Corinne Ramey
Congestion Committee Public Hearing on Wednesday
New York City's Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission will hold a public hearing this Wednesday, January 16. The hearing will be held at 4 pm in the Hunter College Auditorium.
In addition to DMI's Andrea Batista Schlesinger being on the panel, DMI has written extensively about congestion pricing in the past. We hosted a Marketplace of Ideas event featuring London Deputy Mayor Nicki Gavron, who discussed London's successful implementation of a congestion pricing policy. DMI has also analyzed why congestion pricing is not only good for the environment, but good for New York City's current and aspiring middle class. According to DMI's memo on plaNYC:
"By 2030, New York will have nearly a million more residents, and congestion pricing works with other parts of plaNYC’s transportation agenda to ensure that we deal with this growth successfully: promoting economic fairness and prosperity, increasing transit capacity, reducing gridlock and improving air quality."
For more information on the hearing, visit the NYSDOT website. To read DMI's full analysis of the congestion pricing plan, click here.
Posted at 1:02 PM, Jan 14, 2008 in Cities | Energy & Environment | New York | Permalink | Comments (1)
Comments
Most of plaNYC is good... including the congestion pricing, which, it turns out, is mostly a tax on people who can take mass transit to Manhattan but choose not to.
But the population estimate is absurd. The 9 million figure comes from extrapolating trends from 1980 to 2000. Whether these make sense depends on market changes that are hard to predict, as well as on government policy. For example, take immigration policy: New York's explosive growth ended right about the time the US started imposing large-scale restrictions immigration; its current echo growth comes at a time of a new immigration wave. If the federal government opens the flood gate, allowing in anyone who's not a criminal or a terrorist, New York will go far above 9 million. Conversely, if it instead enacts strict border controls and cuts visa quotas, New York's population will go down.
Posted by: Alon Levy | January 16, 2008 04:29 AM