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Machiavelli meets the Big Apple
Ten reasons NYC's congestion pricing plan went belly up
Charles Komanoff, Gristmill
Albany strikes again: congestion pricing -- the smartest urban-transportation idea since the subway -- has been buried by the professional morticians of the New York State legislature, led by Chief Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

As previously reported, the pricing plan, proposed a year ago by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and subsequently improved by a 17-mstrongber state-mandated commission, would have charged an $8 entry fee on cars driven into Manhattan's central business district (CBD) during 6 a.m. - 6 p.m. on weekdays.

... With so much going for it, what killed the plan? There will be time later for sober postmortems, but for now, here's my shoot-from-the-hip Top 10 list of what felled congestion pricing in NYC:
(7 April 2008)

Truckers Hit the Brakes
Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
... Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching "as far as the eye can see," according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 miles per hour.

Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down the Port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off "to pray for the economy."

The truckers who organized the protests--by CB radio and Internet--have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can't break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.

But the truckers' protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators' plight--first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business.

... More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to "take back America," as one put it to me. "We continue to maintain this is not just about us," JB--which is his CB handle and stands for the "Jake Brake" on large rigs-- told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. "It's about everybody--the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can't afford their heating bills... This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people."
(7 April 2008)
Keeping fuel prices low is probably a lost cause, but social justice is not. -BA

Railroads are expanding at a record clip
Gregory Richards, The Virginian-Pilot
America's railroads are back to laying track.

For decades, freight railroads tore up or sold stretches of rail as they lost cargo to trucking companies. But that downsizing has reversed itself in the past few years. Freight has flowed back to railroads amid the confluence of congested highways, a truck driver shortage and high fuel costs - problems not expected to fade away anytime soon.

Railroads, including Norfolk-based Norfolk Southern Corp., have been scrambling to accommodate all the freight on their pared-down networks.

"We see a lot of factors coming into play that are going to make rail transportation a more and more desirable alternative for shippers all across the country," Wick Moorman, Norfolk Southern's chairman and chief executive, said recently on CNBC.

The railroads' solution? Spending billions of dollars to bolster their web of rail lines across the country, resulting in the biggest railroad building boom since World War I.
(6 April 2008)

Missed a Train? Cheer Up: The Next One Will Come Sooner Now
Elsa Brenner, New York TImes
WITH gas prices soaring and the debate intensifying over ways to reduce automobile congestion on the streets of Manhattan, Metro-North Railroad’s announcement that it will add 67 trains a week in and out of Grand Central Terminal is welcome news, commuter advocates say.

“Finally, the word seems to be spreading that the train is a better way to get into the city, rather than paying all that money for tolls and gas and parking,” said James F. Blair, a member of the Metro-North Railroad Commuter Council, created by the State Legislature in the early 1980s to represent riders.

... “This is all a very big deal,” said John Lyons, president of MetroPool, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes mass transit and other alternatives to driving alone. “When Metro-North puts on this many new trains, it’s saying something very important.”
(6 April 2008)
Contributor John writes:
This is positive [news] in a region that desperately needs to reduce the number of people who commute by car. There are far too many people commuting via their personal vehicles in this area.