CONSULTING
CONSULTING
Addressing Congestion Pricing:
Why New York’s Pricing Model May Not Be the Solution for U.S. Cities
Clyde Wilson
January 2025
Transportation and congestion issues are problems that could easily fall into the "Overwhelmed" category. In the last 15 years, due to several issues that we will not even consider in this article, highway construction costs have dramatically increased, and the costs of maintaining and building new railways have more than tripled. 
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This weekend, New York became the first US city to implement "Congestion Pricing".  A couple of years ago, when this subject began to surface in New York, I wrote an article titled, "Coming to a city near you". The concern then - and now - was that some cities have way overspent their budget and are struggling to stay ahead of transportation. They decided to launch a program as a good way to hide another tax.  Our group at the TPN office was discussing this and decided it was our responsibility, at the least, to provide information you do not get from the news services.  It's hard to do that in a short article, but we have all year.
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New York is a city like no other in the US and probably worldwide.  Like many European cities, it differs significantly from all other American cities.  It is always interesting, to me at least, when I hear people say, well, this is how they do it in Paris or Amsterdam.  There could not be any two cities that are more different than most if not all, American cities. 
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Most cities in the US are way behind on their spending for transportation services, but New York is in a different league.  A quick look at a few statistics listed below will clarify how New York's problem-solving methods do not translate to any other city in the country.
Journalists and decision-makers leave out this little profile of meaningful information in the Congestion Pricing discussions I have followed in the last two years.  Another critical piece of information is that in most of these cities, the freeway traffic is not going into the city itself.  The physical city is a small part of the metro area, and most traffic uses the freeway system to pass through the city.  Some get off, but most keep going.
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Last week in the Houston Chronicle an article titled "Houston roads among worst for crashes, commutes" was published.  I have seen this article in the Houston paper and similar articles about other cities.  Also, I live in Houston and can assure you that we have a traffic problem. Still, I have been to Atlanta 4 times in the last 6 months, lived part-time in Los Angeles in the last 10 years, traveled to Chicago a lot in the last few years, and spent a lot of time in DC. I am having trouble finding a major US city that is better in traffic, crashes, and commutes than Houston. 
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The article stated that Experts (I'm not sure who they are, but I can guess) say, "Giving people options other than driving can reduce traffic congestion," which is easy to say, but my educated guess is that this statement is just not true. The article goes on to state that only a small portion of the state's highway funds could be spent on other transportation options, such as rail, bus, or bike lanes.
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The article also discusses building more roads. Adding extra traffic lanes just means they will fill with traffic in a few years. Building roads has always been the basis of the saying, "Build it, and they will come."  Adding more roads does not really get us out of the congestion problem, and building more mass transit has become impossibly expensive. 
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About 15 years ago, Houston planned to extend rail service out to many suburbs.  Part of the plan was to follow a concept I had become involved in while working for the MBTA in Boston 20 years ago.  The plan was to build apartments, light restaurants, light retail, and other amenities at the major railway stops. The thought was that this would encourage commuters to live on the rail line and not need a car. This plan would accomplish two primary goals: more land allocated to house people instead of cars, and fewer people would need a car to commute. The entry to our incorporated neighborhood would certainly be a planned stop, and we had over 500 acres of vacant land on the west side of the planned rail line.  A transportation director for the city gave a speech to our city about the wonderful things the rail service would do for the city of Houston and our community.  He was telling us how efficiently rail traffic was at reducing vehicle traffic.  He said he had recently been to Atlanta and took MARTA directly from the airport to downtown Atlanta.  He said he was sitting in his seat on the MARTA train laughing at the people sitting in miles of stand-still traffic on I85.  Instantly I thought, wait a minute, didn't you say that the rail system in Houston would be instrumental in reducing traffic on our freeways?  Sounds like it didn't work in Atlanta. 
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In Houston, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on bike lanes.  In downtown Houston, our bike lanes even have dedicated bicycle traffic lights to let bikes get a head start into the intersection so cars do not hit them.  In Houston, we have spent money on bike lanes to improve transportation.  Now, the results are in: the bike lanes are never used. I have more than four hours of traffic video around downtown Houston and have never seen more than one bike every 10 to 15 minutes. The bike lanes take up traffic lanes, thus forcing more cars into fewer lanes and increasing traffic idle times at intersections, which also increases pollution. Politicians and lobbyists made big claims about the impact of bike lanes. Then they spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure, only to see the dreams have had the opposite effect on Houston. 
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In summary, we do not have the money to keep building roads, and even if we do, they just instantly fill up. Rail is impossibly expensive and never has any real impact on city traffic. The same is true for buses. Bikes are no help, and they actually have the opposite impact.
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 Well, here we are, staring at a tremendous transportation problem and the only solution so far is to provide a new tax "Congestion Pricing" to hopefully force people onto a rail system that does not work, is not safe, and will not impact traffic in a city that in no way reflects the other cities in our country.
Earlier in this article, I said we would discuss this over the next year. Now, the pressure is on here at TPN. We can do it! I hope you enjoy the coming articles as we solve the world's transportation problems. Hint: Electric and self-driving cars are not the answer.