Filleting a Faulty Reason to Support C.P.

Activist and analyst Charles Komanoff explains why reduced pollution isn't a good reason to support congestion pricing. This makes sense: congestion pricing can actually raise daily traffic volumes, by spreading out the flow more evenly. The overall impact on pollution is negligable either way, as Komanoff explains:

Rather, there are three reasons that in almost any congestion pricing plan, whether Kheel-Komanoff or Bloomberg or Ravitch, the value of the time savings will dwarf the air quality benefits:

1. On a regional basis, congestion pricing eliminates only a small percentage of VMT. Ditto, tailpipe emissions.
2. Emissions from present-day cars (and, increasingly, trucks and buses) are low and trending lower. Thus, the vaunted improvements in traffic flow won't eliminate much car exhaust, because there isn’t much to begin with.
3. Time savings from tolling gridlocked roads rise geometrically with congestion. A given percentage increase in speed saves six times as many minutes when the base speed is 5 mph as when it's 30 mph. Considering that slow speeds also imply high volumes, congestion pricing is practically ordained to generate big time savings -- particularly if the tolls are varied by time of day and day of week.

The lesson for congestion pricing advocates is clear: give the "green" angle a rest. We're not in 1970 anymore. (If per-mile emission rates hadn't changed since Earth Day, the air quality benefits would be some 40 times greater, equaling or even surpassing the time savings.) Clean air no longer provides a powerful rationale for congestion pricing.

From a cost-benefit standpoint, the overwhelming reason to adopt congestion pricing in New York City -- in addition to providing a vital new revenue stream for public transit, of course -- is to enable people stuck in traffic to save time.

Earlier, he makes a point about car pollution:

Cars now on the road are 30 to 50 times less polluting than in 1970. True, there are more cars being driven more miles, but even with a tripling of VMT (vehicle miles traveled), U.S. passenger vehicles today are probably putting out only a tenth as much air pollution as they did on the first Earth Day.

Honesty makes for a good case. We don't want to get bogged down arguing about benefits that don't exist, when there are undeniable time savings at stake.