[sustran] Randy Kennedy in the New York Times

[Sujit Patwardhan]

21 April 2003


Dear Sustraners,

Here's an interesting and informative article on Ken Livingstone's 
congestion pricing for London, from the New York Times.

If you have difficulty in reading the text please log onto the site at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/magazine/20TRAFFIC.html?ei=1&en=a457218b2f4a3f48&ex=1051850095&pagewanted=print&position=

Good wishes,
--
Sujit Patwardhan
PARISAR,
Pune,
India





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The Day the Traffic Disappeared

April 20, 2003
The Day the Traffic Disappeared
By RANDY KENNEDY


When Queen Elizabeth opened the new City Hall in London last year, some 
observers compared the building, designed by the architect Norman Foster, 
to a giant eye. And that is exactly what it looks like -- a glassy 
postmodern eyeball on the south bank of the Thames, staring across the 
river at its staid Georgian and Victorian neighbors as if to say, ''Welcome 
to the 21st century.'' Atop the building is a semicircular penthouse called 
London's Living Room, walled with windows that offer a commanding view of 
the city below. The idea behind this room is to offer a place for Londoners 
to gather, if only through the medium of a television camera, for the kinds 
of serious, big-family sit-downs that go along with governing a sometimes 
dysfunctional city of more than seven million -- a city so decentralized, 
in fact, that until three years ago it never had an elected mayor.

      On an unusually bright morning earlier this year, that mayor, Ken 
Livingstone, strides into the room before a bank of cameras, and with an 
unusually pleased look on his dour face, announces a coup, one that has 
eluded dozens of large cities like New York, Los Angeles and Paris. He has 
not conquered crime or poverty, but he may very well have hobbled an urban 
enemy seemingly just as invincible: the car. Livingstone has just begun the 
world's most radical experiment in reclaiming the city from the tyranny of 
the automobile, a power struggle that cities have been losing in 
humiliating fashion for more than half a century. Since well before his 
election, he has been warning Londoners that far too many of them (about 
250,000 a day) are trying to drive into far too small a place -- central 
London -- polluting the air, choking commerce, slowly strangling their own 
livelihood. To stop them, the mayor decided to draw a line, literally.

       The line formed a lopsided oval around eight square miles of the 
historic inner city. Almost anyone who drove across the line during 
business hours -- in fact, almost anyone who moved or even parked a car on 
the street within it after Feb. 17 -- instantly owed the city of London $:5 
(about $8) a day for every day it happened. If a driver failed to pay, one 
of more than 700 vulturelike video cameras perched throughout the zone 
would capture his license plate number and relay it to a computer, leading 
to a huge fine. And if the driver declined to pay those fines? The mayor 
vowed, only half-jokingly, that the city would relentlessly track his car 
down, clamp it, tow it away and crush it -- ''with or without the driver 
inside.'' Few would be exempt, not even volunteer social workers, teachers, 
foreign diplomats or undercover police officers.

       The idea behind his assault on automotive freedom was neither new 
nor very hard to understand. If a finite resource is free, human beings 
tend to use it all up, regardless of the consequences. If it has a cost, 
they tend to use it more rationally. Livingstone, a far-left Socialist, won 
his mayoralty largely on the promise of applying this tough-love theory to 
London's streets. But in the weeks just before the ''congestion charge'' 
began, it sometimes seemed that he was the only one who believed it would 
work. The newspapers were full of derisive nicknames for it, like 
''Ken-gestion'' and ''Carmaggedon.'' Samantha Bond, the actress who plays 
Miss Moneypenny in the most recent James Bond movies, became the 
sympathetic face of the opposition, presiding over a protest with hints of 
civil disobedience at the West End theater where -- somehow fittingly -- 
''Les Miserables'' was being staged. Tony Blair's government, which had 
given London and other British cities permission to levy such traffic 
charges in the first place, carefully distanced itself from the plan. And 
the bookmaking firm William Hill, one of London's most able arbiters of 
public sentiment, began offering 4-to-1 odds that it would fail by the end 
of the year. (The odds that Livingstone would be out of office before the 
end of his term were put at 10 to 1.)

       On this sunny Tuesday morning, however, it appears that the mayor 
has beaten at least the first of those odds. The number of cars entering 
the cordon zone the day before, the first day of the charge, dropped by 
about 60,000, remarkable even in the context of a school holiday. One 
automobile group estimated that average speeds in central London had 
doubled, nothing less than a miracle in the world of road policy. 
Livingstone, addressing his public in a droopy suit, bright blue tie and a 
pair of sensible thick-soled walking shoes, declares it ''the best day 
we've had in traffic flow in living memory'' and reports that he has even 
taken a call from the government's transport minister, John Spellar, a 
Labor Party archenemy who had helped to expel Livingstone from the party 
three years earlier when he launched his renegade mayoral bid.

       Livingstone's eyes twinkle as he relates the conversation. ''He 
said, 'Clearly the devil looks after his own,' and we had a good laugh,'' 
the mayor says.

       When a reporter asks whether the mayor has truly considered the 
consequences of the scheme failing, especially with his re-election 
campaign only a year away, Livingstone's nasal Cockney voice, already as 
affectless as a door buzzer, drops to a full deadpan. ''I never consider my 
own future when making political decisions,'' he says. He pauses for 
effect. ''How can you be so cynical?''

       As television crews troop out to the balcony to shoot the light 
traffic wheeling around the Tower of London, a good laugh is had all around 
the living room.

       The exchange, however, goes straight to the heart of cities' tangled 
history with the automobile -- undoubtedly the most inefficient, and most 
aggressively defended, means ever conceived for transporting large numbers 
of people through crowded places. The idea of using a price tag to regulate 
driving into crowded places has been around for years, but its progress has 
been slowed by two problems, one big, the other gigantic. The first was 
simply technical: how would you charge for entry into entire cities or 
neighborhoods without putting tollbooths everywhere and causing more 
congestion? That obstacle has now been largely overcome with high-speed 
electronic tolls, sharpshooter cameras (originally developed for 
antiterrorism purposes in London) and even the development of satellite 
tracking of cars.

       The gigantic problem is political. Since at least the end of World 
War II, the battle between cars and cities, a battle over the shape of the 
city itself, has been an epic mismatch. An oversimplified chronology would 
read something like this: the car helps to create sprawl; sprawl siphons 
people and political power away from the hearts of cities; the car returns 
to attack the city, which was never designed to accommodate so many; the 
city is forced to transform itself, ceding sidewalks to streets, trolley 
tracks to traffic lanes, parks to parking lots, whole neighborhoods to 
expressways.

       In the United States, the critic Lewis Mumford foresaw a grim end to 
the whole process: ''a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead 
corpse of a city.'' While the effects have not been quite that dire yet, 
the imbalance remains tremendous. On a purely human level, it can be 
witnessed any weekday in Times Square, where armies of angry pedestrians 
crowd around S.U.V.'s pinioned in crosswalks, the drivers inside easily 
outnumbered 100 to 1.

       But those drivers and the people who profit from them in cities -- 
principally garage owners, automobile clubs and road builders -- have had 
tremendous political influence over the years. They have portrayed 
unfettered access to public tax-supported roads as something like a modern 
amendment to the rights of man. And while it may be in the long-term 
interests of drivers to pay for using some roads in order to make them 
passable again, to put that money into subsidizing more efficient 
conveyances like trains and buses, city leaders have long viewed 
administering that corrective as something close to electoral suicide. Even 
the most crusading anti-car mayors -- like John V. Lindsay in New York, who 
came within weeks of ordering a Midtown traffic ban in the early 1970's, 
and Edward I. Koch after him, who came almost as close to imposing tolls on 
the free East River bridges -- have ultimately backed down or lost their 
battles.

       Though it might seem like a relatively new phenomenon, saturation 
traffic has existed in many cities for decades, virtually unchanged. 
Depending on whom you believe, it is incredibly destructive, costing London 
alone over $300 million a year in lost productivity and revenue just 
because of congestion in the tiny central portion of the city. (One New 
York City study in the late 1990's found that traffic problems in Manhattan 
cost the city as much as $4 billion a year in lost productivity.)

       With its mazelike medieval streets, London was a city plagued with 
congestion long before the car. In his diaries, Samuel Pepys twice recorded 
being stuck in 17th-century horse-and-buggy jams. When the car came along, 
the original notion was that such age-old transportation problems could be 
solved if enough new roads were built to handle cities' needs, a strategy 
called ''predict and provide.'' But by the 1960's, only a half-century 
after the car came into common use, economists and traffic planners were 
starting to notice that new roads seemed only to create more traffic.

       By 1977, when the British punk band the Jam recorded ''London 
Traffic'' (''No one knows the answer/No one seems to care/Take a look at 
our city/Take the traffic elsewhere''), the average speed of a car in 
central London was 12 miles an hour, or a little faster than the top 
running speed of a domestic pig. At the turn of the millennium, more than 
two decades later, many Londoners could only look back on those congested 
years with nostalgia. The average speed had dropped to less than nine miles 
per hour for the first time in modern record-keeping, meaning that car 
travel through Britain's capital was generally as slow as by coach a 
century ago.

       ''We're addicted, really,'' Bev Ramsden, a veteran taxi driver and 
dispatcher, told me one wet weekday morning, inching down the A4 highway 
through the gray margins of Hammersmith, nowhere near the most congested 
part of the city. ''Like addicts, I think we're getting to the point where 
we're realizing how crazy this is. Someone's got to do something.''

       It will probably go down as one of the stranger chapters in the 
history of traffic policy that the man who finally did something is a 
former lefty radical (once known as Red Ken) applying conservative 
free-market ideas. In a way, of course, it all makes complete sense: the 
congestion charge is classic Robin Hood socialism, taking from the 
comfortable Londoner commuting by Bentley and giving to the commoner 
hanging from the strap of a packed double-decker bus. But don't 
misunderstand. While he is a crusader, Livingstone is also a famously 
foot-sure career politician as interested as any in re-election. Despite 
his quip for the television cameras, he did not launch his assault without 
making a lot of practical calculations about its effect on his future. That 
morning, in fact, waiting downstairs for him in a cavernous boardroom was a 
group of strategists who were highly paid to do just that. It was telling 
that most of these strategists were not from London at all but from a place 
with much worse traffic problems and a much more treacherous political 
climate for trying to solve them: New York City. (Average traffic speed: 
about seven miles per hour, no faster than a running possum.)

       Only a few months after his election in the summer of 2000, 
Livingstone began courting Robert R. Kiley, a former C.I.A. official, 
business leader and transit expert, who as head of the Metropolitan 
Transportation Authority in New York in the 1980's was credited with 
resurrecting the city's graffiti-scarred subway system, now considered one 
of the best in the world. Kiley, given the new title of London's transport 
commissioner, brought with him another former top New York transit 
official, Jay Walder, who had become an expert on road pricing at Harvard 
and in Singapore, where a smaller but much more costly congestion-charging 
system in place for more than 25 years has cut car ownership to 1 in 10 
city residents. When Kiley arrived in London, most of the attention focused 
on his transit credentials and how he would use them to rescue the ailing 
London Underground, an effort in which he and Livingstone, fighting Blair's 
government, have been largely unsuccessful. But Kiley told me later that he 
was equally interested in coming to London because of Livingstone's 
determination to try to right the relationship between the city and the 
car. If it worked, Kiley knew, it would be seen as a model around the 
world, and especially back in New York, where more than 250,000 vehicles 
crowd into the 8.5-square-mile heart of Manhattan in three hours every 
morning, roughly the same number that enter the eight square miles of 
central London over the course of an entire workday.

       As the leader of a business alliance in the 1990's, Kiley advocated 
road pricing for Manhattan, but he received no support from Mayor Rudolph 
W. Giuliani, whose voting base in Queens and Staten Island practically 
lived in their cars. In many ways London was an interesting parallel, more 
like New York than any other American city in its atypical transportation 
landscape. In both cities, as packed as the roads can be, more than 80 
percent of workers take some form of mass transit into the central city 
every weekday morning. In London, as in New York, some drivers are poor. 
But most tend to have money -- enough to generate political pressure to 
protect their choice. They are also affluent enough, Kiley points out, to 
be persuaded to spend a little money to save them something much more 
valuable: their time.

       ''We knew all along that the motorist advocates and writers for the 
newspapers and libertarians and people who are really locked into cars 
would be critical, but I think the majority of Londoners supported 
congestion-charging right up to opening day,'' Kiley said later in his 
office, with a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge behind his desk. ''Would I 
call it a popular measure? Probably not. But I think that Londoners have 
long since concluded that someone had to take this dragon on.''

       Sitting there that day, as the dragon was being cowed on the streets 
below, Kiley told me that he had spoken at length about fighting it with 
another very important potential St. George, one in some ways a lot like 
Livingstone -- a political outsider who takes the subway to work, who 
strongly supports the idea of road pricing and who views the prerogatives 
of driving from a much more jaundiced 21st-century perspective. His name 
was Michael R. Bloomberg, and he was the mayor of New York City.

       Though not mentioned in ''The Power Broker,'' Robert A. Caro's 
biography of the master road builder Robert Moses, one of the more iconic 
clashes in the long war between the car and the city took place in New 
York, with Moses playing a role. He and other planners wanted to slice a 
highway through the middle of Washington Square Park, the heart of 
Greenwich Village. It is now hard to believe such a plan was ever seriously 
proposed, but in 1958 it came close to happening.

       At the time, photographed defiantly on the City Hall steps with a 
giant prop key to lock traffic out of the park, a Tammany Hall leader 
framed a question that was only then starting to be asked in earnest. Would 
we, he asked, ''plan and develop our cities in accordance with the needs 
and wishes of the people who live in them or for the convenience of the 
vehicles which pass through them?'' The highway through the park was 
eventually scrapped, but in New York that question, until very recently, 
has been answered almost always in favor of the passing cars. From 1924 to 
1965, car lanes into Manhattan grew from 68 to 120, according to one count, 
while the number of cars on the street went from 390,000 a day in 1946 
(considered intolerable at the time) to more than a million by the end of 
the 1990's. And that is not because travel has been made more efficient. In 
fact, it has often been the opposite. In 1907, with trolleys and traffic 
lanes, the Brooklyn Bridge carried 426,000 people a day; now, with space 
only for cars, it carries far less than half that number and is often 
jammed. Convoys of trucks rumble down the decaying streets of Chinatown on 
their way to New Jersey because tolls on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge would 
cost them an average of $33 per trip to take the highways that are better 
designed for them. Many traffic experts see Bloomberg as the last, best 
chance -- at least for the foreseeable future -- for anything to change. 
When he was campaigning, he sought the advice of car skeptics like Kiley. 
Samuel I. Schwartz, an engineer who worked on East River bridge tolls under 
both Lindsay and Koch, wrote much of Bloomberg's stridently anti-car 
campaign platform himself. And Schwartz, who coined the quintessential New 
York warning ''Don't Even THINK of Parking Here,'' is no moderate on the 
issue. He advocates charging trucks $50 for using Manhattan as a 
pass-through and, were it technically possible, $25 a minute for people who 
want to cruise Fifth Avenue during the height of the holiday season. 
(''They want to see the Rock Center Christmas tree from their car?'' he 
says. ''If they do, they should pay for that great privilege.'')

       After his election, Bloomberg seemed to be moving in that direction. 
He decided, in the face of mounting attacks by powerful garage owners, to 
maintain most of an emergency traffic ban that Giuliani started after the 
Sept. 11 attacks, preventing single-occupant cars from crossing into much 
of Manhattan during the morning rush. He has ended the age-old tradition of 
free Sunday parking in many neighborhoods (including his own, the Upper 
East Side) and banned turns on some busy crosstown streets -- small changes 
but ones met with shrieks of protest. His transportation commissioner, Iris 
Weinshall, even went to London last summer to talk to Kiley and Livingstone 
about the congestion charge.

       But there seems to be a growing sense that Bloomberg could end up 
among the near-miss mayors on any kind of serious traffic reform. In large 
part, this is because he has already spent a career's worth of political 
capital by raising property taxes to fix the city's enormous budget gap, 
for example, and by banning smoking in bars, a move that would probably get 
Livingstone sacked in London. Bloomberg and his staff are so nervous about 
traffic issues that they do not like to talk about them even privately 
anymore. One city official told me of his particular nightmare: trying to 
write the speech that Bloomberg would deliver when he cut the ribbons on 
the new Brooklyn Bridge toll plaza: ''What's he going to say? 'Ladies and 
gentlemen, these things that've been free for decades and decades. I'm the 
guy who's going to make you pay for them! Thank you for your support!'''

       Kiley says he still believes that Bloomberg could sell a congestion 
charge, especially in a city where so many take mass transit and only half 
of the people living at the epicenter of the problem even own cars. 
''That's not a bad place to start,'' he says, ''when you know that half the 
people in Manhattan are going to be with you, almost by definition.''

       For all the rest, he adds, ''Bloomberg could use the analogy of, 
well, look what a difference government has actually made to the subway 
system. Now we've got to take the next step because we have a subway that's 
working better, a commuter rail system that's in good shape and lots of 
room on buses. We've got to really start managing road use. That could be 
his message.''

       Would the message work? New York might not be ready to hear it yet, 
and the messenger might be killed. But inevitably the city will have to 
listen, and the brave politician who forces it to come to its senses will 
be heralded as a visionary. ''Fifth Avenue'' has always had a dull ring to 
it. What about ''Bloomberg Promenade''?


Randy Kennedy, a reporter for the Metro Section of The Times, writes the 
Tunnel Vision column about the New York subway system.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |








-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sujit Patwardhan.
PARISAR,
Yamuna, ICS Colony, Ganeshkhind Road, Pune 411 007
Tel: 5537955
Email: sujit at vsnl.com
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In nature there are neither Rewards nor Punishments---
there are Consequences.
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