Earth Equity News

The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic. By Felix Salmon, Wired, May 24, 2010. "Charles Komanoff's... Balanced Transportation Analyzer, [is] an enormous Excel spreadsheet that he's been building for the past three years. Over the course of about 50 worksheets, the BTA breaks down every aspect of New York City transportation -- subway revenues, traffic jams, noise pollution -- in an attempt to discover which mix of tolls and surcharges would create the greatest benefit for the largest number of people. Komanoff's spreadsheet, which he has posted online, calculates how new fees and changes to existing tolls affect traffic at different times of day. It calculates which costs are borne by city dwellers and which by suburbanites. It calculates how long it takes passengers to dig for change and board buses. And it allows any user to adjust dozens of different variables -- from taxi surcharges to truck tolls -- and measure their impact...

"Komanoff's work may not have made him a celebrity, but his rigor gained him a reputation within the rarefied world of traffic geeks. In 2007, he got a phone call. Ted Kheel, a legendary labor lawyer and one of Komanoff's heroes, had made it his personal mission to completely rethink New York City's traffic policy. Was Komanoff free to help? Now 95 years old, Kheel has been trying to improve New York's traffic for more than half a century. He is obsessed with the economic damage that cars do to cities -- damage that's much greater than most people realize. In 1958, as the New York City Transit Authority was preparing to raise subway fares, Kheel wrote a paper citing a survey that found that traffic congestion cost more than $2 billion a year. 'This vast sum,' Kheel wrote, 'equal to $1 a working day for every man, woman, and child in the city, has to be paid by someone, and it is. It is assessed against all of us in the form of higher prices, inflated delivery costs, and increased taxes.' It would be cheaper, he argued, to subsidize public transportation and save the hidden costs associated with driving.

"Komanoff found that every car entering the CBD [central business district] causes an average of 3.23 person-hours of delays. Multiply that by $39.53 -- a weighted average of vehicles' time value within and outside the CBD -- and it turns out that the average weekday vehicle journey costs other New Yorkers $128 in lost time. At last, urban planners could say just how big the externalities associated with driving are, knowing that the number was backed up with solid empirical analysis. 'It's going to happen,' Komanoff says. 'Cities will charge per mile or per minute according to your exact location and the type of vehicle you're driving.' When it happens, Kheel and Komanoff will be lauded for their efforts to give empirical rigor to the fight to decongest cities. The only question is whether it will happen in Kheel's lifetime -- or, for that matter, in Komanoff's." Charles Komanoff is a cofounder of the Carbon Tax Center, a close ally of CCC.