AN IDEOLOGICAL WAR has come to the transportation sector, and it’s playing out at the national and local levels.
President Trump’s attempt to pull the rug out from under New York City’s congestion pricing initiative found him claiming, in a press release and in public remarks, that he was protecting low-income workers and “working class Americans,” even though generous discounts are available for low-income drivers. In an interview with the New York Post earlier this month, Trump also expressed his opposition to the city’s dedicated bike lanes.
Locally, Boston mayoral candidate Josh Kraft opened his campaign with a robust attack on the city’s dedicated bus and bike lanes. In a WBZ-TV interview, he asserted that the rollout of dedicated bike lanes is “not benefiting the everyday people in our city, families, seniors, our disabled communities and small businesses who are getting hurt by it.”
Both cases represent conservative efforts to reclaim a long-discredited and failed world of fossil-fuel powered automobile mobility, a world that has contributed mightily to chronic traffic congestion, threatened public health, burdened lower income people with high costs of auto ownership, and driven up carbon emissions.
The Trump administration’s bid to kill New York’s congestion pricing program is a damaging blow to the region’s economy and the city’s overall health. The initiative, launched only last month, has already proven to be hugely successful at reducing traffic congestion, thereby also lessening harmful particulate matter emissions and carbon emissions, while at the same time raising meaningful net new revenue to invest in the New York region’s critical public transportation system. This user-fee based approach to revenue collection was designed to err on the side of fairness by providing low-income discounts.
According to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), weekday daytime travel speeds in the area of Manhattan included in the congestion zone were 12 to 14 percent faster in the early weeks of the initiative, while weekend daytime travel was 15 to 18 percent faster. Drivers were saving on average 20 to 30 minutes a day. At the same time, weekday bus ridership grew by 7 percent, and subway ridership grew by 7 percent on weekdays and 12 percent on weekends. Ridership is also up on the commuter rail lines serving the city’s suburbs.
If Trump’s directive is fulfilled, he will have scored some cheap political points (proclaiming himself the savior and King of Manhattan in a social media post), while adding to the burdens borne by all residents of the New York City area, who will need to put up with a return of traffic congestion, possible reductions of transit and rail services, diminished regional air quality, and an overall reduction in quality of life.
Closer to home, Kraft’s decision to target protected lanes for bicyclists and dedicated lanes for buses has become an early hot topic in the Boston mayoral race.
These lanes, chosen to support public safety and improve transit access for some of the most vulnerable people living in Boston, herald a forward-looking way to approach an important matter: the fair sharing of a finite public space. Boston residents who choose to bike to their destination, or walk or take the bus, deserve to benefit from a fairly allocated share of the finite public space that all city taxpayers (even non-drivers) support with their tax dollars.
Sorting out how to do this in a way that serves everyone’s needs is challenging, and it requires a combination of talents (design skills, public engagement skills and political will) to make it all happen.
One of Kraft’s complaints is that Mayor Wu (whom I support for reelection) has not listened to neighborhood opponents of these dedicated lanes. This is a significant overstatement, as anyone familiar with the lengthy public engagement process the mayor has employed in connection with the bus priority lane along Blue Hill Avenue knows. Indeed, many transit advocates believe the city has done too much listening and engaged in too much process.
What’s more, Wu recently put an end to the dedicated bus lane on Boylston Street, citing its failure to deliver on better bus service, and apparently trying to blunt Kraft’s claim that she does not respond to neighborhood concerns. This decision was made to the consternation of many advocates who care about bus transit and fair streetscape design, and who believe that better enforcement of this dedicated bus lane would have led to better bus mobility outcomes.
Of course better enforcement is essential (this was a significant reason why an earlier Summer Street bus lane pilot failed), and the city needs to address this issue, but the mayor is data-driven, and the data suggested that Boylston Street (for a number of reasons) was not bearing fruit sufficient to justify its continuation.
Ultimately, the question at the local level often comes down to the reality that not every voice or opinion can be satisfied. A mayor, or mayoral candidate, needs to navigate the various voices of a diverse and complex city while also being grounded in core values regarding the benefits of a more fairly allocated public realm.
Municipal values (e.g., safety, equity, fairness, reductions in emissions, improvements to transit access) and policies that align with those values should be clearly understood and articulated. When a candidate panders to the subset of Boston voters who resent or fear any changes to the urban streetscape because it threatens their unfounded notion that they are entitled to unlimited and unrestricted use of the entirety of the streetscape, it is in keeping with the Trump approach to connecting safe, sustainable mobility to cynical ideological wars.
People who take the bus, ride a bike or walk to their destinations depend on the city to ensure that the public streets are safe, and that limited space is fairly allocated. Drivers from outside the city might not like it, and some folks living in the city might share that view, but I believe most people understand that for Boston to function well and safely, we all have to collaborate in ways that enable a sharing of limited public assets.
This is particularly true of the most vulnerable people in our city, who do not have any choice other than to take the bus or walk. They deserve a better ride, or commute, and dedicating a traffic lane to make the bus rider faster and more efficient is nothing other than following global best practices.
New York’s showdown with Trump will be decided ultimately by courts. There is a serious legal question whether the federal Department of Transportation has the authority to end the congestion pricing program unilaterally. There is also the tricky situation that bonds have already been issued, whose repayment is directly dependent on the road charging revenue.
Regardless of how it all sorts out, much damage has already been done by the Trump administration undermining public confidence and support for an initiative that was designed with utmost fairness and that has been meeting and exceeding all expectations regarding reducing traffic congestion.
Locally, Bostonians need to confront the reality that for our city to grow in a way that responds to our values and is fully inclusive, we have to collaborate on ways to fairly allocate and share public assets like city streets. We can’t thrive as a city just for some. We can only succeed as a city for all – and that requires compromise, trade-offs and changes to the old ways of doing things. The old ways, which gave all priority to automobiles, hurt many people, both physically and economically.
We have seen the needless deaths and injuries of bike riders and pedestrians, tragedies that might well have been avoided with safe street design, including separate protected bike lanes. We have seen the disrespect to bus riders and cyclists caused by double parking and a streetscape that does not offer these travelers a measure of rapid movement along city streets. These residents deserve to be heard, and they deserve to have a safe cycling environment and a better bus ride. Dedicated bus lanes and protected bike lanes in the right locations are key ingredients in making that happen.
Are we going back to a time of when our transportation systems were funded and designed to support privilege and exclusion, or will we embrace a modern era where we adapt our transportation systems in ways that are fair, sustainable, and inclusive?
Another way to ask this question is: Do we want to live in the transportation past, which largely failed to deliver on the things we say we care about, or do we want to embrace the future with a generosity of spirit and a determination to improve everyone’s access and mobility?
James Aloisi is a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation.
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