Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg expressed a desire to institute congestion-zone tolling for Manhattan below 86th Street. The plan didn’t play all that well in Albany, so as a compromise to keep access to federal traffic-alleviation funds alive, a plan was hatched to assemble a commission to look at alternatives.
The New York Times has a report up on what the Commission’s thinking:
One proposal could be nearly as controversial as the mayor’s congestion pricing plan: the establishment of a No Hail Zone in the area below 86th Street.
Under such a plan, yellow cabs could pick up people only at designated taxi stands. The stands, up to 1,200 of them, would be set up on each block in busy areas and every few blocks in other parts of the zone. [...]
The commission is also studying a proposal known as license plate rationing, under which cars would be barred from the area below 86th Street on certain days, depending on their license plate.
One possibility would be to ban cars on the days of the month that end in the same digit as their license plates. That would mean that if a person’s plates end in a 5, for example, they could not drive on the 5th, the 15th or the 25th of each month. If the person’s plate ended in a 4, the vehicle would be banned on a different three days: the 4th, the 14th, and the 24th. In another version, license plates would come in five colors, with each color barred from the congestion zone one day a week. [...]
One solution that could cut traffic and raise money involves increasing the cost of on-street parking. Currently, Mr. Schaller said, most metered parking spaces in Manhattan charge $1 or $1.50 an hour. If those rates were increased to up to $4 an hour, he said, parking on the street for eight hours would cost about the same as the daily rate at many garages.
Personally, I think that tolling/congestion pricing the area is probably the simplest idea.