Time to toll East River bridges
By Samuel I. Schwartz
New York City has the most dysfunctional traffic-pricing scheme on Earth. We charge drivers to go from Queens to Queens across the Cross Bay Bridge, but we don’t charge them to travel from Queens to Manhattan across the Queensboro Bridge.
We toll tractor-trailers going from Brooklyn to New Jersey $33 if they stay on the expressways and cross the Verrazano Bridge, but we give them a free pass when they take downtown Brooklyn streets, rumble across the creaky Manhattan Bridge and crawl across Canal Street.
Nassau County drivers pay $7 round trip to get to the Bronx on the Throgs Neck Bridge, but not even the penny collected 119 years ago, when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, to enter Manhattan.
Mayor Bloomberg should be supported when he considers congestion pricing. But since Mayor William Gaynor removed tolls on the four East River bridges in 1911, any call for reintroducing tolls has been met with stiff resistance – despite evidence that tolls would help most people in the boroughs, where few commute over those bridges compared with those using subways.
We need a new approach. Clearly, the best places to apply congestion pricing would be where we have significant traffic and a good choice of transit options. Tolling the bridges to the Rockaways meets neither criterion – so wipe tolls from the Cross Bay and Gil Hodges bridges. The Throgs Neck, Whitestone and Verrazano bridges have congestion but no good transit alternatives – knock them off, too.
The one area that has substantial congestion and excellent transit options is Manhattan’s Central Business District – defined as all of the island south of 60th Street. So E-Z Pass the East River bridges and tunnels and the two Hudson River tunnels. Also E-Z Pass southbound avenues at 60th Street, as well as the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway at the 60th Street cutoff point.
Set a pricing rate by time of day and day of week, and even season. Discounts for those who live in the city also could be offered. The 160 tollbooths would be removed at the non-Central Business District bridges, but no tollbooths would be installed at the East River bridges or the Central Business District. Instead, the latest technology – E-Z Pass, smart cards, license-plate photography and other detection methods – would be used, giving drivers flexibility and anonymity if they wanted it.
Tollbooths would remain at the four tunnels for those who would want to pay the old-fashioned way. The bottom line: $500 million more would be collected per year above current levels.
The arguments about long lines at tollbooths would disappear, because not only would there be no booths, but fewer vehicles would divert onto city streets from highways to avoid the tunnel tolls.
Just about everybody would win, especially if we applied excess revenue to the subways and public transit.
The catch is that four entities would have to agree: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority, the city and the state Transportation Departments. The authorities have bondholders whose agreements must be addressed. This is work for a legion of lawyers. It makes sense to have one authority regulate all the entry points and treat traffic systemwide rather than with the current piecemeal approach.
Gaynor made a mistake in 1911. It’s time we admitted it.