More on the politics and organizing aspects of getting the approval to launch congestion pricing

These two columns by Maria Saporta of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, contrasting transportation planning in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, and the environment of state support or lack thereof of transit (Georgia Governor Perdue suspended state gasoline taxes for a time, when prices first went up in the runup after the Iraq war) in "Charlotte shows state support for transit is vital" and "Charlotte transit plans leave Atlanta in slow lane" reiterate my point yesterday about the difficulty of change, especially when change involves multiple actors, stakeholders, and political bodies.

This article from the New York Times, "Bloomberg Tactics Were Highhanded on Traffic Plan, Lawmakers Say," is critical of how the Bloomberg Adminstration improperly "handled" state legislators in terms of winning their approval to go forward with a test of congestion pricing. (Also see this article, "$8 Traffic Fee for Manhattan Gets Nowhere," and editorial "Mr. Silver does it again," both from the Times.)

I think perhaps the biggest problem is that people don't really understand the economics of transportation, either personally or more broadly. Individual decisions don't combine to make a better collective decision when it comes to dealing with the reality of limited capacity and the high cost of building transportation infrastructure, when distortions in the marketplace encourage individual decisionmaking at the expense of the whole, of the optimal.

And in New York State, legislators should be particularly attuned to the role of New York City as the anchor of the entire state's economy, whether they like it or not, and they need to consider decisions in that light, even if it is pecuniary, because if they kill the cash cow of New York City, they can't continue to harvest its revenue stream for projects around the state.