As a long time NYC resident who moved out during Covid but commute to work in the city. I definitely noticed less traffic on the streets and less noise.
I see a lot of talk of other cities that don't have good public transportation. For example, between Flushing in Queens to 8th Ave in Brooklyn, there are privately run buses at affordable rate and get you there at half the time of trains. There are buses from a lot of residential areas in NJ that are closer to NYC that go to port authority (west side, 42nd st) very quickly. In fact, those buses are getting there faster and more comfortable than ever due to congestion pricing.
I'm curious, do other larger cities where commercial is concentrated into one area not have a private mini-bus(es)? I know public transportation would be great, but having a competitive environment for privately own bus services might be the answer to a lot of cities.
In Ho Chi Minh City (and probably Vietnam in general but not 100% sure). Our commercial district is very concentrated.
The busses in general are some form of public-private partnership. Several private bus companies operate the city busses. There are some annoying edge cases. For example, pre-purchased tickets are a mess -- better pay cash. If another operator takes over your route, even temporarily, your tickets can't be used.
Mostly it seems to work though, I take the bus fairly regularly and it's quite nice. It's clean, has OK air conditioning, and arrives frequently enough that I don't have to check the schedule. There's someone to help elderly people and children on and off the bus. Elderly people ride free, reduced price for students, etc. It's pleasant.
Some of these busses are mini-versions for less popular routes. I think I've even seen a couple of other vehicle types, like some form of van (rarely). One or twice a sort of truck with benches.
>>> I'm curious, do other larger cities where commercial is concentrated into one area not have a private mini-bus(es)?
It turns out, there are some private buses. Take for example, Santiago, Chile. It succeeded in terms of profits and customer satisfaction. The problem is they do not survive. There comes a time when they don't pay sufficient "political capital" and get taken over (nationalized) by local politicians.
The result of the private bus system nationalization by socialists is macabre, at least this the Santiago case. First, the newly minted public bus service went from $60M USD profits, to massive $600M in losses [1] overnight. That is a negative 10x return. And service declined as well. [1] But that in itself is not a new story.
Now, fast forward ~12 years. The system bleeds so much money that the govt is forced to increase bus fares. The increase in fares activates the biggest riots the country has seen in decades [2]
Out of the riots, one young protester rises to the top. He comes with ideas of a new constitution. He is a young socialist leader. A certain Gabriel Boric [3], who had ran and won for president of University of Chile Student Federation against the leader of the Communist Party of Chile [4]
So now we come full-circle: A working private bus service was replaced by socialist politicians into a public bus system that hemorrhaged 10x more money than it earned previously in actual profits. The public bus funding crisis and subsequent fare hikes led to massive riots, which were a direct on-ramp for a socialist to ascend to power as president of Chile. In short, successful private local bus enterprise was replaced with a socialist bus system, which then proceeded to implode. This implosion of a socialist idea led to the spread of even more socialism, but now at a national level.
This chain of events from beginning to end, only took 20 years.
There was a time when there were no automobiles in New York City, but there was lots of public transportation. (Ok, there were horses and the consequent manure, and the population was way smaller then. But still...)
Yes, this is absolutely more than vindication. If you pay a toll and then become stuck in traffic on that toll road, you are a victim of highway robbery. The fact that NYC traffic is flowing fulfills our simple toll contract and makes everyone whole.
As someone with children, I can not imagine the bliss of living in Manhattan and being able to do things without needing a car.
Car-centric urban planning is hell with kids. You have to load them up into the car for any small trip. You can't walk or bike anywhere because cars make it so dangerous.
My only regret about living in the US is this car hellscape that is so hard to avoid. It's mandated by law, not chosen by the market.
You can live in an urban neighborhood and only use your car a few times a week (mostly on weekends and for yearly kid doctor visits). Its not just Manhattan, Seattle supports this as well (well, you still "need" a car, but you can get away with not driving it very often). You need to be strategic about where you live (e.g. buying the house 7 minutes away from your kid's K-8 and 10 minutes away from his future 9-12, with grocery stores and dentists nearby).
> You need to be strategic about where you live (e.g. buying the house ...
I wonder what % (presumably low) of the population can live in SFHs and achieve this cities like Seattle.
I should try finding if there's available work that's made visualizations of this sort of things ("How many homes could be within X miles or minutes of A B and C" for SFH, Quadplex, 5-over-1s etc.)
You aren’t exactly going to find an SFH in the suburbs that is much cheaper. So you have a point, but you have to choose between an SFH, a similar priced townhome (basically an SFH without a yard), or a condo with an HOA, all basically unaffordable unless you want to commute from Kent or Marysville. Seattle still has density (the townhome I live in in Ballard is one of three that used to be one SFH).
Seattle is weird in that drive til you qualify is not a thing unless you start getting really far out. Some inner ring neighborhoods and suburbs are comparable or more expensive than the core.
If you want to head straight south or straight north you won’t have to go further out than 1 hour before rents and property values fall significantly from city center Seattle. Tacoma is 30 minutes away without traffic and has a median home price 40% less than Seattle. Drive till you qualify is real.
If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millionaires in the 90s and 00s. You won’t save much money there.
Yeah, the Eastside is a real estate hellscape. Everything east of Lake Washington till highway 203/18 is genuinely quite bad. I had cheaper rent on top of Queen Anne, 1 block from the Trader Joe's, than any place of comparable walk/transit on the east side ($2065/month for a 2 bedroom 1.75 bathroom apartment+1 parking place, ~950sq/ft).
You make a tradeoff. You are still going to plop down $1 million for a home unless you live way out there, but instead of a 2000 foot SFH in Bothell or Lynwood, you make do with a 1250 foot townhome in Ballard (same price, less property taxes, more urban). Ballard isn't exactly Capitol Hill or Queen Anne either (we thought about Magnolia just across the locks, but it made me think that I would at least need an electric cargo bike to make most days work without a car).
Self-driving cars are going to turn America's car-centric "hellscape" into a superpower with untold second order benefits.
Everything will be connected and commutable, especially the suburbs. Automated, on-demand delivery will become a part of everyday life.
Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.
All the clamor for trains and rail will go away when our roads become an even superior version of that. Private commuting to any destination, large homes with lots of land, same day delivery of everything.
Self-driving cars are the magic pixie dust of transportation planning, brought out to justify noninvestment in public transit.
As a mode of transportation, self-driving cars already exist--they're basically a taxicab service, the main difference being that some people hope that self-driving might magically make the cost of providing a taxi service cheaper.
> Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.
"Lots of small things going point-to-point" is a much more difficult problem to route, especially at high throughput, than "bundle things into large containers that get broken apart near their destination." In the space of transit, your idea is known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), and PRT systems have invariably underwhelmed every time they've been built, as they struggle to live up to their promise.
Rail transit is incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people--a metro line can easily move a dozen lanes of highway traffic--and there is nothing that you can do to roads to make them approach that level of efficiency, in part because the routing problems are insurmountable.
China is going to reap more benefits from self driving cars, but they also have (in many cities at least) mass transit in place to truly do multi-modal trips (self driving cars at the end tips of subway rides).
The problem with self driving cars is that they can only optimize road bandwidth a bit more than they are now (and even then, only if you outlaw human drivers), they aren’t a magical shortcut to increasing bandwidth beyond indicated demand (like mass transit can).
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I just got back from Beijing and long journeys across the city in a taxi...they aren't really feasible. Yes, comfortable, but no, the traffic is still really really bad. Subway is much quicker, but the routes are often indirect and require one or two changes, but at least you know you'll get where you need to go.
If you ride the subway enough in Beijing or Shanghai, eventually you will come to the conclusion that both cities are just way too big. No matter how many subways that you build, getting from one place to another takes a minimum of 45 mins (including some walking on both ends). New York, London, Seoul, and Tokyo all suffer from similar problems -- giant metro systems, but these cities are huge.
> As someone with children, I can not imagine the bliss of living in Manhattan and being able to do things without needing a car.
Lifting a 2 toddler stroller up and down narrow, crowded NYC subway stairs is the exact opposite of bliss. Perhaps you are unaware that many subway stations still don't have elevators (or escalators, for that matter) - only stairs. And where the elevators exist, it seems half the time they are out of order...
We bought a very fancy and expensive 2 toddler stroller when we had two toddlers and it saw almost no use because it was a hassle pretty much everywhere. I advise all new parents to avoid purchasing one until there's a proven need, and I don't know any other parents that thought it was a good idea to purchase one. I'm sure it's great for some kids, but certainly not mine or even most kids. I honestly don't understand the use case for it except for nap-time strolls around the neighborhood (and how often do they both sleep at the same time?) or maybe amusement parks when there's 3+ hours on your feet.
My twins spent several hours in their stroller (bugaboo donkey) on many days, back when they were toddlers (a lot of that time being spent having their afternoon nap in the stroller). Living in Sydney Australia. Similar car-centric problems to most US cities. But I guess we're lucky to live walking distance from parks, supermarkets, childcare centres (and now school), and a train station. And the stroller fitted folded-up in the boot (aka trunk) of our (small hatchback!) car. And our train station (and our most common destination stations) has a lift (aka elevator - Sydney has successfully been rolling out a project [1] to install lifts in more and more of its ageing train stations over the past decade). I couldn't imagine having managed, back then, without a 2-toddler stroller.
You have 2 toddlers. You frequently wish to take them to visit friends / parks / supermarkets / libraries / doctors / coffee shops / whatever other places near your location. Such places happen to be 10-20 minutes adult-speed walk from you. Kids are young enough that they cannot reliably walk towards a fixed goal for 10+ minutes, and certainly not at adult speed; they often get either tired or distracted or decide they want to go somewhere else. Kids are old and heavy enough that neither of them can be carried in a carrier. Optimal solution: 2 toddler stroller.
The nyc subway is incompetent at building and has been for decades. But since nobody cares they get buy with ignoring disability and calling it hard even though cities around the world with things just as hard have managed. Those other cities have also done subway expantion is much harder situations at far less cost.
When I can, I always take the stairs. It's usually vacant, while the escalator is packed.
I used to work on the second floor. My colleagues would all push the button for the elevator, and wait, wait, wait. I'd be at my desk before they reached the 2nd floor. (Some of them were jocks.)
In my 20s, I worked a stint on the 6th floor. I'd run up the stairs to try and beat the elevator. I'd poop out on the 5th and have to walk the last flight.
I don't understand why I am the only such person. It's just pure joy to run up and down the stairs. One day I won't be able to anymore, and that will make me sad.
>I don't understand why I am the only such person. It's just pure joy to run up and down the stairs. One day I won't be able to anymore, and that will make me sad.
My little kids looove transit. We take the bus all the time in my small town. We visit San Francisco almost weekly it's how we get around after parking. And we usually start our day in SOMA, an area that is not the nicest. We also frequently take the new central subway. I have not experienced a nightmare yet. Maybe Manhattan is more of a nightmare.
I have no doubt that Manhattan is expensive, but my greater point is that it would be great. A lot of very expensive things are great.
For all of the doom and gloom that I expected on my trip there, I thought that system was amazing. The rest of the city was too, if anything there’s more vacancy in Manhattan, but more crazy people in SFO.
Having a dinky appartment that is still expensive is not worth it unless you’re young and don’t have kids and want to be around everything you care about. Or you’re rich and don’t mind paying a fortune to live in a nicer appartment in Manhattan. If I had the money I would still prefer something outside Manhattan just to be able to avoid the noise pollution, the crowds and all that Manhattan commotion.
Without cars, emergency vehicles could have their sirens at 10% of the volume. Garbage trucks and busses are slowly being replaced by electric versions which are much quieter.
Yes. I live in a small city. Along a moderately busy avenue with speeds around 25 mph, it’s hard to carry a conversation. 30 feet down a side street, totally different story.
Almost 60% of US households have no kids in them [1]. We can infer demand for Manhattan housing stock by vacancy rates and rent levels [2] [3] [4] [5].
I'm already imagining what kind of arguments you are preparing. Kids are infinitely better off somewhere they can just bike places with their friends, compared to a car-centric hellhole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
I hated feeling completely stranded as a kid since nothing was accessible by foot or PT. Even today visiting my parents outer suburban house feels like being dumped on an island.
My social life as a teenager was incredibly limited by the fact that I couldn't just jump on a bus and meet up with everyone else who lived in areas with PT coverage.
Same. We live in Manhattan with two kids and owning a car is just an added expense without much benefit. To be fair, if you lived further out in Brooklyn (Bayridge, Sussex Beach and Coney Island) you probably need a car for the day to day.
The best decision would be to completely forbid individual transport. Now the common space dedicated to streets is for who can pay extra. Forbid individual transport and create some parks and pedestrian streets.
These threads tend to devolve into, "Americans are so unsophisticated everyone else in the world is banning cars and turning downtown into walkable utopia" but what they really mean by rest of the world is a few crowded European cities. If you look at all the new rich mega cities built in the Middle East and East Asia cars continue to exist alongside good public transit as aspirational status icons and the preferred means of transit for people who can afford them. Cars are never going away.
There are plenty of cars in Paris and London. It just feels as though people walking are a priority more than they are in NYC. Cars feel compelled more often outside of NYC, where they also block intersections and park next to crosswalks and block visibility.
It works really well in quite a few other cities, actually.
Car infrastructure takes up a huge amount of space and is incredibly hostile to any kind of mixed use. Having near-zero cars means there is suddenly space available for an order of magnitude more pedestrians. It's why reducing car traffic almost always results in a significant increase in revenue for local shops and restaurants - which means more taxes are being paid.
Converting all of NYC into a huge pedestrian-only zone obviously isn't going to work, but having a few pedestrianized superblocks could greatly improve the quality-of-life.
How do you get all the food in? Manhattan is an island. Without constant food deliveries by truck it will die. This food is delivered to countless restaurants and grocery stores, not to some central warehouse, so delivery by train doesn't work.
A few pedestrian streets or blocks might be worth doing, banning all private vehicles from the entire downtown probably not going to happen or be well received if tried.
this is worth thinking about. The idea that the small toll charge actually pays for the streets it covers is flat out untrue. The citizens of the US vastly subsidize the streets and roads of the country. Just purchasing the land used for roads in Manhattan would cost a massive fortune and the people paying taxes in the US have and are paying for it. Not to mention the cost of maintaining the roads (physical infra) and policing the roads. So if NY put the land to more productive use and didn't have to maintain the roads I think they could save a lot of money.
we still need roads for ambulances and deliveries and bikes and shared cars / busses, and there obviously would be enormous costs to peoples time for what already is one of the biggest cities in the world.
If I live in a NYC like this how do I visit my friends in Philadelphia? What if they live in Towson MD? Now what if they live in the suburbs? How would I visit anybody in the country side anywhere? What if I want to buy in bulk at Costco? What if I just want to buy anything I can't carry on the subway?
I have spent over a decade without owning a car in multiple cities. It's definitely possible but I've been fortunate enough to have friends and family with personal vehicles I can use.
>The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case. The largest burden of this tax is falling on low income commuters who live off the train lines and have to drive into Manhattan, yet all of the money is going to... the train lines (MTA). Understandably they're not too happy.
Those people simply don't drive into Manhattan, parking is already $30-$40 a day, driving from Jersey means you are already paying at least a $15 toll (you can drive from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx without paying a toll). An extra $9 simply doesn't matter.
Already 85% of commuters to lower Manhattan take public transit. Of the remaining 15%. An analysis found that only 2% of working poor New Yorkers would pay the charge. Otherwise low income New Yorkers would overwhelmingly benefit from the better transit funding
While I am sympathetic to the general gist of the "poors aren't the subject of this tax" argument but the change in denominator "85% in this zone" to "2% of the city's working poor" is obvious and it's kind of concerning that with the huge efforts that went into quantifying this they couldn't come up with something more precise.
It's not like NYC doesn't have cameras everywhere and couldn't probably figure it pretty easily in an afternoon by crossing the ALPR DB with the tax DB (after spending 48mo of political wrangling to allow that to happen).
> I am sympathetic to the general gist of the "poors aren't the subject of this tax" argument but the change in denominator "85% in this zone" to "2% of the city's working poor" is obvious and it's kind of concerning
Why? Do you want to know something other than the second statistic?
I wonder if adding congestion pricing in small cities to certain intersections or stretches of road would work the same way. if people really want to go through the busiest intersections or areas, then they’re going to have to pay a little bit.
Then people question whether they are going to go through, or pay a little bit to keep up the infrastructure if they do.
It's one thing to have it for a whole downtown area, applying it to individual intersections or roads is going to be a nightmare for drivers and just generate more and more surveillance infrastructure.
I was living in London when congestion pricing was introduced and went into the West End the day before and the first day of and the difference was night and day. The difference along Oxford Street, Regent's Street, Green Street, etc was astounding.
And in the 20+ years the evidence seems to back up how much of a net positive it has been.
NYC congestion pricing took way too long because the New York Democratic Party sucks and, as usual, legal efforts were made to block it, much as how well-intentioned laws like CEQA (designed to protect the environment) are actually just weaponized to block development of any kind.
What's so bizarre to me is how many people have strong opinions on NYC congestion pricing who have never been and will never go to NYC. Americans love the slippery slope argument. It's like "well, if they make driving cars slightly more expensive in Lower Manhattan then next the government is going to take away my gas-guzzling truck in Idaho".
What's also surprising is how many people who live in outer Queens and Brooklyn chose to drive into Manhattan and were complaining how this changed their behavior. Um, that was the point. I honestly didn't know how many people like that there were.
What really needs to happen but probably never will is to get rid of free street parking below about 96th street or 110th.
Also, either ban or simply charge more for combustion vehicles. Go and look at how quiet Chinese cities are where the vehicles are predominantly electric now.
Why does the slippery slope concept surprise you? It actually happens often - banning smoking indoors, for example - started in just one city, once they tweaked the model and overcame the legal challenges, it spread rather quickly. Legalized casinos, same thing. Uber, drinking age, pot legalization, more. Why would toll roads or congestion pricing be different? (Idaho's Sun Valley probably already implements something similar). And ICE vehicles are definitely in many politicians' crosshairs, if you don't already see that coming in the next decade, you aren't really looking.
These would be examples of normalization, not a slippery slope. The OP's example makes this clear (from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car," not "congestion pricing in NYC" to "congestion pricing elsewhere").
(Regardless, I think the answer is simple: congestion pricing is only economically viable when an area is simultaneously congested and has alternative transportation methods that would prevent the local economy from collapsing. NYC is one of a very small handful of cities in the US where this is true, although that's largely a function of 80 years of car-centric design. Maybe it will change.)
Sounds like an arbitrary distinction, but in any event, it was the OP who used "slippery slope" to refer to going from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car."
The distinction is important: a change in a law isn’t always a slippery slope towards other things. Implementing congestion pricing isn’t a slippery slope towards seizing peoples’ cars, which was GP’s point (which I agree with).
To make it obvious: universal suffrage is a change that happened, but it wasn’t a slippery slope towards giving dogs the right to vote. Some changes result in new stases.
Yeah well if you live in the US, you'll hear dumb arguments like that every day - "maybe we could like, make you wait an hour before you can purchase a gun?" "DEMONRATS ARE TAKING OUR GUNS" "We should fund sex education/planned parenthood" "BECAUSE YOU WANT TO MURDER BABIES", etc.
Numerous politicians and advocates have suggested exempting electric vehicles from the NYC congestion pricing. Such vehicles are exempt in London. It isnt unusual for governments to start a program with one goal or purpose, then expand it (or use as a launching point) to achieve further goals, such as banning ICE vehicles.
This is currently happening with cigarettes. Banning them at workplaces and other public places is one thing. But we live in a capitalist country that celebrates individual freedom. Or do we? Beverly Hills CA and Manhattan Beach CA have both banned the sale of cigarettes entirely. Massachusetts banned all flavored cigarettes and is trying to permanently ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone a born after a certain date.
These go beyond "normalization", it is exactly slippery slope... get a small foothold then keep expanding the position.
People suggest all kinds of things. Just about every special interest group in the city wanted a congestion exemption; most did not get it. I don’t think this itself makes for good evidence of a slippery slope.
I think the slippery slope has long happened and also gone away.
There are a ton of roads with "turnpike" or "pike" in their name. Some cost money [1] others are free. What's the big difference between NYC's congestion pricing and the Florida Pike?
I guess you can fight congestion pricing in order to slow the spread of toll roads but it's not the beginning of a slipper slope. Usage fees are a very old concept (price discrimination by time is pretty old as well).
I'm generally sympathetic to arguments that are "we will fall down the slippery slope." But as someone who has spent too much time stuck in traffic, I WANT congestion pricing to spread. It's just basic economics that people end up paying for a "free" resource with time - grossly inefficient.
Right, because you’re an elitist who will happily pay the $9 whenever necessary, because you are in the top 5% of earners, and don’t mind imposing a $180 pay cut every month to the poor who need to commute to their $15 an hour job. That’s 20% of all employed people, by the way.
It's funny how the urban design forcing poor people to pay car insurance and auto loan, just to survive, is fine; yet charging a hundred or so to use the highly valuable space in the city is outrageous.
Concern about public order is fair. But instead of fighting for the privilege to avoid it cheaply, why not fight to actually fix it. Triple the prison population, or whatever your solution is.
Japan has a 99% conviction rate, and still has 56% of women reporting having been groped on transit.
This cannot be solved. To force women on transit is to flip a coin whether they will be assaulted. You’re not going to beat a car culture with that strategy.
I heavily doubt that New York City has the appetite for incarceration that would be necessary, for even a remote chance, to turn public transit into a merely neutral option versus a car.
What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease. Just like that, the dream was dead and I realized we will never escape car culture.
Cars are bad. The alternatives are too flawed and dangerous in their own ways, to have any serious chance at unseating the incumbent.
Japan is not NY and arguments based on sociatal/cultural behavior don't apply universally. Do you personally use these scary subway systems in the US that you have so many stats about?
Interesting; instead of trying to answer my statistical objection, you are now forcing me to provide anecdotal evidence; to then most likely reject it for being anecdotal evidence. Pass.
As for “it doesn’t apply universally,” that’s not an argument because almost nothing applies universally - not even a sunrise and sunset, if you’re at the North Pole. My point can still be valid in almost all metro areas.
Finally, let’s say I did use these systems (and, sometimes, I do use public transit). I’m a man, you are 90% likely here to be a man, we’re not the ones getting groped, therefore our personal opinions on the likelihood are obviously irrelevant. You should be asking your wife and your 15 year old daughter to ride for a year and rate their comfort level.
I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.
As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.
This Post article doesn't provide a source. Mine claims the NYPD as a source but doesn't link it either, though. It seems like only one of these can be correct: there would have to be a very large spike in felony assaults in a single month for the number to go up by 9% YoY.
The Times article doesn't mention this year's stats. Last year's were definitely worse, so it's not surprising they mention that.
The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, if not lower, than being shot elsewhere.
I'm fundamentally against any measure that intentionally increases the cost at use of any form of transportation service whatsoever. Public transit? Free. Gas tax? Kill it.
I grew up on a goddamn island, I've seen what an inability for people to travel easily or when the cost of doing so has to be seriously weighed does to an economy and it's not good for anyone or anything except a very select lucky few who are well positioned to take advantage.
While the NY government can probably extract this rent from this area without damaging anything serious but it is not something that should be allowed to proliferate.
INB4 environment/pollution, the richer we all are the better custodians we will be of the environment. Nobody cares if their energy is clean when they can barely make ends meet.
I’m impressed. This is one of the strangest opinions I’ve ever seen. What is special about “at use”? Presumably because it lets you avoid the question of whether everyone should get a free car. Does a monthly car payment count as “at use”? Why not if a monthly transit pass does?
The other replies point out that different forms of transit compete with each other, so the more cars we have, the fewer bikes and trains.
Because once an investment has been made in a car and roads or in a train line or whatever there should be no artificial distinctive for people to use it as they deem appropriate.
As others have said, you are describing a totally imaginary world where money is the only cost. “Artificial” is doing all the work. But the very investments you’re describing are “artificial”, and more than that, they require constant spending to maintain. Why should cost at point of use be the only artificial incentive? What about the environment created by those investments? The quality of roads, the cleanliness of the train? Your distinction is contrived in service of your predetermined conclusion.
Taking up space, degrading public infrastructure, polluting the air, and killing pedestrians are real ongoing costs of transportation. The cost does not magically end at vehicle purchase.
But when there are multiple competing forms of transit, or high externalities caused by use (or overuse) artificial disincentives are optimal. As an example, if you have access to both a car and a train, and the car pollutes less than the train, some artificial incentive to only use the car when necessary and to use the train otherwise is actually optimal.
You're also, it seems assuming that investment is a one-time thing. Once an investment has been made in a train line or a car, you still need to afford maintenance over the thing over the lifetime of the thing. Including the opportunity costs of doing other things instead.
I’m in the side of transit should be free, but as I understand it, the fare is often a pretense to more easily enforce problematic behavior on the train. Fare evasion and other antisocial behavior often come together.
California has quite the gas tax, but it seems to do little to change behavior. Likely because the alternatives to driving are generally not great, but rolling the taxes back shouldn’t be the solution.
This is precisely the reasoning I bring up. In essence traffic congestion is an externality not unlike pollution. What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time. We've made explicit a cost that was already there, and by doing so the system can respond to it and behave more intelligently.
> What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time.
Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.
Exactly. The janitor has every right to sit in gridlock beside the CEO. If either doesn't like it they can adjust things but realistically the CEO's got the most ability and incentive to do so.
These artificial price distortions wind up most benefiting the people who were in the best position to alter their behavior.
Excessive car use lowers mobility for EVERYONE. Restrictions to car use, lower speeds via traffic calming, removing car lanes and adding bike and bus lanes, all of this IMPROVES transportation times including for cars!
Yep, except for public holidays where I'm going by car I never spend time in traffic. In my small city I can e-bike everywhere on almost entirely separated bike paths and if the weather isn't good I can take the bus or subway. If all else fails there's still Uber and Bolt
Gas taxes (partially) pay for the roads. Get rid of those and you've just decreased your tax base, which means you're going to have to pay for it from another tax. It's just shifting the tax burden. We can argue about what's a better tax policy, if a certain tax is progressive or regressive and so on but wherever the money comes, somebody needs to pay for the roads.
NYC is one of about 2 places in the US that actually has usable public transit, barring certain outer boroughs where car ownership dominates. It's largely a hub and spoke model though so it's good for going into and out of Manhattan but not so good for, say, getting from Red Hook to Flushing so driving will dominate that kind of travel.
But that's why congestion pricing is targeted at Lower Manhattan and can't really spread beyond it. Like see how far you get trying congestion pricing in Houston or Dallas, let alone Bakersfield, Boise or Lexington (KY).
Economic incentives work. They're probably most responsible for the drop in smoking. Congestion pricing consistently changes people's behavior and every metric shows it. Some bus lines in NYC now move nearly 30% faster.
I don't know what island you're talking about and what happened but will generally agree that people are struggling all over. It's well-known that real wages have largely been stagnant for 40-50 years.
But that's not a problem caused by gas taxes. It's caused by capitalism.
Great comment from that video: "When cars were banned from Central Park drivers whined and now we can't imagine it any other way." Everything is impossible until it is done.
I see this with new apartment buildings in my small, NIMBY-dominated town.
Building proposed: "It will be too expensive! We need housing for those making 10% of median income, not for those making the median income!"
Building mid-construction: "This building is unbelievably ugly! How could we let this happen to our town?!"
Building completed: "This building is completely vacant! Why did we allow this to be constructed? It's just proof we should never build anything again, it's not needed."
18 months later, building fully occupied, lots of happy residents with mixed incomes: Silence, because they are too busy complaining about all the other buildings.
I heard a similar statement recently, which is that due to the nature of politics, there are decades where nothing is possible, followed by a couple of years where everything is possible, and you spend the former preparing and pushing for the work that will happen in the latter.
She delayed it by 6 months because she thought it would hurt some candidates in House elections, and then she reduced the fee by a significant amount when it did go into effect in January, but it's still working incredibly well.
I don't think it made sense either, especially because cutting the congestion pricing revenue last-second meant she had to start talking about raising taxes on the entire state instead, but that is the consensus on what she was thinking.
She delayed it by many months and lowered the fee, but eventually it went through. There was a theory that she wanted to delay it to win some contested seats in the November election, but that did not bear fruit. Now those voters still hate her, as do all the people that wanted congestion pricing. She was not well liked at the Democratic National Convention.
The reason she's not well liked is because she did absolutely nothing about probably one of the most corrupt mayors in the history of NYC.
The congestion charge is nowhere on the DNC's radar nationally. The mayor of the largest city in the country engaging in blatant quid pro quo with a president from another party, certainly is.
I'm not quite following here. What is Hochul supposed to do about Adams? The DoJ suit against Adams didn't happen until a month after the DNC. Blatant quid pro quo with a president from another party couldn't have happened until long after the DNC.
This guy is so cool, he uses the word "ratfucked"! Twice! Not just "fucked", but "ratfucked". Of course, congestion pricing was in fact implemented and remains in effect, so maybe not entirely "ratfucked"? Guess I'm not cool enough to understand. And because of his choice of words, people who are unfamiliar with this project don't even know what action(s) Kathy Hochul actually took that was/were detrimental.
My guess is that she lacks the essential political skill of reading the room. It's not like NYC is the first city to attempt congestion pricing. Anyone who has spent any time in London can see its benefits. So I think Hochul had her political focus on the wrong things.
It took a lot of time and effort to bring the stakeholders together for congestion pricing. And to withhold her approval at the last moment was shocking. It's hard to imagine what she was really thinking and even harder to understand how she felt she would be rewarded for it. That's not a real answer to your question, but her reasoning on both congestion pricing and Eric Adams just seems opaque.
Perhaps it's a social sign for being one of the NYC local. They also referred to a person by a single name, further emphasizing they were speaking to the select few who would know what they were talking about.
If only they could also write with a heavy NYC accent, their comment would be even cooler. Forget about it.
That's interesting. It must be that I associate rats with NYC. You used some terms that not everyone is familair with, I jump to the wrong conclusion, taking some guesses as to what you're talking about, and here we are.
ratfucking as a term in political context was dramatically popularized by the movie All the President’s Men, where a (historical) character describes his covert political actions thusly.
NYC is an extreme outlier. The city itself is older than America, older than the British colonies even. It was built by the Dutch. It's infrastructure is closer to Tokyo's[0] than any other American city. Congestion charge works in NYC because anyone driving solo into Manhattan is either an idiot or a cop[1].
In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so comically car-dependent. You might as well just raise the gas tax. Most cities don't even have a downtown to protect from cars, they're just suburban sprawl forever.
The actually radical solution for places outside the Tri-State Area is as follows:
- Ban mixed streets and highways ("stroads"). That is, any road in the network must either be built to exclusively service local properties, or carry high-speed thru traffic, not both. Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.
- Level the zoning code. Allow mixed commercial everywhere, get rid of lawn setbacks, and allow up to four story buildings basically anywhere the soil won't collapse from it. The only limitations to this policy should be to prevent existing tenants from being renovicted immediately.
- Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.
I'm not sure how any of this would play in the motosexual parts of America, though. Even nominally blue states like California would shit themselves if you tried to even slightly inconvenience car owners.
[0] To be clear, Tokyo as we know it today was basically rebuilt by America after we leveled it with firebombs. It was specifically built in the image of Manhattan.
[1] I can imagine several reasons why NYPD cops might not want to take public transit which I won't elaborate further on here.
> In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so comically car-dependent. You might as well just raise the gas tax. Most cities don't even have a downtown to protect from cars, they're just suburban sprawl forever.
Nah. Almost any city built pre-motor-car has a decent downtown that can make for a starting point. And these things grow when policy supports them.
> Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.
Nah, this would just result in a wave of urban highway building that also drained transit budgets.
The way forward is to make street parking permit-only, give permits to existing but not new residents, and allow development. Do that and the rest will sort itself out.
> - Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.
BRT is a spook that has never worked (or rather it's worked very well in diverting transit efforts and stopping effective transit).
The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.
Expanding the commute availability circle does not increase the supply of housing, because people build sparser neighborhoods with larger lawns. If you want to increase the supply of housing, you need higher density, not longer distance.
What longer distance does is make the closer areas more valuable, because people will pay $$$ for a shorter commute. And for those who can't afford the closer housing, they get to pay $$ on a car and gas instead.
Cars are only helpful in exactly two scenarios:
1. You live in a remote rural area where any sort of transit infrastructure is comically infeasible. 99% of the people posting here do not quality for this.
2. You live in a city so maliciously planned out that living without a car is unthinkable and that any other option to get to where you're going is not available.
I use the word "malicious" because the gutting of American cities' transit infrastructure was a deliberate act by American car companies giving their competition the mafia bust-out treatment.
I feel like its often people talking past each other.
I currently live in NYC and am very congestion pricing. Cars are a major negative to most people in the city.
But I have also lived in rural parts of America. Yes, it is annoying you can't walk to a corner store, but cars are not that big of a deal. You can bike or run in the streets without concern that cars will come by. And housing is so cheap it makes it so worth it.
If public transit even remotely resembled anything in China or Japan, Americans would ditch their cars in a heartbeat. But every train ride I've been on to Manhattan is like commuting through an open sewer while being harassed by strangers doing an obnoxious dance with a bluetooth speaker in my face, dodging puddles of urine, and wondering if today's the day I'll be thrown off the platform.
Of course people would rather commute in a gas guzzling SUV. I don't even know how it's controversial. It must be a form of Stockholm syndrome to think that this would be attractive to any normally adjusted human being.
I’ve taken the train a lot in and around NYC, including a ton of subway trips. While the experience you’re describing is certainly not so rare as to be nonexistent, it’s also far from the norm. The large, large majority of subway rides I’ve taken (99% at least) were complete non-events. Perhaps you’re unlucky?
1. A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train), is unacceptable to bear, when there exist alternatives.
1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly or wrongly, people feel more in control when they're driving compared to when they're using public transit (or similarly, taking a commercial flight), which makes them feel better about it. And there is some element of sense here: accidents do not occur evenly among the population, because some drivers are better and more alert than others.
2. If you're traveling with small children, the various (however rare it may be) unpleasantries of NYC public transit become an order of magnitude more unpleasant.
3. There certainly is an element of Stockholm syndrome among NYC transit users, in that other very large cities around the world with ridership comparable to NYC have very little antisocial dysfunction, but in NYC it often gets waved away as "part and parcel of living in a big city".
That imagery isn't the norm, but there are dozens of annoying behaviors, smells and experiences on the subway that make the daily grind an RPG dice roll in terms of if it's not a new story you'll be telling.
Please, this is the absolute least intelligent response to anything I've read today. You do nothing to further the conversation in anything resembling an informative way.
Cars are only harmful in dense cities. They work just fine everywhere else. For example in small cities kids can play in the road without fear of cars. It's only in dense cities where they can not.
Dense cities are also the only places where public transit works, so it kind of balances out.
> This is just a small example.
New York city is a small example? New York city is the largest city in the US, and pretty much the ONLY city where you can do this. And the mediocre results (10% is very little) from even NYC show that this will not even come close to working anywhere else.
I live in a low density city and my neighbors are constantly complaining about how fast cars speed by and how it makes it unsafe for their kids.
Dense cities are too congested for speeds to get that high. As an example, I felt safer biking in downtown San Francisco than I do on the country roads near me because people are constantly speeding and on their phones.
Seems to be working fine, I know the large city about 60 miles from me looked at this, and I am all for it. But its mass transit is a awful mess, at times walking is faster that taking a subway.
I wish they would start this, but its politics is such a mess nothing really gets done there. New Ideas there gets implemented far slower than then ideas in Roman Catholic Church.
Transit always seems to be kind of a chicken and egg problem. You can’t have good transit unless you have good ridership, and you can’t have good ridership if you don’t have good transit.
Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
Vancouver. The first section of SkyTrain was built in 1985 (40 years ago) well after cars had dominated the city. I couldn't find historical figures for transit mode share, but today more than 50% of all trips are made by public or active transportation, and 90% of residents live within 10 minutes of a frequent transit line.
For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.
> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Shanghai. Amsterdam up to a point - they never completely lost their transit, but it was in pretty bad shape.
> Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
It can help. You need improving transit and densification to happen together so they can reinforce each other, so you need coordination between transport policy and housing policy, I think that's the key.
The other good reason to choose congestion pricing as the start to breaking the chicken/egg problem is that, outside of NYC and maybe Chicago, public transit in the US is primarily buses on streets shared with car traffic. It's hard to attract ridership and improve buses when they're always stuck in car traffic, so starting by reducing traffic via congestion pricing is particularly pragmatic.
Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so.
I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.
That's not an A/B test because it has no way of controlling for broader economic trends over time. How do you figure out if what you're seeing is because of that one thing that changed, or the enormous list of other things that also changed around the same time?
A more valid design would be randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it. Obviously not feasible in practice, but that's at least the kind of thing to strive toward when designing these kinds of studies.
That would be a bad design for an A/B study (and NYC congestion pricing is not a “study” anyway), because cities are few and not alike and have an enormous list of other things that are different. What NYC equivalent would you pick?
In any case, not every policy change needs to be an academic exercise.
Yup, that is indeed a part of the problem. You'll notice I did say, "Obviously not feasible in practice."
I've got a textbook on field experiments that refers to these kinds of questions as FUQ - acronym for "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions". You can collect suggestive evidence, but firmly establishing cause and effect is something you've just got to let go of.
> randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it
Cities are stupidly heterogenous. These data wouldn't be more meaningful than comparing cities with congestion pricing to those without. (And comparing them from their congestion eras.)
The real world isn't A/B tests. No government is going to spend millions on equipment and infrastructure on a congestion zone because some engineers are like "Let's just test this out. I have done zero research on what could possibly happen, but it would be fun to see what the results are."
When you write it out like that, it seems to make total sense! But then you read grant proposals that get funded - in things like the social sciences and humanities, and even conventional science and health - millions of dollars essentially just throwing darts to see what sticks.
> Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so. I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.
Policies have different effects depending on how likely people judge them to be long-term changes. Construction along a route will cause people to temporarily use alternative forms of transportation, but not e.g. sell their car or buy a long-term bus pass.
Yes, the inability to know counterfactuals will make judging policies more subjective than we might like. The closest we get to A/B testing is when different jurisdictions adopt substantially similar policies at different times. For example, this was done to judge improvements from phasing out leaded-gasoline, since it was done at different times and rates in different areas.
unfortunately, building a second NYC for the purposes of A/B testing isn't feasible.
but we have before and after data to compare - that's what this article is about. and the congestion pricing plan included requirements to publish data specifically for the purposes of comparison between last year and this year.
Unfortunately, the possibility exists that the moment of introducing the A/B test requirement will be strategically chosen to freeze the status quo in the way the chooser prefers.
“A/B in time” suffers from inability to control for other factors that might vary over time. In this case, that could be the economy or other transit policies.
"before" and "after" introduces a large axis of noise
The problem is that for A/B testing to really work you need independent groups outcomes. As soon as there is any bias in group selection or cross group effect it's very hard to unpick.
Generally, that's considered to introduce counfounding factors on the time axis ("did we see improvement because we changed something or because flu season hit and people stayed home") that you'd prefer to mitigate by running your A and B simultaneously.
But in the absence of the ability to run them simultaneously, "A is before and B is after" can be a fine proxy. Of course, if B is worse, it'd be nice if you could only subject, say, 5% of your population to it before you just slam the slider to 100% and hit everyone with it.
yes, but how the hell he proposes to make A/B testing of "whole Manhattan policy"?
build another Manhattan just for test? makes no sense. whole manhattan is important. not 5%. so no 5%. a/b test can be done only for things which affect one person, like for example GUI etc, big group under test but effect on individuals,
in such big scale a/b test is tool to deceive, not to get to right conclusion
It is, indeed, much easier to do A/B testing online in environments you control than IRL.
(Purely hypothetically: one could identify 10% of the island as operating under the new rules and compare outcomes. This is politically fraught on multiple levels and also gives messy spatial results.)
It's nice that all those numbers are up, but it would be great also to see some metrics that attempted to measure the overall utility of the change. Something like avg time spent commuting, or really commute_time * dollars_spent_commuting^B where B is some parameter for the relative utility of time and money. Of course B is different for everyone but something like this could be attempted.
Stated another way, if they made congestion pricing $1000 instead of $15 or whatever it is, all those numbers mentioned in the article would go way way up and it would look like a smashing success. The article doesn't make any attempt to measure anything that could potentially be a downside.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
Were that delivery driver using a car instead of a bike, then your wife would likely be dead instead of in the ER.
(At least in the US, having a driver's license is in no way, shape, or form an indication that the driver is capable of driving correctly, much less their willingness to do so.)
I have seen as many car drivers punished for running a red light as I have seen cyclists running one--zero in both cases. Enforcement of traffic laws is painfully lax.
Yeah, just imagine. I did. For hours yesterday evening I imagined.
Had a car killed my wife or unborn child, there would have been a legal trail and insurance.
Had the e-bike killed my wife or unborn child, there was neither. I doubt I could ever find the killer of the unborn child if the baby died later due to injuries-- there's neither license nor registration on an e-bike.
Pushing powered transportation into the unregulated, uninsured space is madness.
You would likely be unhappy if you saw the outcomes of almost all vehicle manslaughter cases. It’s the easiest way to kill someone and get away with it consequence free
The perpetrators of most vehicular homicides face little to no consequences.
You'd have to be an utter asshole (like a kid totaling three cars in a year, all going 70-100+ mph on urban streets), or the world's dumbest criminal (motorcyclist out on parole running a red, killing a pedestrian, fleeing the scene, and ditching the motorcycle in a field) for killing someone with a car to be more than a 'whoopsie daisies, at least nobody important got hurt'.
In my town, just last year, a cop running down a young woman when she had right of way in a crosswalk, while doing 74 mph in a 25 mph zone at night, with no sirens, got a $5,000 fine for it.
That's how much the life of a grad student is worth.
---
Look, I'm all for traffic enforcement, but anyone who thinks that bikes are the big problem on the road is nuts.
In other forums there are lots of complaints about the NYC crackdown on e-bikes. NYC has taken steps to discourage their use. Maybe not enough, but definitely more than in most other parts of the country.
It would be interesting to force eBikes to be registered which the owner then receives a number plate that must be placed on the bike. The owner would be subject to fines any rider of the bike incurs unless the bike is reported stolen so that the video is proven to be after the bike was stolen.
Gotta give those automated systems something to use
> Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
It sounds like measures to limit the danger of electric bikes might be warranted, but that’s a separate issue. Even if electric bikes are a problem I’d be shocked if they came anywhere close to causing the pedestrian fatality rate of cars (even when controlled by frequency of use) in an urban environment, not to mentioni the additional impacts of things like emissions (including non-tailpipe), noise, space, etc. of cars. I don’t know much about motorcycle statistics. I can imagine the group that rides motorcycles might be less likely to hit pedestrians than those of e-bike riders, but I don’t know.
If we have to choose only one of these problems to tackle at a time—which we don’t!—I’d rather they tackle the one which is killing hundreds of people a year.
The traffic has a negative effect on more than just car owners--smog, noise, accidents, slower taxis, to name a few. Why should only car owners, who are a minority in Manhattan, vote on a problem that affects everyone?
This is one of those things that I struggle to have a strong opinion on from a personal experience standpoint as I can't imagine wanting to drive in Manhattan...
I find transit and traffic to be a complex topic and sometime I see changes to a road locally and "yeah that makes sense to do taht there" but the next street over "no way". The New York City dynamic, I've zero clue how that plays out...
Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious.
The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like highlighting how many fewer chicken deaths would occur if we created an omnivore or meat tax.
IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. How much fewer social interaction is happening across the distances that those car based trips used to occur. And how much harder is it to get goods into the areas. Is less economic activity happening.
In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up.
If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users.
IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.
It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending.
I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
I can understand why poor families might save enough money to make the trip across town to a nice restaurant or a high end shop in a wealthy neighborhood they could never afford to live in. I can't understand how making it prohibitively expensive for poor people to drive into those nice neighborhoods will result in them becoming rich enough to open fancy restaurants and shops in their own poor neighborhoods where no rich people will ever travel to. The people in the poor neighborhood can't afford to eat/shop in such places often enough to support them and rich people won't go into poor neighborhoods for them either.
Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.
I don’t understand. This family saved to afford a fancy meal, parking, and possibly tolls, but can’t afford the congestion pricing?
It’s not about bringing fine dining to every neighborhood, but if it costs (money or time) more for the poor and rich alike to leave their neighborhood business owners could be incentivized to step up their game.
Driving into NYC is one of those things that is most convenient at the beginning (driving in, stay in my car) but has a high cost at the end (looking/paying for parking, traffic, on a parking time limit, etc.) I do think if people grow ACCUSTOMED to taking the subway in, they will prefer that in most cases.
I don't think you can infer that people were using their preferred method just from the fact that they were using it - after all, the status quo was also the result of policy.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
I think the article mentions this?
> In March, just over 50 million people visited business districts inside the congestion zone, or 3.2 percent more than in the same period last year, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (its estimate tries to exclude people who work or live in the area).
See also the "Other business measures are doing OK so far" heading.
There were critics who predicted that it would not reduce traffic and congestion. They argued people had no choice but to drive and would just be forced to pay.
> In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
The article highlights that was $45 million in the month of March alone:
"In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year."
It's sort of weird, because taken to its logical conclusion (nobody drives into lower Manhattan) they would be collecting nothing. They are disincentivizing the thing that they are counting on to provide revenue.
Of course, practically that will not happen, but it could be that they are overestimating the long term revenue stream. As more and more people get used to not driving into downtown, that will become the habit, and then their kids won't be used to it and they won't do it either.
The cool thing about pricing is you can make the pricing variable to achieve whatever ends you want… if you’re desperate for more cars for some reason you can just lower the cost and the ‘market’ will respond. You can have lower costs in the afternoon or at night, or no cost on weekends.
They are tracking that sort of thing. One of the line items is "vistors to the zone - up". Another two are restaurants and Broadway receipts which have no data yet.
I'm a little unsure how to read you. These results look, frankly, amazing. The benefits to schools and busses alone would have been good. That traffic is faster everywhere is a cherry on top of it all.
And you did see that they had a section on restaurants, right? Those are up. They polled stores and found only 25% that report a negative impact. That looks concerning, I agree. Would love more polling on it with quantification.
Could this still be a bad policy? Of course. Could it be a good policy today that trends to bad some day in the future? I'd think so. But we have tools to monitor this stuff that flat didn't exist before. We should be in a good place to try stuff like this. And, again, these results look amazing.
Getting business stats is fraught. If a business is struggling, the owners opinion on the cause is important, but is it accurate?
In Wellington, New Zealand, failing business love to blame cycle lanes for their woes. The government sacking a significant number of people and an economic downturn is apparently not the cause.
To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?
Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.
If you would normally do one behavior because it is being heavily subsidized by other people and you are not bearing the cost of that behavior. Of course people have a preference to not bear the cost of their own externalities
Every time my mom comes to visit us in the city, at some point she says she could never live here because she couldn't imagine having to drive in city traffic every day. And every time she does that, I remind her that her car hasn't moved even once since she first arrived a week ago. Mostly we walk everywhere. And every time she responds, "Oh, you're right. You know, that's been really nice."
She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.
>She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.
I'm in a suburban area. When I was a child, I got driven everywhere - until I was old enough to take public transit by myself.
I'm about to walk ~3km (2mi) each way to a grocery store, something I do regularly. I save thousands of dollars annually like this. I could feed myself several times over with that money.
It will never stop being strange to me that people actually get that car-dependent mindset ingrained into them.
1. Possibly reasons like this: https://archive.is/tjdZ2 ... to save you the click, the title/subtitle reads:
> When Getting Out of Jail Means a Deadly Walk Home
> Nearly every day in Santa Fe, N.M., people released from jail trudge along a dangerous highway to get back to town. Jails often fail to offer safe transport options for prisoners.
2. You must have a preference for walking, since a bicycle would be at least 3x and as much as 10x faster than walking.
3. The thousands of dollar number seems misleading. If you bought a car solely for this purpose, yes, I believe you're right. But that seems unlikely. The actual marginal cost of using a car you already owned for this purpose is on the order of $3-500.
I commend and support what you do (though I prefer to use my bike when I can). But I don't think the financial benefits should be overstated. There are, of course, other benefits.
The average annual cost of owning a car in Canada is >$16000 CAD. In the US it's even higher at >$12000 USD.
Obviously owning a bike, taking public transit and taxis, and occasionally renting a car isn't free, but if you live in a walkable neighbourhood and can take public transit to work it's easy to keep your monthly transportation expenses under $200. The great part about not needing to own a car is that there's no sunk cost that incentivises you to choose one option over another.
I don't think revealed preferences are the only reasonable way to define "preference."
To use an extreme example: Does the homeless alcoholic divorcé really prefer to be homeless and divorced?
For a more abstract example, consider games like the Prisoner's dilemma, where "both defect" is worse for both players than "both cooperate" but choosing to defect always improves the result for a player. Surely both players would prefer the "both cooperate" solution to the "both defect" but without some external force, they end up in a globally suboptimal result.
This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum.
If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.
> To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?
Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ).
Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that.
All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety.
I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.
There are plenty of places where consumption taxes DON’T have a strong effect, like vice taxes on tobacco and alcohol. It’s absolutely worth actually testing it.
Vice taxes on tobacco have an incredibly strong direct effect.. especially on preventing youths from starting to smoke and on poor people continuing to smoke…. It’s something like a 7% reduction in the number of youth smokers for every 10% increase in price.
A consumption tax isn't going to make meat suppliers any more conscious of environmental effects from poor processes though, if any thing it will push them further away from it to try and lower prices more.
Also steak is a terrible example, cows eat alfalfa which is a nitrogen fixating crop and reduces artificial fertilizer usage that doesn't require pesticides and is basically free to grow anywhere it rains. And we don't grow alfalfa in arid places to feed US people meat, we grow it in arid places because it is near the ports and container ships need some sort of cheap bulk weight to send back to China as ballast.
Think about it more; if the vegan and steak options were ~equivalently priced - more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive. The idea isn't to make it prohibitive; insofaras don't make the most environmentally-expensive choice also the cheapest.
To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.
> more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive.
If?
Getting protein from vegan sources can already be done much more cheaply than getting it from steak, though the quality of the amino acid profile may be lower.
Getting protein from "the vegan option to a steak" - i.e. something marketed to be a direct substitute for a steak, with its vegan nature as an explicit selling point - is a different story.
I presume that, generally, people eat steak because they subjectively enjoy the experience of eating steak, and perhaps because they don't enjoy a carefully planned out plate of legumes and whole grains in the same way. But some seem to be much more extreme about this than others.
I personally eat meat (and dairy) regularly - but probably overall less than the local average, and usually not beef.
As a committed meat-eater: I have no idea what vegan food costs, as the label almost immediate makes me skip over them. To make me look at them, you'd have to make the non-vegan options prohibitively expensive.
Well most raw vegan food is already way cheaper that raw meat:
Quality organic dry chickpeas, lentils, beans, soy etc… already are around 2€/kg where I live and when you add water they double/triple in weight so you end up at 1€/kg. You’ll probably eat a bit more weight than meat but still the price is nowhere comparable. Add some whole cereals instead of white bread for nutrition and better satiety: they’re more expensive but you got the price back on the quantity you eat (you won’t stuff yourself that much T165 bread or brown rice: the fibers will make you feel full super fast). And for the vegetable you usually can find stuff super nutritious for cheap : apples, leak, cabbages and alls sorts of oignons.
Even fancy organic quinoa is like 10€/kg but also double in weight and you only eat ~1.3 times the meat weight you’ll eat in meat-meal.
Industrial chicken is 5€/kg un the shop and "good" one 15€/kg. Quality beef is nowhere in that range.
Missing the point, which was that you're not going to convince people like me who ignore the vegan options just by having them be cheaper than meat, because I won't look.
The only thing that would make me look at the vegan options would be if I felt I couldn't afford the meat options.
I'll reword it. The idea isn't to make everyone skip meat; but to make the non-meat options more competitive. I say this as one with multiple briskets in my chest freezer waiting for some good weather.
My problem with congestion pricing is that it still doesn't provide great incentives for cities to improve walkability and public transit.
"What do you mean our transit is bad, look, our ridership numbers are 3x higher than all our neighbors combined!" *Does not mention the fact that congestion pricing in neighboring cities is 3x lower.*
In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts. If your city has safe districts with good transit where rich people live, and unsafe districts with terrible transit where poor people live, congestion pricing will allow rich people to choose between the convenience of taking a car with no traffic jams versus the cheapness of transit, while forcing poor people to choose between a car they can't afford versus walking down a street where they may be assaulted.
It's even worse if you have rich people living in the city center where they work, and poor people who also work there living in towns much further away. Then, only the rich are able to vote on congestion pricing.
This probably doesn't apply to New York specifically (not an American, have never been), but it's definitely something to have in mind in general.
>In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts.
When I lived in Atlanta, there were people, mostly YIMBYs and other urbanists, who wanted to charge a significant congestion fee to anyone living in surrounding towns like Alpharetta, Roswell, Duluth, etc., who commuted into the city to work.
It would effectively be a car vice tax paid by the working class, as most of the people I knew out there lived there because Atlanta rents and home prices are insane.
Congestion pricing is ok when there are alternate methods of transportation that are usable enough that you could expect a person to just switch to them rather than pay the fee. But when there's not such an alternative, the people will simply pay the fee because they have no other option, and now you've just further immiserated peoples' lives.
The closest thing to a response I've heard is that they think such a situation would encourage people to vote and push for better transit options. I just don't see it though. Ignoring that in my case, Atlanta, the city was a de facto one party city in which primaries were mostly determined by media endorsements and more emotional issues than transit and urbanism development, I just don't see that this kind of policy making that shapes the incentives (both carrot and stick) for the masses works in practice. Peoples' decisions are so much more complicated and subject to tons of other factors that this approach can't control.
People said the same thing about New York City, but it is absolutely not true at all about NYC. Rich people drive into NYC, others take transit.
It may be true in Atlanta, but it wasn't passed in Atlanta. I'd want to see a ton of data before I believed your claims though. Typically suburbs are where the wealthier people live.
