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 July 26, 2007 | Vol 6 No. 13 |
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In This Issue: – Serious Politicos Show Their Skills in Congestion Pricing Deal What came of the marathon four-day session was an agreement to set up a commission to examine how to mitigate traffic-clogged streets in Manhattan. While at first glance this appeared to doom the plan to “study status,” the road to congestion pricing becoming a reality isn’t actually so rough. It’s worth mentioning that the seasoned politicians and negotiators in Albany did their job and deserve accolades for patching together a complex deal that satisfied most of the people involved while still furthering the goals of traffic reduction. With tensions running high between the governor and majority leader over who was to blame for the do-nothing regular legislative session, differences were set aside to map out a detailed nine-month plan. In case you missed it, the traffic “peace agreement” included establishing a 17-member commission to report back on how the city can tackle its traffic problems. Part of the report must include how to implement Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to charge vehicles $8 to drive below 86th Street during the week, but the commission can also study other proposals that would meet the same traffic reduction goals as set out in the Mayor’s plan. Questions the commission will probe include outstanding issues on where to place the congestion boundaries, how to handle traffic and parking at boarder areas and what the pricing should be. To accomplish all this, the commission has a relatively short amount of time. The deal sets forth a rigorous timeline (www.streetsblog.org/2007/07/20/the-congestion-pricing-timeline) of activity between now and January 31 when the traffic reduction report will be presented. During that time the commission will “conduct hearings, take public testimony, and review information and proposals regarding traffic congestion.” Following the report on the 31st, the State Legislature, with a message on home rule by the City Council, will have to vote on the plan by March 31, 2008. The reasons for a near-certain victory on congestion pricing are both political and technical. Insiders argue it will be difficult for the commission to recommend anything but the Mayor’s plan since a requirement was built into the agreement that other traffic-reduction proposals must reduce average vehicle miles traveled by the same amount as the Mayor’s congestion pricing plan. RPA produced a report recently on congestion pricing alternatives, which analyzed alternative methods for reducing traffic congestion in the city and concluded none of the alternate proposals – license plate rationing, truck-only measures, traffic management measures and transit improvements – would reduce congestion or improve air quality with anywhere near the effectiveness of the PlaNYC congestion pricing program. Politically, the 17-member board is stacked heavily in the Mayor’s favor. Of the seventeen members, three are appointees from the Senate, three from the Mayor, three from the governor, three from the City Council, one from the Senate Minority and one from the Assembly Minority, all of whom the Mayor gained early support from. That equals fourteen votes from supportive offices. The creation and compostion of the Commission marked a real turning point for the Mayor, and displayed the genius of Kevin Sheekey, the City’s chief negotiator during the talks. By the time you read this, legislators will have likely headed back to Albany and voted on a program bill, Assembly bill A09362, introduced by the governor and sponsored in both houses. Interestingly, the primary co-sponsors of the Assembly bill were congestion pricing’s primary critics from the outset: Manhattan Democratic party leader Denny Farrell and Westchester County representative Richard Brodsky – a show of strength that Silver can lead his delegation and yet another example of how Albany can foster strange bedfellows. Despite tensions flaring up in Albany again with the release of a bombshell report on Monday from the state Attorney General’s office that top Spitzer aides engaged in a smear campaign against Senator Bruno, the congestion pricing bill seems immune to the troubles. That may not be the case for other deals that were reportedly struck during the same negotiating session, namely Campaign Finance Reform and capital spending for economic development and higher education, a sign that Albany may finally be on the same page as traffic-reduction advocates (www.campaignfornewyork.org) that pollution-belching vehicles and the economic drain of congestion must finally be dealt with.. But taking a longer view, say decades and half-centuries instead of years, has the cost of building big risen, stayed flat or fallen? It’s an important question, because as New York City and others in the region contemplate big projects, such as a new commuter rail tunnel under the Hudson River, deciding how much something will cost and whether it’s worth it is perhaps the most important question. Viewing this question through a historical lens might be helpful. Last month, I looked at whether building big projects, such as subways and skyscrapers, take longer to build today than 50 or 100 years ago. I concluded they did, even though one might think that technological advances and increased societal wealth would mean the opposite. The article, Slow Going, prompted an unusual amount of well-informed responses. The money question has a similar logic. Wouldn’t better technology and a richer society make big projects cost less, at least as a percentage of a society’s wealth? Let’s take a look. The city’s first subway line opened in 1904 after a mere four years of construction. How much did it cost? The usual figure given is $33 million. Given the size and scope of the project – double tracks and more than two dozen stations all the way from City Hall to 145th Street – that sounds like a pretty good deal. But how much is $33 million in today’s dollars? If one spent a similar amount today, what would it be? Interestingly and significantly, there is no one answer to the question. According to standard economic models, there are actually half dozen or so methods of comparing spending and prices in different times. And each produces wildly different answers. Let’s start with the Consumer Price Index. Under this method, a similar size basket of goods, say a loaf of bread, a newspaper, a frying pan and so forth, are compared over time. This produces the Consumer Price Index, which lets us evaluate how much things cost today compared to yesterday. Under that method, the first subway would cost $755 million today. That’s not bad, given that the price tag on the smaller 2nd Avenue subway is often given at $16 billion. But the Consumer Price Index is just one way of comparing costs. Another, arguably equally valid method, is to use the relative share of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Under this method, you basically figure out what percentage of the country’s GDP something cost, and then figure out what that same percentage equals today. Under that method, the city’s first subway would cost $14.2 billion in current dollars! Quite a difference. The price tag on the 2nd Avenue Subway starts to look not quite so bad, although the 2nd Avenue subway will not have as many tracks or stations as the 1904 subway line. An excellent place to begin such investigations is the website MeasuringWorth.com. Using the six methods for comparing value listed there, we get prices of $592 million, $755 million, $1.7 billion, $3.3 billion, $4 billion, and the whopping $14.2 billion previously mentioned. The Measuring Worth site gives a similar example of how price comparisons can vary with big public works projects, but going back even further in time – to the Erie Canal, perhaps the most important public works project in New York City’s and the nation’s history. From Measuring Worth (at www.measuringworth.com): “Using the CPI or GDP deflator for 1825 shows that it would be about $148 million, not more than the cost today of a few miles of Interstate highway. Using the unskilled wage measure the cost is $1.6 billion, a bit more, by GDP per capita the cost is close to $4.1 billion and as a fraction of GDP it comes in close to $108 billion. As a comparison the current budget of the U.S. Department of Transportation is $60 billion.” What can we learn from all this, besides that value is relative and contextual? For urban planners, I think it can prompt us to think about how we rate value when we attempt to put down big public bucks on something. Perhaps the most significant measure of worth when discussing public projects is as a percentage of gross domestic product, or even a city’s domestic product. For this measures how much of our blood and treasure, so to speak, we are willing to commit to something big – like say a new tunnel under the Hudson River. And getting back to my original question, does building big cost more today than it did in the past? Such comparisons are relative, one must remember, because even a subway line built today is very different than one built a century ago. Figures for the subway and other projects suggest that big projects today cost more than they did in decades past, whatever the method of comparison used. Why is this? Answers awaited. How Jane Jacobs Became Jane Jacobs Author Alice Sparberg Alexiou, a longtime journalist, tells the life of Jacobs from her birth in Scranton to her death as a Canadian citizen last year at age 89. Along the way, this relatively short book, 200 pages or so, shows both the roots of Jacob’s original and fresh thinking, and tells her career in greater nuance and complexity. I never knew for example, that Jacobs lacked a college degree and had been a terrible student in high school. She did not even attempt to attend college initially. Later after moving to New York City from her native Scranton, she applied to Barnard but was rejected because of her poor high-school grades. In grade school, she was thrown out of class for impertinence, which seems in retrospect to signal her independence and lack of deference to authority. Jacobs, who got started as a journalist freelancing for Vogue and other popular magazines, got into writing about planning and architecture almost by accident in the early 1950s. In just a few years she was lecturing at Harvard and had come up with the ideas that became the basis for her groundbreaking classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is still a shock reading the precision and confidence of Jacob’s writing, to think how relatively new she was to the entire subject, not to mention untrained in development, planning or design. After the release of Death and Life, Alexiou tells how Jacobs lead the fight against urban renewal in her own Greenwich Village, her eventual relocation to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition to the Vietnam War, and her move into writing about economics more than urban planning. In broad terms, most casual students of urban planning know this story. It is the more complete telling of it that makes Alexiou’s book worthwhile. Lewis Mumford, for example, who is frequently cast in newspaper stories as Jacobs' great antagonist, is shown more accurately in Alexiou’s book as agreeing with Jacobs most of the time and having initially helped her in her career. The two great writers about cities were united in their hatred for conventional urban renewal and Robert Moses’ plans to hollow out Manhattan with freeways. The two parted company only in their respective solutions to urban decay, with Mumford favoring the creation of Garden Cities outside urban centers. Jacobs contemptuously described Garden Cities and Mumford’s support for them in Death and Life, thus drawing a line between the former friends. Mumford and Jacobs were very similar in many respects. Both were journalists first, both lacked college degrees and were essentially self-taught. Alexiou apparently missed these parallels, because she doesn’t mention them and at one point uses Mumford as an example of academic pretension. In telling Jacobs’ story, Alexiou writes admiringly of the woman but does not hallow her further. She shows that Jacobs had her blind spots and could say stupid things, like in 1970 flippantly advising New Yorkers not to pay their subway fares as a way to start breaking down authority. Alexiou also criticizes Jacobs for not focusing enough on race as a factor in urban decay. I was personally unconvinced by Alexiou’s criticism but she marshals strong supporting arguments. As far as I can tell, this book by Alexiou, a longtime journalist and graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School, is the first formal biography of Jacobs. More are likely to follow as academics, who Jacobs always held in certain contempt, perhaps because of their institutions’ initial rejection of her, mine the story of this great thinker of the last century for more material. |
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Saturdays in July July 28
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Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President, Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
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