NJ's Stealth Gas Tax Initiative
NJ voters will have some say November 7th on Governor Corzine’s transportation funding scheme. A question on the state-wide ballot will ask whether or not to constitutionally dedicate to the Transportation Trust Fund the 1.5-cent remainder of the 10.5-cent per gallon state gas tax.
Rell, DeStefano - Whose Growth is Smarter?
Stopping sprawl has become a hot topic in Connecticut’s gubernatorial race.
Groups Urge Booker to Support Pedestrian-Friendly Highway
A coalition of environmentalists and transportation reformers joined with the Ironbound Community Corporation to ask Newark Mayor Cory Booker to support a more pedestrian-friendly Route 21, known locally as McCarter Highway.
Pressure Mounts for NYC Change
Is New York City ready for new transportation priorities? Activity by elected and civic leaders suggest it is becoming more so.
Secaucus: Attract Cars or Displace Trucks?
Meadowlands planners face an interesting choice regarding property next to the NJ Transit Secaucus transfer station.
New Yorkers on Slow Buses
Survey: “Do you consider slow moving bus transportation a major, moderate, or minor problem or not a problem?”
Verrazano Tolls in S.I.-Brooklyn House Race
Toll policy at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge has been one of the most covered issues in the race for New York’s 13th district — which covers Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn — pitting incumbent Vito Fossella against challenger Stephen Harrison.
Freight Trains Return to Staten Island
Locomotives are already making test runs from Linden, NJ to Staten Island over the Arthur Kill lift bridge and tracks that connect the Howland Hook Marine Terminal to the railroad network in New Jersey.
NJ's Stealth Gas Tax Initiative
NJ voters will have some say November 7th on Governor Corzine’s transportation funding scheme. A question on the state-wide ballot will ask whether or not to constitutionally dedicate to the Transportation Trust Fund the 1.5-cent remainder of the 10.5-cent per gallon state gas tax. 9 cents of the tax is already constitutionally dedicated to the transportation fund. The governor’s transportation funding plan, enacted earlier this year, relies on money borrowed against the proposed dedication and bond refinancing and has sent long-term state transportation debt soaring (MTR#s 521-523).
Corzine’s plan had its supporters and opponents during last spring’s legislative session. Some environmentalists and transit advocates opposed it, upset by the new debt and the 11th hour removal of the fix-it-first language that had been included in the prior Trust Fund authorization. AAA joined organized labor in supporting the dedication, arguing that any new money allocated to transportation is money well spent.
However, the issue has been nearly invisible since last spring — the legislature avoided any fanfare when it added the measure to the ballot this summer and even its most likely supporters have remained mute with just two weeks until election day. Perhaps the measure’s supporters calculate that the absence of organized opposition and turn-out due to the Menendez-Kean U.S. Senate race somehow lend a strong likelihood of success.
What if the measure fails? Governor Corzine will either have to cut back the five-year transportation spending package he trumpeted earlier in the year, or add other new revenue to the transportation funding stream. In the latter case, the measure’s failure would be a blessing in disguise. The state will have to find new revenue in four years when the borrowed money runs out again, and today’s temporary gasoline price reprieve may be the most favorable foreseeable time to bite the transportation revenue bullet.
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Rell, DeStefano - Whose Growth is Smarter?
Stopping sprawl has become a hot topic in Connecticut’s gubernatorial race.
Early this month, front-runner Governor Jodi Rell announced a plan to halt sprawl in the state. “Today, we are charting a new course for Connecticut,” Governor Rell said. “Think about the times we have shaken our heads in disbelief at the sight of another beautiful green field of hillside torn apart while nearby land well suited for development goes unused. My order aims to prevent sprawling development patterns from forever changing the character of our communities.”
Her Executive Order creates an Office of Responsible Growth which will be housed in the powerful Office of Policy and Management. It will be charged with numerous tasks, among them:
- Creating an interagency steering committee to coordinate growth plans;
- Starting educational campaigns for local leaders about smart growth;
- Creating incentives for regional planning, zoning updates, and resources for municipal planning;
- Updating the state’s Green Plan (by June 2007) to guide preservation efforts.
While the executive order focuses heavily on promoting transit-oriented development (as did the governor’s announcement that she was seeking a deputy DOT commissioner to focus on mass transit and land use issues—MTR #538), it does not broach the larger issue of changing the overall planning perspective and practices used by CT’s Department of Transportation. Transit-orientation in the wide parts of the state without decent transit is moot, yet compact, walkable development can avoid the radical generation of new car trips seen under current development practices. ConnDOT could follow the lead of NJ DOT and spearhead the state’s smart growth efforts by providing planning resources for municipalities to engage in efficient development siting, and coordinate complementary transportation investments. The Governor’s statements did not articulate the vital connection between sprawl and traffic congestion.
Editorial boards applauded her effort, but worried that the order needed stronger teeth to really slow sprawl. Some commentators questioned whether the new Office of Responsible Growth will be able to change the culture of highway engineers: “The Executive Order’s mandate to promote roadway design that supports economic development and walkability is wonderful… but will there really be a broadening of roadway engineers’ mission to achieve this? Will the DOT be required to share power with localities?” asked Toni Gold in a guest column in the Hartford Courant.
Governor Rell has already made transportation a key issue, securing passage of $3.6 billion in new revenues, mainly for modernization of the state’s commuter rail system.
A week after Rell’s announcement, Democratic candidate John DeStefano, mayor of New Haven, released his own 8-point smart growth plan. He points to sprawl as a root cause of traffic congestion, but falsely claims road expansion projects, such as widening I-95 from Branford to Rhode Island, are traffic solutions and “fix it first” initiatives, rather than immensely expensive enablers of sprawl and future increases in driving (Rell supports the same set of projects). The eight points are heavily integrated with his transportation and property tax relief plans, something that won praise in a subsequent Toni Gold piece, where she called “tax reform the essential ingredient missing from Rell’s plan.”
DeStefano says he will expand regional planning organizations’ role to include housing and economic development plans. In practice, the power of CT’s regional development councils to implement transportation plans is limited by ConnDOT’s control of dollars and projects, so a more effective step would be to transform ConnDOT into a leading smart growth agency. Reform of ConnDOT is one explicit DeStefano goal, though he seems more interested in separating mass transit and port responsibilities from the DOT than in changing the policy-making framework at the agency.
Other aspects of his plan include putting large projects up for a statewide vote, streamlining government agencies, and providing more educational materials about smart growth. He names specific incentives, such as density bonuses, that have a good chance of slowing sprawl and encouraging more development in targeted growth areas.
Overall, transit and smart growth advocates favored DeStefano’s plan, though congratulated both candidates for bringing the issue to the fore.
The attention cannot come soon enough. Statistics from the state are sobering: DeStefano reports that the rate of land development in the state has been 850% greater than population growth during the “past generation.” He said vehicles miles traveled, the measure of total driving, increased 17% in the past decade.
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Groups Urge Booker to Support Pedestrian-Friendly McCarter Highway
Community Corporation to ask Newark Mayor Cory Booker to support a more pedestrian-friendly Route 21, known locally as McCarter Highway.
The state DOT completed an extensive community outreach program to get feedback on two proposals for the roadway. While community response was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the road at its current width and improving intersections and the pedestrian environment, then-Mayor James’ office favored taking adjacent property to widen the road. There have been no public statements from the new administration supporting either design.
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Pressure Mounts for NYC Change
Is New York City ready for new transportation priorities? Activity by elected and civic leaders suggest it is becoming more so:
- The standing-room-only “Manhattan on the Move” conference hosted by Borough President Scott Stringer last week (MTR #540) is one sign. Stringer noted that talking about congestion pricing has become “an applause line.” Stringer says he will follow up the input he received at the conference to make transportation reform themes like more space and better intersection priority for pedestrians and better movement of priority traffic like buses a major part of his public advocacy.
- A group of Brooklyn elected officials has written to Mayor Bloomberg urging a fresh look at city transportation policies. “ Innovation and development of better transportation systems and infrastructure need to be accelerated significantly to maintain and improve Brooklyn’s quality of life and its capacity to sustain more people and jobs,” wrote the group of 18 elected leaders. The city council members, state legislators and Members of Congress follows a letter sent to the mayor by several dozen Brooklyn civic leaders in July (MTR #535) calling for more directed City Hall attention to basic mobility and traffic-related quality of life issues, connection between development plans and transportation improvements, greater priority for traffic calmed streets, relief from ever-growing truck traffic and a comprehensive look at mass transit needs in the borough. The elected officials referred directly to the July civic letter, and also pointed to the challenges of break-neck development and appropriate design: “Suburban-style development that generates large amounts of car traffic will only further clog our streets and plague our neighborhoods.”
- Brooklyn civic organizations hoping to change the Atlantic Yards development proposal for the better have called for congestion pricing to reduce traffic in downtown Brooklyn and nearby areas. Although city-wide groups like the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the Municipal Art Society are coalition members, the Brooklyn organizations were the ones that insisted on including roadway pricing in the transportation measures they felt could make large-scale, dense development at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues work. The transportation section at www.brooklynspeaks.com argues that “Downtown Brooklyn is congested even without the proposed development, and roadway pricing has proven an effective way of curbing congestion in other cities, notably London.” When New Yorkers outside Manhattan urge congestion charges, then something is happening with the public mood.
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Secaucus: Attract Cars or Displace Trucks?
Meadowlands planners face an interesting choice regarding property next to the NJ Transit Secaucus transfer station. Owners of a large truck lot want the property rezoned by the Meadowlands Commission to allow construction of a 4,300 space parking garage. At the same time, Norfolk Southern Railroad has expressed interest in the site as a way to expand capacity at its adjacent Croxton Yard.
NJ Transit has resisted the notion of making Secaucus into a big park-and-ride station, worrying that Manhattan-bound bus and train riders might well skip stations further west, south or north and instead drive on congested highways in search of a quick train shuttle trip to Manhattan.
The Secaucus Junction station and the massive Turnpike 15X interchange project were planned with the understanding that office and hotel development, with associated parking, would take place nearby, but the developer Allied has never shown any sign of moving on its real estate plan. The 15X project especially seems a case of government auto-pilot, where an ill conceived project is approved, makes even less sense over time, yet proceeds over many years under its own inertia.
According to the BergenRecord, NJ Transit’s opposition to large-scale parking at Secaucus has flipped. That’s likely because of low ridership at the big, expensive station and perhaps a sense that if some riders from across the state drive to Secaucus, others are available to take their parking spaces at the more remote stations. That may make sense from a narrow NJ Transit business perspective, but it’s bad policy for a state that needs to manage peak demand on its roadways. One estimate the Tri-State Campaign has seen suggests that northern reaches of the NJ Turnpike will simply fail due to traffic growth within a couple of decades. Big parking development in Secaucus will hasten and worsen that development.
By contrast, expansion of Croxton Yard would take trucks off of New Jersey highways. Norfolk Southern estimates its yard plan could allow it to add service equivalent to 30,000 truck trips annually to its northern NJ operations.
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New Yorkers on Slow Buses
“Do you consider slow moving bus transportation a major, moderate, or minor problem or not a problem?”
Levels of concern regarding bus speeds were lower than several more general concerns in the poll, such as traffic congestion (55% major, 26% moderate) and transit crowding (49%, 27%). Together, the findings make sense, since not all New Yorkers rely on buses, but the bus problem was still seen as a problem by a sizeable majority of those polled.
Source: Tri-State Transportation Campaign opinion poll of 800 New Yorkers on traffic and transportation issues (conducted by Michaels Opinion Research), May-June 2006. Margin of error ± 3.5 percentage points.
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Verrazano Bridge Tolls in S.I.-Brooklyn House Race
Toll policy at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge has been one of the most covered issues in the race for New York’s 13th district — which covers Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn — pitting incumbent Vito Fossella against challenger Stephen Harrison. Harrison, presently an attorney in Brooklyn, has called for a high-speed E-ZPass system to be set up at the bridge, and for a blanket exemption from the toll for all residents of the district. He says under those conditions, he supports returning the toll to two-way status. The toll presently is only collected (at double the usual MTA one-way rate) at the bridge in the Staten Island-bound direction of travel. Many in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan say it distorts “normal” traffic patterns, especially causing trucks to traverse downtown Brooklyn and lower Manhattan to avoid the big double toll. But the one-way toll has been sacrosanct in Staten Island because it supposedly reduces back ups on the east-bound S.I. Expressway.
We think Harrison is right that non-stop tolling could make the one-way toll obsolete (leaving aside the absurd notion of exempting people in a specific congressional district), especially if the system was cash-less (like congestion charging in London and Stockholm) or had sufficient incentives to really cut down on cash payment. However, a less controversial place to start and still reduce congestion would be to simply institute non-stop tolls using the existing directional set-up.
Fossella has cast the issue simply as Harrison support for two-way tolls, and is running ads that say a vote for Harrison is a vote for worse traffic, with the subtext that Harrison is no Staten Islander. Unfortunately, S.I. Advance editorial writers are largely going along with Fossella’s selective look at Harrison’s position, instead of turning attention to the MTA’s failure to keep up with technology applications around the region (it is the only toll agency around that has not implemented some form of high-speed toll collection – see MTR #’s 442, 468).
Congressman Fossella in fact wrote to the MTA in 2003 urging implementation of high-speed E-ZPass at the Verrazano, arguing in a letter that “It is self-evident that keeping the toll plaza and mechanical arms in place and mandating a 5 mph speed limit diminishes the very benefits inherent in the E-ZPass system” (MTR #430). Fossella also lauded the Port Authority’s 2005 launch of high-speed tolls at the Outerbridge Crossing.
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Freight Trains Return to Staten Island
Locomotives are already making test runs from Linden, NJ to Staten Island over the Arthur Kill lift bridge and tracks that connect the Howland Hook Marine Terminal to the railroad network in New Jersey. The connection is likely to reduce truck traffic on the Goethals Bridge significantly – in 2002, the connection was estimated to be worth 56,000 Goethals truck trips annually. It has been a long time coming (see MTR #s 106, 147, 162 and 368). New York City rehabilitated the rail bridge, and has recently been doing track and yard work on Staten Island, while the Port Authority has made the connection from the bridge to the Chemical Coast line, which runs along the Arthur Kill and feeds into the complex of tracks and yards around the big northern NJ ports.
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