NYC City Council member David Weprin from eastern Queens took on the Manhattan carpool rule this week. Weprin used the numbers produced by the Sam Schwartz company (MTR #353) for the parking garage industry and other groups to assert that the rule is causing a harsh economic impact in Manhattan.Weprin said he would introduce a resolution calling for the carpool rule’s repeal in late February and is currently rounding up support for it.

Brooklyn and Queens supporters of the carpool rule would do well to urge their City Council members to refrain from supporting Weprin’s resolution.

As we’re written previously, the garage owners and their report attempt to lay the impacts of recession, Sept. 11-related job losses, highway and street closings, heightened security — including bridge and tunnel checkpoints — and the carpool rule entirely on the rule itself.A close look at the garage report suggests that, because the carpool rule encourages carpooling, 10,000 fewer people are reaching the Manhattan central business district by car than did prior to September 11.This perspective makes the report’s already stretched argument even weaker.

While Weprin will likely try to canvass Brooklyn and Queens Council members first to build support for his resolution, it is important to remember that the worst traffic in late September, as drivers and truckers tried to return to normal routines, was not in Manhattan, but on the bridge and tunnel approaches in western Brooklyn and Queens.City transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall called the traffic on Sept. 24 “the worst in the city’s history.”Traffic backed up from the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges far into Park Slope, and from the Queensborough Bridge well into central Queens. With terrorism alerts and vehicle searches still occurring, the rule may keep recurrences of such nightmares at bay.

The garage owners’ study also ignores the very high costs of traffic congestion to NYC, and that a better working city will be better off economically in the long run. As the Daily News argued in an editorial Friday, “don’t be hasty and abolish the SOV restrictions. They are doing far, far more good than harm. If, indeed, they are doing any harm at all.”

Report Shows Increase in Carpooling
(Feb 18, 2002)

Carpool Rule Set Until May  
(Feb. 11, 2002) 

Manhattan Carpool Rule Still Working for NYC (Feb. 4, 2002)  

MTR search facility and back issues:

Search our database of all past issues of Mobilizing the Region since Fall, 1994.

Go to index of all Mobilizing the Region back issues