Roadway to Less Traffic

Gov. Cuomo has embraced congestion pricing as the way to get the MTA the new funding it says it needs. It’s not a bad idea — if it’s packaged with serious reform of the agency, and if City Hall can manage to execute its part of a complex plan.

Congestion pricing involves charging all drivers who enter the most crowded parts of Manhattan, especially on weekdays. The goal isn’t simply to raise revenue, but to end (or at least reduce) traffic slowdowns that keep setting new records.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg pushed one such plan a decade ago; it bombed. But now a team of transportation experts has produced a far better scheme — one that also exploits the advent of E-ZPass technology, which makes tolling cheaper and less intrusive.

The heart of the MoveNY plan is a uniform toll on vehicles entering any part of Manhattan below 60th Street from elsewhere in New York.

Right now, cars get charged $8.50 each way to cross the three East River tunnels, while the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges are all free.

MoveNY would slash existing tolls but add new ones at the now-free entry points, including all across 60th Street. At the same time, crossing the Verrazano (toll: $92 round-trip for a five-axle truck) would also get cheaper.

The idea is to make the cost of the crossings more fair — and also to remove a driver’s incentive to shop for the cheapest toll, which puts many vehicles on smaller, local roads and those that cut through Manhattan’s central business district.

Queens and Brooklyn residents would lose the ability to enter Manhattan without paying but save at other crossings, including the Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges. (Taxis, Ubers and the like would instead pay by the hour for the time they spend in the zone.)

The reduced congestion would speed up traffic by 20 percent, say the MoveNY folks, headed by former traffic czar “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz.

It could also raise $1.5 billion a year in new revenue — nearly twice as much every year as the MTA says needs for its emergency plan. Schwartz & Co. suggest using $375 million for bridge and tunnel maintenance, and the rest for transit.

There’s certainly merit to the idea: Motorists would benefit from less-jammed roads, and air pollution would drop, too.

But New Yorkers, who already pay enough in taxes, tolls and transit fares, must not shell out another $1.5 billion, only to see it wasted. Before the MTA gets this new cash flow, the public needs a full accounting of the agency’s recent failures plus reforms to prevent future repeats.

The city can’t afford more multibillion-dollar cost overruns, as in the East Side Access project — nor the unheralded idiocy like the failure to do timely maintenance that led to the Summer of Hell. More: The new revenues must not be eaten up by the Transit Workers Union come newcontract time.

And City Hall needs to do its share. London, for example, cut its traffic not just with congestion pricing but also by prioritizing its bus system — expanding bus lanes, etc. — to lure folks from cars to mass transit.

Still, the plan has promise. With tweaks, MoveNY may very well be, as Cuomo says, “an idea whose time has come.”