Ben Adler chronicles the endless struggle to bring congestion pricing to New York, for Issue 15. Read it on our website here. It has taken almost 6

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2024-09-15 21:30:04

Ben Adler chronicles the endless struggle to bring congestion pricing to New York, for Issue 15. Read it on our website here.

It has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York. This is the story of how politicians and advocates built the coalition it needed to finally happen.

In the 1980s, New York’s Department of Transportation held a series of public meetings open to any interested New Yorker on what to do about the city’s chronic traffic problem. ‘This older, professor-like guy attended these meetings, by the name of William Vickrey, and he kept pestering me to do congestion pricing’, said Sam Schwartz, then an official at the Department of Transportation. ‘I hadn’t heard that term before.’

The idea of congestion pricing for New York City dates back to 1952, when it was first proposed by William Vickrey, a young academic at Columbia University who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. It was an idea ahead of its time that would take decades to gain traction. This is the long and tortuous story of how, more than 70 years later, Vickrey’s congestion pricing vision may be about to become reality in New York City.

New York, by far the largest and densest US city, is also the most choked by congestion. The city’s drivers lose an average of 112 hours per year to gridlock, according to the Dutch location technology firm TomTom. The next-worst US city, with 89 lost hours annually, is Los Angeles.