Cars and Cities
Posted in Models by Devin Maeztri on March 13th, 2009
The section below is republished with permission from the Going Solar Transport Newsletter #101, 10 March 2009, compiled by Stephen Ingrouille. Going Solar newsletter provides an excellent commentary on sustainable transport issues.
“Only a few months after his election in the summer of 2000, [the Mayor of London Ken] Livingstone began courting Robert R. Kiley, a former C.I.A. official, business leader and transit expert, who as head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York in the 1980′s was credited with resurrecting the city’s graffiti-scarred subway system, now considered one of the best in the world. Kiley, given the new title of London’s transport commissioner, brought with him another former top New York transit official, Jay Walder, who had become an expert on road pricing at Harvard and in Singapore, where a smaller but much more costly congestion-charging system in place for more than 25 years has cut car ownership to 1 in 10 city residents.
“When Kiley arrived in London, most of the attention focused on his transit credentials and how he would use them to rescue the ailing London Underground, an effort in which he and Livingstone, fighting Blair’s government, have been largely unsuccessful. But Kiley told me later that he was equally interested in coming to London because of Livingstone’s determination to try to right the relationship between the city and the car. If it worked, Kiley knew, it would be seen as a model around the world, and especially back in New York, where more than 250,000 vehicles crowd into the 8.5-square-mile heart of Manhattan in three hours every morning, roughly the same number that enter the eight square miles of central London over the course of an entire workday.
“As the leader of a business alliance in the 1990′s, Kiley advocated road pricing for Manhattan, but he received no support from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose voting base in Queens and Staten Island practically lived in their cars. In many ways London was an interesting parallel, more like New York than any other American city in its atypical transportation landscape. In both cities, as packed as the roads can be, more than 80 percent of workers take some form of mass transit into the central city every weekday morning. In London, as in New York, some drivers are poor. But most tend to have money – enough to generate political pressure to protect their choice. They are also affluent enough, Kiley points out, to be persuaded to spend a little money to save them something much more valuable: their time.
‘We knew all along that the motorist advocates and writers for the newspapers and libertarians and people who are really locked into cars would be critical, but I think the majority of Londoners supported congestion-charging right up to opening day’, Kiley said later in his office, with a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge behind his desk.
‘Would I call it a popular measure? Probably not. But I think that Londoners have long since concluded that someone had to take this dragon on’.
“Sitting there that day [of the introduction of the London Congestion Charge], as the dragon was being cowed on the streets below, Kiley told me that he had spoken at length about fighting it with another very important potential St. George, one in some ways a lot like Livingstone – a political outsider who takes the subway to work, who strongly supports the idea of road pricing and who views the prerogatives of driving from a much more jaundiced 21st-century perspective. His name was Michael R. Bloomberg, and he was the mayor of New York City.â€
Ref: Randy Kennedy, New York Times, 20/4/03 {To be continued in #102}
