History tells us that the only way to reduce traffic congestion is to provide more public transit.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to levy congestion pricing on motorists heading to Manhattan south of 60th Street — set to start Jan. 5 after what can only be called a long and winding road — has provoked strong opposition in car-dependent suburban communities. Hochul has tried to tamp down this frustration, first by shelving the original $15 charge on the eve of the June congressional primaries, and second by waiting until after the November elections to reinstate the charge at $6 cheaper.
The resultant $9 toll could prove too low to dissuade enough drivers from entering Manhattan or lessening notorious levels of traffic. The plan may even fail to secure, at the reduced level, a sufficient stream of revenue to ensure that the city’s subway stations are fully upgraded and that the aged and disabled can access them.
One way or another, whether through congestion tolls or taxes, Manhattan’s gridlock can be eased only by adding more transit. Even with the completion of the East Side Access link for Long Island Rail Road riders and the Second Avenue subway line, the region’s automobile culture still holds sway, along with the expectations for mind-numbing traffic at virtually all times of the day or week — especially in light of the flood tide of Ubers, Lyfts and Amazon deliveries on city streets and escalating curtailment of work-from-home schedules. The ubiquity of the car is, of course, an old story. Just a quick glance at the rearview reveals a city that has long suffered extreme difficulties with tie-ups: From 1920 to 1950, when the city’s population grew by 40%, vehicle registrations increased 525%, while vehicular river crossings to and from Manhattan rose 105%, according to a 2016 New York City Department of Transportation report.
In 1950, at the end of his nearly five years in office, New York’s first postwar mayor, William O’Dwyer, was forced to conclude that even after reorganizing the city’s traffic department and endorsing new highway construction supported by toll revenues, “on the day I left office the problems were as bad as the day I began.”
As he later put it, “the easier it became for an automobile to travel in New York, the more came.”
Without using the term, O’Dwyer had stumbled upon a concept that experts would soon start to call “vehicle traffic generation” for each new mile of road constructed. The phenomenon is still going on today. If you build, or widen, a highway, then more cars will typically come, and more lanes and extensions will become necessary.
As O’Dwyer later put it, “the easier it became for an automobile to travel in New York, the more came.”
It took time before transportation and municipal planners understood that the only means by which cities could meaningfully reduce surface congestion in the federally underwritten automobile age was to provide more transit and mobility options. The realization was especially slow to dawn in New York because O’Dwyer ceded too much power to Robert Moses, his ardently pro-car construction coordinator. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, too, gravitated away from ports and rails. (Ever notice the city lacks a major freight system, thus dictating its undue reliance on trucks?)
As returning WWII veterans sought scarce housing in the city and in the suburbs then springing up, Moses failed to advance a single mile of new subway lines, whose operation had been funded with the help of O’Dwyer’s controversial doubling of the 5-cent fare, untouched since 1904, rather than the real estate tax increase favored by advocates for New York’s low-paid working families.
Supported by banks, trade unions and the construction industry, Moses stitched a ganglion of highways, bridges and tunnels, some of which destroyed working-class neighborhoods like Tremont in the Bronx. The bulldozers rolled after a long period of pre-war and wartime neglect of the transit system relied upon by 3 million New Yorkers a day (not counting Sundays), wrote historian John Strasbaugh in “Victory City.” Ironically, Moses, who saw the automobile as a means of promoting freedom and upward mobility (like President Dwight Eisenhower’s federal interstate highway system itself), never learned how to drive himself.
It only took one day after O’Dwyer’s 1945 election for the unelected Moses, who had begun to shape his Caesarean regional project under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, to propose $1.5 billion from the hard-pressed city’s capital budget for more of the same.
Over the next decade and beyond, Moses’ plans aroused opposition from neighborhood activists, and even City Hall, which had been content to see the public works projects continue as long as they did not require levying taxes. The most famous Moses dud of a blueprint was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a high-speed roadway linking the Holland Tunnel, Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan Bridge. It was defeated, in part, by Jane Jacobs of Greenwich Village, a proponent of human-scale planning. An expanded version of the much-abominated, elevated six-lane Mid-Manhattan Expressway, a hare-brained scheme during the O’Dwyer years that would have darkened 30th Street east to west, also went into the ditch.
Would that Moses or his mayoral sponsors had chosen to interrupt the contemporary pattern of slighting mass transit. Within a quarter-century of WWII, our auto-centric culture had taken firm hold across the region. The region, as exemplified by Manhattan’s particular traffic woes, has been dealing with the consequences ever since.
American cities lacking a robust public transit network will find themselves at a disadvantage, with diminished employee productivity, quality of life, road maintenance costs and environmental health.
And the current pass at which the Metropolitan Transportation Authority finds itself — with projected budget gaps ranging from $211 million this year to $652 million in 2028, according to a new report from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli — should stand as a warning to other American cities not to fall short on funding public transit serving their central business districts. American cities lacking a robust public transit network will find themselves at a disadvantage, with diminished employee productivity, quality of life, road maintenance costs and environmental health. Buses and rail systems still lack the deep-pocketed constituencies that roads and bridges enjoy, as in Moses’ day. Data compiled by Green New Deal Network show that the New York State Department of Transportation had, by August 2023, spent 90% of $1 billion in “flexible funds” from Joe Biden’s infrastructure law on road repair and maintenance rather than on climate-friendly infrastructure such as bus shelters, bicycle lanes and railways.
Whether congestion pricing will put a serious dent in New York City traffic woes is not yet known. But in the last analysis, the answer lies in making public transit more extensive and attractive, whether funded with the help of congestion tolls or higher taxes. That, not making way for even more gridlock, represents the only real path to a sustainable urban future.