Upper Green Side

A Dose of Decongestant for Our Neighborhoods

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The Upper East and Upper West Sides of Manhattan are some of the most densely populated and most traffic congested areas of our city. But the two are not necessarily linked. While we have a lot of people living very closely together, very few in fact own cars and even greater rarity are local residents that use their car daily. So where do all the cars come from? Not here!

In our Transportation Survey we found that about a quarter of local residents own cars and most use them less than 5 times a week. I’ve looked through quite of bit of traffic data about our neighborhood and during the average workday, there are hundreds of thousands trips made by automobiles through our neighborhood, but as best I can measure less than 10% (and probably closer to 5%) of all automobile trips in our neighborhoods are made by local residents.

Local residents report walking and mass transit (buses, subways) as their primary means of getting around. This is actually a function of our density and mixed-use zoning. Because of our density, mass transit is feasible. Because of our zoning, you can walk to a nearby restaurants, grocery & pharmacy stores and many other types of venues to satisfy everyday needs.

Think of many low density suburbs where mass transit is infrequent or non-existant and you can walk for miles (where there is even a sidewalk) and only find residential housing. If you don’t have a car out there, you can’t really get around.

With the advent of the Congestion Pricing plan approved by a vote of 13-2 by the State Commission on Traffic Congestion, our neighborhoods have a chance to breathe easier and reap the benefits of our walking, mass transit riding and our general low use of automobiles. By charging more for automobile users from other areas to drive through our neighborhoods, less of them will drive here and create traffic congestion. The money collected from those willing to pay the charge will go to transit improvements which can take even more people. In that way, changing automobiles more can not only act like a powerful decongestant, but it can dramatically improve our quality of life over the long term.