{"id":427,"date":"2006-12-06T11:51:59","date_gmt":"2006-12-06T18:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/?p=427"},"modified":"2006-12-06T11:51:59","modified_gmt":"2006-12-06T18:51:59","slug":"dont-even-think-of-progress-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/?p=427","title":{"rendered":"Don’t even think of progress here."},"content":{"rendered":"

The mayor really is an all kinds of smoke out of doors kind of guy. The man who has sold the idea that the Republican model of \u2018smaller government\u2019 is best expressed by telling you not to eat at Dunkin\u2019 Donuts. Of course, everyone one loves to tout the sheep in wolf\u2019s clothing argument. If that is the case, then kudos to Mike\u2019s clever interpretation of the liberal model of progressive taxation is renters subsidize homeowners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I digress. Why mention Mike when we should really be talking about Uncle Joe Bruno? Just because it\u2019s congestion week, and Ken Livingston has the biggest cojones in congestion pricing these days, don\u2019t expect diminutive Mike Bloomberg to throw down. This is, after all, a man who won\u2019t fly commercial to his Caribbean hideway. But before you get all exercised thinking our mayor wouldn\u2019t take on a limey, remember, he\u2019s not afraid of the serious opponents. Like the Chinese. Particularly those selling Chow Fun.<\/p>\n

Since Streetsblog <\/a>has written all you need to know about congestion pricing, and I don\u2019t care how expensive they make it to drive into Manhattan — except to note, whatever it is, it ain\u2019t enough, since all of New Jersey parks on my block on the weekend — I decided take a skeptic\u2019s position, but not because I enjoy being a jerk (a pleasure I pursue for its own rewards), but to try to establish some possible remedies that we can do without resorting to the sort of utopian bitterness that pervades so many car-free tracts.<\/p>\n

First, a very provocative observation: Manhattan isn\u2019t that congested. It\u2019s true. For all the complaints about subsidized on street parking, and productivity lost, you can still travel a large percentage (if not majority) of the streets of Manhattan most of the day with about the same ease of any large metropolitan area, and find about as much parking.<\/p>\n

“You obviously never take a cab up 6th Avenue at 5PM,” you shout over the blare of honking horns. True, I do not. “And you never try to park downtown,” you also counter. Also true: I don\u2019t work for the city, so parking on sidewalks all over downtown is a perk unknown to me.<\/p>\n

But the salient point here is that destination based driving (I want to go shop in SoHo! I need to drive to work so I can pick my kids from soccer on the way home!) is the source of most of our car-based congestion. It mirrors a set of behaviors learned in the suburbs: that cars are the best way to get somewhere, and, once there, parking must be absurdly proximate to the final destination. How many people think they can actually park within a block of the Apple Store in SoHo? I don\u2019t want to know.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers don\u2019t drive much for a couple reasons: we live here, we know driving isn\u2019t typically the fastest way to get somewhere, and we don\u2019t own cars. Oh, and driving is fucking expensive. So charging people 10 bucks to drive to SoHo on a Saturday (even the most expensive congestion pricing in London tops out at $15) isn\u2019t much of a deterrent, particularly when it costs $6 for the tunnel and $20 to park for an hour.<\/p>\n

True deterrence would require managing all Manhattan entries south of the GWB, and treating everything south of 185th Street as a congestion zone, because there are strange race\/class components to this — though much of northern Manhattan is more easily traversed by car, there are plenty of bottleneck points up there. Do you want to explain why time and money is invested in making Houston Street passable on a Saturday night, but not 125th Street on a Saturday afternoon (and more practically, to deal with the overflow of people going up perimeter avenues to avoid the FDR). To say nothing of outer borough boulevards.<\/p>\n

And that isn\u2019t possible. Not because it isn\u2019t a good idea, but because of Uncle Joe. Even with Spitzer looking to be a somewhat rational — sorry, we’re comparing him to Pataki: make that sentient — human being, the two-headed devil of Silver\/Bruno, coupled with the yokel upstate attitude evidenced by the state DOT (which controls most our street\/traffic management) create the pitch perfect ode to shitty governing.<\/p>\n

So we aren\u2019t going to get congestion based tolls, or fares for entering zones (and I don\u2019t know that such an idea even can be worked out). And we still have the prospect of nodal congestion issues (commuting, tunnel approaches, and some destination based driving — Times Square, the EV weekend, etc.). So what can we do with the tools we have? My skeptic\u2019s approach sees three options: cops, cops and parking meters:<\/p>\n

First, cops:<\/strong> stop them from parking all over downtown. Well, not just them. Everyone. No more parking exemptions for city employees. No more lax enforcement of the above (mini-congestion management, since it would reduce a large number of river crossings daily).<\/p>\n

Second, cops:<\/strong> let\u2019s enforce the laws we have. Getting in and out of Manhattan at rush hour sucks. We can always make it worse by aggressively enforcing the laws we already have. Double parking, intersection blocking, multiple turning cars, speeding. All these things add to congestion and danger. If we can\u2019t make it more expensive in money to get into the city, we can make it more time consumptive. It might not be so pleasant for those living on Hudson Street in the short term, but eventually it might improve. And if it doesn\u2019t, DeNiro can buy them all dinner, since he probably suckered them into moving there in the first place. And, most crucially, start ticketing assholes who use the horn. It\u2019s on the books, it\u2019s a healthy fine, and it would make such a quality of life difference for residents.<\/p>\n

Third, parking meters:<\/strong> Get rid of them. There\u2019s no way you can make it practical to have meters reflect the value of parking. Are you going to put 24 quarters in a meter for 30 minutes? Who uses those meters anyway? Um, people driving into Manhattan, right? Anyone living here certainly won\u2019t be giving up a street spot to drive across town.<\/p>\n

Sure, there will be some fools who think they can commute to Manhattan with free all day parking available, but it will only take about a month for everyone with a car in a garage to get rid of it, take up residency on a curb and never move. Then, after a morning or two of circling for two hours for a spot, they will get the message. Get rid of all curbside parking on avenues and main cross streets (save delivery vehicles), and any meters on side streets (most of them are meter-free anyway).<\/p>\n

Will this make Manhattan a pedestrian paradise? Probably not, but I hate most pedestrians too, so whatever. But put up breathalyzer checkpoints at the main exit routes of Manhattan for several consecutive weekends, and you would radically change the driving patterns in Manhattan. What would all this congestion improvement get us anyway? I don\u2019t really care if everyone going home to Jersey suffers every night. And if they actually tore up some streets once we were so deliriously car free, they would only fill them with condos from Scarano and Kondylis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The mayor really is an all kinds of smoke out of doors kind of guy. The man who has sold the idea that the Republican model of \u2018smaller government\u2019 is best expressed by telling you not to eat at Dunkin\u2019 Donuts. Of course, everyone one loves to tout the sheep in wolf\u2019s clothing argument. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missrepresentation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}