People’s pocketbooks and wallets drive behavior. Remember the idea New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed, modeled on a program in London? If you drive your car into the most congested areas of Manhattan, you have to pay a daily fee. The revenue would go toward improving public transit services.
The idea collapsed this spring in the New York state legislature. Now, reports the New York Times, $4-a-gallon gas is accomplishing some of the same goals anyway. One big difference, of course, is that high gas prices are reducing traffic everywhere, not just in the most congested areas. And there’s no extra revenue for public transit.
Meanwhile in London, where congestion-pricing godfather Ken Livingstone lost his re-election for mayor, new mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative, is looking again at the the most recent congestion-pricing zone extension in the western part of the city and says he doesn’t want any more extensions.
“I am not going to be having any more congestion charges,” he was quoted as saying in The Guardian. “What I am determined to make happen is a modal shift towards bicycling and walking, not just in inner London but also in outer London.”
The program overall has been popular with Londoners, who saw congestion diminish and liked what they saw. The betting — from one of Livingstone’s deputy mayors whom I met in Cambridge — is that it’s so popular that even the conservative Johnson won’t scrap the whole program. And note that, unlike so many of the more conservative pols in the U.S., even Tory Johnson wants more people walking and bicycling.