Congestion pricing is great. I routinely end up in Manhattan on Friday and Canal Street at 5pm is running smoothly (not packed end to end with idling cars as before), the city looks like a regular city instead of the packed cars honking and spewing tire dust and exhaust. Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. It’s a different environment and everyone is loving it that I’ve talked to.
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. I
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
Yes I imagine a handful of crime was caused by the sheer number of people on the street. Fewer people idling about looking to cause a ruckus has made a huge difference. Passive benefits are what will keep cp in place.
> ”Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.”
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
London is a pretty good city for walking around and public transport.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
Congestion pricing is only a half of the solution. The second half should be the MTA reform. MTA has been a dysfunctional mess and a bottomless money pit for as long as I remember. MTA of today will squander any amount of money you throw on it wasting all the potential gains from congestion pricing.
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
This is the story of the American public sector. Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector because clearly public organization X sucks. The private sector is greedy and a black box, so they're basically going to bleed the tax payers dry because they have no accountability to anyone. And the added complexity of hops between communication just burns money. And now the military is paying 150 dollars for a shovel.
The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
The real problem is public corruption. People got tired of public officials getting paid off by a public sector union to create a bunch of makework jobs at taxpayer expense. The theory of privatization is that you put the contract up for bids and then every private company has the incentive to get the contract until the profit margins are low enough, and "low profit margins" are to the public's advantage.
But then the contracting process gets corrupted to prevent most companies from bidding and direct the contracts to specific cronies.
What you actually need is better ways to stop public officials from screwing the public for personal advantage.
I disagree fundamentally - as more things got privatized in the US, you can clearly see the degradation of our services. For example, the NYC subway.
The reality is we are now paying a lot of money for some of the worse public services we've ever had. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, our public services were considerably higher quality - AND this is with increased labor. We've managed to significantly lower labor cost through technology, and yet the quality has degraded.
We've tried the theory of privatization. In fact we keep trying it over and over. Look around you. Is it working? Yes or no? No, right? Then we should be on the same page.
> as more things got privatized in the US, you can clearly see the degradation of our services. For example, the NYC subway.
The question is whether this is caused by privatization or by corruption. Obviously if you constrain who can bid on the contract so that it can only go to some well-connected paymasters who overcharge and underdeliver, things are going to go poorly.
> We've tried the theory of privatization. In fact we keep trying it over and over. Look around you. Is it working?
In which place are we incarcerating the politicians who deliver the contracts to their cronies?
So the solution is private corruption where nameless corporations and CEOs get to take public money with 0 oversight instead?
I'm not a yank myself, but in the Netherlands the national railway (NS) is "jointly" owned but run as a private business and is a complete clusterfuck, exactly because we for some insane reason believe that running public transport should be profitable. Prices get raised every year (and we already have some of the most expensive train costs in the world), there's less trains, conductors get paid like shit and treated like garbage (hence them striking often), the trains are late more and more often, they're filthy etc. I don't want to drive, but if me and my partner decide we want to go to a different city by train, it costs us easily double what the equivalent car journey would cost. Of course, if we didn't subsidize cars as heavily as we do that'd probably be a different story, but that's venturing off-topic.
Similarly in the UK, privatization led to nothing but chaos there, and now they're left with ludicrous prices compared to all other modes of transport, because again, things are being run as a private business and they're expecting profits to be made.
Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable. If it's possible, that's great, but we should aim for quality of service above anything else. How about we instead divert the gigantic chunk of money that goes to maintaining roads and making sure drivers have few inconveniences and instead start investing that in actual public transport instead?
> So the solution is private corruption where nameless corporations and CEOs get to take public money with 0 oversight instead?
Presumably the solution looks something like rounding up all of the public officials who officiated over anything that even hints a whiff of personal advantage and sticking their heads in a guillotine.
> Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable.
Whether something is profitable or not and whether it's provided by direct government employees or not are two independent things. You could very easily pay a private company to operate a transit system while subsidizing fares with tax dollars.
Meanwhile at some point the government is going to be buying something from the market. If they operate the trains, are they also going to design and manufacture the trains? Are they going to manufacture the steel that goes into the trains? What about the energy used to make the steel, or the trucks used to transport it?
But as soon as you have the government buying something from anyone, you need to start lopping off the heads of the public officials whenever there is anything fishy going on with the bidding process or you get what we've got.
There wasn't a "theory" because this wasn't some garbage that aloof academics cooked up.
At the time thins were privatized (50s through 80s) the misalignment of incentives was plain as day obvious fact. People looked at <shuffles cards> New York City, and said "do not want" and they attempted to break the feedback loop between public agencies and the parties they were making work for and tried to resolve it by putting more of the decisions of what work needed to be done under the umbrella of the agencies doing it. With proper competition, this can work. But people like you have spent the last 70yr erecting barriers to competition and so in an environment where things are only ever getting bid on by the same few players the costs rise and the values go down.
The sane way to privatize a transit system isn't to give the private company ownership over the system, it's to have the government own all of the plant and equipment and pay various private companies to supply or operate pieces of it. Then they're not deciding what fares are (the thing with no competition), they're deciding how much they bid to provide rolling stock or train conductors and then the government chooses the company with the most attractive bid for each thing it needs to buy in any given year.
The government in turn sets the fares by amortizing the total cost of the system over the number of riders modulo any taxpayer subsidies it intends to provide.
The half-nationalised half-privatised system you're suggesting isn't that far off the UK's approach, which results in almost zero maintenance, no on-platform support for disabled people and fares so high that people fly to other places in the UK via europe because it's cheaper than taking the train.
The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth combined with pique at government departments that had the temerity to point out that "Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)".
The problem is that you switch from the government doing something possibly inefficiently to private industry who WILL take their cut no matter what which leads to even less efficiency. The contracting companies are the same but they love privatization because the government has far less recourse when they don't deliver properly.
If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.
For the modern strain: see DOGE. And how much money got saved? Yeah, exactly like that.
> The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth
For that to be true it would have to be actually saving money in order to allow lower taxes at a given level of deficit spending.
> Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)
Quoting a satirist isn't a real argument.
> If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.
If you want real competition then you need real competition, i.e. multiple companies that can each supply the thing. And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.
But when the corruption is the outcome desired by the politicians, preventing competing bidders is the name of the game.
Quoting Republican propaganda isn't a real argument, but you did it anyway.
The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).
> And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.
This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that. So, contractors only have to worry about being sued after the fact, if that. In reality, the failures only manifest 10 years down the road and the companies have all rolled up and disappeared with the profits.
> Quoting Republican propaganda isn't a real argument, but you did it anyway.
I think you're missing the dichotomy:
> The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).
One of two things has to be true. Either their purpose in doing privatization is to cut government spending in order to cut taxes, which would imply that it actually does save money. Or, their purpose is something else, like diverting the same number of tax dollars to their cronies, in which case "in order to cut taxes" is an erroneous attribution of their purpose.
And by the evidence it's the second one, because they don't actually cut spending and yet they still want to do privatization for some reason. Meanwhile if it was the first one as you claim then we should actually want to do it because then it's more efficient and would provide more government services per tax dollar regardless of whether or not you want to cut taxes.
> This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that.
This doesn't require a large number of personnel and in particular it doesn't require the likes of bus drivers or construction workers to be direct government employees, because they're not going to be tasked with making managerial decisions either way.
The real problem is that the people who are tasked with those decisions get paid off (revolving door etc.) to make sure the government gets locked in to some specific contractor or otherwise takes no effective recourse when they come in late and over budget.
The other thing is that privatization is old-school patronage on steroids: if you structure it right, you get to channel government money to the recipients in a way that continues even after you lose power.
Public or private, this is what happens without competition. Even with a fixed set of tunnels and tracks, there are ways to benefit from competitive market forces.
Americans have a weird thing with government agencies (or government-owned companies, e.g. Amtrak) simply hiring people to do a thing the government is tasked with doing, or buying things the government needs in order to do that thing. So instead our governments at all levels rely heavily on contracting it out to private companies to do the exact same thing but with higher cost and turnover and no long term expertise built in-house in the government agency which is now tasked with managing and overseeing all this contracting.
The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
I suspect the theory is that private companies with many clients besides the government are less susceptible to bloat and waste than a government agency is because they are not a singleton entity and will be outcompeted if they are sufficiently inefficient.
A problem with this theory is that, I imagine, a lot of such companies basically only have contracts with the government. So it ends up with the same singleton problems, just outsourced.
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax. It doesn’t actually ‘work.’
As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public.
Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result.
Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living.
If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
Great to hear the positives about congestion pricing. It would be great to see how it can ease the congestion in Toronto. Unfortunately, I suggested congestion pricing as a possible solution as part of an academic project and was laughed off.
Car culture is strong, I’d seek local transport advocacy group interest[0] before academic interest. Your academic colleagues all probably drive to work.
[0] in the case of NYC, for example, Transportation Alternatives https://transalt.org/
It remains amazing to me, time and time again, how relatively small fees can encourage large changes in behavior. At the aggregate level, people overvalue their time and undervalue their money.
I think you’re agreeing with each other. GP was talking about at the aggregate level where your observation is about the individual specifically. At the aggregate level with traffic reduction you’d think individuals would weigh their money as a shortcut to regain time but they don’t. My personal guess is because Manhattan is not the actual destination, work and home are the destinations, Manhattan is just the environment. Before it was the cost of car maintenance to drive into Manhattan (in the individuals eyes “free”), now it’s car maintenance + $9/day.
I certainly refuse to pay $0.10 / plastic grocery bag since those fees were put in place. I have been exclusively shopping with a canvas bag for years now. Likely having saved thousands of bags in that time. In fact, I am angry at the half-dozen times where circumstances have forced me to pay for one.
I think I’m up to like 8 canvas bags, significantly thicker yet still significantly plastic, which I continue to forget at home.
These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time
I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!
HN likes to equate all environmental issues with carbon. It’s one dimension but not the sole dimension. Bags were a huge litter, wildlife and quality of life issue.
My wife was a finance commissioner for a water utility. Guess what the most common clogger of storm drains was? Shopping bags. They did hundreds of service calls annually doing service that ranged from fishing them out to using a hydro-jet to clear a pipe.
Within 18 months of the bag fee, those calls dropped 60%. That’s easily $800k in wasted labor and dollars in this small city.
Great example. FWIW I don't think this is just an HN issue. It's hard for most people to have a systemic view of policy. I'm pretty dialed in on these issues and I never even thought of the drainage impacts of the bags.
That would’ve been a fantastic way to advertise this initiative to voters. Unfortunately, there were no mentions of clogged pipes, clean watersheds, or any other benefit, so I’m meeting them where they chose to meet us.
New Delhi’s has gotten more polluted over the last decades, to the point that it’s almost comical. (400+ AQI being normalised.) Post pandemic, it’s done a decent job in some parts at reducing the amount of trash on the roads. On the balance, I find it more pleasant now than before.
I’d also guess that most people would prefer trading emissions for e.g. not living next to a carcinogenic or toxic-waste dump.
Sufficiently high CO2 levels, such as existed at the end of the Permian period, can raise temperatures above that which would be survivable. Sure, people could huddle in air conditioned survival pods. This doesn't seem to be a sufficient rebuttal of the claim.
If you think an analogy with the P/T extinction is invalid, note that CO2 levels are rising now much faster than they did over that event.
> people could huddle in air conditioned survival pods. This doesn't seem to be a sufficient rebuttal of the claim
I kind of think it does, particularly when we’re talking about temperatures that humans choose to live in (almost precisely as you describe) today.
CO2 is not going to render our inland cities uninhabitable. It will make them more deadly, more expensive and less comfortable. It will cause a continuation of the current extinction event, which is already comparable with (if not equivalent to) P/T.
This is why environmental activism is ineffective and counterproductive.
Where I live, the campaign against natural gas and an arbitrary timeline for decarbonization, combined with accelerating the shutdown of a major nuclear plant, just triggered a 30% increase in electrical delivery cost this year and is driving migration due to cost. (to places with dirtier electric and gas production, btw)
Back when this was new, there were studies showing that the typical canvas bags sold at grocers are also breeding grounds for all sorts of nasty things that you don't want to be transporting your food in.
So it's just purely all downsides. Like security theater, but for the environment.
Tell that to the Anacostia river in DC! They great at reducing watershed pollution. It's really noticeable how much better things have gotten since the bag fee.
As a side effect, DC's water authority has also been able to cut maintenance budgets because clumps of bags were our main source of sewer clogs.
Likewise with the canvas bags they are so much nicer but if I do end up needing an 8 or 10c bag I hardly care. If I spend 50 its 1/5 of 1% of the cost.
Eg when plastic bags are free Grandma wants 5 things in 2 doubled bags but at 8 cents each she'll just stick them in the cart with no bag at all and transfer them to the back seat even if 8c for single bag to carry them in would add negligible costs to her $120 basket.
People are not perfectly rational. When there's no explicit price tag people tend to overlook costs. For example when Tesla Model S sold at $70,000 a decrease in gasoline prices was predicted to hurt sales even though a few hundred dollar swing in fuel cost for one year is not going to materially change total cost of ownership of a luxury vehicle.
I'm not sure why what is functionally a $180/month fee is considered "small". I think what we're seeing here is that public services (like roads) are more enjoyable, for those who can still use it, if the lower half of the income ladder is banned from using it.
That doesn't make much sense, driving a gas car from Jersey is gonna eat up a couple of gallons of fuel ($10x20=$200/mo), insuring it will be $200/mo, if it's not paid off it'll cost at least $500-600, parking will run easily $500 but likely more. Why is that $180 the straw that broke the camel's back?
The Jersey thing isn’t the issue. Car commuters still commute. Most of the traffic volume are whiny Long Islanders who’d rather cut through Manhattan than navigate the belt parkway and bridges to New Jersey. Also poorly served Queens and Brooklyn residents — I grew up in Queens… my dads public transit time to Lower Manhattan or my mom’s time to Manhattan hospitals was about 2 hours — similar to taking Metro North from Dutchess county or LIRR.
The downside of this stuff that we don’t have data on is how it affects big employers who benefit from car transit and benefit the city as a whole? How many patients are going to avoid NYU, Cornell or MSK in favor of a satellite site not in the city proper, for example?
NYC chased most of the big industries away already in my lifetime, I wonder if this will impact commercial business in the city in the long run.
When I lived in the area, I used to regularly drive in to lower Manhattan after 6PM for free parking because it was cheaper, faster, and more convenient than taking the train from right in front of my NJ apartment. The congestion charge would change that equation.
The parking should've never been free in the first place, that's always a mistake. Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain and own.
> Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain
In what universe is this true?
There are 3 million parking spots in NYC. If each cost $3000/year to maintain (presumably that's "many thousands"), that would be $9 billion/year - considerably more than what's spend on the entire Department of Transportation.
I'd be shocked if a single spot cost even $100/year to maintain.
It's the opportunity cost of the land being used as parking.
Manhattan is one of the few parts of the US where we don't indirectly mandate seven parking spots per car on average. A surface lot ends up costing about $7,000/spot to pave. But at >$1,000,000 per acre garages are used instead. But then that's tens of thousands per spot in construction cost. Underground parking is the most expensive type due to excavation cost. Meanwhile the most convenient parking curbside is offered by the government for free or <$1. Is there something wrong with this picture?
> Treating curbside parking like it was exactly the same as large rectangular lots is nonsense.
Yeah because the parking is already built. But obviously before you build the parking you have a choice - and building "free" parking is a really stupid choice you should never make. You can give that space to building or the road, either will be more productive.
Opportunity cost of not having protected bike lanes or dedicated transit right of way. Especially in a place like Manhattan improving cycling safety and getting busses out of traffic would be a huge net gain for the city compared with huge amounts of space dedicated to large private vehicles.
You can buy a used car that gets 30 mpg city for $7,000. Even with a loan, that's closer to $200/month at today's (rather high) rates, not $500-600/month.
Insurance on that will be on the order of $60/month for an adult safe driver, not $200/month.
Driving from say, Jersey City to the East Village and back every day is going to use about 10 gallons of gas per month @ $3.20/gallon that's $32/month, not $200/month.
Parking is bad though it depends on how long you park for, but that's because that has also been jacked up to only allow the wealthy to drive.
Manhattan is at least as dense as London, and land values must be about the same. The market cost of parking in London far outweighs the cost of the congestion charge, so presumably that's the same in New York.
Seems that renting a square foot of downtown Manhattan land is about $60/year. A parking space being about 200 square foot, that's $1k a month if paying the actual rate, just for parking (let alone the road space)
Seems that $200 a month is small when compared to the actual cost.
Not a fair comparison. Private owners have to pay property taxes and renters have exclusive use.
Never mind that the land value for a curbside parking spot on the side of the road is substantially less simply because you can't build anything on it.
Curbside parking still has opportunity costs. Why dedicate scarce publicly owned space in NYC to subsidize suburbanites, when it could benefit New Yorkers?
If you make it so only rich people can do a certain thing, you'll have way fewer people doing that thing. I'm curious what kind of inconveniences this has caused for people who can't afford to pay the fee though.
Are you actually curious or were you just trying to make a gotcha against congestion pricing?
I ask because the "only rich people" criticism of NYCs project has been beaten into the dirt and discussed at nearly every level of politics for more than a year now. If there's anything you want to know the information is readily available.
I'm not curious because I already know the answer. The inconvenience is that driving through the city is $9 more expensive without any improvement in other transportation alternatives. For some people that's no big deal but obviously for a lot of people it is, hence why there's fewer people on the road. The "missing" people are the ones who simply can't afford to be there.
The OP, as well as plenty of other articles, pointed out a rather immediate improvement in alternatives: the busses are faster as a result of traffic being reduced.
The source I found agree with 1-4% for bus routes within Manhattan, but it also said:
> Commutes on Hudson River and East River crossings for several express bus routes linking the boroughs with Manhattan have, on some lines, shaved more than 15 minutes off commuting times.
If you're going to massively inconvenience millions of people then you have to do better than a couple buses running faster. Better as in, using the new funds to completely revamp the whole system. If those faster bus lines don't provide an alternative to my previous route then they don't provide me an alternative to paying $9, losing my job, or picking a different city to live in.
If ~$200/mo is enough for you to quit your job in Manhattan, it's clear you weren't happy in the first place. Congestion pricing has done you a service.
>>The "missing" people are the ones who simply can't afford to be there.
I don't believe that for a second. They could afford to drive a car, insure it, maintain it, buy fuel, and pay for very expensive parking in NYC, but $9 is too much now?
I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong if there's any data that suggest that this is actually true.
People pay what they have to pay do get to work or get around. In that sense they could "afford" it, because the alternative is to move or get a different job.
You're trying to make it seem like driving in NYC is simply a lifestyle decision that people could choose to do or not do. For some people it is, for many people it's simply the only viable option. Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
>>Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
Which implies that the people who continue driving are indeed those who have no other option, and those who do have taken it instead of paying the $9. Would you disagree?
And no, of course I don't imply it's a lifestyle choice - merely that some people(not all!) were driving in NYC even though they indeed had other options available, because there was no extra cost associated with it - now that there is, those people use those other options where possible.
Again, it's really fun to speculate why who and where is doing what, but if you have more specific data then please share.
May I ask if you actually live in NYC? My understanding is that owning and regularly driving a vehicle is exceptionally expensive compared to almost any other city. Parking alone can massively eclipse the estimated monthly amount listed elsewhere in the thread.
Why would they not be there then? How is that supposed to even work if it doesn't affect consumers' behavior?!
This kind of argument reminds me of a French politician who defended a tax on sweet drinks as a way to fight against the obesity crisis looming (France performs better than most country in that regard, but the situation is still bad). She wanted a tax to deter the consumption of sweet drinks, but at the same time they wanted the tax to stay at “a level where it would not affect the purchasing power of people”.
Funny because I was going to use that exact example as something that absolutely works. I can easily afford the sugar tax where I live, it's been around for a few years now. But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
I understand the same mechanism works with cigarettes and loads of other things - even if you can afford them the increasing price puts you off.
But maybe for a more relevant example - I can comfortably afford parking right in the city centre where I live. But the idea of paying what's being asked for parking puts me off so much I just park at the nearest park and ride and take the metro in.
> But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
So you're telling me that the very same people who refuse to buy non-brand Coke copies whose taste is indistinguishable from true Coke in blind tests would accept to buy Diet Coke despite it tasting like shit in a way that everyone can feel? And they would do so for a smaller gain than what it would save them to buy the cheap copy?
Which is why I kept insisting that OP posts some factual data to back up their claims, because as much as I enjoy the guessing of who does what and how and when, it's just a bunch of strangers on the internet giving their theories so far(me included of course).
These are all lifestyle choices. You don't need to do any of those things. Getting to work or getting around one's own city are not lifestyle options. They're necessities.
Using market-style policies to try to nudge people around only works if there are alternatives they can choose from. In this case for many people there are not.
And like I said in my other comment - those people most likely still continue driving and pay the $9 fee. It's people who have other options or who simply don't really need to be there who have now stopped.
This exact same scheme has played out in many other cities already, this isn't new.
> People working _in Manhattan_ can't choose their employer and where to live
None of the blue collar workers in Manhattan (the janitors, the restaurant waiters and cook, etc. the massive working class that is needed for white collar work to be able to operate) can live in Manhattan.
I can also afford the parking in the city center, but mostly choose to patronize businesses in the suburbs where the parking is free (and usually plentiful). That I think is what city business owners are worried about.
It is, the subway is a few orders of magnitude safer and cheaper. Sometimes it can take more time... now. Because of congestion pricing. Before, it was often faster to just walk next to the cars than be in one of the cars.
I assume you're referring to just taking the metro instead. Not everyone who drives lives near a metro. Not every destination is accessible via the metro. Many people commute from more affordable areas far from the city where public transportation isn't always a viable option. Driving gets $9 more expensive but public transit doesn't suddenly get better for the people who can't pay $9.
There are very very few places in nyc not accessible via some combo of bus, metro and ferry. It's not as reliable as say Japan but the public transit network is pretty extensive.
Not everyone who drives through NYC lives in NYC. Even if it were, those transit hops add time. Now you're forcing people to choose between paying money they don't have or spending time they don't have.
If you're driving through NYC you probably have enough money for gas and $9 and all the other tolls on the road. No one is driving around on their last drop of gas going "gosh I could just get out of Nyc to Long Island if I just had that $9 for gas".
The poor car owner who can't afford $9 stories are all made up nonsense. "Not everyone has $9 to spend to drive their tens of thousands of dollars car."
If you want the government to help poor people, there are much better ways to do it than giving away access to one specific kind of public resource to everyone.
Sidewalks can fit an order of magnitude more people than roads can fit cars. Especially if one car lane was re-allocated to make sidewalks wider. Less traffic means less air pollution.
It's almost never needed to faregate sidewalks. Tourist districts can organize a special improvement district tax on stores to fund sidewalk upgrades, trash collection, shuttles, security, parking, and planting flowers. This makes the zone more even more attractive to tourists.
This analogy pretty much gets at the heart of what makes these policies distasteful. Me walking or driving through my own city or neighborhood, where I live, pay taxes, and vote, is not the same as me taking a trip to Disney. I don't do it just for fun. I do it because living requires me to occasionally move from place to place.
Auctioning off to the highest bidder the right to move around is cruel because you make it so that some people simply can't afford to exist in public spaces, and because you're telling people that their own city or neighborhood doesn't even belong to them.
The correct analogy here would be access to healthcare, water, or electricity.
Are people entitled to drive through an area? Or are people entitled to travel through an area? When you live in a car dependent society the two seem to be the same. But they're not the same. Only 22% of Manhattan residents own a car!
Look at a school. Many make the front driveway bus only. Because parents dropping off kids one at a time was very low capacity and causing a line of cars to form every morning backing up into the road. There's just not enough space for everyone to drive single occupancy cars to the same destination within the same half hour time slot. Favoring school buses in the school driveway is not an attack on drivers. It's acknowledging the limits of geometry and time, and choosing to get the most out of our common space.
Does this imply that the government should buy everyone a car? Or is driving not actually necessary for existing in this space and it's enough to let people walk for free?
Keep in mind that we're not talking about some suburb where you have to drive two miles to get to the store, but rather about the most walkable place of its size in the US.
The theory is that the price signal helps people make their own arbitrage between time and money and it would maximize society utility, but the reality is since people have a very different amount of money, it just do what you say: the rich pay without second thoughts and enjoy the higher quality of life when the less rich see a degradation of their own: they will either pay with money they don't have in excess and have to stop other consumption, or take public transports which is less convenient for them (since it's cheaper than car commute, they would be doing it if they didn't like it better).
Yeah, and I'm guessing the opinions of those people don't get taken into account by folks who are studying or manufacturing consent for these policies.
We have finite space for roads and an expanding population. Doing nothing means people spend as much time on congested roads as they would taking public transportation. Objectively the worst of both worlds and people having invested in a car and being used to it will continue living in it as it gets worse and worse.
Providing additional impetus to make a change seems virtuous.
If there's an overall plan to revamp transit and public spaces to accommodate all people then I'm in favor of it. That's how functioning cities do it. This is clearly just a money grab by a corrupt city.
If slack capacity exists in public transportation and roads are way over what's needed immediately is for people to switch over. Making it more expensive to drive instead of subsidizing it is a way to achieve this.
I'm convinced that having individual cars as default mean of transportation sucks, don't get me wrong.
But it's not because “doing nothing” is bad that any decision is good.
This kind of decisions that reduces the freedom of movement of the majority but spare the rich is exactly how people like Trump reach power.
You want to solve the urban planning problem that is car congestion, then the solution is a urban planning one, not a new tax.
Or at least if you want to leverage economic incentives, you have to give everyone working in Manhattan and not living there $200 a month so that their overall purchasing power isn't impacted (the marginal price of taking the car stays the same, and so does the incentive).
The situation as described on the ground seems to be fewer people driving so it seems like it is already working. It doesn't decrease freedom of movement by making people use public transit.
Trump got power because we are a garbage people with neither merit nor intelligence.
Surely the reduction in vehicle count is more than enough to cancel this out, but a moving vehicle does emit more exhaust and tire dust per unit of time than does a vehicle idling. For the environmental improvements it's more about the reduction in the number of cars than about the better traffic flow.
Right. Presumably a car idling for ten minutes produces less pollution than a car being driven for ten minutes, but a car that is driven for ten minutes and idled for an additional ten produces more pollution than either of them. Any pollution produced by cars idling in bad traffic is superadded to the pollution produced in transit so improving the flow of traffic should reduce pollution even if the total number of cars remains steady.
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
I think that depends on the motivations of the driver. You (and I) are probably thinking of a trip that is motivated solely by getting from A to B (or A to B to C to A). In that case, any pollution from idling is strictly additive.
But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)
And more emissions. Idling is pretty efficent, as is driving at a constant speed. Repeatedly stopping or slowing, then accelerating is not. This is also an unintended consequence of "traffic calming" devices e.g. speed bumps or chicanes. People slow down, then hit the gas again which is awful for emissions.
I’ve sometimes pondered if a traffic calming device could be made which would allow vehicles to pass unimpeded if they are at or below the speed limit, but subject to an increasingly large bump if they exceed it. The problem, I suppose is that it must be extremely robust which would make it expensive and potentially more complex than a simple passive bump on the road.
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.
The people who blare loud music and rev their engines are the people with expensive cars? The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Are you adequately distinguishing between expensive cars and formerly expensive cars?
A brand new Rolls-Royce or Mercedes comes with an engine purposely designed to be audibly subdued and doesn't come with a sound system suitable for projecting a racket onto the opposite side of the city. A 10 year old Acura or BMW with a modified exhaust and a trunk full of aftermarket subwoofers, on the other hand... but that's available at a different price point.
> Who says they could afford it? Getting an insane car loan for a vehicle you can't afford is an American tradition.
The implication of the question was to point out that the purported advantage of congestion pricing is really in pricing out the riffraff, because "we've succeeded at keeping the poor people out of the borough" isn't a very sympathetic goal and is what "expensive cars" was presumably intended to deflect consideration away from. What other relevance does it have if the cars are expensive?
If you're admitting that the people being priced out are in fact poor regardless of the price of their cars, I guess that's kind of my point.
Really? I must admit I have not noticed it. I've had nightmare trips trying to get into the city still during traditional heavy traffic times. Frankly I've thought more "the pandemic is finally over" than I did "congestion pricing is working" over the past few months.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
