New York governor Kathy Hochul is bringing back the much-awaited Manhattan congestion pricing plan, according to sources inside her office. It’s a good start towards ridding the island of cars, but it doesn’t fix the heart of commuter culture’s whole issue: Cars are a bad way to get to work. Instead, if public transit isn’t an option, we should all be riding motorcycles — and I can prove it with data.
Congestion pricing is well-intentioned, but the real issue with congestion is how inefficient cars are at moving people around. The average car you see out on the roads has 1.4 people in it, meaning less than half of cars have more than one occupant. All those thousands of pounds of metal and plastic, stretching feet in every direction, serve only to move one person. A study out of Belgium, reported by New Atlas, tells us that’s not exactly the best way to get around:
The study, which was presented at the Association des Constructeurs Européens de Motocycles (ACEM) 2012 Conference in Brussels, found that if 10 percent of all private cars were replaced by motorcycles in the traffic flow of the test area, total time losses for all vehicles decreased by 40 percent and total emissions reduced by 6 percent (1 percent from the different traffic composition of more emission-reduced motorcycles and 5 percent from avoided traffic congestion). A 25 percent modal shift from cars to motorcycles was found to eliminate congestion entirely.
Obviously Belgian traffic patterns and driver attitudes likely differ a bit from the average New Yorker, but the effects seen in the study are staggering. A 40 percent reduction in congestion is incredible, and it only requires one in 10 cars be replaced with a bike — a car that, statistically, was only carrying one person anyway. Better still, bikes and scooters are more fuel-efficient than cars, so everyone’s saving gas by making the switch.
To really free up congested roads, the key is encouraging and incentivizing two-wheeled travel. That means dedicated motorcycle parking spots, legalized lane filtering coast to coast, maybe even tax incentives for operating a smaller, more efficient vehicle. Using 4,000 pounds of car to move 175 pounds of person was never going to be efficient in any sense of the term — let’s get more people on bikes instead. Learn to love rain or hail riding, even, and you’ll never want another cage in your life.