The real cost of all this traffic
Next year, congestion pricing is coming to New York City. And maybe, just maybe, the toll for motor vehicles entering the lower half of Manhattan should be set at $100.
That number comes from Charles Komanoff, an environmental activist, a transit analyst, and a local political fixture. It represents neither the amount that would maximize revenue nor the amount that would minimize traffic. Rather, it is an estimate of how much it really costs for a single vehicle to take a trip into the congestion zone—in economists’ terminology, the unpriced externality associated with driving into one of the most financially productive and eternally gridlocked places on Earth.
To be clear, Komanoff does not actually think that the state should charge each car, pickup, and box truck $100. He doesn’t think the toll should be anywhere near that amount. “At heart, I’m very much a radical,” he told me as we sat outside a stylish coffee shop in SoHo, to which Komanoff had brought his own coffee in a thermos. He has been detained numerous times while committing acts of civil disobedience, most recently in September, for blocking a heliport that rich people use to fly out to the Hamptons. But when it comes to policy implementation, he told me, “I am a total incrementalist.” Komanoff, who ran the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives for six years and is now the head of the Carbon Tax Center, thinks $3 to $15 would be a reasonable levy, depending on the hour and the purpose of the trip. (The Traffic Mobility Review Board is still determining the rate schedule; the state will use the proceeds to buttress the city’s strained public-transit system.)
Whatever the toll, Komanoff is delighted that New York is finally going to charge drivers something for the privilege of taking up road space below 60th Street in Manhattan. Driving in this area is not just a miserable experience, as anyone who has tried to take the Lincoln Tunnel into the city at rush hour or idled bumper-to-bumper near Madison Square Garden knows. It is also an immiserating one for everyone else—bikers, business owners, joggers, schoolkids, pedestrians. When you drive in a place like New York, you are imposing costs on everyone and everything around you.
To name just a few of the obvious ones: You’re degrading the environment. Cars produce greenhouse gasses that worsen the climate crisis. The air quality in New York is better than it used to be, but still, every day, 700,000 vehicles move through the heart of the city at an average speed of just seven miles an hour, pumping ozone, fine particulate matter, and carbon dioxide into the air. Pollution alone causes the premature deaths of an estimated 1,400 people a year in the metropolitan area, plus thousands of hospitalizations.
Motor vehicles are also responsible for a startling number of collision deaths in New York. Drivers killed 257 pedestrians and bikers last year, including 16 children; the city’s decade-old Vision Zero project has proved wholly ineffective at stopping these deaths. The week before Halloween, a 7-year-old boy was hit and killed in a crosswalk in Brooklyn by an NYPD tow truck. Nor has the city managed to stop the blight of nonfatal accidents: Every year, cars, buses, and trucks injure roughly 13,000 people.
Residents also suffer from the noise pollution that motor vehicles cause. Cars are loud. I don’t just mean show cars with after-market modifications or taxis with horn-happy drivers. I mean regular old cars driving in regular old ways. The average decibel level is 70 to 85 in Midtown, thanks to the perfusion of motor vehicles. Living here is like having a vacuum cleaner running next to you at all times. That kind of noise pollution damages deep sleep and puts New Yorkers at greater risk of hearing loss and dropping dead from a stroke.
I could go on. Cars and trucks require the city to spend billions on highway and road maintenance. They reduce foot traffic to mom-and-pop shops on main thoroughfares. They make it harder for emergency vehicles to maneuver to people in need. They’re ugly. They kill dogs. They spook and frighten pedestrians and bikers. They limit the mobility of kids and tweens, whose parents reasonably worry about their children getting run over. And they take up an inordinate amount of precious public space—four times the footprint of Central Park.
How do you put a dollar amount on all of that? Komanoff’s analysis doesn’t try; instead, it focuses solely on the delays that cars and trucks cause one another in Manhattan’s central business district, and the time value of those delays.
As we sipped our coffee and nibbled on pastries, Komanoff walked me through how he arrived at the $100 figure. Back in the Bloomberg administration, he told me, “I was trying to figure out what you would need to charge cars in order to have the subways and the buses be free.” He began creating a spreadsheet. He added data on the number of trips drivers take into the central business district, broken down by type of vehicle (taxi, private car, truck, and so on), purpose of trip (work, nonwork), entry point (road, bridge, or tunnel), and time of day. He devised a formula on the relationship between the number of vehicles on the road and vehicle speeds.
The thing kept growing. Sixteen years later, he told me, it has 160,000 equations.
“In an Excel spreadsheet? It doesn’t crash your computer?”
“It’s really well done,” he told me. “I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump, but it’s amazing.”
It is kind of amazing. All of those variables allow Komanoff to model the traffic-slowing effect of adding a single car to the road at any given time. He estimates that each vehicle entering the lower half of Manhattan from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. on a weekday reduces all vehicles’ average speed from 6.2685 miles an hour to 6.2684 miles an hour. (That’s roughly six inches an hour per vehicle.) Given how many vehicles there are, the aggregate delay works out to 24.3 minutes—more, once you account for cars headed into or out of New Jersey, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. The value of that lost time? Roughly a hundred bucks at prevailing wages.
In contrast, walking, biking, taking the bus, or riding the subway causes only infinitesimal delays to other New Yorkers, and sometimes no delay at all. Plus, those methods of transit are better for the environment, less of a public-health threat, and less damaging to the city’s physical infrastructure.
As we talked, Komanoff noted that nobody deserves the hellish experience of driving in Manhattan, including people with no choice but to commute by car and small businesses reliant on vehicles for drop-off and pickup. However the review board sets the toll and whatever the effect, New Yorkers stand to win. If people ditch their cars for the subway, there will be less congestion. If people opt to pay the toll, the Metropolitan Transit Authority will get much-needed cash. Not everyone will benefit all the time, Komanoff said. But one analysis found that just 5,000 outer-borough residents with incomes under the poverty line would be hit by a daily toll. And motor vehicles right now benefit from being able to impose massive costs on the city and its residents for free.
Taxing vehicles coming into the lower half of Manhattan would be a good step. Komanoff also believes that the city should add a per-mile fee on food-delivery services. Charge for street parking. Pour money into public transit. Improve bike infrastructure. “The point is to get people used to things so they start changing their behavior,” he said. “They see things getting better.”
Cars just aren’t compatible with cities, Komanoff said. We had talked about taking a taxi ride together, so that we could see firsthand how bad the city’s traffic is. But in SoHo, he balked. He told me he gets pretty much everywhere on one of his three bikes. When he needs to rent a car to go upstate, he bikes out to LaGuardia airport to pick one up. He’d taken a taxi in New York only two or three times in the past decade, and not even for the purpose of research did he want to break that streak now.
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