Traffic Plan Drives Debate

TV REPORT: Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to charge drivers entering Manhattan south of 86th Street $8 a day faces a long road to approval. Jego Armstrong reports on the controversial congestion pricing plan, which pits motorists against environmentalists.

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…MEANWHILE, SMALL BUSINESSES FEAR BIG LOSSES By CAROLYN NARDIELLO
NYCity News Service
A few times a week, Joshua Bienstock loads his black, four-door Dodge Neon with a box full of binders, a power-point projector, a briefcase and a laptop.
He then drives his sedan, whose odometer has long clicked past 145,000 miles, from Queens into Manhattan to teach dispute resolution seminars and conduct labor-training classes for city union members.
The commute from Forest Hills that now takes him 25 minutes would take more than an hour and a half by mass transit, and with all those materials, “It would be virtually impossible,” he explained.

When Bienstock drives across the 59th Street Bridge, it costs nothing. “For many of us in Queens and other boroughs, it’s our lifeline, those free crossings,” he said.

But with Mayor Bloomberg’s new congestion pricing plan, all that could change. The initiative, announced last month, is slated to cost car drivers $8 a day and truck drivers $21 a day to enter Manhattan’s business district south of 86th Street.

Small business owners like Bienstock, who make up 40 percent of the local economy in the city, say they would get hit hard.

“They’re the bedrock of local neighborhoods,” said City Councilman Tony Avella, a Democrat who represents the northeast region of Queens, an area not serviced by subway.
“We need small businesses to survive for the city to survive,” he said.

Bienstock, whose company is called Resolve It Inc., said he would lose $1,200 per year.

He is on the board of directors at the Queens Chamber of Commerce, which last year released a congestion-pricing study called, “A Cure Worse Than the Disease.” The study found the plan would cost the city $2.7 billion and decrease jobs by 23,100.

Hugh O’Neill, president of Appleseed, the economic development consulting firm that conducted the study, said small businesses will feel the pinch.

A small company, he said, with four vehicles making deliveries to Manhattan each day is going to pay $420 a week in congestion charges. “They may be small,” he said, “but they’re an important part of the city’s economy.

Bill Graves, president and chief executive officer of the American Trucking Association, agrees.

“Congestion pricing increases cargo transportation costs and hurts the economy,” he said. “Higher manufacturers’ and retailers’ operating costs mean higher costs to consumers for everything from gasoline to clothing to food.”

But the congestion pricing plan has many supporters. “I think the effects are generally positive,” said Bruce Schaller, president of Schaller Consulting, which focuses on transportation issues.

Business focus groups that he spoke with last fall in the boroughs outside of Manhattan said they were unconcerned with congestion pricing because they had already discontinued deliveries there.

“I think that a lot of businesses, particularly as boroughs outside of Manhattan have grown in population, have become more localized,” he said.

In a recent Gotham Gazette story, Schaller wrote that the plan would decrease childhood asthma rates and fund $31 billion in transit projects in the metro area. “When you look at the pluses and minuses,” he said, “overall it’s a plus.”

The authors of a December 2006 study, “Growth or Gridlock?” by the Partnership for New York City, also defend the plan. Traffic has become a drag on the economy, costing $3.2 billion annually and more than 37,000 job, the study found

Bloomberg based his congestion plan on one London Mayor Ken Livingstone started in 2003, citing success in reducing traffic and improving air quality.

Rohit Aggarwala, the director of long term planning and sustainability for the city, said the plan would actually help local businesses. “If the traffic moves faster, you’re going to be able to make more deliveries,” he said. “There are productivity benefits.”

Some congestion-pricing opponents have offered alternatives.

Graves believes adding new roads or bridges funded by fuel taxes is a better way to reduce congestion. Avella and others have called the plan just another tax on the people who can least afford it.

“Why are we the orphans?” said Bienstock, who contends wealthy Manhattanites would benefit most from Bloomberg’s plan.

Under the mayor’s proposal, those driving within the district would pay $4 – half of what visitors coming from outside the zone would pay between 6 a.m and 6 p.m.

“The rich get richer,” Bienstock said, “and the schlepers out in the suburbs [and outer boroughs] pay the price.”