The Lengthening Rush Hour(s)

If you have a daughter in college who's thinking about careers, here's a thought: Advise her to become a transportation planner. Why would that be a good career choice? Because just about everything we thought we knew about how people move through cities is changing. Her advantage: When she graduates, she won't have to unlearn anything.

One example of the head-turning changes in mobility: People are rising so early to drive into cities that, in many places, rush hour now begins before 6 a.m. The Wall Street Journal interviewed one man who until recently met his carpool at 4:15 a.m., arrived at work at Washington, D.C.'s Dulles Airport at 5:20 and then . . . took a nap. His wife called at 6 a.m. to tell him it was time to start work. (Alas, his wee-hour carpool broke up recently, but he's looking for another.) Why would someone do this? To beat traffic, he told the Journal.

He's not the only one. "We've seen extraordinary growth in the percentage of the population that is leaving home before 6 a.m.," the author of a recent study of America commuting patterns told the newspaper. How much growth? About half of all new commuters since 1990 travel in off-peak hours, before 7 or after 9 a.m.

This is changing the way a lot of businesses operate, starting with public transit. Washington's Metrorail system now starts up at 5 a.m., a half-hour earlier than it did two years ago. Seattle's Sound Transit commuter trains pull out of the Tacoma station starting at 5:45 a.m. When the line was launched six years ago, first trains left at 6:20.

Other services aimed at commuters are waking up earlier, too. Nearly all Caribou Coffee shops on the East Coast now open at 5:30 a.m., the Journal reported, and the vast majority of McDonald's restaurants open their doors and drive-throughs by 5.

But the lengthening rush hour isn't the only change. New York's Metro-North Railway, a commuter service that runs north to Westchester County, then angles over to Greenwich, Conn., recently disclosed an interesting statistic: Fewer than half its riders now board at suburban stations and head into the city in the mornings or make the reverse trip in the evenings. So who's catching the train if it isn't commuters headed for Manhattan? Increasingly, it's people headed out of the city for work in the 'burbs, workers traveling from one suburb to another, and off-hours riders headed for the city for fun.

This milestone (49.3 percent now follow the traditional commuter route, down from 65.3 percent in 1984) is "kind of a benchmark that shows what has been building over the last several years and demonstrates the way the region is changing: more job growth in the suburbs and more diverse commuting patterns," one urban researcher told the New York Times.

Well, yes, but here's the twist: The rail service's ridership is at a 23-year high. So we're not seeing fewer of the traditional commuters on the Metro-North but rather others who've figured out ways of using the commuter service. (Some credit belongs to Metro-North's management, which has been skillful in marketing to these non-traditional riders.)

So perhaps the lesson here is the surprising adaptability of rail transit. Where we once thought of commuter lines and transit in general as good at only one thing — hauling workers from the 'burbs to the city — it turns out they're good at a number of things. But, hey, that's probably something your 19-year-old daughter could have told you.

Solving High Property Taxes

In a project that newspapers everywhere ought to try, the New York Times looked recently at property tax bills in New York's suburbs and found an astonishing range. How astonishing? In Woodlynne, N.J., the property tax rate per $100,000 in home value was a staggering $3,063 a year. On Long Island, Sagaponack homeowners paid only $163 per $100,000 in value. The reasons for the range are complicated. But here's some advice to elected leaders: Beware of the so-called solutions to this problem. They'll only make things worse.

So what explains the range? Well, New York's suburbs are in three states, and how these states dole out responsibilities for supporting schools, roads, public safety and so on explains some of it. But only some; there's a lot of variety within the states. (Example: While Woodlynne homeowners pay more than $3,000 per $100,000 in value, homeowners of Avalon, N.J., pay only $224.)

Duplication and cost of government explain some of it. As an official in Fairfield, Conn., told the Times, it helps his city's homeowners that Connecticut has all but eliminated county governments, removing a layer of taxation. He pointed to nearby Westchester County, N.Y., where tax rates are higher. "There's a lot of duplication in Westchester," he said, "with village and town and county layers, and you've built in some redundancy. If you did a management study for local government like they do in business school, you'd never split things up like this."

Schools take in the lion's share of property taxes in many communities, and some systems pay their employees better than others, which pushes up tax rates. The average teacher in Fairfield, for example, made $64,760 last year, but over in Great Neck, N.Y., he made $80,276.

You get the idea: Some of the range is created by the states, some by the structure of government, some by local preference. But if you add all these things together, it still doesn't explain the wide difference in average homeowner tax rates. What does? It's the tax base, stupid. The wealthier the homes and, more important, the greater the amount of commercial property, the lower the rates per $100,000. Go back to the extreme cases. The average home price in unlucky Woodlynne, N.J. is $79,900, while the average house in lucky Sagaponack goes for a cool $3.2 million. Local taxes in Woodlynne are a burden, then, while in Sagaponack they're more like an annoyance, somewhere between the endless search for good lawn service and the unreliability of Jaguars.

But there's an even greater reason that local taxes vary: the amount of commercial property. Simple formula: the greater the amount of commercial property, the lower the tax rate on residential taxpayers. Drop an office building, industrial park or shopping center into your town and watch the taxes on owner-occupied houses decline. You can even afford gold-plated government if you have enough commercial land. Great Neck, where the teachers are paid so well, has 40 percent of its land in commercial uses.

There's an incredible range in these suburbs in the amount of land taken by commercial uses. White Plains, N.Y., which has a full-fledged downtown shopping district, is 60 percent commercial. Nearby Scarsdale, N.Y., is only 6 percent commercial. Not surprisingly, the median property tax in Scarsdale is more than three times the median tax in White Plains.

OK, so what to do? Most local officials are pleading for greater state aid, particularly for funding the schools. A few have raised the notion of tax sharing, so that the suburbs with a lot of commercial land help out those with a little. (Not likely. As one professor who studies localities told the Times, those asked to give up the tax base "will fight that to the death.")

We have a simpler solution: Do nothing. Land uses and property tax rates aren't acts of God; they're the results of local decisions. Take the schools. Yes, the school tax burdens are steep in some suburbs, but good schools ensure that you'll be able to sell your house for a good price one day. As one fiscal policy researcher told the Times, "Without even being able to articulate it, suburban home buyers understand this is part of the price they are paying for a house — so, in a perverse way, high school taxes are linked to high home values."

If localities want to change things, then, they can. They can accept less government, less desirable schools — or, better yet, redevelop parts of the community as commercial districts. Bottom line: We don't need to relieve Scarsdale's homeowners of their high taxes. They're perfectly capable of relieving them on their own.

Fixing the Schools

Government management was considered an oxymoron until the 1990s, when a group of mayors came to office determined to do what most elected officials only talk about, which is make government more efficient, responsive and accountable. Since then, mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York and Martin O'Malley in Baltimore have made enormous strides in improving things like trash pickups and pothole repairs. But one important part of government continues to defy rational management: the public schools. But there are signs that, even there, change is on the way.

You know why governments were considered management-proof in the past: no bottom line, muscular unions, timid bureaucrats and witless elected officials. But smart mayors are finding ways of applying bottom lines to government performance (through tying 311 citizen complaint calls to response reports), working with unions (by trading raises for productivity gains) and giving bureaucrats some backbone (through occasionally brutal performance reviews, as O'Malley instituted in Baltimore).

And yet for all the attention and resources that schools have received since 1983, when the "Nation At Risk" report alerted citizens and policymakers to the sad state of public education — not to mention a long line of short-term management fixes — we still don't know how to assure steady progress in our schools. But we're getting closer.

Once again, New York is a good place to see what lies ahead. At first glance, the school system there seems to be floundering. Three years after Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools and placed an attorney, Joel Klein, in charge, Klein is rethinking the entire management system. Where Klein spent his first years consolidating authority, he's now thinking of radically decentralizing it. Isn't this just more academic tail-chasing?

Actually no. The New York schools were a mess when Klein took over, divided into 32 community districts, many of which were patronage operations with scant interest in the actual education of children. Klein needed to wipe out that failed system, and by all accounts he has done so. (Test scores have risen, perhaps as a result, though hardly anyone is satisfied with where they are.)

What Klein is focusing on now is dramatically and permanently raising student performance. And he has come to recognize what others have: that the secret is highly effective principals. So the next wave of management reform in New York schools will almost certainly be about giving principals much greater leeway to select and assign teachers, move resources to problem areas, use outside vendors if the central office doesn't address the school's needs and so on — in return for meeting demanding performance standards.

In the future, then, principals may become the celebrated heroes of public education, not central-office bureaucrats or even teachers. A similar thing happened with the New York Police Department in the early 1990s, when the glory, rewards — and accountability — suddenly shifted to district commanders and away from police headquarters. Result: After a period of excuse-making and finger-pointing, performance soared and crime dropped. Could the same happen with the schools? Stay tuned.

Footnote: So why are the schools so hard to manage? They have the usual anchors of resistant unions, spineless bureaucrats and feckless elected officials, but there are two other barriers: state and federal regulations that make school administration nearly impossible and an apparently sincere academic crowd that believes schools can't be managed like every other human endeavor. One is Diane Ravitch, an educational historian, who blasted Klein's efforts in the New York Times recently, calling them "insane" and saying they are "far less important, far less consequential than the daily dealings between teachers and students." What Ravitch doesn't appear to recognize is that good management is how you improve those daily dealings across an entire school system.

The Not-So-Free Freeway

When people on the political left and right start advocating the same things, watch out. It's gonna happen. So what do liberals and libertarians agree on today? Congestion pricing.

And what is congestion pricing? It's the idea of charging people to drive on the busiest streets at the busiest hours. Libertarians have been pushing this idea for years. Their notion: toll lanes on expressways. Tired of sitting in traffic? Jump over to the toll lane (formerly known as the HOV lane) and you can zip to work . . . for a price. Under most of these proposals, drivers would attach electronic devices to their cars to be read by toll-lane sensors. The sensors would charge your toll-payment account automatically, depending on the time of day and length of your drive.

At first, liberals were aghast at the idea of charging people to drive on freeways that were meant to be, well, free. (Critics called them "Lexus lanes," because they thought only rich people would use them.) But they're coming around to the notion, although in different ways and for different reasons.

The liberal idea: Charge people to drive in congested downtowns. This idea comes from London, where Ken Livingstone, the colorful leftist mayor, pioneered the concept. Livingstone was uninterested in speeding yuppies' journeys to work. He wanted to thin downtown London's traffic. And he didn't want people to place sensors on their cars. He used security cameras, where were common in London, to record license plates. The plate numbers are compared to computer records of those who've paid to drive in an eight-square mile area of London. If you've paid the $14 fee, great; if not, expect to receive a $260 fine.

In both ways, congestion pricing seems to work. That is, it does appear to speed yuppies to work and discourage driving in congested areas. (Traffic in downtown London has declined by a third since Livingstone imposed the fees in 2003, while transit use — particularly on buses — is up.) And it's coming to a city near you.

Tolling the freeways is the first to take hold, and it's spreading fast. The latest: The Georgia Department of Transportation is preparing to add toll lanes to two interstate highways near Atlanta. Under a preliminary plan, there would be two additional lanes on each side of I-75: a toll lane for trucks only and an HOV/toll lane for motorists. An HOV/toll lane would also be added along each side of I-575.

Charging to drive in downtowns hasn't taken off yet, but it's being talked about in New York where a business group, the Partnership for New York City, is urging the city to look at it. In many respects, Manhattan would be a perfect test case; it is, after all, an island with a limited number of places to enter and exit. And there are lots of cars there: 840,000 a day south of 60th Street, the New York Times reported recently.

Still, this is such a new idea, politicians are proceeding cautiously. "Although we're always open to ideas from the business community," a spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the Times, "this isn't on the mayor's second-term agenda." (Bloomberg later repeated that he had no plans for such a fee.) But even radical ideas can become mainstream thinking seemingly overnight. Consider, for instance, the idea of charging people to drive on freeways.