Uber's Not Causing Traffic Jams -- It's The Crowding Underground
Thanks to Uber's success, Mayor Bill de Blasio has seen the future — and it's the gridlock that plagued Manhattan's streets in the bad old days of grimy, dangerous city living.
But the mayor's measure to cap black cars won't solve the problem. He'd better think about how else to get people from point A to point B.
If the city's rail, bus and subway systems keep deteriorating, more people will opt for a car.
Or they'll leave New York.
Uber's made it easier to order a car. Cheap gas and cheap financing to buy a high-class sedan or SUV, plus fewer middle-class job opportunities, mean more people willing to drive.
So in the past four years, the number of black cars trawling New York's streets for e-fares has grown from 38,000 to 63,000 — a 66 percent increase. Every month, the city issues 2,000 new licenses.
What causes most congestion isn't a commuter driving a car in and parking it, says Sam Schwartz, Koch-era traffic commissioner. It's “vehicles in motion” — like a black car whose driver enters Manhattan in the morning and spends the day ferrying passengers.
The impact “of a few thousand more” such vehicles could be “enormous,” Schwartz says.
Manhattan traffic speeds are down 9 percent in the past half-decade.
Yes, the city has made other changes to the streets that may cause congestion — the Uber folk mentioned bike lanes and lower speed limits at a recent City Council hearing.
But the city built bike lanes and pedestrian islands because we have a record number of cyclists and pedestrians.
Though a walker takes up less room than one of the city's nearly 831 for-hire Escalades, there is nowhere to put them all.
Citi Bike alone does 40,000 trips a day, 40 percent of the business Uber does, even though Citi Bike covers a fraction of the territory.
And we're not going back to the pre-Bloomberg days of speed over safety. In 2001, 393 people died in or under a car or truck. Last year, 248 died.
Decreeing a cap on cars — de Blasio's impulse — won't fix the problem, though.
Instead, we've got to give people a choice. Between 1998 and 2013, car, taxi and truck traffic coming into Manhattan fell — by nearly 400,000 people a day, from 1.3 million to 934,000.
At the same time, billions of dollars for the state-run MTA was yielding results.
Subway, bus and rail traffic coming into Manhattan soared, by 500,000, to 2.8 million daily. Better service made people want to take the train.
Now, with subways packed to the gills, it's no wonder that some people with money — or with someone else paying — are opting for the car.
Has the mayor tried to get on the Lex line at . . . well, almost any time? Has he been on an Eighth Avenue subway in Penn Station at rush hour, where there are so many people waiting to walk up a staircase that the motorman must wait for people to exit before he can move?
If you need to look OK for an after-work dinner, touching a screen for Uber is increasingly reasonable — even if it takes longer.
If the mayor doesn't want people riding around in air-conditioned black-SUV splendor, he and Gov. Andrew Cuomo will have to think hard about subways. (It's good for New York City that the two men work so well together.)
And buses, too — Manhattan should have more traffic lanes for buses that carry way more people than cars, with strict enforcement.
Uber itself knows that Manhattan's future isn't single-rider cars. Its fastest-growing area is UberPool, for carpooling.
And Manhattan needs to think about a congestion charge. And not the kind London has, where drivers pay once to come into the “zone.”
No, a per-minute charge for driving or idling on a Manhattan street. If congestion is a real problem, every vehicle on the street is helping to cause it — and every vehicle ought to pay.
It's easy to blame Uber. But traffic is caused by people who made a choice — and they're making that choice for a good reason: de Blasio and Cuomo's inaction on the crisis of crowds underground.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post