The last post-September 11 automobile restrictions for lower Manhattan end today, roughly two years and two months after the terrible attacks.

For a time, the carpool rule affecting all Manhattan crossings south of 61st Street worked well to limit some of the discretionary car trips to Manhattan, and bad traffic impacts near the bridge approaches on the eastern side of the East River. However, today’s lifting of the rule will probably not cause much of a ripple, since noticeable enforcement of the rule, at least at the city-owned bridges, appeared to end in the spring of 2002.

While Mayor Bloomberg was talking frequently about East River bridge tolls, transportation reformers and urbanists thought the carpool rule might act as a precursor to tolls and a permanent policy of discouraging car trips into Manhattan’s core. The voices that were raised for and against the carpool rule probably presaged in a small way the debate that would accompany a serious city proposal for East River tolls (MTR #’s 345, 355).

But the end of the rule for the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown tunnels and the Queensboro Bridge in April, 2002 made today’s action just a matter of time. City transportation commission Iris Weinshall said the timing was geared toward the pending reopening of the downtown PATH line.

Officials pointed to HOV-3 lanes on the Gowanus and Long Island expressways as surviving legacies of the Sept. 11 restrictions, though those policies had been needed for some time before 2001 because the clogged-up HOV-2 lanes on those roads were causing big delays for thousands of express bus commuters. Post-Sept. 11 restrictions on large trucks will also remain in place at the Holland Tunnel (see MTR #418). Since the Midtown carpool rule ended, the city has reestablished a morning HOV lane on the Queensboro Bridge. It should consider similar measures for the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. The Port Authority is reportedly researching a number of ways to increase bus and HOV flow in the Lincoln Tunnel, now that the exclusive bus lanes there are at capacity.

We are likely to need new measures to manage cars entering Manhattan before long. Traffic entering the city is lower now than during the boom times of 1999 and 2000, but it could swing back to record or unprecedented levels when the economy rebounds. It would be best to prepare for that eventuality now. At any rate, expect renewed public focus on the high costs of congestion in the years to come, and possibly sooner.

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