By Ted Mann
Associated Press
Morning rush hour traffic headed into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge last year.
Sam Schwartz, the former New York City traffic commissioner known as “Gridlock Sam,” is on a multi-year crusade to revive a left-for-dead idea: installing new tolls on the East River bridges and across 60th Street, the northern boundary of Manhattan’s business district.
The resulting $1.2 billion in revenue could be channeled into the cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority and upgrades the city’s roads and bridges, according to Schwartz’s vision.
That funding influx would also enable the city and state to develop new projects, everything from highway widening to new bus-rapid transit roadways. Even fanciful initiatives would be on the table, such as a set of bridges reserved for bikes and pedestrians linking Manhattan, Jersey City, Governors Island, Brooklyn and Long Island City.
Just don’t call it congestion pricing. For the plan to be more than an academic exercise, Schwartz believes it needs to be more politically palatable than Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s push for new tolls around Manhattan in 2007 and 2008, which sparked a revolt by more car-oriented constituencies in boroughs beyond Manhattan.
As the Journal reported Thursday:
Mr. Schwartz pairs new tolls—$7 cash (or an EZ-Pass discount) to cross the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro and Williamsburg bridges by car in either direction, and to cross 60th Street in Manhattan—with cuts in the cost of using the bridges such as the Throgs Neck and Whitestone farther from the central business district of Manhattan. Drivers least served by the subway system—and, not coincidentally, opposed to previous efforts to install tolls—would see costs fall.
The plan would spread pain widely: Drivers in southern Manhattan would lose an existing tax break for parking costs, to the tune of $20 million annually. Cyclists traveling into Manhattan would be hit with a 50-cent fee. Taxis and livery cars would pay a surcharge to cover their travels through the central business district—a less complex system with a flatter rate than the plan Mr. Bloomberg first proposed, which would have charged different vehicles at different rates at different times.
The proposal is a long way from substantive debate and will need powerful allies to have a chance of becoming reality. But it’s worth a look at the way one transportation expert — and at least some of those who have heard his pitch — thinks the city could reap money it needs from a shift in how it charges residents to get around.
The East River Bridges weren’t always free. Schwartz’s office is decorated with an antique placard from the Queensboro Bridge listing the span’s long-ago fares: 10 cents for an automobile, 5 cents for a push cart and 3 cents for a horse on a lead. East River tolls were abolished in 1911 by then-Mayor William Gaynor.
Since that time, tolls for the other bridges and tunnels in the metropolitan region have doubled about once per decade from 1960 to the present day. At that rate of increase, a round trip across the major crossings could reach more than $50 by 2030, Schwartz says.
For Schwartz, the answer is to wipe away existing prices for all the New York crossings — he doesn’t try to undo the Port Authority’s prices — and allow market demand to set the price for travel into Manhattan, where mass transit is plentiful. At the outer edges of the regions, where transit alternatives are few, he would cut tolls or eliminate them altogether.
His opponents, however, question the ability to hold some tolls low. Some, like Assemblyman David Weprin, said they simply believe city residents deserve free routes into Manhattan.
“If I’m pressed for time, I’ll take the (Queens-) Midtown Tunnel,” said Weprin, a Democrat from Queens. “If I’m not pressed for time, I’ll take the Queensboro Bridge.” He chuckled and added: “Because it’s free!”
Weprin has his own plan to provide funding for the MTA: reinstating the so-called commuter tax as a 1% levy on the income of out-of-city residents, to be split evenly between transit and road projects. That might be as much of a lift as Schwartz’s tolling plan.
The commuter tax, anathema to suburbanites and their representatives in Albany — including some of the same constituencies who have worked to roll back the payroll mobility tax — was repealed in 1999.
