from having other functions. What might otherwise be used for green space, housing, non-automobile transportation, commercial space, or the provision of basic services to local communities, is instead used for car storage. Other land uses are either prevented entirely, or dispersed to farther places. Generally speaking, the more a place is designed for cars, the less likely it is to provide amenities that can be reached by walking or biking, and the less potential there is for mass transportation. The more a place is designed for automobiles, the more necessary private vehicles become. The more necessary vehicles become, the more space that must be dedicated to them at the expense of other needs and uses, creating a perpetual movement towards car-oriented design and dependance.
Car oriented design also exacerbates many social issues. I have explained how car culture perpetuates itself and diminishes the potential for mass transit. Mass transit is much more affordable than owning a private vehicle, and so less affluent communities are directly harmed by policies that prioritize vehicles over other uses. There is yet another layer to the inequality inherent to cities that prioritize vehicles. In The High Cost of Free Parking, economist and UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup explores the true cost of “free” parking and how we all pay for it, regardless if we own a car or not. In his study, Shoup finds that the average cost of a parking space is over $20,000 and can add millions of dollars to the cost of a development project. This parking is most often not passed on to the users of the space, but rather distributed across the population. We pay for the cost of parking through higher food and apartment rental prices. This amounts to a massive subsidy for people who use vehicles and disproportionally harms people who cannot afford a car. By increasing the ease of settling anywhere, the rise of the car has also greatly exacerbated problems with class and racial segregation.
The history of vehicle ownership and the changing geography is not as benign as people having the freedom to move where they want. Often, they have done so at the expense of others. The lower cost of vehicle ownership, the National Housing Act of 1934, the creation of the Federal Housing Administration, and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, all created the conditions for a mass exodus from the city to the suburbs. These policies served the interests of white Americans at the expense of others. FHA redlining, which was based largely on the racial components of neighborhoods, and new suburban developments with deed covenants, conditions, and restrictions, which prohibited sale to nonwhites, and excluded nonwhites from reaping the massive benefits of all of these subsidy programs. As whites left cities for the suburbs at an incredible pace, they still needed quick access to their jobs in the city center, and so city leaders decided to construct highways that pierced through city neighborhoods leading to and out of city business districts. Poorer and nonwhite communities were not included in the exodus from the city following WWII, but were instead often victims of freeway construction programs that razed their communities, leaving them uprooted. These types of issues continue to play out today with poorer communities most affected by the adverse consequences of car culture.
While many countries and cities continue to prioritize vehicles in city planning and design, others have taken large steps to greatly reduce the use and impact of private vehicles. The Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark certainly provide models of success in planning and designing cities to function without private vehicles. Many European cities have begun taking steps to ban or significantly limit vehicles in city centers. In this paper I look at similar policies, focusing especially on congestion pricing efforts in London and New York City.
Similar to ferry, rail, or any type of transport system, all road networks have a finite limit to the amount of people or goods that they can carry. This is a given network’s capacity. Nearly every city in the world contends with this geometric fact as their roads become congested and traffic slows. This comes at a great economic and social cost, with congestion on United States highways estimated to cost $78 billion. As the world becomes increasingly urban, and as vehicle ownership rates grow, congestion is projected to worsen. While a range of tools and strategies exists to mitigate rising congestion, such as expanding transit service, shifting road space to alternative uses, creating high occupancy vehicle lanes, eliminating free parking, or expanding mass transit options and bicycle infrastructure networks, I focus on comprehensive congestion pricing plans, where a charge is placed on road users when congestion levels are high or upon entering central districts of a city. Iterations of congestion pricing in both London and NYC have designed policies that aim to not only reduce traffic into central business districts, but also create new revenue streams to fund improvements to sustainable bicycle and mass transit networks. I first provide an overview of congestion pricing, its benefits and challenges, and then look at how this policy has played out during the last few decades in London and NYC.
Origins of Congestion Pricing
Congestion pricing, now considered policy of the progressive left, actually originates from the conservative economic doctrines of Milton Friedman, who advised both Reagan and Thatcher, and who proposed the idea of congestion pricing in a 1951 paper titled “How to Plan and Pay for the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need,” in which he posited that road capacity is limited, highways require more capital to maintain than expected, and excessive traffic on highways must be discouraged to prevent congestion. Likening highway use to other market commodities Friedman writes, “Like automobiles, shoes and cigarettes, highway service is a product offered to a number of individual consumers.” A simple solution to this problem, according to Friedman, would be to charge highway use similarly to other goods and services, based on the amount the user feels “he needs and how much he is willing to pay” to use the highway. Friedman imagined an electronic road pricing system involving radioactive road markings and car mounted geiger counters. Sixty-six years later the basic principles of Friedman’s congestion pricing have been implemented in cities around the world. With congestion on the rise, greater support for environmental programs, greater awareness for the health impacts of noise and air pollution, and congestion pricing programs that have already proven effective, his idea, radioactive roads aside, are more pragmatic than ever.
Benefits and Challenges
Despite the pragmatic qualities of congestion pricing, there is much pushback to its implementation, and so an overview of its benefits and challenges is in order. There are many clear benefits to a well-designed and managed congestion pricing program. Firstly, by reducing congestion it leads to more reliable roadways, with more predictable travel times, less pollution, and cheaper movement of goods in the city, which benefits both businesses and consumers. Lower levels of pollution means healthier cities. Research has shown that about 9,500 people die prematurely in London each year from air pollution. Much of this is caused by NO2, which is a gas created primarily by diesel cars, lorries, and buses. Once lower congestion levels are achieved, it becomes more feasible to dedicate street space to alternative uses such as green space or bike lanes. Streets can be redesigned in safer ways that prioritize pedestrians. Finally, congestion pricing creates a new revenue stream that can be used to pay for such improvements.
The challenges to congestion pricing, however, are equally as numerous. Congestion pricing aims to significantly alter the status quo of transportation, not only in the city, but also extending to the wider metropolitan area. Corruption, general distrust in the government, and government incompetency compound issues of NIMBYISM and resistance from motorists and business owners, who will ultimately incur a higher expense for entering city centers, hampering efforts to gain support for such projects. Designing and managing a program so that it creates a net benefit that is enjoyed equitably throughout the entire metropolitan region is difficult. While road users definitely have to pay higher fees in such a system, the benefits are less clear or certain. Congestion pricing, unless implemented with clear equitable benefits, is potentially regressive. While higher earners can afford to pay the additional charges and enjoy less congested roads, the fees may exclude lower income groups from using roadways within affected areas. If the program is not designed equitably, it is bound to fail in its stated goals and amount to another tax burden that disproportionately affects lower income communities. These challenges and risks significantly decrease the popularity of congestion pricing.
Congestion Pricing in London
London has enjoyed a successful central business district congestion pricing program for almost 15 years now, but despite all of the clear advantages to congestion pricing, successful implementation of the program proved unlikely when it was initiated in 2003. How did London overcome the political unpopularity of such a project? The answer to this question is complex, involving local, national, and international politics. While the creation of the E.U. created new legal pressures and incentives to tackle London’s deadly pollution, credit for the program’s implementation is usually given to Ken Livingstone, who implemented the program as mayor in 2003, despite widespread opposition and skepticism of the initiative.
The rise of Ken Livingstone and his policy to tackle congestion and pollution in London extends back over thirty years to the creation of the Greater London Council (GLC), which was conceived in the late ‘50s and formally set up in 1965 to address traffic and development issues that were affecting postwar London, which was now sprawling beyond the boundaries of London’s long-time administrative boundary, the London County Council (LCC). Although the new political and administrative body was subject to the greater authority of central government, and from wild internal swings between Conservative and Labour control, it did undertake major projects and change the face of London. The GLC also gave rise to Ken Livingstone, who was elected to the GLC in 1973 and successfully led a left-wing “takeover” of the GLC in 1981. Nicknamed “Red Ken,” Livingstone became a clear target of Thatcher and conservatives and the 1983 conservative manifesto promised to abolish the GLC, which it did in 1986. The abolishment of the GLC was not exactly a defeat for Livingstone though, and he credits his adversaries with raising his profile, claiming that "if Thatcher had just ignored us, no-one would have ever heard of us." Livingstone is a controversial figure, and it is thought that heavy-handed opposition to him also helped him become London’s first directly elected mayor in 2000, a position created by the Greater London Authority Act of 1999 along with Transport for London (TFL). Both the Labour party and Tony Blair maneuvered against him during elections with Blair declaring that Livingstone’s election would be a disaster for London. To understand the rise of Ken Livingstone and his power to transform London transportation, it is also important to understand the historical and political pathways that led to these governmental and institutional shifts: from the abolishment of the GLC, through years of Thatcherism, to the creation of the GLA and the seat of a publicly elected mayor.
Just as the GLC was primarily organized to address persistent and worsening problems that affected a growing postwar London metropolis, the GLA was set up to deal with similar problems that arose in part from the shift to Thatcher’s neoliberal policies, which shifted responsibilities of the GLC to the central national government, local boroughs, private public partnerships, and quangos. In London Underground: A Cultural Geography, David Ashford describes how these shifts and political battles were directly tied to funding and maintenance and improvement projects for the London Underground. He describes how Ken Livingstone, as leader of the GLC, used public subsidies to cut Tube fares and improve the system, but ran into problems as outer borough’s fought higher rates imposed on them by GLC transport schemes.
“The Conservative-run Borough of Bromley claimed that, since it was not on the Tube-network, it was being unfairly penalised by the rise in rates. ‘Judges, not noted for the frequency with which they use public transport, ruled against the GLC both at the Court of Appeal and in the House of Lords.’ The only way to comply with this ruling was to double fares, and the resulting public outrage forced the government into a humiliating U-turn, compelling it to accept the ‘Balanced Plan’ proposed by the GLC.”
Soon after this debacle, Thatcher introduced a Parliamentary bill that dismantled the GLC, ending large government subsidies and improvement programs for London’s Tube. This defeat would not be the end of Livingstone’s efforts to radically alter transportation in London. A little over a decade later, with the Tube underfunded and deteriorating, Livingstone ran for mayor on the promise that he would fix the Tube. In need of capital, he developed a congestion pricing program to deliver on his promise.
The success of London’s congestion pricing program was quickly apparent and inspired cities around the world to try the same. A year after implementation, congestion in London was down 30%, traffic was moving faster, and pollution levels were lower. Livingstone announced that he had plans to double the area of the congestion zone. Although this expansion was rejected, Livingstone was elected for a second term as mayor, and support for the congestion charge zone remains strong today.
NYC and London Collaborate on Policy
Enter NYC, one of the many cities eager to push its own congestion pricing scheme after witnessing London’s success. In fact, leaders from the two cities had been discussing the potential of congestion pricing for nearly two decades. In 2008, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and his supporters failed to garner the support in the state legislature to pass a comprehensive congestion pricing bill. “Congestion pricing,” rather than one policy, can be viewed as an umbrella term for a range of policies that aim collect money to control congestion and to use revenue collected to fund more sustainable forms of transportation. Bloomberg’s congestion plan was simply an expansion of tools and policies that have long been in effect in NYC. In fact, when Livingstone was elected mayor eight years earlier, and set out to implement transportation reform, he hired as transportation commissioner none other than Robert Kiley, the American transit planner widely credited for saving NYC and Boston transit system. Kiley funded major improvements to the M.T.A. by issuing bonds that would be backed by fare revenue from increased ridership, as well as a possible toll hike on Triborough Bridges and Tunnels. These are similar policies that Livingstone had in mind to help fund the Tube’s rebuilding. Bridge tolls and other congestion pricing mechanisms have been part of the NYC transportation landscape since the building of the bridges. Rather than a simple London to NYC congestion pricing policy transfer, we can see that the two cities and their congestion mitigation and public transit solutions intertwine throughout the last few decades. Kiley and Livingstone were able to design and implement a very comprehensive and robust congestion pricing scheme in London, while NYC has struggled to do the same, and so an exploration of the similarities and differences between the London and NYC cases is in order.
Two of the world’s growing number of megacities, London and New York have much in common. Both have roughly 8.5 million inhabitants, high levels of wealth and thriving service sector economies, highly developed transit networks, and traffic congestion that is expected to increase as the cities grow, especially in and around central city districts. While the cities share much in common, there are also key differences, and these impacted their respective bids to enact congestion pricing.
Air quality is no longer a primary concern of most New Yorkers, unlike London, where vehicles primarily run on diesel fuel, emitting much more pollution than the average vehicle in the US, and where voters expect politicians to address the problem. The problem of congestion and pollution was more urgent in London than it is in NYC. As mentioned earlier, about 9,500 people are believed to die prematurely annually from air pollution in London. That number, estimated to be around 2,700, is much lower in NYC. The geography of air pollution differs in NYC too, where pollution affects not only central business districts, but also poor neighborhoods in the South Bronx, where many food distribution and waste transfer centers are clustered. It should be noted that the closest that New York came to passing a comprehensive congestion pricing bill was in the late ‘70s, when Federal regulators used the Clean Air Act to order NYC to toll all of its untolled bridges to reduce traffic into the city center, thereby lowering air pollution, which was a much greater problem in NYC in the ‘80s and ‘90s than today, largely an effect of strict regulations on vehicle emissions in the U.S.
Unlike London, where the newly created GLA and mayor position granted Livingstone the power to move forward with congestion pricing without the support of the central government, in NYC many of the policies regarding road and bridge rely on state legislation. The reason the bill was rejected in NYC also seems to stem from disagreements and bickering between state and city politicians. Indeed, supporters of the bill agreed to a wide number of changes including reducing the size of the charge zone, adding a small charge on taxi and limo trips, and the addition of a tax credit for low-income residents. When questioned about why they voted down the bill, many legislators cited personal offense to Bloomberg’s tactics, with many describing threats of political reprisal against lawmakers who voted against the bill.
As discussed earlier, congestion pricing schemes affect different communities in different ways. Garnering the support in NYC will require that both constituents within and outside of the city are convinced that they will benefit from such a program. Districts outside of the city, where most people drive into the city, might be swayed by improved trip times, while city residents, of whom less than 50% own vehicles, are more likely to support congestion pricing if it will make their streets safer and transit options better. The most popular scheme to bring congestion pricing to NYC is the MoveNY Plan started by ‘Gridlock’ Sam Schwartz. This plan highlights the unfair and unbalanced aspect of roadway tolling into Manhattan, arguing that lowering tolls on some bridges and introducing tolls on un-tolled bridges brings greater equity to the city. The plan builds off of this argument, highlighting the benefits that reduced congestion and added revenue could bring. The plan’s proposal to lower the amount of some tolls and shift the lost revenue to un-tolled bridges immediately attracted the attention of groups set to pay less to enter the city.
London has been enjoying the benefits of comprehensive congestion pricing for over a decade, but implementation required a politician who was willing to gamble his political future. Bringing the benefits that London enjoys to NYC will require strong leadership and coalition building. It will require multiagency and city and state cooperation and planning to ensure that any added revenue delivers tangible benefits to drivers, transit users, residents and businesses. MoveNY has developed a strong framework that addresses the primary challenges to congestion pricing in NYC, but moving forward will require political vision and risk. Congestion problems and NYC’s old, deteriorating transit system will only become more urgent issues over time, begging the question of when rather than if a new congestion pricing bill will be brought to the NY State Legislature.
While MoveNY ingeniously garners wider support by creating a “fair” tolling system that lowers the tolls on certain bridges and makes up for this lost revenue by placing low tolls on all of the untolled bridges into Manhattan. People who use the bridges that would see their tolls lowered are inclined to vote for a policy that lowers the cost they incur entering the city, while the “fair” nature of the plan makes it more difficult for other groups to argue that tolling their bridges would be unfair. These groups argue that their boroughs, Queens and Brooklyn, are less served by transit, and that ultimately the toll would be regressive, hurting lower income workers. This argument is also becoming less tenable as census data increasingly shows that households that own cars in these boroughs make, on average, over $40,000 dollars more than households that do not own vehicles.
While tolling the bridges might be the most effective solution to transit funding and vehicle related issues in NYC, these policies remain largely tied to state politics, and are therefore unlikely to be implemented in the near future. Moving forward, however, the city has many options available that garner funds for transit while lowering congestion without relying on votes from the state legislature. These include expanding Bloomberg’s PARK Smart curbside parking program, and charging rates that discourage driving, while encouraging drivers to park for less time, ensuring that spaces are open for other drivers looking to park. The city can reform its parking placard system, which goes unenforced and today arbitrarily gives placards to 160,500 city workers. The city can also reprioritize street corridors to serve higher occupancy vehicles, or transit such as buses or street cars, and active transportation such as walking and biking. From an activist standpoint, it is crucial to understand the legal and political implications and constraints of all these policies, as politicians are generally risk averse, and enjoy marshaling the complex political and legal nature of these policies to remain free of blame and the responsibility to address these difficult issues.
Lessons from London's Success
Over a decade after the implementation of congestion pricing, the streets of London are congested! This is, however not a sign of failure. Congestion pricing was aimed at reducing private vehicle trips into the center, and in this sense it has been tremendously successful. The streets now move more people than ever, are safer, and more amenable to transit, walking, and biking. New congestion is largely caused by private car services and online shopping delivery vans, but it is also related to the fact that the city has dedicated more space to other modes of transportation such as buses and bicycling. So while some see the measure as an unfair cost burden, London enjoys one of the highest approval rates of public transportation, less congestion and pollution than before implementation, and more options to get around the city. Congestion Pricing in London has proven to be a progressive policy, and although the route to a similarly comprehensive plan will ultimately prove quite different in NYC, the experiences, victories, setbacks, and problems that London has experienced in addressing its transportation problems can greatly inform NYCs continuing struggle to do the same.