Charles Komanoff
Recent Posts
Why Traffic Congestion Has Rebounded in the CBD
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Traffic congestion in the Manhattan core is rebounding. Travel-speed data culled from taxicab GPS and released last month by City transportation and taxi officials suggest that average motor vehicle travel speeds in the Central Business District fell by 8.5 percent from 2012 to 2014. The slowdown follows years of flat or even rising speeds — a phenomenon that […]
Uber and Manhattan Gridlock Are Rising Together
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How responsible is Uber for the 9 percent drop in Manhattan travel speeds that New York City transportation officials reported last month? The answer appears to be: quite a lot. If — and it’s a big if — the surge in use of Uber and other app-based car services is not offset by a decline in use of […]
How Much Will Fares Rise Without Closing the MTA Capital Plan Gap? Try 25%
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When the MTA’s chief financial officer warned last month that the likely price for failing to fund the authority’s capital plan was a 15 percent fare hike, the response was swift. Just 24 hours later, according to Newsday, MTA chief Tom Prendergast “backed away” from that scenario, calling it “unconscionable.” Evidently the one thing worse […]
Climate Idealism Can’t Hold a Candle to Collective Action
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Cross-posted from the Carbon Tax Center. Why do Copenhageners ride bicycles? The key reason, says Yale economist and bestselling author Robert J. Shiller, is that Danes are idealists who resolved, after the oil crisis of the 1970s, “to make a personal commitment to ride bicycles rather than drive, out of moral principle, even if that […]
Just in From London: Congestion Charging’s Street Safety Bonus
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Add street safety to the list of benefits from congestion pricing. That’s the takeaway from a new “working paper” analyzing traffic crash rates in and around the London congestion charging zone by three economists associated with the Management School at Lancaster University. “Traffic Accidents and the London Congestion Charge” slices and dices the monthly changes […]
Cheaper Gas and Uber Have Manhattan Gridlock Poised to Get Worse
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Traffic gridlock in Manhattan has been on the wane for some time. Newly released 2013 traffic counts from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council show 747,000 motor vehicles entering the Manhattan Central Business District on a typical weekday. While that still constitutes a crushing load, it’s 5,000 fewer cars each day than in 2012 and […]
Speed Kills, But NYPD Won’t Open the Data
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On the surface, the crashes that killed Jill Tarlov and Michael Williams last month could hardly have been more different. Williams, a 25-year-old rookie cop, was riding in an NYPD van on the Bruckner Expressway shortly after dawn en route to police the Peoples Climate March, when the driver of the van crashed into a […]
Fair Tolls: Fixing NYC’s Gridlock and Transit Shortfall in One Fell Swoop
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When Governor Nelson Rockefeller merged New York’s commuter rail lines, the NYC Transit Authority, and Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to form the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968, he had several motives. The new agency consolidated political power, made more efficient use of regional infrastructure, and devoted surplus bridge and tunnel toll revenues […]
“Saner Rules” for Bicyclists Won’t Make NYC Streets Safe
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“I argue for saner rules for bikes,” tweeted traffic guru “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz yesterday, referring to a post that he and fellow former NYC DOT engineer Gerard Soffian put up on CityLand. “[F]or their own safety and for the safety of others,” bicyclists should comply with traffic laws, they wrote. In keeping with Sam’s trademark […]
Safety in Bike-Share: Why Do Public Bikes Reduce Risk for All Cyclists?
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What if Yankees legend Yogi Berra had followed a season with 24 homers and 144 hits with one featuring 27 homers and 189 hits? Would the baseball scribes have declared “Yogi Power Shortage” because only one in seven hits was a homer instead of one in six? Duh, no. The headlines would have read, “Yogi […]
The Unintended Consequences of Trimming Alt-Side Parking Hours
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I remember alternate side of the street parking. It was 1974, and I was underemployed and living on West 22nd Street. My tiny Renault and I were regular participants in the twice-a-week “slide” that Matt Flegenheimer described in his Monday Times story on Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez’s bill to bar police from ticketing alternate-side-parked cars once […]
Swapping Horses for Taxis Would Saddle CBD With Even More Gridlock
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That didn’t last long. Last Thursday, less than 24 hours after a mayoral spokesman floated the idea of letting owners of the city’s 68 horse carriage medallions swap them for taxi medallions, Mayor de Blasio reportedly laughed off the notion. A good thing, too. It’s generally poor policy to buy off one entitlement with another […]