New York City has a new plan to place tolls on some of its busiest public streets in hopes of relieving paralyzing Manhattan traffic—a move that could increase pressure on San Francisco to follow suit.
San Francisco has considered so-called “congestion pricing,” a toll that would dispel traffic during the busiest times on key roadways, for nearly a decade, going back to City Hall’s 2010 study examining the feasibility of time-sensitive tolls on downtown streets.
The notion has come up several times in the past year. In 2018, State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) cosponsored a bill that would have introduced pilot rush hour toll programs to SF and LA.
While that proposal didn’t make it out of committee, Wiener suggested in a March interview with CBS SF that he may bring it up again.
In February, the San Francisco County Transportation Board Authority voted to spend $500,000 on a “downtown congestion pricing study,” which may open up a lane for City Hall to explore the idea further.
While toll roads are hardly a new idea, New York’s new system, the first of its kind in the country, will be timed for critical rush hour windows.
Starting in 2021, drivers will pay between $10 and $15 to access Manhattan’s central business district (CBD)—loosely defined as the area below 60th Street in the borough—during busy hours. Curbed NY projects that the plan could generate $15 billion each year for New York City’s transit authority.
The bigger question for California is whether congestion pricing will help cut down on traffic. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, University of Maryland Professor of Public Policy John Rennie Short testifies that similar pricing schemes “[have] succeeded in cities including London, Singapore, and Stockholm.”
Short also claims that research from those studies shows that “[p]roperly used, congestion pricing can make crowded cities safer, cleaner and easier for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians to navigate.”
The most common concern is that road tolls may shut out low-income and working-class people—driving in San Francisco is already a pricy prospect as it is.
In 2018, finance site Smart Asset calculated that the median price of gas in San Francisco was 38 percent higher than the U.S. average. The city also charges many times more for traffic violations than most other cities—generating roughly $124 million in ticket fees annually, according to the Chronicle.
Oakland-based transit nonprofit TransForm published a January paper titled Pricing Roads, Advancing Equity, which examines the potential effect of traffic-based road tolls on poor and disenfranchised communities.
“The mechanics of toll payment (such as requiring users to front sums of money or have bank accounts to link to their transponders) [may] limit access for low-income people,” according to TransForm.
However, the report cites San Francisco’s previous research as evidence that such problems are fixable, noting that a toll program might help underserved commuters:
With targeted discount and exemption programs, it is even possible that people from vulnerable communities who still need to drive can benefit from the decrease in congestion and increase in reliability.
[...] The 2010 [San Francisco...] study found that less than six percent of peak period travelers to the focus area were low-income drivers. SFCTA proposed a 50 percent discount for those commuters as well as for people with disabilities.
The vast majority of low-income travelers would be accessing the area by other modes and would benefit significantly from expanded, faster, more reliable transit, as well as better walking and bicycling infrastructure.
In February, San Francisco’s annual SF Mobility Trends report found that although bicycle and mass transit use are up since 2010—six percent and five percent, respectively—vehicular traffic is up 27 percent.
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