curbing gridlock

This week the city declared “gridlock alerts” because of the traffic morass that is being caused by the United Nations General Assembly. City transportation officials are forecasting Midtown speeds dipping to 3 mph or even lower. Their advice — to avoid driving anywhere near the East Side — should not be taken lightly. But, with average speeds on normal days hovering at about 4.7 mph, a brisk walking speed, drivers have been experiencing gridlock throughout the year. Before you say “nothing new here, drivers have been complaining about traffic for a century” (you’d be correct), there is something different today — traffic speeds are the slowest ever recorded — over 30 percent slower than historic speeds over the past century.

Forty-seven years ago, in 1971, I was assigned to the research office of the old city Traffic Department. I had traffic data from 1915 through the 1960s. I noticed that Midtown speeds hovered about 7 to 7.5 mph for the pre- and post-war decades, despite a doubling of traffic volumes. This was partially accomplished by traffic engineering: avenues converted to one-way operations, upgrading traffic signals, more restrictive parking rules, turn restrictions and more. I say partially because I believed another factor was at work. I hit upon it during the 20 years I worked in city traffic.

In 1982 I became traffic commissioner and did my best to modernize traffic systems, increase enforcement, establish bus lanes, and crack down on placard parking. Despite my best efforts, traffic speeds edged upward just slightly to about 7 ½ mph. I came up with a theory that there was a misery level drivers were willing to accept at around 7 mph. If speeds got higher than 7 mph, more people would drive; if they dipped below 7 mph, fewer would. This seemed to explain why, for 70 years, Midtown speeds stayed about the same despite dramatic changes in traffic volumes. But something happened in the past few years that has set a new level of misery, far slower than 7 mph. What’s going on?

What I hear most often when speaking with New Yorkers is, “those damn bike lanes,” “trucks double park freely,” “Uber and Lyft are killing us,” “the subways stink,” “bus drivers never pull into the curb,” “illegal parkers — especially those with placards — are the culprits,” “more traffic, more pedestrians, more construction, more everything,” and “taxi drivers don’t know how to drive.” Everyone is quick to blame the other person. With a background in physics and engineering, I prefer to look at the data.

Traffic volumes entering Manhattan’s central business district are down by about 100,000 vehicles over the past decade. Vehicle miles travelled, a much better measure of the amount of driving, has jumped 7 percent in Manhattan and the dense East River neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. How can volumes go down but driving go up? It’s because cars usually just head straight to parking, travelling just a few miles in Midtown (I am not minimizing their contribution to congestion). But vehicles-in-motion, mostly taxis, Ubers, Lyfts and Vias, have soared. As traffic commissioner, I found the closest relationship of any parameter to traffic speeds was vehicles-in-motion — the greater the VIM numbers, the slower the speeds. I had studied taxis at the time and found a single cab’s impact on traffic was up to 40 times that of a commuting car.

The bike lanes do reduce vehicular capacity on city streets, but the biggest Midtown program was introduced during the Bloomberg administration, which preceded the more significant drop in speeds over the past five years.

With the rise of Amazon and other delivery services, there are more trucks delivering smaller loads than ever before. This has not been studied sufficiently but I’m certain there’s an impact.

Subway, and especially bus ridership, is down. On-time performance has plummeted this decade from 89 percent to the low 60s; we cannot survive as a world capital with such poor service. People are switching to greater traffic-impacting modes such as Uber and Lyft.

So, armed with these facts, what’s the best approach? Having been at this since the Lindsay administration, I maintain that it must be multi-pronged: transit must improve, the growth of for-hire vehicles needs to be reversed in the business district (through pricing, not a cap), traffic enforcement needs to be more scientific (writing the most tickets does not mean better traffic flow), placard parking should be eliminated in Midtown, growth of truck mini-deliveries needs to be controlled, and insane tolling policies that encourage motorists to drive out of their way to use a “free” crossing vs. a tolled crossing or to drive through the business district rather than around it to get to New Jersey.

The strategy that solves many of the problems is a robust congestion pricing program — for all vehicles — that reduces traffic flow and therefore congestion while raising revenue to improve transit and other transportation systems. An for-hire vehicle congestion charge will go into effect in 2019. I am hopeful a congestion pricing plan for all vehicles entering the CBD will be passed in the coming legislative session.