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Shucks. Not knowing New York politics, I assumed that the city council’s approval of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan would carry the day in Albany.  Not so.  The plan just died in the state assembly, with opinions among Democratic assembly-members running roughly four-to-one against—a resounding defeat. Sorry to get everyone’s hopes up.  I guess we’ll just have to keep our eyes trained on Europe for a while longer.

It passes! Shortly before 7:30 p.m., the New York City Council approved a measure urging state lawmakers to vote in favor of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal. The vote was 30 to 20, with one member absent. Assuming that the state legislature approves the move, New York will be the first American metropolis to implement this sort of charge.  But it’s not an untested idea.  In fact, congestion...

The best-kept secret among transportation experts is the near-universal agreement that variable tolls–known as congestion pricing–offer the only real solution to worsening gridlock.

Cascadia’s cities could benefit immensely from electric robo-taxi service someday if we get the public policies right but we don’t know exactly when autonomous car service will arrive. In the meantime, we need an action agenda to address our current transportation problems that also enables a just transition to self-driving cars. To kick off 2019, I propose the following slate of sensible reforms that would reduce transportation emissions and congestion...

Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a non-profit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving faster.  They considered lots of the standard solutions—improving signal timing, clearing accidents quickly, encouraging telecommuting, and so forth—and found that many of them could, in fact, provide some temporary congestion relief. But here’s the rub:  RAND found that over the long haul, these kinds of solutions simply don’t have much...

Every once in a while there’s a truth that everybody knows, but that no one will acknowledge. And when someone finally says it aloud, it sounds shocking. Like this: …what we’re doing now isn’t working. Not for drivers, taxpayers or the environment. We can’t tax and build our way out of this. That’s Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat in his column today, talking about what most people in Seattle already...

The conversation shared below was part of the YIMBYtown 2022 conference, cohosted by Sightline Institute and Portland: Neighbors Welcome.* Reducing urban car dependency is a necessary and integral initiative to making housing more affordable and neighborhoods healthier, not to mention lowering climate-warming emissions. Yet American transportation policy overwhelmingly continues to spend billions on freeways. How are transportation, housing, and climate advocates working to stymie the freeway industrial complex, and what...

“Urgent.” A Portland task force studying how to use pricing tools to make the transportation system more equitable used the word five times in their final recommendations, which are expected to be adopted by city council on October 13th. But is the city up to the task? Side by side with new ideas are ones that somehow keep coming back to city hall every couple years, with few results to...

Critics of congestion pricing argue that the policy favors the rich and hurts the poor. A new proposal to break gridlock in downtown Seattle offers a progressive approach to get traffic moving. Few low-income households would pay the toll and the revenues from higher-income households could put free, multi-modal transit passes in the hands of low- and moderate-income people who travel to downtown.  Workers in downtown Seattle—Cascadia’s biggest jobs hub—who...

The Seattle Times recently tested public opinion on the idea of imposing tolls to reduce congestion and, oh my, people hate it! In January, the Times reported that 70 percent of voters in Cascadia’s biggest city oppose or strongly oppose “a toll to go into downtown Seattle as a way to reduce congestion and raise money for transit.” Polling numbers like that might cause an ambitious politician like Seattle Mayor...