Controversial Toll Includes Dozens
Of Coveted Transportation Proposals
By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal, which would charge drivers $8 to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, includes a virtual honey pot of transportation initiatives that are contingent upon its passage at the state level. Some of those initiatives, like residential permit parking (RPP) in Brooklyn Heights, have been on local wish lists for decades, upping the ante on the controversial toll that has little political support from state politicians.
A mayoral senior policy advisor said the RPP program, which would require a residential permit to park on neighborhood streets, is contingent upon the state’s authorization of congestion pricing. The RPP program’s primary purpose, said the advisor, would be to keep outside drivers from hogging neighborhood parking spots and taking the train into Manhattan to avoid paying the $8 toll.
The advisor said reducing the number of government-issued parking placards, which some city employees use to park illegally, is not a significant component of the plan.
Other projects, like expanded bus, subway and ferry service, would be funded through a regional financing authority that would collect an estimated $30.9 billion over the next 42 years in congestion pricing tolls, much as the MTA and Port Authority are funded through bridge and tunnel tolls, or train and subway fares.
“You can’t impose a congestion charge unless people have an option with public transit to get to work or carry out their lives. And so the question is, how do you pay for the necessary expansion of the public transit system?” said Kathryn Wylde, president & CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the influential group that published a report last year advocating congestion pricing.
“The way we fund transportation improvements, the capitalization of the budget, is primarily through tolls. Its clear that’s the most likely source of revenues,” she said. Wylde is also on the mayor’s Sustainability Advisory Council.
The dozens of transportation initiatives bundled together in the mayor’s plan would inarguably improve mass transit for many New Yorkers. But the centerpiece, congestion pricing, would force state politicians to vote for a toll many of them call a tax on working families.
“I don’t know what other elected officials are hearing from their constituent base, but this is not something I can vote for,” said Janele Hyer-Spencer, D-Bay Ridge/Staten Island. “All of those things are really lost on the voters here. What people are really hearing is, ‘How much more of these taxes and fees are we going to be saddled with?’”
Residential Permit
Pricing ‘Held Hostage’
Local proponents of residential permit parking have maintained that the program is needed now to reduce the number of commuters who clog neighborhood streets in search of free parking and end up taking spots from residents.
“I’m very upset to know that [residential permit parking] would be held hostage to congestion pricing,” which could take years to get approved, if at all, “because we know that it’s needed,” said Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association.
Josh Sirefman, then the COO and executive vice president of the city’s economic development corporation, testified to the City Council in 2004 that the study would “lead to a pilot program should the study find that commuter vehicles make up a significant percentage of vehicles parked in residential neighborhoods.”
A study on RPP by the Downtown Brooklyn Council, published last year, found that 97 percent of the parking spaces in the study area (Boerum Hill, Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights) were occupied, and that 22 percent of the drivers in the area were headed to work or school.
“So the definition of a ‘significant proportion’ is up for definition, since they never gave it. But they never said the numbers shown by the study do not constitute a significant proportion, they just said they wouldn’t do it,” said Sam Rockwell of Councilman David Yassky’s office.
Residential permit parking was one of the few initiatives in the mayor’s transportation plan not emphasized in the Partnership for New York City’s December report, that advocated for congestion pricing.
“There’s been a lot of thinking on this issue by transportation people working in their own silo, by environmental people doing the same, and some by business organizations. And the eight months meeting with the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning was really an opportunity for a lot of us to come out of the silo and into a conversation,” said Wylde.
“It’s the first time we’ve had a really comprehensive approach. So it picks up a number of conversations about the traffic problem that couldn’t be really resolved on a parochial basis, where it was one neighborhood at a time. It really had to be addressed as a citywide policy,” she said.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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