Congestion Pricing is Important

Yesterday, the New York congestion pricing deal was big news. A long list of notables lined up to praise it, and the NYT's City Room blog published over 1,450 words of detail on it. Today, it seems to be an afterthought, at least as far as the NYT is concerned. The paper's headline is "New York Deal Tightens Limits on Election Cash", and even the subheds, in the paper, make no mention of congestion pricing, which is finally mentioned, en passant, seven paragraphs into the story:

The compromise also tied together other issues, in classic Albany style. It would set up a commission to study Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan for “congestion pricing” and alternatives that are intended to ease New York City traffic, but it put off action on any measure until March. After announcing the deal, Governor Spitzer also indicated that he was inclined to grant lawmakers a long-sought pay raise as a reward for, as he put it, going “a very long way toward enacting the reform agenda that I laid out.”

Yes, they really put scare quotes around "congestion pricing", as if burying the story wasn't enough.

The plan reappears at the very end of the article, if anybody ever gets that far:

The agreement would also establish a 17-member commission to come up with a final plan to reduce traffic congestion in Manhattan, subject to approval by the City Council and the Legislature, by next March.
Though the compromise on reducing congestion appeared very similar to a plan that the mayor criticized earlier this week, Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement on Thursday, called the plan “a victory.” But the final measure is fairly modest. Among other provisions, it would require that any program expire in 2012, effectively turning any plan for “congestion pricing” into a kind of pilot program
Still, the mayor said he would seek as much as $500 million from the federal Department of Transportation to pay for the plan. The department has announced it would make $1.2 billion available to cities that undertake traffic reduction programs.

This is just weird. The expiry date is no big deal, since the legislature can repeal congestion pricing at any time anyway. And of course the scheme would be a pilot program: it's the first of its kind. (It always had an expiry date, from day one.) That makes it more important, not less. On one of the most important developments to affect its readers' daily lives in the foreseeable future, the New York Times has been comprehensively beaten by not only the WSJ, which has a long article looking at the experience in London, but also by the New York Post.

Both supporters and opponents of congestion pricing deserve better coverage than this – so we can certainly be thankful that the likes of Streetsblog are there to fill the gaps.

Among the opponents of the deal one should count commenter tinbox, who wrote in response to yesterday's post on the subject that all manner of nasty things might happen in the wake of the plan's introduction. Congestion prices might rise, as they have in London; the scheme might be privatized; New Jersey motorists might be upset. All of which seem like good things to me. And in any case the congestion charge for NJ motorists is going to be all of $2, since the $6 tunnel toll is deductible from the proposed charge.

I hesitate to draw too much of a causal relationship, but the highest office rents in the world for the past few years have been in London's Mayfair, right in the congestion-pricing zone, and they've been rising stratospherically. The congestion charge there has made London a much more pleasant city to live and work, and it's helped to solidify London's status as a global financial center. New York City – and New Yorkers – can and should be allowed to compete on a level playing field, without unhelpful interference from Albany.