Andrey Stoyanov sells bagels and coffee from a catering truck on the corner of Third Avenue and East 67th Street. He says traffic is relatively calm there until trucks come to make a delivery. On Mondays, when he said the trash trucks come and there are more deliveries, traffic backs up into the intersection.
But Stoyanov, who lives in Queens, said he has not used public transportation in five years. "Believe me, I hate it. It's ugly, dirty, and they do not come on time Never," he said.
To run errands and travel on his days off, Stoyanov drives-even though the bus and subway are close to his house. But if there were improvements, he said he would use public transit. Just make it nicer, make it come on time and the people will change themselves, " he said.
Congestion pricing may be scrapped for the time being, but that doesn't mean lawmakers and community organizations have stopped thinking about how to tackle traffic and make public transportation "nicer," as Stoyanov put it. Now, more than ever, experts are turning their attention to an assortment of smaller changes that can alleviate the city's traffic problems.
If congestion pricing had gone through, the federal government would have provided $354 million in additional transit funding. Now that the cash infusion is gone, the city should be looking closer to home to improve alternate transportation, said Wiley Norvell, spokesperson at Transportation Alternatives, a community advocacy group.
His organization is pushing a comprehensive program called Complete Streets, which aims to make the city's roads more accessible to buses, pedestrians and bicyclists.
"That's the way to get people out of their cars," Norvell said.
According to data Transportation Alternatives gathered from U.S. Census studies, 20 percent of driving trips in the city are less than one mile. The organization seeks to reduce those short car trips, according to Norvell.
The city's Department of Transportation invoked Complete Streets last September when it introduced a new Ninth Avenue bike lane to Community Board 4. The lane, now operational, is a model for future street designs, and includes dedicated bus and cycling lanes separated from vehicular traffic by a raised median and wider sidewalks to enable safe pedestrian passage.
To speed up bus service, Transportation Alternatives is one of several organizations calling for the widespread implementation of bus rapid transit, which features sidewalk payments to decrease boarding times and traffic signals that will delay a green light for a bus, in addition to dedicated lanes. New York city transit will implement its version of bus rapid transit, called " Select Bus Service," this June in the Bronx along Fordham road.
While bus rapid transit will encourage more commuters to use public transportation, legislators and advocates also hope to reduce traffic by discouraging parking. Assembly Member Micah Kellner, who represents parts of the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, suggested that more parking lots should be built at Metro North rail stations in suburban new York and Connecticut to make it easier to commuters from those areas to use existing transportation.
At the same time, many transportation experts feel that parking in the city should be more difficult. The current exemption for city residents from the 18-percent parking-garage tax lowers costs for drivers and decreases tax revenue, according to Neysa Pranger, of the Regional Planning Association. The association is a nonprofit that works to improve quality of life and economic competitiveness in the tri-state area. Converting existing free street parking to metered parking and introducing residential parking permits will also make driving less desirable, Pranger said.
To deter city residents from commuting between the boroughs, West Side Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal brought up an idea that been tried –and dismissed-before.
"As unpopular as it is, tolling the East River bridges, she said.
The fees, she explained, could help lighten inter-borough travel.
Many also suggest enforcing existing traffic and parking laws-and creating new ones-to ease the flow of traffic for the cars that will remain on the road.
East Side State Senator Liz Krueger put forward legislation that would use red-light cameras to ticket vehicles caught blocking intersections, and she backs the creation of dedicated taxi stands to help drivers and customers find each other, while preventing taxis from trolling the streets.
Tackling the 10,000 trucks that use Manhattan as a throughway each day is also important, she said. The city could crack down by ticketing trucks that cause congestion by double-parking, or limit trucks to nighttime-only deliveries in non-residential areas. Lowering the tolls on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which runs from Staten Island to Brooklyn, could also encourage truckers to bypass Manhattan on their way to Long Island.
State Sen. Jose Serrano, whose district covers part of the Upper East Side, wants co-ops and condo associations to do their part in stemming truck traffic. Buildings that only allow deliveries between 10 AM and 4 PM should allow for nighttime delivery, he suggested, when trucks will not inhibit the peak flow of traffic.
Kathryn Wylde, president of Partnership for New York City, said granting government subsidies to water taxis is a smart way to reduce the burden on bridges and tunnels leading into Manhattan. Currently, one-way passage costs more than $10 and receives no government money, but she said subsidizing ferries from Orange County, Long Island City, the north Bronx and other areas would be a relatively cheap way to discourage commuters from driving.
But to really ramp up bus and rail service, the MTA would have to spend money, and the authority's capital fund faces a multi-billion-dollar gap. This year, two proposals that could have helped close the gap, congestion pricing and the so-called millionaire's tax, did not succeed in becoming law. The millionaire's tax, which would have charged people with incomes of higher than $1 million a surcharge amounting to just under 1 percent of their income, was shelved in April.
"The problem is that those are really the only options," said East Side Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, "additional taxes or additional fees of some kind,"
Kavanagh, who supported congestion and the tax on high-income individuals, said legislators must completely rework and the funding schemes in a manner that everyone can support.
West Side State Sen. Eric Scheiderman, who once served as counsel to New York Public Interest Research Group's Straphangers Campaign, agreed that it was time to revisit the MTA's funding. He called New York State Senator Liz Krueger s tax structure on of the more regressive, with the state's poorest residents paying a higher percentage of their income than the wealthiest residents do.
Though far removed from rush-hour gridlock, the restructuring of MTA funding may be the most important step in getting cars off city streets. As Rosenthal, the West Side Assembly Member, explained, the net impact of these smaller transit changes in minimal. "Upped enforcement is something we can do," she said, "but that won't be enough to change the face of Midtown traffic."