Streetsblog San Francisco

While the full results of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority's (SFCTA) congestion pricing plan, the SF Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (SFMAPS), have not yet been released, the agency will hold a series of public meetings starting next week to discuss the general principles of congestion pricing and how it could work in San Francisco. At the public meetings, the SFCTA will detail several possible scenarios to charge drivers for driving into San Francisco's downtown during peak periods, a prospect that should spark significant public and media debate.

In the best-case scenario, the SFCTA predicts raising $80 million for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements, with traffic reductions of up to 12 percent, emissions reductions up to 16 percent and transit speed improvements of up to 20 percent.

While these numbers sound great, the agency still has to convince a lot of people about the benefits of congestion pricing, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was an early advocate for the concept, but who is not so sure now is a good time to try it.

"I've worked very hard to promote this construct, but I want to do it in a thoughtful and judicious way and I want to do it in a way that's not going to hurt the economic growth of this city at a time when we're trying to recruit companies and trying to recruit people," Newsom told Streetsblog. "We have a lot more work to do on that. We need a lot more outreach, a lot more consensus."

"I'm not ideologically opposed by any stretch," added Newsom, but "I'm not sure this is the right time to be having this debate."

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It’s not often that you get to see your work set off a Eureka moment for someone else -- particularly when that someone is from a different culture. But I had that experience recently, and it seems worth sharing on Streetsblog in light of the interest shown today in my analysis of the travel delay costs from FreshDirect deliveries.

I presented a paper last week at an international forum on traffic congestion in Guangzhou, China. People in that city are beginning to look at congestion pricing, and I was asked to discuss why the Bloomberg toll plan failed politically.

As part of my talk, I described the “social delay costs” from an additional car trip into the center of Manhattan -- literally, the total time that all road users combined spend in traffic because any one of them decided to drive. Afterwards, one of the organizers, a professor of transportation engineering, asked me to present a technical version of my paper to his students at South China University of Technology.

The next day, when I came to the part about social-delay costs, the professor peppered me with questions about my methodology. As I went through the steps -- basically, every trip takes up an incremental amount of limited street space, which lowers speeds, which adds to everyone's travel times -- the professor grew more intrigued. It wasn’t that the idea itself was new, but that if traffic speeds and other baseline data were known, then the delay-impact of one trip could be quantified. And, moreover, that the impact varied enormously depending on the time of day: when there is ample spare road capacity, say, in the middle of the night, an extra trip has little discernible impact, whereas one trip during congested peak times adds several hours to the aggregate time that all other vehicles must spend on the road.

I daresay that for the professor, my elucidation of one trip’s delay costs helped move congestion pricing from the realm of abstraction to something tangible and, perhaps, essential. If a peak trip to the center of New York or some other city can impose one or two hundred minutes worth of delays on others -- and if no driver is ever called on to take that impact into consideration -- then of course the city will be awash in gridlock. No city, not even Guangzhou, despite an emerging 21st century transit infrastructure of Bus Rapid Transit and new subway lines, will be able to forestall the tide of free driving.

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As I climbed the steps out of the Lake Merritt BART station this morning I heard loud chanting. "Wow," I thought, "those bicyclists have really pulled out the troops!" But the demonstrators that greeted me across 8th Street in Oakland were pile drivers, iron workers, carpenters and other trades workers, chanting "Jobs for Oakland Now!" Not far from their boisterous demonstration in front of the main doors of the Joseph Brot Metro Center were a few cyclists showing their signs to passersby, "Bridge the Gap Now" "All the Way Across the Bay" and "Safety Path!" Across the street, Transform and Urban Habitat were also making their presence felt, opposing the Oakland Airport Connector that the building trades unionists were clamoring for.

Democracy in action, I suppose. Long-time bicycle advocates from the East Bay and San Francisco converged on this meeting, hoping to convince the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) to support using some of the new tolls ($5 on all bridges as of July 1, with $6 congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge during rush hour, and for the first time, a half-price toll for carpoolers) to fund a new west-span bicycle/pedestrian/maintenance/safety lane to make the bridge safer, and to finish the transbay route for bicyclists and pedestrians too, not just motorized vehicles. But that effort was bureaucratically sidetracked before this meeting even started.

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Urbanists often find themselves falling into a pattern of thinking
that boils down to the dictum that what’s good for drivers must be bad
for walkability, and sustainability, and all the things that they prize
about well-designed cities. Drivers seem to believe this too, which is
interesting because it often isn’t true.

Take performance parking.
Both urbanists (and drivers) seem to believe that it’s good (or bad),
because it makes parking more expensive, which is bad (or good) for
drivers. But this assumes that a free parking system, where open spots
are almost never available, is desirable for drivers.

That’s
like saying that a store that gives away bread for free — and which
subsequently never has any bread — is good for people who like eating
bread.

For the most part, thinking about congestion pricing
follows this same rule. Urbanists tend to like it because it makes
driving more costly and raises revenue for transit infrastructure.
Drivers tend to oppose it, because they don’t want to pay more to
drive. In fact, congestion pricing would be good for people who really
want to drive and good for people who’d like to have an alternative to driving.

This
message has been slow to sink in, but the fact that drivers may benefit
from congestion pricing may be beginning to resonate with urbanists.
Unfortunately — and so powerful is the
what’s-bad-for-drivers-is-good-for-cities mentality — the absorption
of this message has caused some urbanists to conclude that they’ve been
wrong all along, and that congestion pricing really is bad. If drivers might benefit, it must be the case that cities, and the earth, will not.

So writes the New Yorker‘s David Owen, in an extremely misguided piece in the Wall Street Journal.

By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city
at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that
can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.

Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic
jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the
environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers
into subway riders or pedestrians.

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Having entertained legislators' own ideas about how best to fund future transportation spending, the House Ways and Means committee turned to representatives from the administration and key interest groups today to hear their thoughts on the matter.

The administration's view could not have been much clearer -- this business is all very important, but we're not ready to commit to anything at this time.

Roy Kienitz, the Department of Transportation's Undersecretary for Policy, made it quite clear that the administration is not prepared to support any of the new funding mechanisms proposed -- not a VMT tax, not indexing the gas tax to inflation, and not taxes on imported oil and refined gasoline.

Kienitz did leave the door open to a tax on trading of oil futures, which he said the administration would have to investigate thoroughly. A key concern is that in a world where oil is traded on global markets, such a measure would simply shift trading off of American soil.

Why the stubborn refusal to engage in the funding debate? Ostensibly, the administration is reluctant to adopt new taxes or fees amid recession.

But this explanation rings hollow. Congress could easily delay the time at which revenue-raising measures take effect until 2011 or later, as is being done with funding mechanisms in the health reform bills under consideration.

The president must know this. A reasonable assumption is that he simply does not want to have a tax debate at this time, not with other key priorities involving new tax burdens also being considered.

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Dear San Francisco Chronicle:

Your story today on SFPark is a new low, infantilizing a parking management pilot that is the envy of municipalities across the country and has the attention of cities as far-flung as Tokyo, Japan. For an agency that is getting more than enough bad publicity on things that it does poorly--and we're the first in line to harp on the negative--the MTA deserves credit for coordinating with the Port to develop the largest and most sophisticated parking management system in the world, which will allow city managers to finally measure with precision the driving and parking patterns in San Francisco so that the streets can become more efficient and less congested.

How do you cover this giant leap for parking-kind? You exaggerate a simple learning curve for a new multi-space meter as though it were a technological Berlin Wall.

"These newfangled meters take much more skill to operate than simply dropping coins into a slot," writes Rachel Gordon, who I'm hard pressed to believe took this editorial tack on her own, given that she rides transit regularly, has been covering transportation issues for awhile and isn't as bound to the windshield perspective as her editors seem to be.

Just how much more skill do these "newfangled meters" take?

Drivers have to remember the number assigned to their space and then log in the information on a keypad. Then they have to decide whether to pay with a credit card, debit card or coins, and finally they have to figure out how to select how much time they want.

To steal from SNL's Weekend Update: Really? Really?!?

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Have you ever idled in traffic or waited for a late bus while thinking: "The city government should put me in charge of fixing this mess"?

Well, it's time to make notes on that brilliant traffic-calming idea. The Intelligence Transportation Society of America (ITSA) kicked off a $50,000 "Congestion Challenge" today that seeks to pair social networking with innovative transportation policy-making.

Co-sponsored by Spencer Trask, a private equity firm specializing in high-tech investments, the contest asks transportation professionals and everyday citizens to submit their proposals for clearing the nation's jam-packed roads, bridges and transitways. Each submission will be judged based on its ability to address five issues: sustainability, safety, behavioral impact, economic competitiveness, and speed & efficiency.

But the most compelling aspect of the challenge is its approach to judging. Instead of subjecting entries to an evaluation panel that might be too tied to outmoded ways of thinking, the ITSA asks aspiring judges and contestants to set up their own Facebook-style profile pages (mine can be seen here) and rate entries themselves.

This democratic format appears ripe for urbanites to flood the zone with support for genuinely worthy ideas. If livable streets advocates can organize and support a congestion solution devised from within their own ranks, one can imagine a lot of state and federal DOT officials taking notice.

MTA Executive Director Nat Ford sat down with Streetsblog San Francisco last week for an hour-long interview. In today's segment, he addresses the funding crisis facing California transit agencies, the long-awaited implementation of the Bike Plan and the internal MTA battle over how to balance the different modes.

I also asked him about criticism from some advocates and officials in other agencies that the Mayor has hamstrung the MTA in some areas, preventing bold action to make San Francisco a true Transit First city.  

"I think, from my meetings with the mayor, there’s some situations where he wishes we were moving a whole lot faster," said Ford. "There are situations where we are very aggressive, and then there’s some situations where we need to be a little bit more deliberate in what we’re doing."

Part II of the interview with me and reporter Matthew Roth was recorded on April 8th:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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The Municipal Transportation Agency's federally-funded parking experiment, SFPark, is shaping up to be the most powerful tool remaining in the city's traffic-busting toolbox considering the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's criticism of congestion pricing and Mayor Newsom's recent tempered support for the plan.

SFPark is the largest dynamic parking demand management project in the world, with 6,000 curbside parking spaces and 11,500 off-street spaces in city-owned garages. The pilot will last for a year-and-a-half and focus on seven target areas, most in the downtown business district and tourist areas along the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Assuming the time line isn't delayed, the MTA will release a request for proposals by the end of January for vendors to install the technology required to map parking patterns in the pilot areas.   With $19.8 million in federal funding from San Francisco's Urban Partnerhip Agreement set to roll into city coffers in February, the MTA will install meters, sensors and networks within two months and start collecting baseline data in May.  After sixty days, parking managers will start adjusting parking rates, which by law can be raised by no more than $.50/hour every 30 days in the pilot zones; the control zones will not see any change in pricing throughout the trial.

Jay Primus, the MTA's SFPark project leader, believes the public outreach that has already occurred with businesses, transportation experts, environmental advocates, and community stakeholders will facilitate its acceptance. If the pilot works as projected, Primus said the MTA expects the rate of parking fines will be reduced.  Though San Francisco's parking fines are 57% of parking revenues (PDF, page 3)--a far cry from New York City's parking woes, where parking fines are half a billion dollars annually and more than 500% of parking revenues--the agency hopes to fulfill its mandate to voters to improve the management of city streets

"Part of [SFPark] is to continue to realize the original promise of the MTA," Primus said.

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