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I was flabbergasted by by Mr. Engquist's comment that The City makes $1,000,000 per DAY on alternate side of the street parking and would unlikely remove this Pot of Gold to reduce congestion. I felt "blessed" that I live on a street where there is ONLY two day alternate side parking.

Little did I realize, that while I was listening to the show, that I was being ticketed ($45) for forgetting to move my car!!!!! (Time to move: 11:30 am/ Time of ticket: 11:39 am)

Thank you Brian for such a hypnotic show!
Perhaps The NYC dept of finance should give you a commission! : )

Bravo Christina! Here is bike riding proposal.
Recently Paris, France introduced new introduced very convinient bike initiative. It was implemented in Lion originally.
Paris created rent stations for bikes around the city with total 19,000 bikes for the begining. You can rent a bike at any of them and return at any of them. This allows not to think where to put your bike worriing whether it can be stolen or damaged. Certainly 19,000 is not a lot but it is a beginning.
How about making some bike lanes inside the curb so bikers would not need to ride in the middle of the streed being in danger to be hit by car or open car doors of parked cars.
One of lines like this from Grand Central to Wall Street can get the option of biking to work to many comuters. Certainly Wall Street companies may give employees chance to take shower at arrival.
As to idling I would place stickers on those cars with text like this: "You are endangering our troops in Iraq by making yourself comfortable in A/Ced car". It may even work better than fines and there will no need for cops. Concerned citizens can do it.
Ans as long as I can not bike in the city I'm forced to drive there.

I find it interesting that they want to charge people to force a behavior change away from private vehicles, but since that is the only real competition to mass transit, they can now increase fares on everyone else. What a joke, it really is only a tax increase like the other poster mentioned.

It would be beneficial if the city gave some sort of incentive, be it simply an increased awareness of to maybe decreased parking costs, for people who ride motorcycles and mopeds. These vehicles are smaller, way more fuel efficient, and much easier to park. While you can not haul more than two people (unless you have a sidecar), it seems most people don't ride with passengers anyway. And since people go from work to home without a stop inbetween, you don't need a trunk as you aren't hauling anything bigger than a backpack.

Evelyn, the reason is simple, the city just wants another revenue source. They have no intention of improving the system as much as they hype that as the reason. I can't understand how a locality which takes in more tax revenue per capita than anywhere else in the country is so incredibly wasteful. Adding more taxes to an already overburdened population would cause far too much of an uproar and kill the current regime's political future so why not wrap it in environmentalism?! Bloomberg has not really tackled the tough issues of reducing the cost of government itself, that is the main problem that is choking off funds to mass transit and other initiatives -- i also find it questionable that there is not written the proposed law that the dollars from congestion pricing go only to mass transit, so you know this will be absorbed by other priorities like gov't pensions, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/12parking.html?ex=1186027200&en=81da2ab440b050aa&ei=5070

this article from the NY Times shows how the city goes out of it's way to hel;p create the crowded system by reducing parking spots. if you can park where you live, you wouldn't be driving around the street looking for a spot, thus removing cars, idling, etc.

""Mr. Miller estimated that less than 1 percent of all co-op and condominium buildings in the city have private garages. The city also limits how much parking new buildings below 60th Street can offer, requiring that no more than 20 percent of the units have spaces.""

of course, you can also blame the people in the article from long island who can't take the train or just permanently move to the city. but the point is that city law limits the number of spaces to 20 percent of the units. Have 100 apartments? Only 20 parking spots allowed.

HELP! I think I'm the only one in the city who simply CANNOT understand why in this time of fare increases and budget surpluses, the MTA won't do a major overhaul of the subway system. How better to discourage car traffic?!!!

In Vienna, there are electronic boxes that show passengers the current position of the next train as well as its expected time of arrival. I know this has been proposed to the MTA. Why not? Trains in Vienna run every two to three minutes and all announcements are not just decipherable but CLEAR! Hello, MTA???!!!

I made comment when you had your last show on this topic. City should consider banning all but essential truck deliveries in Manhattan during normal business hours. Many cities (London, L.A. I believe) require that most business delliveries be made during overnight hours. This would eliminate most double-parked trucks which are major cause of congestion.

Any discussion of bicycles in all this traffic discussion?

Brian,

What about the way cabs 'roll over' in the city? It seems like at 4 pm in the afternoon in Manhattan it's just completely impossible to get a cab home. Most cabs seem to have just gone out of service... (and not many are going to Red Hook, alas).

Isn't the whole point of having regulated cabs that they serve the city in aggregate? It's ridiculous that the cabs all seem to switch up right when rush hour is starting. The city should implement a rolling change for yellow cabs.

Or am I delusional?

ASP suggestion: Change it to only 2 days/wk and do it during evening hours and early morning hours?

It's great the city wants to raise revenues--how about a few hundred thousand tickets for idling? Raise revenue AND make a direct impact on pollution at the same time. Simple enough.

There a lot of avenues (12th, 11th, 10th in manhattan for example) in nyc that have enough space for a light rail. In brooklyn there are streets that could accommodate trolleys, brt, etc.
vision42!!!!!!

I suggest fines for idling vehicles to cut back on pollution and congestion. I live next door to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in midtown. There are idling cars, limos, and SUV's waiting to pick people up all day and night. There should be a fine for having a running car closer than 18 inches from the curb.

And instead of ticketing to prevent gridlock, maybe they need more traffic cops actually directing traffic.

I would like to know why the mayor has not addressed pollution from idling cars? Due to alternate-side street parking I see full blocks of people waiting in their cars for the cleaner to go by and about 80% of the time their cars are idling--in the summer to run their A/C and in the winter to run their heater.

Why not reduce ASP to 2 days/wk instead of 4 or at least hand out tickets for idling?

It actually costs me more to take the train or bus ($17-20 round trip) in than it does to drive in and park in the neighborhoods I drive to. If transit from the suburbs was cheaper and more reliable (another tunnel under the Hudson), I'd take it a lot more often.

Re: SUV Density Survey
How should we count small cars like SUBARU Forrester / Toyota Rav4 / Honda CRX - as SUV's? (They're technically "small SUV's" but certainly not on a par with Lincoln Navigators, Dodge Yukons, Chev. Suburbans, etc.) ??
Thanks for on air response.

Parking. Here's another crowd-sourcing journalism suggestion: How many cars on your street bear out-of-state plates? And (what we can't determine) how many of those people are actually city residents dodging insurance rates?

Solution: permit parking charging residents and barring any residential permit for out-of-state plates.

Better public transportation between NJ and NY. People commuting daily from NJ to NY will drive rather than use mass transit, just because there aren't enough busses and trains at enough convenient times and not enough room on those they have. I know that I have to drive into the city on nights when I have to stay in NYC past midnight. NY is the city that never sleeps because everyone from NJ is trapped in NYC between the hours of 12 and 5:30. Ridiculous.

I live in midtown Manhattan and I am very concerned by the amount of air pollution from automobiles. What incentives are you giving to drivers with low or zero emissions vehicles? We need a solution that considers congestion as the number of cars as well as the amount of pollution these cars create. Jason