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Now here's a brilliant idea from Theodore Kheel, president of Nurture New York's Nature,* a labor lawyer and mediator from New York City who's ideas back in 1965 finally came to fruition:

It was 1965. Robert Moses' New York Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was awash in funds; so was the Port Authority, headed by Austin Tobin. Meanwhile, the Subway Transit Authority was facing a deficit and contemplating increasing the 15-cent fare even as transit workers were demanding higher wages. Moses and Tobin had built empires catering to the automobile; they were not concerned with mass transit's problems.

At the time, I was a contract arbitrator of labor disputes between the Transit Authority and the transport workers union. As someone who knew a great deal about mass transit, I proposed that tolls for the city's bridges and tunnels be doubled, and the proceeds used to subsidize mass transit. If this proposal sounds mundane now, in 1965 it caused a sensation. It was front-page news in all the city's papers. My proposal was labeled ludicrous and reporters speculated that I had gone berserk. Moses and Tobin, normally archrivals, joined immediately in branding the proposal illegal.

So here was a visionary back in 1965 proven correct over time. What does he say we should be doing now?

Fast forward to the present. Once again a transit problem confronts us, as we face the reality that car congestion is strangling the region's economy, destroying our health and damaging the atmosphere. And once again, a creative solution has been proposed, or rather, a pair of solutions, which -- like my two-pronged proposal in 1965 -- would turn car drivers' pain into mass transit's gain.

Here are the old ideas in their new clothes. Prong No. 1 is congestion pricing: imposing a fee on cars driven in the city, which would discourage some from driving and raise revenues from those who do. Prong No. 2 is free mass transit: eliminating the bus and subway fare, and using the revenues from congestion pricing to cover the costs. Simple enough -- but as strange to our way of thinking as my proposal almost half a century ago.

Can it work? Of course it can, once we get through the following roadblocks, so to speak:

First, people seem to think congestion pricing is crazy. But congestion pricing is working in cities like London, Melbourne, Rome, Singapore and Stockholm. And there's no reason to think that it can't work here.

What about free transit? I recently financed a $100,000 study of the benefits of free mass transit, in the belief the benefits would outweigh the costs. Some commentators dismissed the idea as hopelessly utopian -- not knowing, perhaps, that only a small part of transit costs are covered today by fares, and that funds from congestion pricing could comfortably replace that amount.

Let's hope Mr. Kheel is proven right again, but that it doesn't take the 50 years he thinks it will take.

~~~~~

* The artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, recently gave his latest U.S. foundation, Nurture New York's Nature, Inc., an exclusive, world-wide royalty-free license to produce events and products commemorating their work of art, The Gates, Central Park, New York City 1979-2005. The net proceeds are being used solely to protect and help restore the City's natural environment and life sustaining biodiversity, to create public awareness of the importance of those undertakings to the health and well being of the City's inhabitants, and to support the arts for their power to define, illuminate and advance such goals.

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