In the world of urban planning, there are few things hairier than transportation hypotheticals. When NYC pedestrianized Broadway in Times Square and Herald Square in May, the transportation commissioner said that traffic speeds would go up — but now it seems that we won’t know until December at the earliest whether that’s actually true.

At the same time, however, a smart model of what exactly would happen if you changed this or charged for that is a prerequisite for making any kind of informed improvements to a snarled-up central business district. And so, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Charles Komanoff’s absolutely astonishing Balanced Tranportation Analyzer — a 3.5 MB Excel spreadsheet which is the product of many years of research and analysis into the question of New York City traffic.

This thing is so big and so complicated that even with all of the detailed explanations in it, it’s hard to understand — you really need Komanoff himself to walk you through it. But he recently did just that for me, and so I can point you to the “Delays” sheet, for instance, where Komanoff attempts to quantify the externalities imposed by any given car in NYC traffic.

Being a cyclist, I’m acutely aware of the issue of externalities — it generally costs you nothing to blindly step off the sidewalk and into the bike lane, or to open your taxi door without looking behind you, but it can affect me greatly. Komanoff’s a cyclist too, but he’s concentrating in this spreadsheet mainly on vehicular traffic. After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.

Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.

Of course there are lots of variables here; for one thing, the externalities associated with driving your car into Manhattan go up with the total amount of traffic in the CBD. If you think there’s 5% less traffic in New York now than there was a year or two ago, for instance, the cost imposed goes down by 14%, from 3.26 hours to 2.79 hours. Or, to put it another way, if you could somehow implement a policy which resulted in 10% fewer vehicles driving into Manhattan, any given vehicle would impose “only” 2.38 hours of externalities — an improvement of about $43 over the base case.

Komanoff, of course, isn’t just analyzing the present, he also has a plan for the future. First of which, necessarily, involves congestion pricing. To drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street, you pay a toll: on weekdays, the toll is $3 at night, then rises to $6 for most of the day, and for peak periods (6am to 10am, and 2pm to 8pm) goes up to $9. At weekends, there’s a similar but smaller toll, at $1/$3/$5 prices.

Then there’s the subway fare: that too changes according to the time of day. At night subways are free; sometimes they’re 50 cents, and most of the time they’re $1. At ultra-peak hours (between 8am and 9am, and between 5pm and 6pm) a subway fare rises to $2, dropping to $1.50 the following hour.

One of the most interesting parts of Komanoff’s plan is the bus fare: always $0, all the time. That speeds up buses considerably, since it basically eliminates long lines at the fare box as people hunt for their MetroCard. In turn that makes buses more attractive, and a lot of people, attracted by the free fare and faster speeds, will start taking the bus rather than driving or taking a taxi or a subway. In-city commuter rail, on Metro-North and the LIRR, also goes free.

Medallion taxis do not pay the congestion charge, but there is a 33% taxi-fare surcharge. One tenth of that (around 3%) goes to the taxi drivers and owners; the rest (30%) goes to the MTA; the taxi surcharge alone raises enough money to make in-city commuter rail free.

Add it all up, and it’s pretty much revenue-neutral, says Komanoff: the biggest line items are that you lose $1.46 billion in transit fares, while gaining $1.31 billion in congestion charges. But total time savings are the biggie: implement this plan and New Yorkers get over $2.5 billion of time back which would otherwise be spent wasted in traffic. Vehicle speeds in general rise about 20%, and as much as 25% between 9am and 10am.

All in all (see the “Cost-Benefit” tab), Komanoff sees $5.3 billion in gains and just $2 billion in losses. Sounds good to me. What’s more, it’s politically more acceptable than the last attempt to introduce congestion pricing into NYC, where the brunt was disproportionately borne by Brooklyn. This plan puts much more of the cost of the plan onto Manhattanites, largely thanks to that taxi surcharge. Here are Komanoff’s charts (from the “Incidence” tab):

Komanoff’s still working on this spreadsheet, but the main message is pretty clear — that smart congestion charging would be great news for New York, and probably for most other dense cities as well. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you can even try playing around with the numbers yourself. Enjoy!

My fingers weren’t crossed hard enough. I did end up buying a folding bike this weekend — a Montague DX — and proudly carried it, folded in half, into 3 Times Square this morning, after having been told by a security guard that folding bikes were OK to bring in to the office. Except, it turns out, they’re not. The only way you’re allowed to bring a folding bike into the building, it turns out, is if it’s packed up into a bag. Otherwise, no dice.

I suppose my next hope is that NYC’s bike-friendly new transportation commissioner will install some permanent bike parking in the acreage of Times Square she recently pedestrianized. But I’m not holding my breath. In any case, I hope my bike shop accepts returns. They did say they would, but I’ve just learned how much I can trust verbal promises.

Update: I just popped down to check on it — I realized I’d left the quick-release seatpost open to easy theft when I chained the bike up outside. The back tire’s completely deflated. As am I.

These houses are going to be demolished to make room for a parking lot. Says Ryan:

In my view, it takes a particularly unimaginative, short-sighted, and careless sort of person to see a piece of property in this location and determine that the best and most profitable use for it is a surface parking lot (particularly since street parking near H Street isn’t exactly difficult to find).

Not at all. A parking lot is pure optionality. It generates income, it lowers your property taxes, and it makes it really easy to build something highly commercial if and when developers can actually borrow money again. Old houses like these are never going to be particularly lucrative. Best to take any opportunity to demolish them, so that down the road they can be easily replaced with something shiny and new.

As Ryan’s commenters point out, the problem here isn’t that the owners of the houses want to demolish them, or even that the Historic Preservation Review Board neglected to save them. Rather, it’s that the zoning laws allow parking lots (and the associated curb cuts etc) at all. The problem with the parking lot isn’t that old housing will be demolished, the problem with the parking lot is that it’s a parking lot. Historic preservation boards shouldn’t be used as stealth zoning authorities. There are real zoning authorities for that kind of thing.

Last week, I had a rather miserable bike ride home in the rain, and tweeted as much when I’d managed to dry off a little. A few hours later, I got an email from Abe Burmeister, the CEO of Outlier, telling me about his office-friendly and water-resistant bike trousers. Would I like to try a pair? I would — and in fact I’m wearing them today. I rode them in to work in the drizzle this morning and my legs stayed nice and dry; I then rode up to a meeting with Art Capital Group on the Upper East Side and back through Central Park. They’re certainly comfortable — and they’re more presentable than the jeans I usually wear. If you didn’t know they were bike trousers, you probably wouldn’t guess.

But after reading Alex’s blog entry about the Rapha bespoke cycling suit today, a pair of off-the-peg cycling trousers clearly isn’t going to cut it. The only problem is that I very much doubt Timothy Everest is going to offer to make me one of these things to try out — and weirdly I don’t have £3,500 to spend on looking particularly natty while riding my $300 bicycle. I might have to make do with the Outlier trousers after all.

This is not nearly as counterintuitive as it might seem at first blush:

By my calculations, these numbers mean that you’d need to ride your bike in NYC for 7,300 days, on average, before getting injured. At 200 days a year, that’s over 35 years. And I’m quite sure that a large proportion (but by no means all) of the injuries and fatalities happen to people riding unsafely — against traffic, through red lights, without a helmet, that kind of thing. Which means that the odds of a safe bicyclist being injured in NYC are even lower than that.

Going forwards, the safety in numbers effect is going to make cycling even safer and more popular, which means that we should be able to extrapolate the blue line up and the brown line down more or less indefinitely. Good news!

Ryan Avent — whom I’m sure has driven much more than I have — has an interesting take on the psychology of the automobile:

I think the psychological result of getting into a car is often unappreciated. A driver — myself included — immediately feels entitled to deference on the road, to that point that they may become actually angry with other drivers, and with the pedestrians and cyclists who insist on making drivers travel somewhat more slowly, or wait to turn right, or generally make the process of commuting less than an unimpeded sprint from point A to point B.

This reminds me of the time when I was riding my bike crosstown on a narrow Manhattan street, and an angry yellow cab started honking aggressively at me from behind. I had nowhere to pull over to, and he got increasingly irate, until I reached the red light and he screeched to a halt beside me. He then proceeded to tell me in no uncertain terms that I had no right to be on the road at all. When I pointed out that for all his rushing he would only have wound up at exactly the same red light a few seconds earlier, and wouldn’t have saved any time, he replied that in fact he had the right to run red lights if he wanted to, and I was depriving him of that right.

OK, New York cab drivers can get a bit extreme. But I think that Ryan’s on to something here — despite the fact that I’m actually the opposite way around: I hate driving, precisely because I’m so fearful about the damage I might do to someone else. That said, when I’m on foot or on my bike I hate it when people get in my way: I might not suffer from road rage when I’m in a car, but I certainly do when I’m on a bike. Get out of my bike lane!

I’m no expert on road rage, but I do think that the feeling of invincibility when you’re in a car does increase with the size of that car. Certainly from the point of view of a pedestrian I feel much more intimidated by a huge black Escalade than I do by a Mini, even though they both would do me pretty much the same amount of harm if they hit me at speed. Just sitting above the street life, rather than on the same level as the street life, makes a big — and deleterious — difference. Drive around a city low down in a Lamborghini, and pedestrians will be attracted to you, rather than repulsed from you.

Could it be that as cars get smaller the number of nasty car-on-person accidents will be reduced? One can but hope.

Depressing news from Christina Lewis today: we’re entering yet another round of unhelpful bickering between the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein over the future of the World Trade Center site. What we desperately need is a strong New York governor willing to knock heads together — but we didn’t have that in George Pataki, and we certainly don’t have it in David Paterson.

Silverstein seems to think that the Port Authority should provide financing for him to build millions of square feet of empty office space at the site, even after it took responsibility for financing the Freedom Tower (now called 1 World Trade Center) off his hands. The Port Authority’s response is spot-on:

Officials note the agency finances major infrastructure projects throughout the region. They say backing Mr. Silverstein’s projects would prevent the agency from fulfilling its core mission.

“It’s not for the public sector to be financing speculative buildings,” said Christopher Ward, the agency’s executive director.

I hope that the Port Authority does manage to force Silverstein to scale back his ambitions: as a New York taxpayer, I have no particular interest in providing this particular property speculator with low-cost funding which gives him all the upside and leaves me with most of the downside.

On the other hand, we do seem to be moving to a world where the only two towers to be built on the site for the foreseeable future will be the boringly gigantic Freedom Tower by David Childs, and the dully minimalist 4 World Trade Center by Fumihiko Maki. The two interesting buildings, from an architectural standpoint — the Norman Foster and Richard Rogers towers — look set to exist on paper only.

Also, two questions for the WSJ. First, where did they get the idea that Ground Zero is “the most popular tourist attraction in Manhattan”? And second, why does the sidebar open up in PDF format? Most peculiar.

Paul Kedrosky points to this wonderful map of New York City with sparklines showing ridership over time at various subway stations. I can’t get the background map to show up, but the data is all still there, and here’s a bit of the Lower East Side:

It’s well known that the Lower East Side has been resurgent of late — and so the increased traffic at the 2nd Avenue F stop comes as little surprise. (To give you an example of the timescale here, the grey box covers the years from 1952 to 1977.)

What fascinates me about this map is how four stations all of which are quite close to each other can have such very different ridership experiences — a true demonstration of how New York really is made up of very small microneighborhoods.

The Bowery J/M/Z stop has seen less ridership than any other subway station in Manhattan for years, and there are always rumors floating around that it might just be closed. Meanwhile, the Grand Street station just a few blocks away has loads of traffic. Partly that’s a function of the lines they’re on — the B/D lines are useful, while the J/M/Z lines are notoriously unlikely to go anywhere you might ever want to go. But it’s also a function of the fact that the Bowery stop is in a weird not-quite-anything neighborhood, while the Grand Street stop is increasingly finding itself in the heart of a very vibrant Chinatown.

Meanwhile, the Essex and Delancey stop is only very slowly beginning to pick up a little steam — it’s well behind the East Village on that front.

But this chart, of course, is just the beginning. Next up, someone should overlay local property prices, rebased to the NYC average. That could be very interesting indeed.