The congestion pricing commission endorsed Mayor Bloomberg’s plan featuring an $8 toll to drive into Manhattan. Despite the lopsided vote, the plan still faces an uphill battle. Why? Because drivers from outside Manhattan will pay to ease traffic in Manhattan. Terrific — if you live in Gramercy Park.

 

No wonder city and state legislators from the boroughs lined up to oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s original plan last year, and will probably oppose the final plan.

 

Actually, some of the traffic reduction from the toll will occur outside of the charging zone — in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, even northern Manhattan. But the mayor’s staff has never said how much, leaving borough residents and legislators believing that the benefits of safer streets and better air will be confined to those who live and work in the center of town (with the highest net worth).

 

To paraphrase UCLA urban planning professor Don Shoup, the problem facing pricing isn’t that it provokes strong opposition but that it doesn’t evoke strong support.

 

Why is support weak? Because to most New Yorkers the benefits of the plan look pretty thin: a 6-8 percent drop in traffic, but just in glittering Manhattan; a mere several hundred million in new transit funding for a system with endless needs; not even a 1 percent cut in the city’s climate pollution as global warming surges. It hardly seems worth it. No wonder it’s a hard sell.

 

All the more striking, then, that my plan, The Kheel Plan, didn’t penetrate the traffic commission’s thinking. The plan is the ultimate in traffic’s and transit’s carrot and stick: it would double the proposed cordon fee to $16, but would zero out bus and subway fares. That’s right, free mass transit.

 

Drivers will pay $16 under the Kheel Plan to drive into the Manhattan Central Business District, day or night. Transit users will ride for free, day or night. Twenty bucks more in straphangers’ and bus riders’ pockets each week. A one-quarter drop in traffic in the CBD, and almost one-tenth citywide. Over five billion dollars’ worth of reduced gridlock — including major time savings not just for drivers and truckers but also bus passengers, whose rides will get an extra boost as fare-free boarding eliminates human gridlock at bus entrances.

 

I know that something so revolutionary takes time to absorb. But a year ago, hardly anyone outside of traffic experts had even heard of congestion pricing. Mayor Bloomberg and the traffic commission deserve our thanks for putting it on the civic front burner.

 

For half a century I’ve been saying that traffic and transit are two sides of the same coin. New Yorkers need a plan that addresses both. Even more, they deserve a plan with benefits they can feel and touch.