Charles Komanoff
Recent Posts
DOT Street Safety Treatments Are Working — and Derailed Projects Are Putting Lives at Risk
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A Manhattan Institute report found that DOT street redesigns are saving lives, but opposition from electeds and community boards is stifling progress in poorer areas.
No, Traffic Congestion Is Not “Self-Correcting”
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Calling congestion "self-correcting" is a convenient way to steer the subject away from congestion pricing. The argument is that drivers can bail when congestion "gets bad enough." Problem solved -- without collective (governmental) action requiring political leadership. Let's unpack that.
Move NY Campaign Says Toll Reform Can Bypass Albany — Is City Hall Listening?
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A legal scholar says NYC has the authority to toll its own roads and bridges, which could raise revenue for transit.
The High Cost of Giving Away More Parking Placards
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The decision last week to grant tens of thousands of new parking placards to teachers and other school personnel is classic Bill de Blasio: a freebie that’s not really free.
It’s Settled: Uber Is Making NYC Gridlock Worse
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Uber, Lyft, and other app-based ride services are unequivocally worsening gridlock in the Manhattan core and also slowing down vehicular travel in northern Manhattan and the western parts of Queens and Brooklyn, according to a report released today by transportation analyst Bruce Schaller.
Tolling Opens Up Possibilities for Better Brooklyn Bridge Walking and Biking
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With crowding on the Brooklyn Bridge walking and biking path in a state of near constant low-level emergency, this week NYC DOT announced a feasibility study of widening the bridge’s promenade. A path with sufficient space for the thousands of commuters, exercisers, and tourists who walk and bike across the bridge each day would be an […]
Opposing the Move NY Plan Does No Favors for Southeast Queens
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Four highways encircle New York’s 27th City Council district, a largely African-American section of southeast Queens: the Grand Central Parkway on the north, the Van Wyck Expressway on the west, the Southern State Parkway on the south, and the Cross Island Parkway on the east. Highways girdle the transportation perspective of the 27th District’s Council […]
New York Can’t Afford to Put Off the Move NY Plan Any Longer
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During the Bloomberg era, there was no bigger backer of congestion pricing than Kathryn Wylde, director of the Partnership for New York City, a downtown business group. Wylde, a confidante of Mayor Bloomberg, spearheaded the Partnership’s 2006 Growth or Gridlock report that provided both quantitative firepower and political cover for the mayor’s congestion pricing proposal […]
Inside the Latest “Distracted Pedestrians” Con
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Hospital records from 2014 showed that distracted walking accounted for 78% of pedestrian injuries throughout the United States. — Daily News, Sunday, March 27, 2016 A report released in 2015 by the Governors Highway Safety Association found an increase in pedestrian fatalities, and cited texting while walking as partly to blame. Nearly two million pedestrian injuries […]
The Boom in Subway Ridership Is Waning. Why?
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Transit officials recently reported that 1,763,000,000 subway trips were taken last year, the most since 1948. But the rise in ridership was meager, with only 12 million more trips in 2015 than in 2014. The percentage growth rate was seven-tenths of one percent. Over the same year, employment in New York City rose three times […]
3 Sources of Cluelessness Conspire to Blame Victims for “Distracted Walking”
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Oy. Not great to hear @CommissBratton talking about distracted walking as reason for increase in nationwide increase in ped fatalities. — Brooklyn Spoke (@BrooklynSpoke) March 10, 2016 For a policing icon who built his reputation on being data-driven, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton has a penchant for shooting from the hip on traffic safety. At the […]
Street Safety Benefits of Congestion Charging Are Bigger Than We Thought
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Evidence keeps mounting that congestion pricing can catalyze major reductions in traffic crashes. A year ago I reported on research that vehicle crashes in central London fell as much as 40 percent since the 2003 startup of London’s congestion charge. The same researchers are now expressing the safety dividend in terms of falling per-mile crash rates, and […]