Jane Jacobs makes an artful case in The Death and Life of Great American Cities against congestion pricing. The crux of the congestion pricing plan is to reduce the supply of vehicles indiscriminately. It vilifies trucks, and makes allowances for cars.
However, this is backward; trucks and other commercial vehicles have no alternative, and are the most needed of vehicles, and cars are the most destructive to pedestrian and transit alternatives. When the private automobile is allowed to thrive, it steals those marginal users from mass transit, lowering bus and train utilization. Streets are widened, made one-way, and streamlined to promote rapid car transit at the expense of pedestrians. Parking becomes an imperative at the expensive civic density. Trucks may be in nearly perfectly inelastic demand, but business will simply pass those costs on to their consumers in the city and lower quality of life and vitality within, something we can agree is totally counter-productive.
The proper alternative is one Jacobs proposes, and it makes inherent sense: make the city inhospitable to car traffic, and alternatives will be promoted. Reduce demand for private transportation. The core observation, and one that bears repeating is that transit is a nonlinear problem. This means that there is no fixed number of cars or even visitors to a city. There is no one story. Some come to shop, some to work, some to visit, some to make deliveries. The magnitude and frequency of these uses is a function of the city’s vitality, and the manner in which these activities are carried out is not predetermined for all.
That last point is where congestion pricing falls short. It discourages all economic activity; instead of gently nudging private drivers to take transit because it is both faster and cheaper, it tries to force out some users, thereby making private transit faster but much more expensive. At the same time, it makes necessary trips by trucks much more expensive, and therefore only increases costs, reducing city vitality. Deliveries and commercial uses should be accommodated.
Jacobs’ and William McGrath’s basic solution is to promote truck travel and discourage car travel by way of disruptive traffic engineering. Put in more two-way streets. Having poor signal timing. Reduce road width. Have more dead-ends. All of these things simultaneously benefit the pedestrian — the sole progenitor of economic activity — and discourage the casual and wanton user of the roads. Studies of road closures show that cars are not redirected, but instead they vanish. Their users either stop coming, or, more likely, they make use of alternatives. And given the high operating leverage of mass transit, this is a huge boon and makes it possible to run a proper mass transit system. August Belmont fervently resisted reducing crowding on his original IRT line because he understood that so well (and this is why only the city would build the IND lines to reduce crowding: they have no profit motive).
I am a little uneasy promoting truck travel, since as a biker, I fear them. The question is: do the statistics bear this out? Or am I actually afraid of trucks in congestion, a markedly different problem.
