Choking on bumper-to-bumper congestion?
Monday, April 20th, 2009As a successful approach to clearing congested city streets and improve public transportation, congestion-pricing is a panacea many big cities are considering to cure infrastructure ailments. Find out more about congestion-pricing and how it might affect you.
Ticket to Ride
April 13, 2009 by: Morgan Clendaniel GOOD Magazine
How to appease the interest groups keeping congestion pricing from our cities.
In 2003, London enacted a congestion-pricing plan that charged motorists about $11 to drive into various zones in the city center. The successful implementation of congestion pricing in a major urban area only further emboldened supporters of the concept, who have long argued that congestion pricing is the simplest and most effective way to limit the number of cars in urban settings, thus reducing emissions, fuel use, and traffic.
In 2007, New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced that he wanted to implement congestion pricing in New York. It was to work like this: Drivers in Manhattan below 60th Street would have to pay $8; commercial drivers would pay $21; taxi passengers would pay $1. (Tolls from bridges or tunnels to and from the pricing zone would be subtracted from the fee.) The revenue would be used to improve the city’s public-transit infrastructure, and the decrease in traffic could contribute up to $13 billion in saved costs to businesses…read more at GoodIs
