Thoughts while waiting to board the plane to Paris

Today I walked around Brooklyn. It was much smaller than I expected. I walked from Ilana’s in Fort Green to Brooklyn Heights then back through Cobble Hill. The old parts of New York looks like Europe with attached buildings and cobble stone streets. When we rode through the more suburban parts of Queens on the Century, it looked just like Ohio with ticky tacky little houses made with brick and metal railings. Higher end homes were made with stone, also like in the Midwest. Our suburbs are quintessentially American.

Ilana’s friend Carly, who she met when they both lived in Nicaragua, is also trained as a city planner. She went to Cornell. But Carly does community work with a school. Of course, I don’t work as a city planner right now either. Anyway, Carly wanted to discuss the congestion pricing issue with me, bc she is very concerned about the impact it would have on the low-income. We discussed these problems and their possible solutions:
1) Low-income workers who need to have their cars in the city for their jobs would be adversely impacted. Of course, there are respectful ways to address this issue. The Universal Lifeline telephone program is a good example of an honor-system discount program that’s respectful to the recipients for that reason. Low-income workers who use a vehicle in the city would also benefit from reduced traffic because they would be able to get around town more quickly. For example, if a worker needs to drive his truck from client to client and he works for himself, he would be able serve more clients in a day with less traffic on the roads and therefore make more money.
2) Vehicles parking at the edges and crowding people’s neighborhoods – the current system has it’s boundaries primarily in low-income neighborhoods, which would mean that disadvantaged people would be more adversely affected. This is fixed by changing the boundaries. In London, they found that the edge neighborhoods did not experience a change in traffic and parking, but London is a sprawling city and there are thousands of access points. The access points to Manhattan are primarily bridges likely to cause clusters of street parkers at these bottle necks. However, the solution is easy – select the boundaries so that there are thousands of access points and there won’t be any clusters of parkers and accessors.
3) I am very concerned about the crowding on the subway. I suggested that more people would have to ride the buses. Carly said the buses are too slow because people are always looking for change, the bus has to lower itself at every stop, and because of the traffic. Obviously, the traffic would be addressed with fewer cars on the road due to congestion pricing, but an exclusive right of way would also help. A bus rapid transit system with pre-paid, elevated platforms would also speed up the system. This would be a capital investment, but funds for it could come from the congestion pricing program.

My plane just announced boarding for group 1. I’ll tell you the rest later.