IT TAKES A TOLL

It’s time for congestion pricing — and not just for downtown

Safer streets, less pollution, better transit, bustling business districts — San Francisco can have it all.

Yet surging automobile traffic on our city streets is driving everincreasing public health and safety impacts — and climatechanging carbon emissions. The sane response is to expand public transit and lower the cost to consumers, yet the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency struggles with ongoing budget deficits and Muni drivers are in short supply.

Something needs to change, and somebody has to pay. Congestion and zone pricing offer a path forward.

In the United States, congestion pricing is set to roll out in New York City in 2021, taking a bite out of ultrahighdensity traffic in Manhattan’s ridehailing streetscape, and bringing an estimated $1 billion into city coffers. This comes on the heels of similar plans well established around the world — in London, Singapore and Stockholm, to name a few.

In San Francisco, it looks like touristy Lombard Street and hustling, bustling Market Street will be our own test cases for congestion pricing. But why stop there? Tens of thousands of ridehailing cars clog block after city block, and populations (along with carbon emissions) are on the rise.

One solution is to build around transit rather than automobiles, but that process is bogged down in the eternal battle between preservationists and prodensity developers. We need to raise the stakes while they get their issues sorted out.

Two other corridors in San Francisco that would benefit from a use fee are 19th and Van Ness avenues. These welltraveled, roughandtumble urban throughways are also integral links in two major highway systems — California Route 1, and U.S. Highway 101. They are full of traffic that is often “just passing through,” and that brings no real benefit to the city and its residents, but takes its toll in pedestrian safety, pollution and degraded quality of life.

A poorly conceived plan could be a nightmare. Making 19th and Van Ness avenues simple toll roads would merely push the traffic out into the

surrounding neighborhoods. A better solution would be “zone pricing,” a concept that has already been kicking around SFMTA planning offices for a number of years.

Under a wellimplemented plan, residents along both 19th and Van Ness avenues — or any major crosstown corridor — could enjoy discounts or even waivers, and would certainly benefit from improved public transit and reduced pollution and traffic hazards.

Similarly, working stiffs driving around town for Uber and Lyft shouldn’t shoulder the burden of zone pricing. That honor should go to the companies themselves, which, with their billiondollar IPOs, can certainly afford it.

Traffic along San Francisco’s busiest corridors is no joke. According to CalTrans data from 2017, sections of 19th Avenue peak at 7,600 individual vehicles during rush hour. Where 101 touches down on Van Ness Avenue all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, those numbers range from 3,300 to 7,700 vehicles. Prior to that point, along the spur to the Bay Bridge and coming up out of the Peninsula, rushhour traffic can peak at almost 18,000 vehicles.

These corridors aren’t just overcrowded — they’re also dirty, noisy and dangerous. A 2017 study found the city’s highest airpollution rates start on the highways and plunge into the hearts of the city — along the Van Ness corridor, along 101’s path through SoMa to the Bay Bridge and Interstate 80, and all along 19th Avenue as well. Both Van Ness and 19th avenues are also recognized as red zones in Vision Zero’s 2017 map of the city’s “highinjury network.”

Given these clear negatives, congestion/zone pricing for traffic on 19th and Van Ness avenues would do much more than generate significant income for badly needed publictransit subsidies.

It would also improve public health along those corridors, reduce our carbon footprint, and encourage less autocentric urban planning.

According to a 2010 study from the San Francisco County Transit Authority, congestion pricing in Stockholm provoked a 22% drop in traffic, a 14% drop in greenhouse gas production, a 5% increase in sales in the “charged zone,” and a 5% increase in transit traffic. Oh, and also $100 million for the city coffers. In London the numbers were even more impressive — a 30% traffic decrease, 18% down for greenhouse emissions, an 18% increase in transit ridership, and local businesses in the zone grew “twice as fast” as those in “comparable areas.” And there’s also that equivalent of $260 million in new revenue.

San Francisco’s transit authority has recently been given the green light on updating that 2010 report. This time, the findings should not languish on the hard drives and in the filing cabinets of civil bureaucracy.

In a city full of spiking traffic congestion, pollution and roadsafety issues, and in a world barreling headlong into a carbonfueled climate crisis, it’s time for action.

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