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ABSTRACT
What were politicians, planners, and activists able to make of market concepts and market devices as they crafted congestion pricing plans in the context of New York City’s regional governance structure, its transportation infrastructure, and its physical geography? The answer challenges typical assumptions about the use of market mechanisms in restructuring urban space. Market mechanisms and market rationality created a platform for political debate about citywide mobility and its costs. From 2003 to 2014, through five formal plans, advocates and detractors opened up a political space for debating the interests of actors, from drivers, to pedestrians, to the local and global environment to citywide mobility. Market rationality was a provisional assemblage into which actors sought to embed values like sustainability and fairness. These values became more important in each new plan as advocates sought to address the political vulnerabilities of the one that had come before. The changes from plan to plan show challenges, liabilities, and possibilities for using market tools to address ecological and justice issues.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Material place holders can also have unexpected consequences, the roles of things and people are enacted in unique circumstances. It is for this reason that ethnomethodological research approaches are important to actor–network theory. See Law (Citation1997) Traduction and Trahison for a more extended theoretical take on the roles that material placeholders play.
2. Modes of rationality here are equated with Foucault’s ideas of discourses or epistemes or even the term “actor–network” itself. Market rationality is a small scale, unstable discourse/episteme that is still in contention in the case below. It has not been “black boxed” or taken for granted.
3. (Alexander, Citation2000, p. 243)
4. Demand management through pricing contrasts with the postwar idea transportation planning idea of accommodating demand through highway building. This transformation started with economic theory, particularly the work of Vickrey, Citation1969. It was translated first into economic articles, textbooks, and courses. Then, in response to the energy crisis and environmental movement of the 1970s transportation planners built traffic models around the idea of demand management. In the late 1990s, data on traffic flows from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council were digitized and put online, reducing the effort required to access the information. See West (Citation2016) for a detailed account of these transformations.
5. Vickrey, the economist who had originally proposed congestion pricing considered other tolling technologies equally compatible with congestion pricing. See West, Citation2016 for further information on his ideas for mechanical systems that would enable variable pricing.
6. These fears were expressed in response to a variable tolling scheme proposed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1979.
7. In the report, congestion pricing is one way of recuperating the cost of time spent in traffic. It suggests other regulatory initiatives, such as zoning changes and changing street parking codes, as well as new services including a more comprehensive bus system for reducing congestion.
8. The Partnership for New York City is a launching pad for policy ideas taken up by the Mayor, in other policy areas as well. Bruce Schaller’s “Necessity or Choice? Why People Drive in Manhattan” was also an important technical report on the reasons that people drive to the central business district in New York City (Partnership for New York City, Citation2006). In many ways Schaller foreshadows the congestion pricing politics better than Growth or Gridlock. As we will see below the identities of the commuters, their needs and wants, and who is trusted to represent those needs and wants becomes the central issue.
9. The City Council vote was nonbinding, it was an endorsement sent along to The State Legislature encouraging passage of the law.
10. A $21 fee would be charged to small trucks and buses. A $42 fee would be charged to large trucks.
11. Also note that one of the key figures in putting into place the London Congestion Charging was Robert R. Kiley, a former President of Partnerships for New York City.
12. The report was released on 9 July 2007.
13. Critics of Brodsky pointed out that his objections may not stem simply from a principled opposition to the use of market-based fees. The politics of advocacy or opposition are also tied to organized interest that would be affected by congestion pricing. A local transportation news blog that supported the plan, Streetsblog, posted a rebuttal of Brodsky’s critiques on the same day that his report was released to the public. Drawing on a report produced in 2006 by the transportation consultant Bruce Schaller, the author argued that only a small fraction of New Yorkers drive to Lower Manhattan, those who drive tend to be better off than the average New Yorker and they have the option of taking other forms of transit. In a more pointed critique, they produced evidence that Richard Brodsky received campaign contributions from the owners of parking garages, who stood to lose customers if a pricing plan was put into place (Naparstek, Citation2007). There was no rebuttal, however, for the claim that the affluent drivers would have greater access to the city.
14. The MTA operates subway, bus, and commuter rail service in New York City and the surrounding area.
15. As many planners and transit advocates have noted a surcharge on taxis may be counterproductive to the goal of reducing congestion.
16. The decision not to take up the congestion pricing bill was most likely the result of a political fight between the Mayor and the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver. Bloomberg had used his personal fortune to contribute heavily to Assembly Republicans in the hope of giving that party control in the next legislative session. Silver and other Assembly Democrats, in all likelihood, retaliated by stopping Bloomberg’s legislative agenda (Hakim and Peters, Citation2008).
17. Schwartz was the head of a midsized transportation engineering consulting firm when he proposed The Fair Plan.
18. The full quote, from Chapter IV of Machiavelli’s The Prince is: “… It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, [therefore] the prince is endangered along with them” (Machiavelli, Citation1505/1909).
19. Only 43% of voters said it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that congestion pricing funds would be used to improve mass transit, while 54% say this is “not too likely” or “not likely at all” (Quinnipiac University, Citation2008).