Imagine, for a second, all of the 1.4 million cars in New York City were on the road. Given the 6,000 miles of road in the city, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows they would barely be able to move. The unlikeliness of this scenario highlights the necessity of public transportation in modern cities. A few of the challenges they face – namely, congestion and debates over the role of government – are universal. The solutions, however, are city-specific, tailored to the specific needs of each metropolis.
New York to Hong Kong: Public or Private?
New York City’s subway system, clocking in at 150 years old, helps avert the eternal-gridlock described above by transporting over a billion riders a year. The MTA has survived challenges in its history, including a most recent one from private companies. Some have suggested that new methods of transportation, such as Uber, could draw away riders from public transit systems. Kevin Ortiz, Deputy Director of External Communications Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), recently told the HPR he isn’t convinced of the threat. “We’re not really competing with Uber,” he said. “$2.50 to ride the subway or bus is still the best deal in town.” Nevertheless, the MTA is collaborating with some private companies. In the past few years, the MTA installed “countdown clocks” displaying the time until the next arrival. Not content to display those times in stations alone, “We’ve made it a point to give that same information to third party app developers,” says Ortiz.
Despite these private-public partnerships, the MTA is tightly knit into New York City government. Some members of its board are appointed directly by the mayor of New York City and much of its funding comes from city, state and federal governments. This institutional set-up might seem natural to most Americans. However, not all public transit is done in this seemingly traditional method.
Jay Walder is steeped in public transit. He grew up riding the MTA in New York City, and has since held high positions in the transit in New York, London and Hong Kong. His career is most notable for displaying a range of ways that cities can address the challenges of public transportation.
His most recent work has been in Hong Kong, where public transportation has an unusual twist: it’s run by a private corporation, the MTR, of which Walder is the CEO. Last fall, Walder addressed this apparent paradox through the lens of economics at the Forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. “Infrastructure creates enormous public value,” he said. He largely sees public transportation as bedeviled by the problem of how to capture the externality of that public good. In Hong Kong, this has meant a program in which MTR gains the right to buy land next to new railway lines at their pre-railway value. In a city where real-estate prices loom as high as the skyscrapers, such rights are undoubtedly valuable. Walder suggests having a separate income stream allows the MTR independence from political funding difficulties. It seems that such a strategy has paid off: in his Forum appearance, Walder joked about MTR’s 99.9% on-time performance and described Hong Kong as “a city that has always been a little bit ahead of the curve.”
In fact, this idea might be less foreign than it appears. When the United States was building its transcontinental railway, it followed a similar system of giving “land grants” to the companies building the tracks, thereby giving away chunks of valuable farming land conveniently placed to the newly-built railways. However, privatization in the United States led to a tangled mess of differing standards of gauge, how far apart the rails on the tracks are built. And it’s not clear that privatization in the modern era is immune to problems either: it hasn’t stopped recent controversy over building a new high-speed in Hong Kong, which have been delayed for two years.
London and Los Angeles: Cities Stuck in Traffic
Walder also has experience in another city developing traffic innovations: London. He was Managing Director for Finance and Planning at Transport for London when congestion pricing was introduced. The form of congestion pricing in London used is “cordon pricing,” which works such that car owners pay a fee (£ 11.50 in London) to enter certain parts of the city. When this scheme, the first of its kind in Europe, was implemented in 2003, it was met with wide skepticism and opposition. However, the following 11 years have shown it to be largely successful. Car traffic into the area has decreased by 20 percent and the system, while expensive, still turns a £ 60 million profit each year, funds which go into public transportation.
London isn’t the only city dealing with congestion. When Los Angeles is mentioned, the first images to come to mind are those of palm trees, Hollywood, and traffic. The L.A. area frequently tops lists for most-congested city. Such a large issue has encouraged serious search for solutions by many parties. The RAND Corporation, headquartered in Santa Monica, close enough to L.A. to share traffic, is one such group, and in 2008 released a report titled “Moving Los Angeles: Short-Term Policy Options for Improving Transportation.”
The report aimed to provide congestion-reducing strategies that could be implemented in under five years. It strongly recommends against methods like building more freeways because the temporary reduction in traffic additional roads cause would only encourage more drivers to choose that street, thereby bringing congestion back to untenable levels. Instead, it says “only pricing strategies can effectively manage automobile demand in the longer term.” L.A. faced a very similar challenge to London before implementing congestion pricing. However, the RAND report lists cordon pricing only as a “contingent recommendation” and cautions the method has been “implemented only in relatively large, centralized cities with extremely well-developed transit systems” and forcing it into L.A. could create “legitimate equity concerns.” This draws an important distinction: cities can be alike in their problems without being alike in the best solutions.
Paul Sorensen led the team creating this report. He elaborated on the report in an interview with the HPR by noting that L.A., like many US cities, is a lot more spread out than European ones. “There’s not one obvious downtown” congestion center to cordon off, he explains. Instead, some US cities have begun experimenting with charging for certain lanes on highways. While also a type of congestion pricing, this method tends to be an easier sell to constituents because it is presented as an “option” instead of a mandatory “pay to enter” methods such as London’s.
What’s Politics Got to Do With It?
The rejection of cordon pricing highlights the need to appeal to constituents as well as city planners. This opens room for politicians to broker a solution between all affected parties. In doing so, they would be smart to look to global trends in public transportation, but keep careful consideration on what option might best suit their city specifically. Cordon pricing works well in London, but wouldn’t in L.A. Privatization to the extent found in Hong Kong might not work in New York City. In general, cities can be alike in the problem they face while differing in the solutions they embrace. Just as all politics is local, so is all public transit.