By Alex Matthiessen, founder of Move NY
The New York Times
While I mostly use my feet, bike and mass transit to get to work and around town, I often rely on Uber to get me from my home in Brooklyn to places not easily accessed by subway. I support Uber and other “disruptive” business models that inject healthy competition into industries and deliver a better, often less expensive, product to consumers. But the introduction of an estimated 25,000 Uber (and other app-based) vehicles onto the streets of New York since 2011 has unquestionably increased traffic congestion, particularly in the central business district (C.B.D.), which is generally defined as the area of Manhattan south of 59th Street. The ills that go with increased congestion include more air pollution and vehicle crashes. These are legitimate public interest issues for the mayor and City Council to grapple with.
Still, a temporary, arbitrary cap on fleet size or growth risks hindering innovation. Instead, regulators first should curb traffic by incentivizing less overall car dependence — whether among car owners or for-hire vehicle customers. One idea is to equitably price the use of the cities’ roads and bridges, and invest the proceeds in our public transit system.
The first step would be to add a toll to some of the C.B.D.'s most congested bridges and crossings, including the four currently free East River bridges, and along 60th street. This move could reduce the price of the exorbitant tolls on the city’s outer, less congested bridges by nearly 50 percent.
The second step would be to charge for-hire vehicle passengers who use yellow and green taxis, as well as Uber and Lyft, a surcharge inside Manhattan’s most congested areas, which stretches south from 96th Street. In exchange, taxis would be exempt from all tolls bordering the C.B.D.
Read full coverage here.