My business partner prefers phone calls. He lives in Manhattan and I fully believe him because almost every time we speak, the background noise from cars and trucks is incredible. The baseline roar is punctuated by blaring horns that deafeningly echo through the high-rise canyons.
I am part of the problem. On at least two occasions I have driven into Manhattan. My wife finds it extremely stressful, though part of me enjoys the challenge of constantly tracking and responding to bogeys in all directions. Most recently, about 2 years ago, my family plunged into gridlock on a Sunday to secure a free curbside parking spot near Madison Square Gardens. I paid for this sin by enduring the protestations of our then-infant son, which were so dramatic that I resolved it would be the last time we drove into Manhattan. Around this time I was learning about air pollution. I could practically feel and see the particles of all sizes swirling around us.
Speaking to me midday Monday from his apartment’s home office, traffic and horns constantly intruding, my business partner bemoaned New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent decision to unilaterally cancel implementation of a hard-won congestion pricing system for Manhattan. He has a pet theory that car horns cause at least one excess heart attack in Manhattan each year (which seems obviously correct). He mentioned laws against excessive honking, which are clearly not working. My friend posited that two groups abuse their horns the most: drivers of heavy duty commercial trucks, like 18 wheelers and refrigerated box trucks, and yellow cabs.
As I told him, speaking on the phone with my business partner is a categorically different experience from my telephonic conversations with anyone else because of the noise. Like him, I am sensitive to sound and know for sure that it dramatically shapes our experience of daily life. Noise was actually a big disadvantage of commuting by Metrorail, which I eventually abandoned before the pandemic because service had gotten unreliable. New York’s Subway is even louder.
So transit faces its own questions about noise, and the particles swirling in stations underground. But those problems are mostly confined to transit users, whereas drivers in Manhattan impose huge negative externalities on millions of people. A cleaner, quieter Subway seems way more achievable than a cleaner, quieter taxi. Cars are inherently loud, dirty, and, more than anything else, waste space. If I ever drive into Manhattan again, it will be because I happily paid for the privilege.
What do the data say about driving in Manhattan? How many households in the borough have a car? Or commute into or out of the great American metropolis by car? Special thanks to Twitter data wizard
for supplying the figures.I requested commuter mode share data for people who live in Manhattan and work outside of it, or work in it and live elsewhere. I did not ask about commuters who live and work in Manhattan because it seems obvious they overwhelmingly take transit or, like my partner, walk to the office. This was a safe assumption, as the vast majority of Manhattanites turn out not to have a car.
Only 19.2% of people who work in Manhattan and live elsewhere commute by car. Not a small minority, to be generous, but not a large minority either. This basic fact makes the decision to stall congestion pricing even more dubious. Yes, some people would, on the margin, be forced to change jobs. But I have to guess many others would shift to transit or move closer to work or transit or otherwise adjust. Yes, of course, the New York metro area has a horrific housing crisis. But just as other problems cannot justify inaction on housing, the housing crisis is a rotten basis for tolerating congestion. New York’s housing market should be fixed regardless of transportation policy! Now we turn to Manhattanites commuting outside of the borough.
This figure favors the urbanist position a bit less lopsidedly. Less than 30% of Manhattan residents with a reverse commute drive a car. (About half take some kind of rail.) But again, most Manhattanites do not even have a car. Without knowing the details of the congestion pricing scheme … maybe these drivers could be exempted? Exceptions for small interest groups makes the world go ‘round, friends. Whether or not that proved politically prudent, the practical obstacles to congestion pricing, in terms of people negatively impacted, appear to be surprisingly limited. To the point that technical solutions and workarounds should be possible, right?
Finally, how many cars does the typical Manhattan household have? As of 2022 …
I did a little math to estimate the average. Note this does not account for the confidence interval around each value, and is an underestimate because the final category is four or more vehicles per household, whereas I multiplied 2,007 by four.
Still, a computed average of 0.25 vehicles per household is low. Only about 0.2% of Manhattan households have four or more vehicles. I assume some are wealthy automotive collectors with multiple vehicles in storage. Almost 80% of Manhattan households have no car. And 19% have only one. Maybe the carless residents occasionally rent a car, hail a cab, or Uber, but many or most just walk or take the subway. The New Yorker without a driver’s license is a fairly well-established trope. My partner explained that based on the data he has seen, Manhattan households’ car ownership is bimodal with respect to income. That is, households typically have a car either because they are too poor to live near transit or too rich to care about splurging.
The Potential of Pilots
Reflecting on Governor Hochul’s dramatic eleventh hour cancelation of congestion pricing, I suspect that limited pilots hold a lot of potential for enacting the kinds of reforms that most excite American urbanists. The big question is whether our ideas would be as popular in practice as we believe, a theory we should be happy to test.
The big question is whether urbanist reforms would be as popular in practice as we believe, a theory we should be happy to test.
A limited pilot might pedestrianize a few streets in Manhattan, or restrict them to local traffic, deliveries, buses, and cyclists. I know basically nothing about the state of New York land use reform, so I do not assume any of these ideas are new to local advocates. My growing suspicion is that incrementalism can open the door to radical change. Compared with conventional step-change reform, pilot programs:
Attract less attention, especially before implementation, lowering political stakes.
Allow a change to be made (huzzah!) with a much lower burden of proof in terms of “community input” and formal analysis.
Shift the status quo to a more desirable state (‘Do we really want to undo this?’).
Shift debate from, “Should we do something?” to, “What should we do?”
Call the bluff of people who warn that change will be catastrophic or dangerous.
Require fewer resources and encourage bureaucratic entities to be creative.
Are easier to adjust and refine after initial implementation.
Provide concrete evidence for otherwise speculative discussions about reform.
Are less politically costly if they fail.
Make permanent change much easier. Slippery slope? Yes indeed!
I bet there are thousands of people living on the same street as my business partner who sometimes work from home, or just try to sleep at night. If a pilot program turned down the volume of street traffic two days a week, one can only imagine the clamor from local residents to make the change permanent and cede less space to cars.
Maybe, as a compromise, Manhattan could try congestion pricing a couple of days a week and see how it goes. The decision to delay was political, not economic: worrying about sunk cost is reasonable. It would be nice to have something to show for decades of bureaucratic wrangling and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. One wonders if opponents’ biggest fear about congestion pricing is that people would actually like it.
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As I just walked out of a building into the blaring siren of an ambulance, I also wonder whether the contribution of emergency vehicles to loudness might also be mitigated by fewer cars on the road.
It failed due to political fecklessness. The inefficiencies in pouring out a bottle (congestion charging) can be fixed by letting air in (public transportation).