The paradox at the heart of traffic gridlock has always been this: car use saves time for the individual driver but takes time from everyone else. Thanks to the Balanced Transportation Analyzer spreadsheet, we have been able to put a price tag on those delay costs. For a round-trip into and out of midtown or lower Manhattan, they average about a hundred bucks per car trip.

In other words, each additional motor vehicle driven into the Manhattan Central Business District imposes $100 of delay costs, on average, on other vehicle users - on motorists, truckers, and users of taxis and buses. New York City would therefore be justified in charging a $100 cordon fee to drive into the CBD, based on congestion causation alone (leaving aside “externalized” pollution costs). Indeed, by failing to do so the city is permitting the “right” to drive without paying a congestion fee to trample the right to walk, bike, transit and even drive without being caught in gridlock.

Nevertheless, the schedule of cordon entry fees in the Kheel II Plan, which tops out at $30, appears too radical for the public to accept in one gulp. This necessitates an “entry-level” congestion-toll proposal, one tailored to be politically palatable while retaining the Kheel Plan essence of combining a free or cheaper transit “carrot” with a congestion fee “stick.”

We have fashioned such a plan. We call it the Kheel-Komanoff Plan to distinguish it from the basic Kheel model of free or nearly-free public transit. Kheel-Komanoff substitutes a $2 to $9 sliding toll scale for the $10 to $30 tolls in Kheel II. The sliding scale is highest during weekday peak-traffic times and lowest during weekend off-peak hours, reflecting variations in congestion and, hence, the delays each trip causes. The Kheel-Komanoff Plan also reduces the 50% taxi surcharge to 33%.

These changes reduce the annual $3 billion revenue gain that Kheel II provides, to $1.7 billion. That is enough to either slash transit fares or cure the MTA deficit, but it is not enough for both.

We have elected, in Kheel-Komanoff, to apply the congestion revenues to cut transit fares. Kheel-Komanoff retains the universal free bus service and free intracity commuter rail service from Kheel II and reduces subway fares by an average of 49% (vs. the 75% cut in Kheel II), thus preserving most of that plan’s extraordinary benefits for transit users. However, where Kheel II’s nearly one billion dollars in net revenues would plug most of the MTA deficit, the Kheel-Komanoff plan is revenue-neutral, meaning that it cannot contribute to deficit reduction.