Benefits of Reduced Motor Traffic

First of all, a reduction in motor traffic would improve New York's air quality, which now ranks third worst in the U.S., better only than Los Angeles' and Houston's. Cleaner air would have the obvious effect of making the city a better place in which to breathe, and reducing the death toll from asthma, emphysema, lung cancer and other respiratory diseases.

Cleaner air would also create positive ripple effects, such as prolonging the life of the city's street trees, now dying at a rate of some 15,000 a year. [3] This would in turn enable trees to perform their function of cleaning the air and cooling the city. With fewer fumes and less noise at night, apartment dwellers could open their windows, reducing pollution from electricity generation to power air conditioners. Cleaner air (along with a reduction in traffic-related vibration and pounding) would also slow the decay of building facades and monuments.

A reduction in the volume of motor traffic would also reduce traffic accidents, in turn reducing the city's hospital and insurance costs and its daily traffic-related tragedies. Presently, approximately 250 motorists and their passengers, along with 350 pedestrians and 15 to 20 cyclists, are killed in motor vehicle crashes each year. In 1991, according to New York City Police Department Traffic Division statistics, motor vehicle injuries totaled 100,578 to motorists and passengers, 15,406 to pedestrians, and 3,625 to cyclists.

Finally, a reduction in motor traffic would create an enormous economic dividend that could be spread equitably through the populace. The infrastructure the city feels obligated to create largely for the use of drivers has vast fiscal and environmental costs. Automobile drivers are used to thinking that they subsidize mass transit, when in fact motorists receive enormous subsidies from general tax revenues as well as from their fellow citizens who bear the brunt of car and truck noise, fumes, aggression and bodily harm.

Car and truck drivers currently pay only a portion of the total costs associated with their driving, such as road and bridge building and maintenance, signals and lighting, law enforcement and security, rescue, motor-vehicle administration, traffic management, and tax breaks for work-related parking and auto use. In a municipal budget chronically stretched beyond its means, the automobile infrastructure is one great untapped source of savings. Transportation planner Brian Ketcham and economist Charles Komanoff place the annual governmental subsidy to New York City motorists at close to $800 million. The larger public subsidy, measured as the economic and environmental harm borne by non-drivers from motorists' exhaust, crashes and so forth, is an order of magnitude larger. (See Chapter 1, Integrating NYC's Bicycle Policy, under Economic and Social Costs of Motor Vehicles, for full discussion with citations.)

Conversely, with less motor traffic monopolizing public space and services, the city would soon find itself with a budget that wouldn't have to shortchange its mass-transit users. Again, a ripple effect could occur: with more money available to make mass transit pleasant, efficient and reliable (and likely cheaper), car trips would lose some of their appeal. With land freed up by removing some motor traffic lanes from service, some streets could be converted to pedestrian malls, others to community gardens, still others to corridors for light-rail lines. (Some avenues are even wide enough for tennis courts, one anti-auto idea that could capture the imagination of the Dinkins administration.)

For the city to effect this shift in policy, its leaders must examine their deep-seated assumptions about motor traffic. Per-capita vehicle registration in New York City is scarcely more than one-third the U.S. average. [4] Yet city officials, accustomed to viewing New York behind the windshield of their official cars, operate under the assumption that cars deserve more funding and accommodation than other forms of transportation — walking, bicycling and mass transit.

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