The post A Case for Urban Renewal appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>For 21st century urbanists, the hardest thing to remember about cities in 1950 is how bad the housing stock was. Lowe hardly mentions it because it’s the one thing every reader knew: old housing was awful. One New Haven resident complains about rehabilitation because his cold-water flat costs only $50 a month (equivalent to about $500 in 2024). To find conditions remarkable, she has to go to the worst streets of a Black ghetto:
Mary White, her husband and seven children were shoe-horned into a two-bedroom alley house that had no heat, electricity or hot water. They shared a backyard privy and faucet with neighbors
p. 215 (third printing, a Feb. 1968 hardcover)
Or to Pittsburgh:
Street and office lights used to burn all day when rivers vapors rose and held the region’s soft coal smoke in suspension over the city, casting a midnight gloom of smog throughout the day. Smog would turn office workers’ collars gray by noon; coughing and colds were an unhealthy commonplace in Pittsburgh. Even in the suburbs, housewives had to wash curtains weekly to cleanse them of soot. Airline pilots had a particular dread of landing at the Pittsburgh field with its “ceiling of black ink.”
p. 112
To me, and other 21st century skeptics, she would surely say what she says of Pittsburgh: “One needed to know the city as it had been to fully appreciate the extent of the change.” The steelman (or better, steelcity) case for urban renewal might be that it only looks like the worst villain around because it obliterated greater monsters.
This was urban renewal. The enactment of urban renewal [in 1954] as an expansion of Title I, coming so hard on the heels of the scarcely tried redevelopment program, caused even greater public confusion. Most people used the terms interchangeably, an error…
p. 34
What is urban renewal? It is a bundle of powers and funds that afford cities a uniquely versatile tool for bringing about many different kinds of planned changes and improvements in their blighted areas and for carrying out comprehensive development goals. While it is difficult enough to bring about these changes with renewal, such improvements would generally be impossible without it.
p. 560
Lowe opens her book with a narrow, technical understanding of the phrase “urban renewal”, and closes it with a capacious one. But the several case studies that compose most of the book’s considerable girth focus principally on the replacement of slum housing and the rebuilding of downtowns on modernist lines. Her final case, New Haven, is a single 150-page chapter that communicates the impossible weight of the task. Heroic mayor Richard C. Lee and his lieutenant Ed Logue threw everything at his city’s problems – a downtown highway, code enforcement, extensive residential rehabilitation, school investments, community programming. In Lowe’s judgment, New Haven is the true standout of the era. But she still worries that it’s unsustainable:
Will someone keep New Haven moving when Lee is no longer Mayor? Or will the city ride along on recent improvements until it sinks once more into decay…?
p. 546
Half a century on, Wikipedia has a short article about Mayor Lee. The pitiful section on his legacy notes that the downtown highway he built – the Oak Street Connector – is now named the Richard C. Lee Highway. But highways are a sidenote in Lowe’s narrative – there’s much more about the various approaches to replacing slum housing.
With the newly liberal Congress that was elected in 1936 and the Supreme Court’s broadened definition, in 1937, of the federal responsibility for the public welfare, the way appeared clear and the purpose justified for using federally collected income taxes to help financially disabled cities to eliminate this omnipresent evil.
p. 26
The new Congress responded to the consensus that cities needed “positive powers – especially eminent domain and public funds – to acquire and demolish slum buildings, as was being done in some European countries.” It passed the Housing Act of 1937, which established power and purse for demolishing slums and building public housing.
But this approach was too expensive. So Alvin Hansen and Guy Greer filled in the gap with the idea of “write-down” financing:
The willful disregard of economic information inherent in this formula is stunning. Not only were the new buildings economically inferior to the old; they were economically inferior to vacant land at market rates. The urban economy was screaming its need for density, but planners infected with the Howard–Corbusier mindset wear deaf to its calls.
Hansen and Greer’s write-down became Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, although urban renewal work did not start in most cities until the Housing Act of 1954 made more funding available. One city – nay, one man – dominates the history of Title I.
[Robert] Moses created in New York the biggest Title I program in the country – one with more results by 1960 than all other cities combined.
p. 48
Moses already had experience with redevelopment; his 1949 Stuyvesant Town was a popular success (although “planners and architectural critics” condemned its high density) on a similar model.
But the greater reason New York got so much done so fast is that Moses rewrote the Hansen-Greer formula, daring Washington to withhold funding. The New York method was more efficient:
In 1957, federal administrator Albert Cole threatened publicly “to cut New York off from all federal housing funds”; Moses called his bluff in days. (p 91).
Lowe’s 50-page chapter on Moses is of unique interest because it predates Robert Caro’s The Power Broker by six years. But her biography and evaluation of the man are largely the same. In light of 2024’s re-appreciation of Moses and present-day concerns with finding people who can Get Things Done, her chapter’s conclusion (headed Men to Run Programs) is prescient:
Can a city today attract the talent needed to meet the demands of the new programs? Mediocrity at the technical-managerial level and lack of effective leadership at the top are major urban problems of today.
p. 109
What New Haven intended to do with federal aid under the Housing Act was to virtually gut the heart of its downtown – removing the crazy quilt of “taxpayers,” cobblers’ shops, gin mills and hundred-year-old half-empty lofts and unattractive buildings.
p. 432
Along with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Lowe praises New Haven for having the boldness to reimagine its central business district (“A DARING CONCEPT”). But the thirty-page tale is one of debilitatingly slow fits and starts: finances are promised and lost, offers are made and retracted. In the end, even upgrading a slummy center into high-end office and hotel space cannot pencil out:
That New Haven’s downtown redevelopment actually went through seems to be a commentary on Roger Stevens’ unusual character… [If] Stevens had been a conventional developer or an ordinary man, he would surely have walked away from the project long ago (as his close advisors had counseled). Even with redevelopment aid, the project was not a market place transaction and could not be done through conventional financing mechanisms…
Where special financial reserves or guarantees were available, things got built.
p. 463
Among the many virtues of extemporaneous reading is the chance to view the past as future. Lowe could hardly have picked a worse time to offer predictions about the future of cities. Just two months after my volume was printed, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination lit the powder keg that 1960s urbanists had only half-acknowledged.
But for our purposes, her timing is ideal. She tries to see a hopeful future, with urban renewal dogging the heels of the spreading slums and abating their evils with clean, public or affordable housing. But even in 1967, doubts have crept in. She worried about the lack of talent and commitment among mayors and staff. “Urban renewal”, tightly defined in the 1950s, has opened out to encompass almost any urban policy.
There are only inklings, glimmers of the post-1970 urban crisis. She writes about “juvenile delinquency”, not “crime.” Drugs barely appear; firearms not at all. She has no idea that landlords will soon set the match to their own buildings. In the strangest passage of the book, she sees the colors of the new and terrible dawn and praises it as hope:
Many landlords found it cheaper to vacate a building than to continue operating a slum… The boarded-up houses, and the growing vacancy rate in these neighborhoods (almost double [Philadelphia’s] average of 6 per cent for rental housing) were among the more hopeful signs in the blighted inner city. The impressive improvement in housing revealed by the 1960 census could be attributed in part to this “slum cleansing operation.” When the gray areas are cleared, as called for by the comprehensive plan, it is hoped that the costs, both in human and site acquisition terms, would be greatly reduced.
p. 360
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]]>The post Master Classes appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>You can also see the talk I gave the same day:
Pro: When you speak to architects as a practitioner, they call it a “master class”, which is very flattering.
Cons: Don’t try to follow Alain Bertaud.
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]]>The post Transit oriented development in Bengaluru could lead to additional $64 Million per year appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>Bengaluru has low building heights and the paper’s counterfactual depends on relaxing FSI/FAR from their current level to 2 (only 2!) around 500 meters of the metro line.
The paper finds
“The complementarity between TOD and the metro unlocks additional gains equivalent to about $64 million per year or one-half of annual operating costs of the metro system.”
Paper reference:
Chen, L., Hasan, R., Jiang, Y., & Parkhomenko, A. (2024). Faster, taller, better: Transit improvements and land use policies. Journal of Development Economics, 103322.
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]]>The post Hot takes and pensées, #UEA2024 appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>Alice Wang showed the most convincing evidence I’ve read on net costs of urban highways, using Seattle data. Smartphone data reveals that people avoid trips that either cross or use a highway. She estimates that replacing highways with surface roads would increase welfare by a massive 9%. Most of the gain is from improved access to urban destinations. But the suburbs would be a bit worse off. (One weakness: she doesn’t reckon with capacity constraints, so she’s probably missing low on the traffic costs).
Interestingly, burying the highways has basically the same result. That’s because the suburbs’ loss is mostly a function of the redistribution of businesses.
Railroads and highways have equally large effects in terms of neighborhood fragmentation (Vikram Maheshri & Kenneth Whaley).
Can we integrate these types of barriers into spatial social science? Evan Mast has built a new neighborhood/district geography that usually lines up with highways, rails, and rivers. But the basis for his new geography isn’t trips or maps, it’s moves. I didn’t realize many people move within a neighborhood, but it’s apparently quite common.
Seth Chizeck won the student prize for research showing that free transit vouchers didn’t help outcomes for beneficiaries much.
Urbanites save more of their money than suburbanites with equal incomes and demographic profiles. Daniel Murphy showed that city dwellers spend more on housing and eating out, but so much less on durable goods, maintenance, and utilities that they end up with a higher rate of savings. One possible explanation is that suburbanites own more land, which is a form of savings. But that doesn’t explain why urban renters save more than similar suburban renters.
Murphy’s explanation is home size, which correlates with savings rates across countries…
…and across time:
I will confess I had no idea that U.S. density had grown so much from 2010-2020.
HISDAC-US is an impressive dataset. It provides an estimate of built-up density nationwide at a 250 meter grid from 1810-2015, based on Zillow’s ZTRAX records. The estimates are from work by Stefan Leyk & Johannes Uhl.
Texas counties that lost more soldiers in the Civil War had more urbanization from 1870-1900. (Phil Hoxie and Beatrice Lee).
Joshua Coven looks at the entry of institutional investors into Georgia’s housing market. They crowd out small investors, induce more construction, and decrease homeownership. The result is slightly higher prices, slightly lower rents, and more diversity in single-family neighborhoods.
In Colorado, water impact fees are a significant cost attached to every new home. Benji Edelstein showed how a shift from one-size-fits-all pricing to contextual pricing changed construction patterns. This research (not public yet) is well-timed: the Supreme Court’s Sheetz decision will make it hard to sustain flat pricing models when better data is readily available.
Raheem Chaudhry and Amanda Eng study children who grow up in NYCHA public housing – the largest and among the best-run in America. Children who move into NYCHA projects are more often than not moving from a worse neighborhood. And among children who live in NYCHA, those with more years are better off as adults.
Hector Blanco and Noémie Sportiche investigate Massachusetts’ “Chapter 40B” housing law, which allows mixed-income developments to bypass local zoning (after a tortuous process). Hector’s presentation interpreted the data in a YIMBY-friendly way: for most houses around most 40B sites, there is no measurable effect on prices or migration.
But you could flip it around: there is a large and significant loss of value for the immediate neighbors (up to 0.1 mile) of large 40B developments. And it makes renters, at least, more likely to move away.
By contrast, Joe Gyourko and Sean McCulloch reported a strong “Distaste for Density” using bordering municipalities (here’s an earlier version). Numerically, the distaste for neighbors’ density might be comparable to what Blanco and Sportiche found. But the authors framed it in the opposite way.
Each real estate listing belongs to one Multiple Listing Service (MLS) or another, sometimes with overlapping territory. When a sharing agreement between the Miami and Beaches MLS’s broke down, homes and buyers matched more slowly and prices fell. (Walter D’Lima presented this multi-author paper).
Rebecca Diamond’s keynote was a reminder that modeling choices matter. She thinks of permit process as a fixed cost that doesn’t vary with project size, an approach which yields predictably meh results.
Gordon Hanson’s keynote dealt with place-based policies. The most salient takeaway is that non-place-based policies, like Social Security and Medicaid, are more targeted to the poorest, neediest regions than the explicitly placed-based policies like tax incentives.
Urban economics is a rapidly growing discipline. Top students who wouldn’t have given it a thought twenty years ago are flooding into the discipline to take advantage of new data, powerful computers, and the gnarly-but-solvable public policy questions that 21st century cities present.
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]]>The post Where sale prices are going up appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>Is there another way to judge the popularity of various places? Perhaps so. I just uncovered a database of real estate price trends from Redfin. Because housing supply is often slow to respond to demand trends, housing prices probably reflect changes in demand. What do they show?
First let’s look at the most expensive cities: San Francisco and New York City where I live now. If conventional wisdom is accurate, I would expect to see stagnant or declining housing prices in the city and some increase in suburbia. In Manhattan, the median sale price for condos and co-ops was actually lower in 2024 than it was in mid-2019, declining from $1.25 million in August 2019 to $1.05 million in August 2024.* Similarly, in the Bronx multifamily sale prices decreased slightly (though prices for single-family homes increased). By contrast, in suburban Westchester County, prices increased by about 30 percent (from just under 250k to 325k). Similarly, in Nassau County prices increased from 379k to 517k, an increase of well over one-third. So these prices suggest something like a classic suburban sprawl scenario: stagnant city prices, growing suburban prices.
In San Francisco, by contrast, property values declined everywhere. City prices declined from $1.2 million in August 2019 to just under $1 million today; in suburban Marin County, the median price declined from $633k to $583k. So sale price data certainly supports the narrative of flight from expensive cities.
What about places that are dense but not quite as expensive? But New York might not be typical. Let’s look at Boston, another dense, transit-oriented city. Condo prices in Boston have actually risen, from $625k in 2019 to 719k in 2014, about a 14 percent increase. In Middlesex County, prices rose from 485k to 615k- about a 27 percent increase. So prices rose more in the suburbs, but they rose in both city and suburb, indicating stable or growing demand for urban life. The same is true for other relatively dense cities like Philadelphia (19 percent increase city, but over 40 percent increases in suburban Montgomery and Chester Counties), Washington (6 percent city, 21 percent suburban Montgomery County, and Chicago (16 percent increase in city, over a 50 percent increase in suburban Lake County).
What about the Sunbelt? In my home town of Atlanta, city condo prices increased by over 30 percent, from 245k in 2019 to 321k in 2024. In suburban Cobb County, prices rose even faster, from 180k in 2019 to 300k in 2024. Similarly, Dallas prices increased from by about 25 percent (205k in 2019, 266k in 2024), while prices in Collin County to its north almost doubled (153k to 285k). So city prices grew at hefty rates but still lagged behind suburban growth rates.
What about prices for single family houses? Here, the picture is much more complex. In Philadelphia, price patterns for houses were pretty similar to those of condos. But in Boston, there was not much difference: city prices rose by almost 34 percent (from 649k to 870k), and Middlesex County prices by about 41 percent (600k to 850k). And Washington city prices grew by over 50 percent (from 777k to $1.3 million) more than in Montgomery County (about 30 percent) or Fairfax County (35 percent). In metro Atlanta, city and suburban prices both grew by about half (299k to 499k in the city, 287k to 465k in Cobb County).
So it seems to me that the real story might be that there is unmet demand for multifamily housing in suburbs, and unmet demand for houses in some cities.
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]]>The post Book Review: (de)Coding Mumbai appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>[In] Mumbai, there is a specific type of architect who has become the interpreter of regulations and there are those architects who are aestheticians working on building skins. As much as there is convenience in this split, it has taken away a big part of the agency of the architects in the city…
One of the ways to change this situation is to start looking at architecture also as urban design exercise. Through the discipline of Urban Design…there is great potential to initiate dialogues and processes for neighbourhood-scale changes in the city.
(de)Coding Mumbai, p. 272
Following Michel Foucault, the authors describe the origins of planning in British Bombay, triggered by the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague, which spread from inland China through Hong Kong and to ports around the world.
The Indian subcontinent suffered an estimated 12 million deaths, most of them in Bombay Province… According to some accounts, close to 2,000 people died every week in the city for over a year and more than 8,50,000 inhabitants fled the city… It is under these dire conditions that the provincial state established the Bombay Improvement Trust in 1898.
(de)Coding Mumbai, p. 23
The Trust widened roads to bring in clean sea air (although Pasteur had established the germ theory of disease, old ideas lingered). It demolished slums, replacing them with multistory, modern housing blocks. And it used land readjustment (called Town Planning Schemes in India) to expand the city.
What Padora and Khemalapure add to this well-established history is how the granular text of the new regulatory documents dictated the form of now-historic neighborhoods.
The authors skip ahead to the post-Independence era, which they call “urban sprawl.” For American usage, that’s the wrong phrase – the era was characterized by a legalistic approach to planning and the coexistence of both hostility to new migrants and a concern with equity and redistribution. The principle underlying those contradictory impulses was an overweening respect for planners and planning. Planners “knew” that cities should be moderately-sized just as they “knew” the necessities of life for the very poor.
To achieve both ends, planners discouraged high-rise growth in central Mumbai, with catastrophic consequences: incredibly high formal housing costs and about half the population living in unregulated slums.
One project the books covers is the World Bank’s “sites and services” neighborhood in Charkop, which Alain Bertaud helped design.
Since India’s turn toward market ideas in 1991, Mumbai regulations have begun to relax. But the relaxation is far from laissez-faire. Instead, the regulatory regime creates a high market value for floor space, which it then monetizes directly and indirectly.
By selling FSI, Mumbai’s regulators incentivize rehabilitation, slum replacement, preservation via transferable development rights (TDRs), private open space, and other priorities. The obvious tradeoff is that development is more expensive than it would be under a regime without FSI. But
Padora and Khemalapure are more interested in drawing our attention to another tradeoff: regulators lose their leverage to regulate the interface between private and public space. Of one project, they write:
The project is a clear example of how suburban areas have been utilized as pools to balance TDRs… The bye-laws and design of such projects however, make no attempt to rethink the high-speed interface between the buildings, between the neighboring plots and the adjacent highway.
(de)Coding Mumbai, p. 226
The high value also distorts construction toward uses that do not count against the Floor Space Index (FSI), such as structured parking. In summary, the authors condemn this Byzantine system:
Since 1991, FSI has become a form of currency that is used instead of monetary compensation by the State in Mumbai.
(de)Coding Mumbai, p. 249
The authors spend just a few pages looking to the future – the first quote in this review is from that section. Theirs is more glimpse of the future than a vision. Clearly, they wish architects were doing something richer than regulatory interpretation and exterior decoration. The first step in that direction is to illuminate the current dispensation, and the authors have done so admirably.
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]]>The post Toward an Erdmann synthesis appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>Although I’ve been Erdmann’s colleague for most of this time, I’ve maintained wide priors on the question of credit standards. Many other scholars, left and right, are skeptical of the broad, century-long trend of encouraging (and subsidizing) homeownership. Whether or not Fannie & Freddie’s mortgage securitization constitutes a subsidy, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t influence who can buy a home.
The excellent Kalamazoo Debate helped clarify things, probably because it isolates the credit issue from the supply issue.
With these facts, Kevin’s story sounds very plausible:
There are some holes in this argument. Homeownership in Kalamazoo hasn’t changed much over time. Would a temporary 2% drop really shut off the supply of new housing? But if we leave Kalamazoo aside, the national decrease was much larger and the rebound incomplete, so maybe Kevin’s right nationally, at least for post-2000 analysis.
Can Kevin and the skeptics both be right? There’s no technical contradiction between these two points, they just have opposite vibes:
(We can add: rental subsidies don’t boost construction much because they’re targeted to people who aren’t close to being able to afford new construction and/or because zoning limits the land available for multifamily construction.)
This doesn’t tell us whether subsidies are good or not. It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise if a milk subsidy made milk cheaper, right? Housing markets are weirder than milk markets, but it’s still not that weird to think that housing subsidies make housing cheaper.
Just because the subsidy / filter synthesis is possible doesn’t mean it’s true. The pre-2000 homeownership rate was stable and lower than today’s. Was that just demographics? Is Kevin’s story correct for a working-class slice of the population but less central to the major trends than he believes?
It’s in big, general-equilibrium questions like this that we really need rigorous economic modeling. The facts are available. Can a model match these moments?
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]]>The post Congestion Pricing: Traffic Solver or Sin Tax? appeared first on Market Urbanism.
]]>The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips.
This article appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.
Congestion pricing aims to reduce demand for peak-hour car trips by charging vehicles entering the city center when roads are the most congested. Charging rent for the use of roads is consistent with a fundamental principle of economics: when the price of a good or service increases, demand for it decreases. Charging different rates depending on the congestion level spreads trip demand over a longer period than the traditional peak hour. The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips. Congestion pricing then becomes more akin to the “sin taxes” imposed on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol than to traffic management.
The traffic on urban roads in a downtown area is not uniform during the day but is subject to rush hour peaks, while late-night road networks are usually underused. The use of roads in the downtown area is similar to other places like hotels in resort towns. Hotels try to spread demand away from peak season by reducing prices when demand is low and increasing prices when demand is high. When resort hotels charge higher prices during weekends and vacations, it is not to discourage demand but to spread demand over a broader period. Well-conceived congestion pricing for urban roads works under the same principles as the pricing of hotels. The goal is to maximize the use of a fixed asset by spreading demand over a more extended period.
Starting in 1975, Singapore was a pioneer in applying congestion pricing. As technology evolved, Singapore modified its system to adjust road pricing where and when it was most effective. To this day, it is the most advanced model in the world. While not every city has the political set-up that would permit to implement Singapore road pricing system, it is helpful to know how this city establishes its pricing mechanism and monitors its performance.
Singapore is now developing a next-generation Duration-Based Charging system incorporating satellite-based technology to allow for more sophisticated charging mechanisms, including charging based on the distance traveled or time spent on the road. The same technology is proposed to be used in the US for Mileage-Based User Fees that will hopefully replace the gasoline tax to pay for themaintenance of roads and highways.
Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) closely monitors traffic conditions. One of the key performance indicators is the average road speed. They measure it in the following manner:
Singapore road pricing has achieved its goal of maintaining a minimum speed within specific roads over more than 30 years. While the city has constantly invested in public transport, it has recognized that individual vehicles are an indispensable mode of transportation and complement other modes like transit, bicycles, and automated vehicles. A large city requires a lot of maintenance. Workers in charge of this maintenance, like electricians, plumbers, painters, nurses, and doctors, must use individual vehicles to fulfill their tasks. Shops, restaurants, and bars need to be resupplied continuously. Congestion pricing is particularly efficient in organizing this indispensable car or truck traffic.
Unlike Singapore, most pricing mechanisms and performance monitoring in other cities using congestion pricing, like London, Stockholm, and Milan, are primitive. Except for Stockholm, they charge a fixed rate for entering an area. Milan charges cars according to their pollution level. The objective seems to be to discourage car usage rather than optimize the use of existing roads.
The congestion pricing projected to be implemented in New York in 2024 seems to have the most muddled objective. The city has never mentioned road speed objectives. The peak period is from 5 AM to 9 PM on weekdays, priced at $15 for cars when entering the zone, while $3.75 for the off-peak period. This flat toll for most of the day suggests that the primary purpose of the toll is to raise revenue to subsidize the vast public transport deficit resulting from years of mismanagement and under-investment. The boundary of the priced zone, south of 60th Street, will create other distortions within Manhattan. It would have been better to set tolls in most of Manhattan and part of Brooklynn by hours and places at different rates.
The impact of the toll on the freight delivery cost ($24-$36) for shops, restaurants, and construction sites has never been discussed.
Ironically, while congestion pricing’s objective is to obtain a more rational use of existing roads, parking remains free on many streets within the Manhattan part subject to congestion pricing. Parking on the roads that are metered costs $14.50 for two hours. Because metered or unmetered street space often occupies both sides of the road, deliveries and taxis loading or unloading passengers block an entire circulation lane. If traffic congestion were the main issue, most of the curb side street lanes devoted to parking would have been dedicated to bicycle or car lanes for loading and unloading. Establishing clear objectives and monitoring performances and possible secondary impacts on transport costs are indispensable tasks for any city considering congestion pricing. The goal of congestion pricing is not to maximize revenue but to manage traffic more efficiently
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