Note that it was snowy in NYC today, so people were likely dissuaded to drive by other factors than congestion pricing as well. It'll be interesting to see what impact there is as we get further along in the year.
The dashboard is based off of Google Maps travel time data which I'm unsure of the exact accuracy. I imagine the city might also have other more direct metrics that can be used, such as the count of vehicles passing through the tunnels into the congestion zone.
Note if you check "unaffected" routes (16 and 18), you'll see they had much smaller changes.
Also, while simple metrics are cool, what commuters really care is how long it took to get from point A to point B, which is what this shows...
You are correct, steveBK is incorrect.
Right this dashboard won't be meaningful until 3/6/12 months out when any seasonality / weather related effects all average out.
It's a neat little project but people aren't doing that on the regular so the data should be pretty good.
I do wonder how google handles edge cases, passengers, busses, etc. I've been in rideshares where the driver is using 4 phones - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/business/apps-uber-lyft-d...
I think, at least the way I would approach the problem, would be to look at the speed or flow rate of the phones on a particular road as the primary signal. I believe Google has ways of detecting if the device is in a car/vehicle vs being carried for example so they could filter out "walking" phones. Then looking at the flow of devices alleviates the need to calculate the carrying capacity of a particular road. The speed/flow tells you want you're trying to measure more directly than trying to count phones and decide if that means a road is congested or not, to do that you'd need to develop a heuristic to estimate the capacity of roads which seems like you're unnecessarily ignoring the direct signal in favor of trying to calculate it from a noisier source.
Snowy? That was a light dusting that I cleaned up with a broom.
I have a flexible commute that sometimes involves driving a car into the zone and if I see snow in the forecast I'll be less likely to be in the city with a car that day.
I love congestion pricing, I will gladly pay $9 if it lowers traffic during peak hours. I also try to plan trips in the offpeak hours anyway. If you leave at 11pm you can get from shea stadium to Philly in an hour forty-five.
I think it was worse in suburban areas slightly outside of the city, at least on the NJ side. In western Bergen county, I had a bit over 1 inch and had to break out the shovel for the sidewalk.
Still though, an inch or two around here is not a big deal. I only really start complaining when I have to break out the snow blower.
I happened to be living in London when congestion pricing was brought in and the difference on day 1 in the West End was like night and day. I believe it's never gone back to the pre-congestion pricing levels. I fully expect similar in Manhattan.
The social media response has been particularly interesting. Predictably, there are a lot of non-NYCers who simply object to the slightest inconvenience to driving in any form. These can be ignored.
What's more interesting are how many native (or at least resident) New Yorkers who are against this. They tend to dress up the reasons for this (as people do) because it basically comes down to "I like to drive from Queens/Brooklyn into Manhattan". There's almost no reason for anyone to have to drive into Manhattan. It's almost all pure convenience.
The funniest argument against this is "safety", the idea that the Subway is particularly unsafe. You know what's unsafe? Driving.
Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere.
And if we're going to talk about subsidies, how about free street parking... in Manhattan. Each parking space is like $500k-$1M on real estate. In a just world, a street parking pass would cost $500/month.
The second interesting aspect is how long it takes to bring in something like this. In the modern form, it's been on the cards for what? A decade? Longer? Court challenges? A complicit governor blocking implementation? That resistance only ever goes in one direction.
My only complaint is that the MTA should be free. Replace the $20 billion (or whatever it is) in fares with $20 billion in taxes on those earning $100k+ and on airport taxes. Save the cost of ticketing and enforcement. Stop spending $100M on deploying the National Guard (to recover $100k in fares).
Public transit fares (that are going up to $3 this year) are a regressive tax on the people that the city cannot run without.
All studies show that free public transit is a bad idea. There is a reason no country provides it. People mis-treat free things. When you ask them to pay for it, it enforces civic contracts. With contactless terminals in place, a free MTA benefits no one. It's also difficult to get additional funding to improve something that's free.
An MTA monthly pass is 130$. That's the price of a single uber round-trip to JFK. NYC also allows employers to provide commuter benefits tax-free.
It's cheap enough.
Luxembourg has free public transit.
> There is a reason no country provides it.
While small, Luxembourg is still considered a country. And their public transit is both free, and fantastic
Several EU cities have experimented with making public transport free, and people seem to really enjoy it.
Also, as you so eloquently put it, it isn't clear that the cost for issuing and checking tickets is covered by the income from the tickets, and there are reasons why MTA tickets cannot be priced at the actual cost to cover the ticket compliance infrastructure -- with a nice analogy to the cost of parking vs value of parking real estate. What justifies the subsidy for on-street parking?
Some internet searching suggests fares account for between 25 and 33 percent of the MTA’s revenue. There’s no way the infrastructure for collecting fares costs that much.
This is one of the main criticisms of free fares: in reality the revenue stream from fares is never actually fully replaced, so it just results in the transit agency becoming underfunded. This makes transit worse for existing users who are already paying. The new users you get because of free fares are mostly casual users like tourists who have alternate options, so serving them isn’t that useful and not worth the negative impact on existing users.
>Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere.
I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, but this it needs to be noted that most road damage is done by weather and heavyweight vehicles like semis/trash/buses/delivery vehicles etc., not regular passenger vehicles.
Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.
This is true, but it's also changing in interesting ways: the rise of both light-truck SUVs and EVs as a whole means that passenger cars are, on average, heaver than they've ever been before.
This is still a small portion of overall road damage, but it matters in places like NYC. In particular it matters on our bridges and cantilevered highways, where passenger traffic can't be easily filtered away from weight-sensitive areas like commercial traffic can.
>Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.
I don't think there would be much point. At the end of the day we'd all pay it because we all consume the goods they deliver or transport during intermediary steps in the supply chain.
I guess you could argue that the status quo is somewhat of a tax incentive that favors local manufacturing (i.e they use the roads for every step of the chain vs imported goods which only use it for delivery). I don't take much issue with that.
Repairing road damage is only a part of road cost. We do not build expensive 2-16 lane roads and massive parking lots to support trucks and buses. We build them because everyone needs to drive their personal vehicle to work each day at 8am.
Then the space taken up by unnecessarily big roads and parking lots further stretches distances between destinations out, leading to... more roads required.
I agree that semis are subsidized to a ridiculous degree, but I don't agree that we necessarily _need_ them. What we need is a way to transport things, and in a non-subsidized world, we'd probably come up with a different way which could be just as good or better.
Note that diesel is taxed nearly 40% higher than gasoline per gallon in the US. And shipping trucks use a lot more gallons of gas (total and per mile).
Should the rate be higher? Perhaps. But it's already a bit slanted towards vehicle weight based on fuel type and consumption.
Electric vehicles, and especially electric shipping trucks, are going to require finding new taxation sources.
Why is the answer to offset MTA ticket revenue an additional tax on those making $100K+ or those traveling through the city (airport taxes) who don’t use the service? In a city with super high cost of living and almost no auditable way to connect taxes collected with service delivered, this sounds like a penalty to anyone making six figures or connecting through the airport.
There has to be another, more sustainable way for a rich city like NYC to make a service truly accessible and free without another tax. It’s like how the Bay Area bridge tolls have increased by $1 this year to fund the BART system => we still don’t know what was done with the last increase in tolls, yet we have to pony up the extra cash this year.
Smarter folks than me on HN might have an idea other than, “let’s tax folks who make more than an arbitrary dollar amount annually” that has worked in other large metropolitan areas.
The subway fare is _insanely_ cheap and it's also uniform, which is important because short intra-Manhattan riders like me subsidize outer borough commuters. What a bizarre thing to complain about.
What does free transit do? People need to earn some money and then use that money. It's a healthy psyche. $3 for a ride anywhere in the city is pretty cheap
Figuring out how, and how much, to pay, and then fumbling with cash and change or whatever, during the fairly stressful experience of boarding, is something of a barrier to using transit. So removing the fare payment entirely removes that barrier. But, that's gotten a lot easier with support for paying fares in apps, so I think it's a lot less of an issue now than it was ten years ago. I used to be in favor of free fares, mostly because it'd make using transit less intimidating for newbies. But I'm on the fence now.
As you say, it has gotten a lot easier, and nyc is the easiest out of the systems I've used recently. You tap your phone, any credit card or a card you get with cash (replacement for metrocard), and the gate opens while they take your money. 12 taps and you're not charged anymore for the week.
This is great, but I'd be more interested in seeing how congestion pricing impacts travel times for buses, specifically, (within and around the congestion zone, including express routes from the outer boroughs), as well as overall transit ridership.
@gotmedium, would you consider integrating:
1. MTA's Bus Time feed: https://bustime.mta.info/wiki/Developers/Index and 2. MTA bus/MNRR/LIRR/Access-A-Ride ridership feed: https://data.ny.gov/Transportation/MTA-Daily-Ridership-Data-... 3. Equivalent feeds for city-connected NJ transit services.
I think the biggest thing CP is going to do in NYC is end toll shopping. There were previously some pretty obvious arbs available to people trying to get off LI.
The biggest policy failure of CP though to me is that they left taxi/uber relatively unscathed. Often the majority of traffic is taxi/uber, so make the surcharge on them a fraction of what individual drivers pay is kind of nonsensical.
Are we trying to minimize traffic (so tax call cars) or parking (so tax taxi/uber less since they don't have to park in Manhattan?). It smells of lobbying mostly.
The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Private passenger car driver is paying 12x Taxi toll / 6x Uber toll. Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider.
Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured?
Also your average Taxi may not even cross into the CPZ 12x per day, so unclear we are making it up on volume either.
Small correction, every ride that starts and/or ends in the zone incurs the fee so a taxi that enters, does 12 trips, then leaves pays the same amount as a private car even though they only entered the zone once.
There's still a per-ride citywide congestion fee baked into each Uber fare. So overall there are still more overall congestion taxes paid by the taxi/uber in your scenario.
That's great, but it's still too cheap
> Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured?
It isn't. It's vastly more expensive to ride in a taxi when you include the fare.
It should be cheaper. No circling the block looking for parking, no space needed at all for that matter. That alone is worth giving taxis/ubers at least a different pricing structure.
I don’t know about cheaper - this is already on top of the $2.75 per-ride NY State congestion fee. So now, if you take an Uber ride in NYC that’s even just a few blocks or few minutes long, it will be $2.75+$1.5 = $4.25 of just congestion fees for every ride.
Because there are fewer cars in the system for each chauffeured ride vs private vehicle.
Fewer cars "in the system" but same (or possibly more) cars on the road actively moving. Take a look at some of the dwell times for ride hail vehicles in NYC. Can easily approach 20-35%.
Plus the apps are kicking drivers out at various quiet periods of the day in order to avoid paying them minimum wage. So true empty time is higher.
Again I'm not arguing for better treatment for personal vehicles. I'm arguing all the fees are too low, and the ride hail fee egregiously so.
I don't know any of the science or research, but it still seems like it could possibly be a benefit. The increase in cars moving seems like it could be more than offset by the reduction in parking requirements. Those people taking private vehicles have to park them somewhere. More taxis means we can use some of that space for something useful instead.
> Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider.
Only partially right? Tax incidence depends on the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply.
> The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
The fee for cabs was actually set by dividing the regular fee for private cars by the average number of trips cabs make into the Congestion Relief Zone per day (because the fee is only paid once per day for private cars, but per trip for cabs)
if the passenger car pays once a day, it's only generating one unit of congestion.
The car takes up space in the city the entire time it's there, even if the congestion impact is less while it's parked.
The lengths this city goes to keep free parking...
And further, if I am already paying $50 fare to take an Uber, a $1.50 toll is not deterring me or reducing my usage at all. It is less than the rounding error on the tip I give the driver. I probably won't even notice it amongst the 5 line items of fees, taxes, surcharges, etc on the digital receipt.
This is where the dogma gets in the way of reality. Uber and cabs are the glue that fills the gaps that public transit has left unfilled for decades.
The policy goal is to reduce congestion by discouraging personal vehicles in the zone and generate revenue for transportation as a whole, not to turn the city into a pedestrian park. The state took an approach that does that without nuking the city.
Based on the fact that nobody seems to be giddy about this, I’d say they did a decent job at that. If the crazy transit nuts are happy and the angry Jersey people are happy, something went wrong.
Moreover, the parent misses the forest for the trees: yeah, the congestion fee is lower than the fare, but the fare is vastly more expensive than driving a car.
The current pricing model encourages resource sharing (this was true before congestion pricing as well), and the choice of whether or not you take a car or a cab is a function of the amortized cost of use per unit time. So yeah, just in terms of congestion fee it's a little bit cheaper to take an Uber for a single trip, but if you ride around in an Uber all day long, it's way, way less cost efficient than driving your own car.
The congestion relief zone is probably one of the single densest transit zones on the planet. Rideshares and cabs are definitely useful for filling in the gaps in the boroughs, but you basically never need one in downtown Manhattan.
I live in Manhattan and I am decidedly anti-car. If I had my way private vehicles would be banned (with exceptions for e.g. people with relevant disabilities).
But cabs are important! This past august, I bought a new desktop PC (I did not want to build it myself for various reasons). I took it home in an Uber. Trying to walk to the subway with that giant box would have been virtually impossible.
A transit nut would have suggested a simple solution that does not destroy the planet - just use a simple cargo bike.
You don’t. Yet they are popular.
It’s only the densest transit zone in the US. Many international locales are denser and measurably better.
This issue highlights that people take for granted that things are permanent and people will accept anything. This is great for me — I’ll happily pay the toll to move faster when I’m in the city. But my guess is my customers will start melting away faster and I’ll be spending quality time in Jersey. That was happening even before COVID and I think will accelerate.
They would have been smarter to hold out for a few years and add a surcharge to the road mileage tax that’s coming.
You're forgetting that the transit zones themselves are not only affected, the main BRIDGES are also affected. So even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances
```
Manhattan's Congestion Relief Zone starts at 60th Street and heads south to include the Lincoln, Holland and Hugh L. Carey tunnels on the Hudson River side, and the Queensboro Bridge, Queens Midtown Tunnel, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge on the East Side.
Drivers will be charged when they enter the Congestion Relief Zone using the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro or Williamsburg Bridges, or the Holland, Hugh L. Carey, Lincoln or Queens-Midtown tunnels.
Drivers coming from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan will be charged once they reach 60th Street.
```
> even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances
Incorrect--if you take one of those bridges/tunnels below 60th street, then stay on FDR or West Side Highway to travel to a different part of NYC (i.e. you never enter the interior surface streets below 60th), then you don't pay the congestion fee.
"The Congestion Relief Zone includes local streets and avenues in Manhattan south of and including 60 Street, excluding the FDR Drive, West Side Highway/Route 9A, and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections to West Street."
One of the gaps is accessibility, rideshares are useful for people who have trouble getting around.
> I think the biggest thing CP is going to do in NYC is end toll shopping.
Or toll beating. An old trick is taking a tractor trailer (or any big truck with more than a few axles) from LI to mainland without paying tolls: take the 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd, left onto 59th, left onto 1st and strait up to Willis bridge which leads strait into the Deegan.
Fwiw, we have other mechanisms for limiting taxis and Uber. We can actually put a hard limit on the number allowed to operate.
This ends up being a little awkward since Uber charges market prices, so what happens when the number of Uber drivers is capped is _Uber_ pockets the congestion fee instead of the city. But the taxi lobby is strong and we can't fix everything at once
How do you figure that? The amount of the surcharge for the average taxi/uber driver per day will be many many multiples of the cost for a regular driver.
In the case of a regular driver you you have someone paying $9 to bring a car into the congested area, probably serving one trip by one person.
In the case of a TLC driver you'll have them paying probably well over $100 a day (assuming the $2.75 charge x 4-5 trips an hour give or take) and aiding in the transport of probably dozens of people to their destination.
It seems completely obvious why this is a better approach to relieving congestion while still preserving the ability of people to get around.
> In the case of a TLC driver you'll have them paying probably well over $100 a day (assuming the $2.75 charge x 4-5 trips an hour give or take) and aiding in the transport of probably dozens of people to their destination.
This is completely wrong.
First, the fee for cabs is different from the fee for private cars, and in fact, it was set at the value which is the private car fee divided by the average number of trips into the Congestion Relief Zone that cabs make each day.
Second, passengers are the ones paying the fee, not cab drivers. It's one of the fees tacked on to your receipt.
Third, this fee has already been charged on cab fares since 2019. The only difference is it's now being applied to all vehicles except taxis/FHVs. For cab drivers, there's no difference - it was the one part of the program that has already been in effect for years!
I have a car and live in Brooklyn. I usually take an Uber anyway because parking is a pain and/or expensive.
So I was previously comparing: $0 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $0 car toll + $50 Taxi/Uber fare
Now I am comparing: $9 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $1.50 Uber toll + $50 Uber fare
That is - the fee is being passed onto riders anyway, so why should I pay a lower toll sitting in the back of an Uber than when driving myself across the bridge?
This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?
Once the Uber drops you off, it's available to take someone else somewhere they need to go. Car services are an essential part of a total system that enables people not to have to drive. Personal cars are the opposite of that.
It's one of those things about the way Americans think about transit that makes me insane, they try to assess the ROI of every single individual leg of a transit system rather than assess the system as a whole.
For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.
That's just one example. Here's another more suited to your example. What if you generally switch to taking transit into the city, and only take an uber when it's raining or you have something heavy to carry?
If I allow there to be a robust market for Ubers in the city then that's possible. If I aggressively charge Ubers then you can't do that, and you're back to driving every day.
There's plenty of examples. But in short it's clear that private cars are by a mile the worst and most inefficient thing occupying the roads. That's what we want to have the strongest incentives against.
>For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.
That's a cute anecdote but is there any empirical evidence behind this? I'd imagine the people who commute downtown, stay late often enough that this is a concern, is willing to take the bus even though they have a car and can otherwise afford daily commute downtown (gas/parking), but at the same time can't pay for an uber on those late nights, is approximately zero.
My empirical evidence is going to Europe and looking around.
I'm being somewhat argumentative on purpose but the concept I'm explaining actually is important. There's something similar to a phase change when a city/area becomes sufficiently well connected so that transit can basically solve every problem.
You go to somewhere like Switzerland and it just jumps out at you. There's a fundamental approach that everywhere someone wants to go should be accessible by transit in a way that's workable. There's also a fundamental decision that being able to bring a car somewhere isn't necessarily something that has to be supported.
It's just a different way of looking at things.
Can you envision an American town that literally does not allow cars anywhere near the actual town, like at all?
If that seems utterly impossible to visualize then you're starting to see what I mean. Now try to visualize a Swiss town that literally has no ability to connect to the broader transit system.
Service industry workers tend to get off between 2:30 and 4:00AM. If you get off at 2:30, great, you can take the bus or train back home. If you're held late to clean or do prep for the next day? You'll be waiting until transit service resumes in the morning (as late as 6AM).
So what do you do? You drive to work every day and pay the parking costs, because it's preferable to ending up stuck downtown with everything closed for several hours while you're exhausted from working a double.
This problem with public transit is the single biggest reason people who work at restaurants have to always drive to work. It's exactly as the comment you're replying to put it.
I guess to me it just seems like you want to deter end users picking taxis/ubers over trains a bit more, and $1-2 is not going to do that when they are already paying 5-10x subway fare for their ride.
I can see by your example how over the course of the day the taxi/uber collects a lot of CPZ fees for the city, I just don't see the fee reducing anyone at the margin from using taxi/uber.
At the end of the day I'd love to see transit improve, and if all this does is reduce traffic for the well heeled who already are taking taxi/ubers.. I mean I win there too, but it doesn't feel great.
For the record when I commute it's always by transit, the problem is weekend/night service has degraded to the point that I feel forced to take taxi/uber quite often. I've lived in NYC nearly 20 years and have found, if anything, night/weekend service to be less predictable and more perplexing. This again harms the less well off even more, as they are more likely to be doing shift work / non-traditional workdays than your M-F 9-5er.
Just this weekend, yet again, I was trying to get around midtown and Apple kept telling me what should be a 6min trip would take 30min by train even though I was 5 seconds from subway entrance. I couldn't understand why, and went to MTA website and saw no alerts for the 6th ave line. Then I went to the live train time page and realized the problem - the 6th Ave line was running at 15min headways, so Apple had me walking 2 blocks to 8th Ave then to wait 15min for the train (possibly 30min if its a B/D and I needed an F/M). This was Saturday around dinner time. Just awful service.
Agree that service in NYC these days is worse than it was about 15–20 years ago. At the time I didnt know that the MTA was the center of a political power play between city and state, depending on whimsical politicians in two centers to cooperate to get anything done. The main improvement in the last 20 years have been the time tables and the linkage to maps on the phone, which at least make the pain predictable at most times, even if not always explainable. I hope service can improve soon and more trains thrown at peak times. The current situation is borderline dangerous at crowded stations during my commute peak hours and if more people yet use the subways without improved service things will turns worse yet.
> This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?
It's not obvious that Uber is exclusively the higher-class option. Someone could easily make the same calculation you just did and decide that for them even owning a car wouldn't be worth it, they'll just do Uber every time they need to. You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.
I don't have data to back it up, but I would actually be surprised if the average Uber customer in NYC owns a car at all.
> You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.
This isn't really a different class.
The other class is the people who can't afford a car or Uber and can barely afford the MTA.
Agreed, I'm just using the terminology that OP was. The actual class lower than this doesn't pay the toll at all, whether the Uber toll or private car toll.
Think of the congestion charge as a charge on the vehicle, rather than on the person, as the stated policy goal is to reduce the number of vehicles in the CBD, not the number of people overall. The Uber is very likely going to continue to be used to service other passengers after dropping you off within the same calendar day, so one potential "fair" solution is to split the congestion charge among the many passengers using that one vehicle. That is your reduced Uber toll charge. But even in this case, it's not really an even split, taxis are going to generate a much higher congestion charge revenue than a single passenger car.
The rideshare toll is already a charge on the vehicle and not the riders. If you share an Uber with two other people, the per-person congestion fee for the trip drops to $0.50.
Alternatively, day parking rates drop enough (due to market forces) to compensate for the cost of the toll.
While I'm sure congestion pricing will have a positive impact on traffic, I'd wait a little while longer to draw any conclusions, considering (1) the data is from a single day (2) lots of people aren't back from holiday travel and (3) there's a winter storm across the country and a decent amount of snow fell in Jersey/New York today, discouraging driving.
You can already extrapolate from the results from other cities who have implemented the policy, where it has been wildly successful at reducing congestion.
So far, none of the data provided by the linked site would suggest Manhattan will see a reduction in transportation times. This is with the Monday snow however, which I'd imagine caused delays by itself.
I will say, being in Manhattan, their seems to be less traffic on the road. I wonder if Google Maps traffic data is using a rolling average of ~7 days or something
Are you sure? Compare before/after for the main affected regions (Holland Tunnel, Queensboro) versus the unaffected regions. We definitely need more data, but I think there's an immediate reduction in the obvious places.
You're right...I was only looking at internal Manhattan, but the bridges and tunnels seem to show a significant reduction in transportation times
According to this data, traffic is reduced on the bridges and tunnels but not within Manhattan itself, e.g., going from Hell's Kitchen to Midtown East or Greenwich Village to Alphabet City.
Google maps traffic data is live
I thought London's traffic returned to the same levels as prior to their congestion pricing?
It has not. Traffic levels are down 15-20% while number of visitors to the inside of the congestion zone has increased. Traffic speed inside the zone has also increased slightly.
Overall, London's example shows that congestion pricing works as advertised.
Singapore is probably the better model to look at? We had congestion pricing before London.
... for rich people.
Nope, it's been great for poorer people who take transit at higher rates than others, and congestion pricing funds useful transit expansions for them.
The name is rather confusing. I thought this "Pricing Tracker" was going to be tracking the pricing of the congestion toll (implying that it changes dynamically throughout the day), but what it's actually tracking is commute time.
Something like "Congestion Pricing Impact Tracker" would be clearer.
1. The data is obviously flawed, but if there's anything to speculate from it, it's that the actual congestion in lower Manhattan isn't affected that much.
2. So the success of this policy really depends on how much additional revenue it's bringing in for the city and the MTA. The $9 increase needs to significantly offset the loss in toll revenue from the decrease in drivers.
3. There are so many other simple policies that would benefit quality of life in NYC:
- Daylighting — Don't allow cars and trucks to park at the corners of intersections. Huge safety benefits.
- Metered parking everywhere. Why is NYC giving away the most valuable real estate in the world for free? Would be a huge revenue stream while discouraging car ownership in Manhattan.
- Close more streets to car traffic. This is already true on 14th street and it's fantastic. Close Houston, 34th, 42nd, 59th, 125th. This would make buses much more efficient and further discourage passenger car usage
> So the success of this policy really depends on how much additional revenue it's bringing in for the city and the MTA.
I thought the point of the policy is to get people to use the train instead of cars, freeing up the roads for people that actually need it?
There are several points. Some want it to get people to not drive, but work from home or drive elsewhere instead is fine with them. Some want it to get more people on transit. Some want it to fund transit expansion. You can belong to more than one of the above groups. Nobody belongs to them all.
> Nobody belongs to them all.
Why not?
IMO, ideally:
- Some people work from home or drive elsewhere
- Others take transit instead of driving
- The remainder pay a fee that they didn't previously, which can fund more transit
I didn't give anywhere close to all the different interests here.
The first sentence they said was:
> 1. The data is obviously flawed, but if there's anything to speculate from it, it's that the actual congestion in lower Manhattan isn't affected that much.
I'm not saying that's correct or incorrect, but the person you replied to already considered what you brought up and responded to it. The primary "point" seems not to have worked, so the in-practice reason to keep the policy becomes other benefits, which for the city would include revenue being raised. (I guess you can argue it's not a "success" if the main point wasn't achieved, but good luck convincing the city to give up the additional revenue.)
> The $9 increase needs to significantly offset the loss in toll revenue from the decrease in drivers.
Many of the entries in question are not tolled: the Brooklyn/Manhattan/Williamsburg/QBB are all toll-free, but are included in congestion pricing. Similarly, the street-level entries to the congestion zone were never tolled. I think the state's calculations probably conclude that these more than offset the drop in toll revenue.
(Or, more nuanced: much of the previous toll revenue went to PANYNJ, whereas congestion pricing funds go directly to the MTA/NYCT.)
This is the most econ-brained response possible. Why would the success of a public policy be exclusively defined by revenue generated?
Because it’s based on the assumption that congestion didn’t actually go down, see number 1 posted by op.
If you want congestion to go down, keep raising the price. It will eventually go down and revenue could go up a lot.
Or you get voted out of office and your charges reversed down to zero - or perhaps negative as the people are so mad they take it out on the transit this was supposed to fund.
Politics is tricky, don't take so much you make people affected mad enough to undo what you wanted.
Both parties like money so one party may be voted out if people are angry, but it’s unlikely to result in the charge going away.
It’s also nyc primarily in charge of it and nyc constituents probably are in favor of less congestion and more money.
Politicians like votes more than money. If this is seen as the standard change of hands that happens once in a while in a good democracy then the charge will stay because $$$. However if this is seen as a rejection of the charges they will go away to prove your vote for the new people wasn't wasted. Seen is the key here - while surveys and such influence this, there is emotion there as well. Note too that it only needs a small vocal percentage in some cases to change perception.
Big econ brained is thinking about whether the congestion pricing is approximately captures the negative externalities of traffic
First, it's not exclusively defined by revenue (which is what my first point was alluding to). Second, the underlying assumption of revenue generated is that it's going to the MTA and used to improve public transit and therefore quality of life in the city, which would be a success.
> Metered parking everywhere. Why is NYC giving away the most valuable real estate in the world for free? Would be a huge revenue stream while discouraging car ownership in Manhattan.
There isn't all that much free parking left in Manhattan south of 60th street.
Not saying it doesn't exist, there still are alternate side streets for sure, but it's a rapidly dwindling thing.
Agree that it should be almost nonexistent though for the most part.
Also the cost of metered parking in most of the city these days is similar to garage parking pricing.
Advocates did worry that reducing it from $15 to $9 would create a sort of "no-mans land" — not quite high enough to deter traffic but high enough to annoy people. I'm not sure how to reconcile the significant drop in the bridge and tunnel commute times with the apparent non-effect on commute times within the congestion relief zone.
Most of the bridges and tunnels have their own tolls, with a few exceptions like the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. One possible explanation is that the advocates were right and the combined bridge/tunnel + congestion toll is enough to dissuade driving into the zone entirely for people arriving via bridge/tunnel, but the lower congestion toll on its own isn't as much of a deterrent if you have access to a free crossing into Manhattan from other boros or were already in Manhattan (outsize of the zone) to begin with.
It's a bit silly to set a fixed rate.
Here in Singapore, the congestion charging pioneer, we adjust the fee dynamically to keep traffic flowing.
> I'm not sure how to reconcile the significant drop in the bridge and tunnel commute times with the apparent non-effect on commute times within the congestion relief zone.
Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of that either but it'll be interesting to see when more/better data comes available. Maybe car traffic getting to Manhattan is reduced but those people are using more taxis and Ubers to get around once they're in
You also have to factor in any reduction (or increase) in traffic fatalities and injuries. 34 traffic deaths and roughly 7500 injuries occurred in Manhattan in one of the nation's highest GDP-per-capita area, so the loss of economic output from these fatalities and injuries is likely fairly high.
Not to mention the costs of treating them.
Metered parking everywhere.
Please no. Just tax me at the end of the year if you really need more money. Stop paywalling everything.
Others have mentioned the unfairness of asking taxpayers to subsidize drivers. This is particularly egregious in Midtown Manhattan where many taxpayers are not drivers and many drivers are not (local) taxpayers.
But even as a driver I prefer when cities place an efficient price on parking. Otherwise, if parking is too cheap compared to demand it costs time and stress circling the block to find a place to park. Market pricing, where the city sets whatever prices are necessary to maintain an empty spot or two on each block, seems more fair, efficient, and pleasant.
Any examples of cities that have done a good job on this?
It's been ages since I've driven there, but SFpark[1] was (and maybe still is?) considered the gold standard in demand-based pricing.
One interesting finding from the initial research reports was that it achieved the goal of improving availability while at the same time lowering the average meter price, which is nice because it drives home that the purpose is maximizing efficiency, not revenue.
And despite my using it as an example above, Midtown Manhattan actually does this reasonably well, especially in contrast with trying to park in the Upper East/West Side or Harlem.
Why should everyone pay equally, rather than people that currently store their private property for free on public land in some of the most expensive real estate in the country?
The point wasn't supposed to be to raise more money, it was to decrease the amount of people using the roads. Taxing more would, if anything, incentivize people to use those parking spots to "get their money's worth." More realistically, it would not add a barrier to actually parking on a day-to-day basis. Making you think about and reconsider it every time you go to do it with the paywall is what they want (and what is arguably necessary in order to fix the underlying problem, unless those tax dollars are going to go towards multi-level parking garages that add spaces and not just the existing roads).
It’s kind of how I feel about rent too. Instead of paywalling this $7k/mo apartment maybe just tax everyone a fair amount?
Taking the bus from Weehawken into midtown is super smooth now. It's a super cold Tuesday, but normally it's a honking mess.
The subway was insane. Could be the snow, though.
Yea, not sure if it was a post-holiday thing or weather thing, but shit the trains have been rammed.
Fantastic. That's step one, now fix the public transit, and make it safer and cleaner, so that people actually enjoy using it consistently rather than just needing to do so.
Do that and NYC will be a much, much nicer city to live in.
That is literally what the money is for
The problem is it's just not that much money against the inflated costs of NYC transit construction. It's budgeted to produce $1B/year, though that was before Hochul unilaterally cut the toll by 40%. $1B is like a 2000ft of subway tunnel or half a station these days.
The fact that its a recurring revenue scheme allows them to get bonds based on that income. I think I saw that they were planning to secure $18B for a project when it was $15 for the toll.
Yes though I'd imagine its harder to secure bonds now that Hochul has shown the governor can unilaterally change the fee on a whim, plus new Federal government is antagonistic to the whole program.
Hochul won NY by a fairly narrow margin historically for the state against a pretty MAGA GOP guy. It's entirely possible some more normal blue state GOP type runs against her, wins and reduces the fee further.
> its harder to secure bonds now that Hochul has shown the governor can unilaterally change the fee on a whim
It goes in the bond indenture. State can’t revoke the charge whose revenues it has already sold without defaulting.
You're gonna need a lot more money than that when ~40% of MTA total spending goes to pay pensions and healthcare for people that don't even work anymore by ~2040.
You need ~35% just to keep the system running functioning (which does not include operations - like the actual drivers).
That's only going to leave you ~25% leftover for everything else - and a non-trivial percentage of that comes from the Federal Government - which may not be there in the future (when all of their money is going to pensions and healthcare).
You are exaggerating that number greatly. The number is 8% of the budget for retired employees.
PDF Source, page 9: https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-17-2025...
It should be noted that the MTA has made at least some pension reforms so that current and future employees won't be as costly. Employee contributions are increased as well as the retirement age.
Would be nice if they made transit better first instead of making driving worse first.
Driving in New York has been terrible for a century. The only way to make it better is to disincentivize people from doing it by making it more costly and making public transit better. Urban planners have known this is the case since at least the 40s.
Congestion pricing isn't some kind of new punishment. It's a bill, long overdue, finally getting paid (and only partially).
Robert Moses knew it, but that didn't stop him.
I'm not sure Robert Moses knew that. He wasn't an urban planner. He was an urban doer. He made it his life's mission to not learn the actual impact of his work on people's lives. I suspect he took that willful ignorance to his grave.
Oh, no, he knew.
I didn't mean it in a way that absolves him of responsibility. I mean that he purposefully shut out any information that undermined his self-image as a "great man." That's a form of evil. It's worth differentiating that from other kinds of evil, as I believe it may be the most common.
And will the drivers be prepared to fund this via another channel?
They already fund it via gas tax, registration fees, regular taxes. Let the public transit takers fund their own improvements.
When I lived in NYC I paid huge amounts of money in taxes and as far as I can tell got very little for my money.
Until they can start using their enormous existing budget wisely I don't see any reason they should be given more money.
I agree NYC is not wisely spending its $100 billion per year, but I think the congestion tax makes sense as a way of pricing in externalities. As a non-car-owner in lower Manhattan I dislike passenger cars -- they make it much less safe for me to bike around, and less pleasant for me to walk around. I think most people here benefit if we have way fewer large vehicles in the city, so the limited spots should be reserved for people who get immense economic value from them, like truckers or movers, not random people from the suburbs who want to have dinner in the city.
> as far as I can tell got very little for my money
You literally lived in the greatest city in the history of world civilization.
Sorry it didn't work out for you.
Most of the things people like about NYC were either:
1) Built at least 100 years ago. De-facto relics of a government and society that no longer exists.
2) Things built by the people in spite, not because, of its public policy and government.
If anything, what interests me about NYC is “why isn’t worse?”. There is something amazing about NYC: how a city and civilization can be so successful in the face of government incompetence and public policy failures at every level.
Tokyo is pretty nice
You seriously think NYC is the greatest city in the history of world civilization? Or is it sarcasm? I am asking this as NYC resident.
If your definition of greatest is "total GDP" then it is the greatest in the world. That said, I would agree that Tokyo and maybe even London are much finer examples of cities.
As my sister says (lives around Prospect Park with kids) — if you don’t gaslight yourself that it’s the best city in the world while paying such premiums to live here, you’ll get depressed in a second.
But I agree, I’m scratching my head whenever I hear that statement. It’s definitely the best city in USA though, as there are about 3 real cities in the country.
Of course I do. Ask any person living in New York, they'll tell you the same thing.
Unless you happen to ask the large fraction of people who knowingly moved there to make big bucks for some number of years before getting out. They will all tell you it sucks, the government sucks, you suck for not realizing that and that they're masterminding their exit to the suburbs of Phoenix or Miami or whatever. These people make up a sizable minority of the NYC population at any given time.
Well yeah sure, but obviously people who fail at living in New York don't count.
I regret to say: I’ve lived here long enough to believe you genuinely mean it when you say that.
Is there a song called "Cleveland, Cleveland" that says if you can make it in Cleveland you can make it anywhere?
Oh, you mean the half-century old song New York New York by Frank Sinatra? One written for a musical depicting golden days of 1945? Nice one, I love it.
You are correct that 80 years ago New York was also the greatest city in the history of world civilization. Quite a run isn't it?
It surely was in 1945, no doubt about it.
Where else have you lived?
I live in nyc today and whenever I hear people say that , it turns out they mean “New York City is the greatest city in the world of New York City and Waterloo, Wisconsin.”
And even then , I’ve seen photos of Waterloo… looks like the air is nice and breathable there. And apparently you can afford to rent a place on a normal salary.
You don’t have to agree but at least try and get out of your bubble. You don’t even know enough different people in New York City itself to support that claim, apparently.
I mean it's not hard to figure out.
Here's an easy test. Think of the city you currently live in. Ask people where you live if they think this city you're living in is better than New York. They'll have a lot to say about it.
If you ask people in New York if the place you live is better than New York they'll say "Huh, where is that?"
Such metric would just indicate that respondents are unaware of other cities, no? Majority of new yorkers never lived in good cities. I guess many just repeat 100 years old notion that NYC is the best city in the world and just never doubt it.
I mean… yeah; I think we agree there. That’s kinda my point: people here whom I know to claim New York City is the greatest city in the world don’t actually know a lot about the world.
I've literally been to 80+ countries and have spent time in every U.S. city of significant size. If you can't look at the world and figure out the obvious fact that New York is the greatest and most significant city that has existed since we climbed down out of the trees I'm not sure what's going to convince you.
The odds of you calling yourself "native new yorker" and having never actually lived anywhere else are virtually 100%
I can just ask everyone I know in New Orleans around me who moved from New York.
how do you reconcile this theory with the existence of the Mets?
The quality of bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches is sufficiently high to offset the Mets.
Ehh not the best weather and they haven’t invented the trash can or dumpster yet. You can get good food everywhere these days. And as the years go by I am less and less interested in drinking till 4:30 am especially at todays bar prices.
It will never be “safe” or “clean” enough for the people who think it is unsafe today. Because for some people they see one homeless person and it ruins their day. They fail to realize that hey, transit is the means of transport one might take when you have no money at all, and you are always going to have homeless people on it and its not a big deal either.
Homeless people are not inherently unsafe. Unstable people who threaten & assault those around them are.
The harsh law of hacker news: For any topic outside of strict software development, the strength, viciousness and certitude of opinions expressed is inversely proportional to the level of knowledge about the subject.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/3/3/the-fundamental...
Whiplash, every time.
HN's takes on cars are shockingly bad. For a community as thoughtful as HN, their responses are (to use an insult provocatively) car brained.
It's as if cities don't exist outside the US. The US is decades behind on urban infrastructure and governance. This means their policy debates in 2025 have been globally settled issues for decades with outcomes to back it up. Conjecture can't be an effective rebuttal to evidence.
> HN's takes on cars are shockingly bad. For a community as thoughtful as HN, their responses are (to use an insult provocatively) car brained.
Hm, as a big public-transit advocate coming here 5 hours after your comment, I actually thought the discussion is in pretty good shape. There's a handful of "cars only!" nuts, but they're a small minority. It seems the vibes around this topic are fairly positive, with lots of support for funding better public transit.
It was shocking to read The Power Broker last year and learn that since 1940s at least, urban planners have been aware of induced demand. Caro even brings up congestion pricing as a proposal that was rejected not because it wouldn't solve then problem but because the entire urban planning infrastructure was built to deny that there was a problem.
And this is why we have traffic today per that theory. Demand were induced and in a lot of cases cities didn’t end up building key reliever routes. So those initiall routes were overcapacity potentially from day one in the city.
It is also important to note that induced demand is not infinite. There is a point when there aren’t more drivers to actually get on the roads. We see this in some midwestern cities that had their full freeway plans built and didn’t experience significant growth after those plans were made. Those are “20 miles in 20 minutes” places any time of day for the most part.
Congestion pricing can work to dissuade individuals from living in the burbs, only if there is controls on real estate to deal with the influx of people moving inward. The other benefit is an increase of mass transit usage, which is a plus?
I personally took a cab from Newark to Laguardia at MIDNIGHT and it took 40 min to cross into Manhattan to get to the Queens-Midtown tunnel. Just a new level of traffic. Was fun going in the MIB tunnel.
Living in the suburbs is perfectly fine; I think a perfectly virtuous outcome here would be that people keep living in the suburbs if they wish, but have adequately funded suburban rail and bus transit into the city.
An important piece of context is that NYC has some of the US's best suburban transit, including three different suburban rail systems (NJT, MNRR, LIRR) and one non-subway interurban rapid transit system (PATH).
Problem is, none of the money from congestion pricing is shared with NJ transit/infra
That's because they turned it down[1]. New Jersey has decided that their strategy is going to be to dig their heels in and hope for a supportive administration, rather than plan for the next century of growth in the economic region that powers their state.
[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/12/18/nj-refusing-generous-...
Sweet lord have you ever tasted a peach grown in new jersey? What the hell is going on in that state.
Most superfund sites of any state, decades of chemical industry and now pharma, and also peaches not really liking how north NJ is, mostly. Jersey's a wacky place, for sure, but believe me, the politics in New Jersey get even crazier than this due to boroughitis.
NYS offered, NJ sued NYS, NJ lost
It would be a completely ok thing for NYS to tell NJ $0 get bent, NJ coulda spent turnpike widening money on transit instead of begging from NYS
NJ needs to stop its commuter residents paying NY income tax, particularly those doing WFH more than half the year. They can boost NJT with that pile of money.
How do you propose they do that? NJ doesn't levy NY's taxes, NY does.
(To my understanding, NJ gives every resident an equivalent income tax credit for the taxes they pay in NY. Given that they can't stop NY from taxing its own employees, this would mean they'd effectively need to double income taxes for NJ residents.)
> They can boost NJT with that pile of money.
NJ has had many opportunities to do so over the years and consistently chooses not to.
> I personally took a cab from Newark to Laguardia
I don't understand why anyone would ever attempt to do this. Was it truly the only option?
Flight got rebooked with a couple hours notice, stayed at LGA checkin till it opened, had the first flight out. Fare was more than 100$
I did JFK-EWR coming back from HND one time. Not the only option but probably the best, all things considered. That's life in the fast-paced, slam-bang, laugh-in-the-face-of-death world of non-revving.
I wish people would focus more on scooters and motorcycles than moving people in busses. Coming from a place with decent and cheap public transport, no one likes it. It'll never be as fast, you'll always be closed in a bacteria greenhouse with strangers, there will always be crazies, it'll never have the exact path you need, you don't have as much control over it.. For the past year I've been commuting on a motorcycle with no car and even with snow it's surprisingly fine. Maintenance is cheap since it's much more DIY friendly, I get back from work up to 65-70% faster than cars, usually 35-40% (rush hour), I average 5,8-6,1 l/100 without trying to save fuel.. It's very comfy if you're not in a location where winters are particularly harsh. But at that point freezing your ass off at a bus station waiting to get in the bacteria greenhouse isn't great either.
You're way overplaying the dangers of "crazies" and "the bacteria greenhouse" with respect to travel by motorcycle or scooter (or even automobile). I agree with your point that we should encourage these modes of transportation over cars, but I'd add it will be electric bikes that finally turn the tide on traffic congestion in cities (and all the other great benefits that come with doing that). Just don't tell the electric bike people that they're essentially riding motorcycles.
I mean, I'm definitely biased but I've been sick once since ~2015 and that was Covid I caught at a large anniversary celebration. Before that I was <18 and would get sick every winter in my opinion due to people caughing all around me on the bus for 45 minutes per direction.
With crazies it's not that bad. I remember the bus getting pulled over once by a car with people with pipes/bats who beat a grandpa for getting in an argument with one of the guys prior. That was the only actually violent occurance over thousands of rides, however I still have yet to feel as threatened with a personal vehicle. With a car I could have rammed the fuck out of them or ran them over, with a bike I could have been gone in a second, when the bus driver stops and opens the front door you're just stuck. Again, realistically it's mostly crazy homeless people who pose no threat but I prefer to have some control at least.
My issue with electric bicycles is:
If limited they don't fit with pedestrians or cars so you need to complicate infrastructure. Good for going to the post office but not as a daily since they're just not fast enough. Lovely for old people and to an extent kids.
If not limited they are less tested motorcycles with usually shitty tires and brakes, no ABS, TC, etc with pedals to fulful some potentially existing legal loophole since there's no way you're doing anything close to the motor output manually yet since you feel inclined to pedal gear becomes problematic.
I still have yet to try an electric motorcycle but I'd guess the little electric scooters would be great for commuting. I'm guessing an electric scooter that can do 100-140kmh would be the utility sweet spot. You'd be able to go everywhere and charge for pennies with minimal maintenance. You'd also get the scooter benefits of improved road muck/weather protection and actual underseat storage.
In Manhattan ebike access is excellent -- there are tons of bike lanes and bikeshare stations. They are typically as fast as Ubers for getting around the city since traffic is so bad here, and much cheaper. The main issue is that it's not very safe. Probably this does not generalize to most other US cities.
Unfortunately the citi bikes are expensive enough that they may be more expensive than sharing an uber with one other person.
Anecdote, paid $15 x 2 to take two citi bikes across Brooklyn to avoid a two-leg l-shaped subway ride. Coming home took a $25 uber. The bike trip was ~30% faster. It sucked having to navigate around all the delivery trucks and random private cars parked in the bike lane.
$15 seems too much to me for the citi bike for a 25 minute ride. But I'd do it again to save 10 minutes sitting in traffic in an uber.
Oh and the next day we did the same journey via l-shaped subway ride. It took about 10 minutes more than the bike ride, and included an awkward street-level and overpass transition between the two subway lines. Much much cheaper than uber or bike.
My take is there are a variety of crappy options to get around Brooklyn.
I've driven electric motorbike for 7 years and it's absolutely great for everyday commute. Lighter ones tend to have removable batteries so they work even when you don't have a garage with electric outlet. Some heavier ones you can even take on an occasional long trip, though that's not super convenient – it's commuting (combined with joy of riding) that makes them useful.
One does need to know where one is going to service it, though, because they can sometimes have stupid electrical issues which are objectively easy to fix but hard for you to fix on your own cause you don't know which wire goes where.
> however I still have yet to feel as threatened with a personal vehicle.
There's an old saying that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker.
If you've never felt threatened while driving a personal vehicle by all the road-raging, speeding, tailgating assholes--
In NYC, I disagree. I get sick very frequently whenever I take the subway. It is absolutely disgusting.
The amount of crazy people on there is a lot too. Every friend has some story of some person assaulting or nearly assaulting them on the subway. No one truly feels safe on it.
I truly feels safe on the NYC subway.
You know what's more dangerous than riding the subway? Driving in a car.
Driving in a car is pretty dangerous when you're in some Texas suburb with 50mph arterial streets. Going 20mph through lower Manhattan with an intersection every few hundred feet, not so much
Some quick googling gives me the following figures:
https://www.chopranocerino.com/blog/new-york-accident-statis....
> There were 5,809 crashes on the busy streets of Manhattan in 2023. The borough reported 34 deaths (19 pedestrians, 11 motorists, and 4 cyclists). In total, there were 7,253 injuries.
https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-rare-is-crime-on-t...
> ...there were 1,120 violent index crimes reported as occurring on the subway in 2023, compared to 935 in 2019
Even comparing just Manhattan to the subway system as a whole, driving is more likely to result in an injury by a factor of 7x.
https://youtu.be/xloWKKVxZqI?si=IHNFOcGhiQHX3opN
Dangerous to who? Cause you seem to forget about the people outside of the car.
No one likes decent and cheap public transport? I find that hard to believe. It's basically the common denominator for the best modern cities.
Motorcycles are definitely not the solution. Motorcycle usage in NYC has skyrocketed since 2020 and as a result the streets are far noisier, more chaotic, and more dangerous, especially for pedestrians and cyclists.
I mean it in the sense that I've literally never met a person who prefers travelling by public transport to a personal motorized vehicle outside of long trips. The usage I've seen of it is from people who are too much of a mess financially to afford a car/license or people who are terrified of driving. Incentives just don't fix the issue of having no control and being in a pod with a hundred people you don't know and who have not been screened for insanity, excessive odor, sickness and general obnoxiousness.
And there are scooters and commuter bikes which are tamer, even electric ones. I'm not saying everyone should get sports bikes with 16 Rs in the name and a straight pipe or a Harley Tractor.
Out of curiosity, are motorcycles actually more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists than cars? Couldn't find anything quick enough.
I take the bus in to work every day even though I have a car and the ability to WFH. I love the bus. I get to spend some time outside, walking to and from stops. Most days I just read a book or browse my phone for 40 minutes, and then magically I'm at work. Sometimes I get to chat with people on the bus or at the bus stop, though that's pretty rare, most people keep to themselves. I never have road rage. I never worry about parking. I never worry about people damaging my $XX,000 object. I almost never have to care about road construction, the bus just handles it for me. It's pretty neat!
> being in a pod with a hundred people you don't know and who have not been screened for insanity, excessive odor, sickness and general obnoxiousness.
These events do happen, but they're pretty rare. For the most part, people on the bus are just people, who happen to be on a bus. Just like there are crazy drivers, there are sometimes crazy bus passengers. At least the crazy bus passengers aren't piloting 4000 lbs of steel :)
Hi, nice to meet you! I prefer public transit because when I ride it I don't have to drive or find a parking spot! And I believe it to be safer on balance.
I prefer public transit! No parking, I dont feel nearly the same frustration, I dont have to make decisions, and at the end of the day I can be a little high on the train. Its bliss.
Chiming in to say I also prefer public transit. Why focus on the ride at all when I can just read a book and teleport?
And the real danger of motorcycles is to yourself. You could end up living with a feeding tube slipping in a shower let alone a minor scuff at 25mph.
Agreed. I love public transit. To get to work I can either take ~45 minutes by bus (during which time I read), or 25 minutes by car (during which time I can only loathe that I'm stuck contributing to traffic). That 20 minutes "lost" to drastically improve the other 25 minutes is well worth it.
You don't have to be the one driving...
Sure I could pay for a $40 uber one way at todays rates without vc subsidy. Or I can take a little longer riding the bus and only pay like $2.
I drove for years and was very happy to rid myself of my car and rely solely on SF's public transit and Uber/Lyft for when I need to go somewhere that isn't as readily accessible. Scooters and EBikes can't get me across the bay bridge anyway.
And SF's public transit is worse (both less useful and less comfortable) compared to NYC, many European cities, and any Japanese or Chinese megacity. I still find it perfectly fine, and preferable to dealing with a car.
Sounds like you don't live in New York, then? Most people here don't own a car and don't want to.
Well yea, two major advantages of public transit over driving is that it is safer and less expensive. So if you are going to discount people with those opinions, of course the people remaining are more likely to align with you.
Motorcyclists generally have some compassion for cyclists in that both share trouble with cars, and both have problems with staying upright. Multiple car drivers have tried to kill me in America; no such thing happened in 10 years in Pakistan, and I've had zero direct problems from motorcycles anywhere. Collision dangers aside—there's probably stats for that somewhere, probably poorly trained, drunk, or road raging folks sitting in cars are by far the main risk—the main problem of motorcycles would be the noise and air pollution from the engines, especially when there are too many of them in too small an area, versus having somewhere you can actually walk, think, and play (these differ not) without all that horrid noise and stench. In America, this is mostly limited to a few tourist island towns where there is only an ambulance and a service truck or two, and the cyclists on vacation are all like "wow, this is so nice! I don't get the Threat Of Death™ I usually do from the American stroad".
"Stroad" is a term invented, I believe, by those crazy folks over at "Strong Towns", who probably also have things to say about congestion pricing, and why it's taken so very bloody long to implement it in a supposedly modern and advanced nation.
I favor public transit, or ideally walking (problematic) or bicycling (even more problematic). Bicycling can be very problematic in America, to the point that a tourist from Florida in downtown Seattle once remarked "wow, the cars here aren't trying to kill me!" as we sat at some stinky car-strewn intersection. Basically you're a second class citizen if you walk or bicycle. Folks in cars will yell at you or throw things sometimes, and I have the correct skin color and sex, so it's strictly worse for others.
Buses? Sure, you can find the spicy runs with all the homeless (why are there so many homeless in America? Money out the ass and yet a nation so poor …), but I've had a lot more and a lot worse direct problems with folks who sit in cars, not counting indirect problems such as the noise, air, and real estate pollution (sometimes called "the high cost of free parking"). Usually the bus crazy will do something evil like offer you a joint, or wacky conversation, and will not do something upstanding like to change into the lane that you are bicycling in, forcing you off the road.
I wish my city had better public transit, so I could drive less. Driving sucks!
Have you even been to NYC?
Coming to a place with decent and cheap public transport six months ago: 1. It's faster than commuting by car during rush hour, and otherwise 10%-20% longer within the city limits. 2. There's no crazies. I haven't seen so much as someone rocking and muttering, let alone bothering other passengers. 3. Yeah, it's a petri dish--I've been sick enough to miss days of work twice in the last six months, which is more than in the two years before moving here.
I'm not sure how well 1 and 2 could generalize from Germany to America. You'd need Harberger Taxes or liberal use of Eminent Domain to put rail networks into a city. You'd need competent and well-funded law enforcement to curtail the crazies.
#3 we could fix in either area with UVC and filtered air circulation; or I could just get comfortable with being the weirdo wearing an N95 mask every day
I have also commuted by motorcycle for around 30k miles. It does save a lot of money, but it's not much faster than cars if you're strictly following the law in the 49 states where lane splitting isn't fully legal. You also have 90 times the risk of death per mile travelled, compared to a car, which balances the increased disease risk on a train.
>I wish people would focus more on scooters and motorcycles than moving people in busses
Will never happen. Too 3rd worldy for many of the demographics that tend to drive policy on transit matters.
E-bikes though?
Good, I was hit by a car in NYC while on a bike and it caused a fracture. If this reduces congestion, then I support it because I could have easily died. However, this was accompanied by hikes in public transit pricing. I don't think transit officials are acting in good faith when it comes to their moral arguments and just want to justify raising taxes for the poor.
The people paying the congestion fees are the rich that live in the suburbs and drive into the city.
It is expected that fees will also be passed down to non-wealthy locals by services whose vehicles need to utilize these roads as well-- they will raise their prices
You are wealthy if you are using private car services like that.
Most normal New Yorkers use the subway
You don't understand: plumbers, electricians, facade repair, any business that requires wholesale goods shipped to them in a truck are all things that will ultimately pass the cost to normal people. Increased cost of living will help ensure every last "normal New Yorker" is squeezed out of the area
> However, this was accompanied by hikes in public transit pricing.
It was not. Public transit pricing is completely independent and did not change with the implementation of congestion pricing.
> I don't think transit officials are acting in good faith when it comes to their moral arguments and just want to justify raising taxes for the poor.
The only person who has acted in bad faith is Kathy Hochul, who bent over backwards to water down the policy by having poorer people subsidize wealthy car commuters.
It would be interesting to see the effect on average noise levels. Anecdotally, I have heard fewer honks from single unit trucks today.
Actually, I bet noise levels would be a really good proxy to measure the effect itself.
Bad timing on the charts before and after. Coming back off holidays, delayed flights, and in the middle of massive snowstorms. The constant data is flawed and results irrelavant. You need to wait until the spring/summer and compare windows of time to previous years.
What I am interested to know but cannot find is:
Are there are cameras inside the zone tracking cars to bill them if you are already in the zone, or if cameras only track entry to the zone? (i.e. cameras only on the border). If someone happens to evade the cameras, do they catch them eventually just by traveling within the zone? I believe London for example has internal zone cameras.
The purpose being, first of all, to ensure that people do not somehow evade paying just by operating solely within the zone, defeating the purpose of reducing traffic. And secondly, to stop people from engaging in loophole seeking behavior.
I hope that loopholes and people defrauding the system (license plate obscuration, etc) are quickly caught and penalized. You would hope that if a car enters or is detected with invalid plates, it triggers an automatic report to police nearby to follow up. Otherwise, like so many things (it seems now) we just throw our hands up at people who evade the rules and charge those who follow them. (my comment spurred by an NYT article about how people might scam the system)
The number of people who entirely live and work and drive inside the zone is going to be vanishingly small in comparison to the people who transit the zone border so I'm not sure it's going to be that big of a deal.
I just wonder why they choose not to enforce this aspect of it when it can be a significant population (in a statistical sense) of the car traffic as well as revenue. Manhattan inside the highways is a big place.
Maybe it's the cost of the cameras to be installed.
> I just wonder why they choose not to enforce this aspect of it when it can be a significant population (in a statistical sense) of the car traffic as well as revenue.
It's not. 85% of Manhattan households don't own a car at all. The number is even higher inside the Congestion and Relief Zone. Almost all car traffic within the zone is from people who do not live within the zone.
Plus of that 15% that do own a car how many actually only use the car within the Congestion Zone a significant portion of the time? My guess is the number is well below 1% of car traffic could possibly dodge a significant portion of the toll.
> Plus of that 15% that do own a car how many actually only use the car within the Congestion Zone a significant portion of the time? My guess is the number is well below 1% of car traffic could possibly dodge a significant portion of the toll.
There's no real way to get reliable numbers on this, but I would estimate that >70% of people who live in the Congestion Relief Zone and own a car use it primarily as a way to access their second home in the Hudson Valley.
I would have said that in 2019, but the testimony from congestion pricing opponents during the multiple rounds of public hearings that we've had since then only further corroborate that impression.
I wager they did a study to weigh the costs and came up with the inevitable answer that chasing down the tenth of a percent (a wild guess but I think it's at worst an order of magnitude off from the actual number) of cars that exist only within the congestion zone and never leave would cost more than you'd gain both in fees and second order effects. Especially the population of cars most likely to never or rarely leave are being charged on a per ride basis, cabs and rideshare vehicles like Uber etc.
It's like all the efforts to drug test people on welfare, they cost vastly more than they save/recover.
I don't see what good it would do to have a car that can only travel in lower Manhattan. Yeah the few people who live there, own a car, and are lazy or use it for going to get groceries 2x a week might slip through, but that's nothing significant in my book.
What would worry me is if it leads to more license plate theft. Criminals get to ride for free, while legally registered owners have to fight the fines and clear their name in NYCs byzantine government.
Where are you driving your own car to get groceries easily in lower Manhattan... twice a week?
If you had a friend or SO, one could drop off the other, then circle around a while and pick them up later. But that further reinforces my point that there's little to gain from "cheating" this way.
The cameras are only at the entrance.
Note that a gimped version of congestion pricing was actually implemented, putting it closer to being an annoyance more than an actual deterrence.
Originally it was meant to be $15, but was ultimately lowered to $9.
Going from no congestion pricing to some congestion pricing is the biggest barrier, and that was overcome. Increasing it from here is going to be a lot easier, especially if residents realize the positive effects.
It wasn't gimped, it was a PR play so the governor could claim to be saving citizens costs by 'lowering' it. Like when people buy things they otherwise wouldn't have because it was 'on sale' so they're really saving money if you think about it.
> It wasn't gimped, it was a PR play so the governor could claim to be saving citizens costs by 'lowering' it.
That doesn't make sense, because $15 was already the lower price that she fought for.
> Originally it was meant to be $15, but was ultimately lowered to $9.
It was originally supposed to be $27. $15 was the lower price that Hochul fought for and issued a press release boasting that it was the correct price.
Then she just unilaterally decided to cancel the entire program before bringing it back at $9.
Related:
NYC Congestion Pricing Set to Take Effect After Years of Delays
They don't indicate what the "average" data before Jan. 5 represents. January and February after week 1 have lighter traffic than the rest of the year. If the pre-congestion data extends beyond the winter season, including week 52 and week 1, it can't be meaningfully compared until more data is collected.
Curious how that works ? Does one need an EXPass or is a bill sent out ?
I am also wondering if other Cities will adopt this. Eventually I can see this or something like it be rolled out nationwide as EVs become more popular.
Both Work, however cheaper if you have an EZ Pass.
Yup, it's EZPass. Either with a transponder or plate-by-mail
The branding of congestion pricing has been so disastrous.
It could have been separated into two very normal things: tolls and parking fees. Every city has those. NYC could have played with those knobs until they got mostly the same effect but there would have never been any nonsense about it being illegal or unconstitutional or whatever car advocates are saying.
Even if this works, it will always be hated and fought by a large minority.
Meh, car proponents fight against any concession. You’re proposal is no different. Consider how in these comments people are even mad about being unable to park their SUV in a crosswalk (new daylighting policy in SF).
Just rip the bandage off already.
Yes, unlike congestion pricing, New Yorkers love increased tolls and paying even more for parking than they did last year.
I did a bike ride on Saturday and passed the Port Authority terminal on my way home and it was very packed. When I rode by yesterday afternoon I noticed it was significantly less crowded.
I think its attributed to the fact that it was a weekday and the weather was worse, however I would like to think the pricing had some effect.
Time will tell!
Great. Step two: NYC should force Lyft and Uber to buy taxi medallions for each car. There are way too many of idle cars trolling around, taking up space and polluting.
Congestion pricing should really be referred to as a "lower manhattan driving tax" or similar. It's a misnomer to claim it to be "solving" congestion outside of rush hours like 7-10 and 3-7.
It’s not a tax.
It is if your drive is obligatory
Mouse-over over the chart is broken (scrollbar shown and hidden again and again). I believe you dont need to set x-overflow-auto on the div where the scrollbars appear.
I think it would be interesting to include the George Washington and Verrazano Bridges as they would be alternative routes.
1. The graph doesn't work on desktop. It keeps endlessly animating in the data values flyover at a given point.
2. Congestion pricing, more generally, is ivory tower social engineering (economic discrimination like toll lanes) and a disproportionate tax on the working poor. It would be fairer if it were progressively taxed based on income.
Where is this mythical “working poor” that drives into midtown Manhattan everyday for work? Do you have any stats whatsoever on the number of people who would be impacted? Maybe even a salary range you consider to be “working poor”?
Whataboutism FUD. Nice try.
I'm incredibly hopeful that NYC congestion pricing pays off in a big way - and that we start to see it in other cities across America. I really, really want congestion pricing in downtown SF. During rush hour, cars block the box and slow down busses, with cascading effects.
How do we get around? To get downtown I have to take two busses and then bart (or two busses but it takes longer because there are a lot more stops).
The kicker: I'm not even in a suburb, I live in SF!
All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. At least NYC has a plenty good enough train system.
I end up WFH anyway, largely because it's annoying to get to an office downtown every day.
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.
In the last half decade we've seen the opening of the Salesforce transit center, the Chinatown subway station, the Van Ness BRT, the Caltrain Electrification Project, BART expansion to Berryessa, 800 new BART cars, and hundreds of smaller projects.
You can see a full list of SFMTA projects at https://www.sfmta.com/sfmta-projects
While I'm obviously exaggerating by saying "never", the list is much smaller than it needs to be, and you have some misleading things on that list.
Chinatown subway station is great. Better connects SF residents and it's exactly what I want to see more of in SF.
- Van Ness BRT? That project started in 2003. It took 20 years to complete. Not exactly the poster child of solid transit improvements in SF, except if you ignore how it got there.
- The Caltrain electrification project is great for the environment, but doesn't help SF much as far as improving transit availability. It's slightly faster, at least.
- BART expansion to Berryessa is a bit separate from SF transit improvements, which is what I'm talking about.
- Salesforce transit center is fine and has good vision, like expanding caltrain downtown. But doesn't add a massive amount of transit availability that wasn't already nearby (yet).
I provided a list of the biggest ticket items from the past few years. If you want to only look at projects that increase transit availability, reliability, or speed within SF County, check out the Muni Forward projects. Usually half a dozen lines are prioritized each year. https://www.sfmta.com/projects/muni-forward
I live in the Richmond, so I've been positively affected by the improvements to the 38/38R (although I still would strongly prefer a BRT system) and the new-ish-but-not-really 1X. In the next year I can expect transit improvements to the 1 and the 5/5R. Pretty much every bus I take on a weekly basis has seen transit improvements since I've first moved here.
Geary BRT is still not complete. 25 years in the making, and it is just a half assed solution. SF is very inefficient into completing mass transit infrastructure.
What actually improved about the 38? They moved the stops to the other side of the intersection, which saves maybe 1 minute along the entire route.
- Stops moved to be after the light, so bus isn't stuck waiting after people board
- Stops moving after the light mean Transit Signal Priority works better. GPS on the bus can "hold" the green light for longer - https://www.sfmta.com/blog/green-lights-muni
- Red painted lanes decrease private car use in bus lane, so bus can go faster
- Speeding fell by 80%, so fewer accidents mean transit is more reliable
There have been a few different projects on different sections of Geary over the years. The bus now runs 10-20% faster depending on direction and variability decreased by 25-40%.
Check out pages 15-19 of https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Doesn’t the bus just stop before people board now? Seems to me the issue is the bus isn’t capable of preempting green lights not where it stops and hits the red light on its route. When the police want to get to lunch quicker they are allowed to preempt the lights with the tooling they are given.
Better Caltrain means less road congestion in SF so benefits everyone.
And before that: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8df1z7/after_...
How would you imagine one could make driving better, aside from making public transit better? The best thing you could hope for if you feel like you need to drive within SF is to have as few other people feeling the need to drive within SF.
But wait, I have to ask: why do you live in SF?
Practically anywhere else in the US is cheaper and better for people who want to drive.
Very few other US cities are better for people who want to get around by other means.
it's too bad SF did not build an underground railway system covering the city in the short window when the labor to do so was affordable
What do you mean by "the short window when the labor to do so was affordable"? Other cities in the world seem to be able to build underground railways just fine and they have similar labor costs as the US. See Paris or Sydney for cities that have created new underground railways recently.
Labor costs in Paris for building rail are considerably cheaper https://archive.is/Ojs0k
But my comment was a bit tongue in cheek - it is mostly political dysfunction. Of course the US could find people willing to work for less than $400/hr or whatever, but there is an incentive disalignment.
1851?
1850-1950s. But just as importantly this time frame also happened to be before the NIMBYists stepped in (which is arguably more consequential).
Much of SF didn't even exist until the 1930s-50s. For example, most of Sunset and Richmond is tract housing built during that era - before then it was sand dunes and chicken farms.
People underestimate how new much of the Western US is. For example, Dallas only began expanding in 1891 after the railways were built, LA was a small town until the 1910s-30s era expansion, modern San Jose only formed in the 1960s-70s after absorbing dozens of farming towns like Alviso and Berryessa, Seattle was mostly sand dunes until they were leveled in the 1900s-30s).
Because of how new it was, most of the cities are planned primarily with cars in mind - especially after the 1930s era Dust Bowl Migration and the 1940s-60s era economic migration. Same thing in much of Canada and Australia as well, which saw a similar postwar expansion.
> before the NIMBYists stepped in
NIMBYism in SF only really began in the 1970s onwards.
While NIMBYism is now elitist, it initially started out as part of the civil rights movement ("urban redevelopment" was often a guise for razing historically Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods in that era - for example much of Japantown/Fillmore) as well as the early environmental movement (eg. Sierra Movement, Greenpeace), which was opposed to profit motive compared to modern YIMBY+Greentech model.
While that’s true of the outer communities (San Jose, etc) I took the OP’s message as referring to SF core/downtown which was already pretty developed by the 1950s. Unlike LA, SF was a major city far earlier.
Much of SF's core/downtown was rebuilt after the 1906 fire and earthquake, plus there was massive "urban redevelopment" that made the core much more car friendly.
People are forgetting about pasadena. That was the bigger socal city than la for a long time and maybe even bigger than sf (certainly is geographically).
No in the 70s when they built bart but intended it to be a suburban commuter network
Here in San Francisco? On my insured Stromers, with my family, that I bought for less than the cost of a year of auto insurance. Door to door, I am everywhere I want to be in about 10m. My longest typical journey is 45m across Golden Gate Bridge from the Mission, which is faster than any car, simply because I park my bike at the door of my destinations.
The better question is, have you ever seen a kid crying in the back of a bike?
Hear hear! Though I admit my own kid has cried once or twice in the front of an urban arrow, toddler rage is a powerful thing….
Everyone I know who bikes in the city has been hit by a car at some point (see: my complaints about enforcement of traffic laws in this thread if you want my opinion on that).
I cringe when I see parents with their kids on the back of their bikes. Super dangerous.
Congestion pricing makes driving better, not worse.
Of course it does, if you remove price from the equation!
Sure, but that’s a dismissive interpretation.
It’s a bit like saying “sure, a cinema that refuses to sell more tickets than it has seats leads to a better cinema viewing experience, but only if you remove price from the equation!”
It boggles my mind (by which I mean "you should feel dirty for employing a dishonest rhetorical trick like that") that you can call his take dismissive when you simply ignored the area that is regressing (cost) in order to facilitate the tradeoff.
Cost is explicitly being traded away here to facilitate improvement in other areas. That's the whole point of implementing the toll/tax!!!!!
Phrases like “toll” and “congestion pricing” clearly imply that there will be a cost to driving, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say anyone in the conversation is ignoring cost.
But again, dismissing the improvements because costs go up is like dismissing the reduction of water pollution because “now only people who can afford chemical disposal can operate a tannery next to the river.”
There are two ways to not sell more tickets than you have seats. One is to jack up the price of seats, the other is to add more seats.
The latter in this context would be to e.g. build higher density housing so more people can feasibly take mass transit, as opposed to congestion pricing which is just a tax on people who can't afford the artificially scarce housing in the areas where mass transit use is feasible already.
Wouldn't the price of the car, fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc. dwarf the congestion tax? So the car itself is the worst part about the driving experience?
Maybe. Used vs new cars have vastly different costs. Generally tolls are far more than fuel cost where they exist. Insurance is - in the us - charged per year with unlimited use.
there are some who the charge would be significant (long paid off reliable used car) while others who it is a drop compared to the othes costs (new luxury car)
True, there’s a lot of room to optimize costs. For example the congestion tax costs can be reduced to 0 by avoiding areas it targets. And that’s not even tongue in cheek, one could commute to the edge of the city and take public transport for example.
That is the goal of course. The open question (though we will know in a year) is will they. Or will they just reduce something else from their budget to pay these tolls? If only a handful of people change their behavior this failed (though the extra money to transit may result in useful service expansions for someone else who isn't driving now). If thousands change their behavior it was a success.
for a bus-centric system like SF, congestion pricing intrinsically makes public transit better
Yeah that's the key. Not disincentivising cars but to make public transport the obvious answer by making it really good.
They do that really well here in Barcelona. 21€ a month and you can use all the transport you want in the city, all modes. Why would i want a car what's expensive to own, park and maintain and I can only just it when I've not been drinking?
Problem is, making transport good costs money and a lot of effort. Taxing cars is easy and brings money in.
For what it’s worth a folding bike and BART is a great combo
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.
Well, congestion pricing would make driving better. (And perhaps make busses better, too, since they use the same roads.)
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. At least NYC has a plenty good enough train system.
Except that SF public transit is actually pretty good. East-West transit works extremely well via buses and MUNI depending on whether you live in the northern or southern part of the city. Bay Wheels is extremely affordable and makes a lot of sense for short trips in a city of SF’s size. BART has its limitations but it also generally pretty good. Sure, SF public transit could be better, but I’d actually argue the problem is that driving in SF isn’t hard enough - many people have great public transit options but refuse to use them because we haven’t forced them to reprogram their car-brains.
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.
Same happening here in my smallish (~300k peeople) capital of a small eu country...
Too many cars? More expensive parking! Less parking! More expensive parking! Less parking! More pedestrian-only streets, and even more cars around that...
And the buses? They suck. The city is roughly star-shaped.. want to go from one leg to another? Well, you have to cross the city center. Sunday? Half of the buses don't drive then. Something happening in the city center? Good luck with getting on the last bus after the event is over, and no extra buses added. Dog? Not during "rush hours" (6.30-9:30 and 13-17h). AC? Barely any. Two buses needed? No time sinchronization at all. Train-bus time sychronization? haha good luck. Need to go just a stop or two? It's expensive. Need to go across the whole town? It's slow, even with empty streets.
But hey, parking will be made even more expensive!
edit: also, a student? You get cheaper transport! Here's a line for you to wait to get the transport card: https://www.zurnal24.si/slovenija/pred-okenci-prevoznikov-pr...
Sounds right. Here in SF, instead of police pulling over people who speed and run stop signs, we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections so people speeding and running stop signs can see if they're about to kill a pedestrian.
Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.
Because police can't physically be in every intersection at once, and there's research that shows that removing parking around intersections reduces pedestrian fatalities. They could add cameras, but I bet you that people would fight tooth and nail against that as well... not being able to park within 20ft of an intersection doesn't cause any privacy issues, or funnel money into the city councilman's cousin's company that just so happens to be in the business of installing red light and stop sign photo enforcement cameras, or need ongoing maintenance to keep working
> Because police can't physically be in every intersection at once
Can we compromise at some number greater than 0? I've lived here for more than a decade and don't remember seeing anyone getting pulled over by SFPD.
> Because police can't physically be in every intersection at once
They don't have to be everywhere. They have to be at least _somewhere_ and start visible enforcing. People need to know that they might get away with running a red light a couple of times, but they WILL be caught eventually, and there WILL be consequences.
> and there's research that shows that removing parking around intersections reduces pedestrian fatalities.
I read a lot of the urbanist propaganda research, and most of it is pure crap. Bad statistical methods, poor significance, P-hacking, biased tests, you name it.
You must not be a pedestrian if you don’t like the red zones at intersections. You can’t see the oncoming traffic without stepping into the intersection.
> Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.
If you consistently enforce the law then the fine revenue falls below even its current level because consistent enforcement reduces violations, meanwhile costs go up because the additional enforcement has to be paid for.
The existing system is the one cultivated to maximize revenue by setting speed limits below the median traffic speed so that cops can "efficiently" issue citations one after another as long as there isn't enough enforcement to induce widespread compliance. This is, of course, dumb, but the alternatives generate less net profit for the government.
> we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections
This is called daylighting, and it’s a very good idea. The rest of your comment was just snark, and I assume you know that road improvements don’t have anything to do with law enforcement, but I just want to emphasize that daylighting is going to be a huge positive for the city.
First off, false equivalence - there is no "instead of", what the police do or do not is unrelated to the reduction of parking spaces.
Second, implementing safety by modifying the physical environment is vastly superior to anything else because it scales. There's no longer a need to educate every single person who will use every intersection in the city every day on how to do it safely, nor a need to ensure x police officers are present. The physical design creates an environment that is safe by default.
SF put in 33 speed cameras in known locations, and are aiming to install 900 more by the end of this year. As a bonus to speeders, speeds in excess of 100 mph will incur a $500 speeding ticket, though that may have unintended consequences.
what unintended consequences?
The real unintended consequence is that cities ultimately don’t like to run them. They’re effective, and thus the revenue the city is expecting disappears. In they end they become costs rather than revenue sources.
The root problem is voters tolerating a government that sees law enforcement as a profit center.
that hasn't been true in any city i've lived in that had speed cameras (shockingly few actually). dc makes money on their cameras
$500 is just dinner for some people in SF.
Or maybe people will drive at 99 mph to get the best value.
Speeding also carries point penalties. Get caught a few times and your license is suspended. You can’t just pay to speed indefinitely (unless you also buy something like a get out of jail free card from the police union).
is this different than the existing law? like they're not lowering the penalty
Nothing special. Slight increases in minor accidents and near misses, some minority of which will involve pedestrians or road rage violence Basically the same downsides as anything else that changes the speed via rule or enforcement rather than changing the conditions of the road (e.g. "traffic calming").
i fail to see how adding cameras and an additional penalty will lead to any of those things
Because it only affects some drivers leading to higher variance in speed leading to more friction among traffic. Same reason everyone with a brain suggests traffic calming over changing the numbers on the signs.
This is transit 101 level stuff.
A normal person sees that $500 fine as a incentive to not go that fast. But there's a certain kind of person for whom $500 is nothing compared to being able to tell the story of that time the city sold them a picture of them, complete with certificate that says they broke 100mph somewhere in the city limits, a trophy to frame and display openly in the garage next to said vehicle.
Really gotta wonder if the people that downvoted disagree that people would do such a thing, don't want to give people ideas and thus buried it, or are people who would do such a thing. Or some other thing.
There’s a cost of policing, and a significant amount of ticket revenue goes to court fees. Not everyone pays their ticket.
Likely it’d not raise a fortune and the ticketing revenue would mostly offset the cost of enforcement.
That's.. fine? It'd drive behavior modification if there was even a small risk of getting a citation. Today, there really isn't.
The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people. Rich Democrats will claim it’s beneficial for the environment, while rich Republicans will call it capitalism at work. In the end, improving public transit isn’t really on their radar. And they rule the world.
buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other, but many more people can be moved with a bus.
trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.
almost not worth discussing honestly. this has become yet another factionalized holy war over the last decade.
One challenge with your 100% logical reasoning is that it assumes wealthy and powerful people share the same priorities you do. Unfortunately, this is rarely true, and it often takes time to realize just how different those priorities can be.
I’m all for public transit myself, but after 25 years in San Francisco, I’ve only seen it decline. That sentiment isn’t just mine—many longtime SF residents share this cynicism.
Oh, SF, the home of both some of the most powerful NIMBYs and the most outlandish "social justice" experiments. I feel for this once wonderful, poor city.
As a consolation, I must say that e.g. NYC was also handled miserably, say, in 1980s. Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine, even outright enjoyable here and there.
I think that SF will also shake off its current insanity, and will turn back into a flourishing, living, and thus changing city.
It takes time, thoughtful voting (of many, many people), and likely a bit of luck.
> Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine
Well, except for the people being pushing in front of subways to their death, or lit on fire in stations. The subways stations are getting dangerous enough, even in "not bad" areas, that people are avoiding them.
Out of about 3.5 million riders a day. Meanwhile, nobody pays any attention to the roughly 250 people who die in car crashes every single year in the NYC metro area. If you're so worried about safety, we should ban cars entirely instead of just taxing them a little.
Oh, ffs. I was replying the comment that the subways stays are "fine". They're not fine, they're more dangerous than they were 20 years ago; more dangerous than they should be. The subway system in NYC is of great benefit to the city and it's residents. But it could certainly stand a fair amount of improvement.
And banning cares from the city completely would be moronic, causing incredible harm to pretty much every aspect of it. I'm not "so worried about safety" that I would want to destroy the city, and your putting forth a strawman argument implying I am adds nothing to the discussion.
If you look at basically any subway station now, and compare it to 1980, it's a huge improvement. If you want a reminder, visit Chambers St station (it's heavily affected by leaks from the buildings above it).
What are they doing instead? Driving on the roads? Staying home?
I don't live in SF, so could definitely be some local nuances I'm missing. in NYC, there is a pretty clear partisan split on the new congestion tax. the (relatively) red leaning areas are the loudest opponents. I guess having so many high earners already taking public transit might change the discussion.
Those areas are the poor areas. The rich areas in NYC are the most democratic.
> buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other
This is not true at all. Some ways of increasing throughput for both: Build higher density housing which allows more people to take the bus/train and reduces congestion even for the people who still have to drive, add more lanes that either can use (e.g. by building parking garages and then converting street parking to travel lanes), make streets one-way on alternating blocks (reduces congestion at intersections), build pedestrian catwalks above busy intersections to reduce pedestrian-induced congestion and keep pedestrians safer, etc.
> but many more people can be moved with a bus.
The "can" is really the problem. If you do the numbers for a full bus the bus seems very attractive, but then to run buses to everywhere that everyone travels in cars without an impractical amount of latency, many of the buses would end up having only one or two passengers -- and sometimes none -- while still requiring three times the space and fuel of a car and on top of that requiring a separate driver at significant expense.
So instead there is no bus that goes to those places at those times. And since you can't get those people on a bus, they're reasonably going to demand a solution that doesn't make their life miserable when they have to drive a car.
> trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.
Trains (especially subways) work great in the areas with the population density to justify them. But now you're back to needing higher density housing.
I wish we had more trains where it's still possible to route them in shallow tunnels that are cheap to build by excavations, say, in many parts of Brooklyn. (The 2nd Avenue extension had to pierce rock at rather serious depths.)
The problem is political not technical. People don'tewant thair streets block by construction for a couple years and so make up reasons against it. New york is easy as nothing archeolorical evists to worry about (north america generally lacks minerals to make things of interest from they used things that decayed long ago.
I thought that was only possibly because in there wasn’t so much in the way of buried utilities back then
Suppose a non-rich person needs to use the highways for work and can make twice as many stops during the day because of congestion pricing.
Imagine a group of non-rich people who decide to carpool because of congestion pricing and end up spending half the time in traffic every day and as a result get more leisure time.
Considering that a parking spot in Mahnattan costs close to $1K per month, most of the cars are driven by people who are not poor.
Free/cheap street parking exists in Manhattan. A lot of it.
> The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people.
And spy on everyone, all the time, because now it “““has to””” track every vehicle's every move — Total Information Awareness
> how do we get around
By moving out of crappy overpriced cities?
If it was so crap, it wouldn't be overpriced.
How do you explain Comcast?
It's difficult because I've never had Comcast (I pay my £10/month BBC fee that hasn't gone up in years with pleasure) but I'd probably start by saying that Comcast is not a scarce good.
If it wasn't scarce then it would be cheaper. The problem is that it is scarce, artificially, as a result of regulatory capture etc.
Which is the same reason housing in places like SF is so expensive. Artificial scarcity as a result of zoning rules that make construction prohibitively expensive or otherwise inhibit it from increasing the housing supply.
Houston metro has more people than SF metro, so why does housing cost more in SF? Because there is less of it.
To bring us back onto the topic, Manhattan is a scarce resource, and there's nothing artificial about that fact.
There's plenty more space in the up and down direction. Bridges and tunnels could be used to add car or other vehicle capacity.
This thread is about transportation, not office or resi space.
Edit - I see you've changed your message. How does a bridge over water add road capacity to a peninsula?
It doesn't. There may be a other materials that bridges can go over, however.
Your solution to road congestion on a densely-populated peninsula is more roads. Got it.
It's not just more roads, although more roads are one of the things it is possible to create.
You can also create more housing, so people are closer to their jobs and have to travel fewer miles. Manhattan has higher density than most places, but it also has more people, and would you be surprised to learn that the zoning in most of NYC no longer allows the buildings that are currently in Manhattan to be built almost anywhere? So as a result you can't create more of them and people who might like to live in Manhattan instead live in the suburbs around the city and drive into the city in a car.
You can also create things that aren't roads, like subways, which then allow you to remove cars and buses (and bus lanes) from the roads when it becomes viable for more people to take the subway, which reduces road congestion.
While I agree with disliking the things you mentioned, could it be argued that adding barriers to entry for getting into the city will just increase WFH and hurt SF more? I can see a lot of people choosing to just stay home rather than take a bus – not everyone is close to MUNI or BART.
For a concrete example of carrot and stick - check out ridership numbers for the 49 after the Van Ness BRT project finished. 49 ridership is more than completely recovered at 140% of pre-pandemic numbers. In comparison, the 38 and 38R didn't get their dedicated bus lane out in the Richmond and ridership numbers are still nowhere near pre-pandemic. Make the bus fast and frequent and people will take it.
https://www.sfmta.com/reports/average-daily-muni-boardings-r...
By the way, the head of SFMTA resigned this week, and there are rumors of a full audit on the horizon.
Fewer single-person-vehicles = more desirable ontime Bus/Tram throughput = more people who are close to MUNIBART taking MUNIBART.
Then use tolls to improve and expand the mass transit services instead of only ever catering to the single-person-car-commuters.
(ofc it takes more than ontime performance to sell people on mass transit, needs to be a safe environment at all hours of the day -- even if I can take BART into the city in the afternoon, if I don't feel safe taking it back at 10PM then I'm just going to drive both ways, to say nothing of the choice to stop running trains at midnight)
Most transit agencies have this problem of the "vicious transit cycle" - people don't take the bus because it's too infrequent/unreliable => more cars make the buses more unreliable => less money because so few people take it => back to start. It's amazing when you're sitting in a bus behind 20 cars backed up over 4 blocks, and you look back and there's 50 people on the bus. Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles
And if you look to places like Meixco City and Bogota, their bus rapid transit is very fast and efficient. But good luck taking away a single lane of traffic for dedicated bus services anywhere in the US.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrLLq1V4acKnG3RVA
This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.
According to Google street view, the road had 3 general car lanes per direction up to and including Nov 2016.
Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.
Yet there’s now 6 lanes? So they didn’t take out two lanes for bus traffic?
> Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles
They're building up more and more Bus-Only lanes here in the Twin Cities, and as a daily bus commuter, the change has been fantastic. Really makes a big difference in speed & reliable bus timings when the bus gets its own space to operate.
Nah. Most agencies have a problem of people realizing that wasting life in buses is not worth it.
Transit can never compete with cars on speed in well-designed cities.
We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities".
Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives.
This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. (https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...) (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fe...)
Speaking of "wasting life in buses", did you know that the average LA / Chicago / NYC driver spends 85 to 100 hours a year just sitting in traffic? Food for thought (https://inrix.com/scorecard/)
> We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities".
No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me.
> This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars.
Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).
> No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time.
Even if that is true, average commute time is just a single factor. There's also health, cost, comfort, the environment, safety. Comparisons using a single metric are simply invalid.
> Go on, fact check me.
Ok.
Couldn't find any reliable data, could you cite your sources? What I have found is a few sources with wildly different data, e.g.:
- [1] puts Houston at 42 minutes, very different from your claim of 28 minutes.
- [2] claims the average time for the EU is 25 minutes.
Most of the sources I've found are based on self-reported data (surveys) so I do not put much weight on them. Do you have any sources that provide reliable data?
[1]: https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commu...
[2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
London average commute time is 38 minutes, quite comparable to 31 minute in Houston. I would argue you get much more spare time while using public transportation too, as well as so much needed walk time.
> London average commute time is 38 minutes, quite comparable to 31 minute in Houston.
Houston is 28 minutes. So an average Houston citizen gets 20 more minutes every day. In reality, it's even more because Houston is way better designed for daily chores: buying groceries, getting kids to chess clubs, etc.
It can work out to a whole _hour_ a day of extra time compared to London.
And they will live in FAR FAR FAR better conditions. In their own house, with plenty of space.
So yep, dense cities are a folly and need to be refactored (by demolishing).
Manhattan is such a strange place to live. People are locked into something far off the normal ways of living, and they forget those other ways of life and look down on them (smaller less dense cities, suburbs, rural areas). Living in closets in high rises and moving around underground isn’t life. Having room for living, being able to get around quickly with private owned vehicles, and walking on grass instead of concrete is a better way of life. Somehow masses of people, especially younger people, have convinced themselves that an unhealthy way of life is healthy.
Manhattan/NYC also provides you with truly diverse crowd of people around, cultural events and experiences, different food and many more.
NYC in general also have plenty of different neighborhoods with very different lifestyles and vibes.
None of that crap you mentioned has anything to do with the previous post. I live in as suburban of a neighborhood as you can imagine and within 10-15 minutes could walk to a Vietnamese restaurant, 2 sushi restaurants, Thai, NY style pizza, 2 bars, several shitty Mexican restaurants, and just about every fast food chain. I’ll trade this ease of living over “vibes” any day.
Several million people disagree with you.
I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking'
For certain high frequency routes in Chicago, I never minded sitting on the bus to get across town. At least once I got off I didn't have to find a parking spot. Now wasting life waiting for a bus is another story.
> I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking'
Yup. Wide roads, plenty of parking, distributed industry and office space, low density.
"Low density" just means that the entire area is covered in asphalt. That's not what well designed looks like.
Yes, and?
> That's not what well designed looks like.
It is more flexible, people-friendly, enables better living. So yeah, "well designed".
Unless you’re one of those people who can’t drive?
That indeed is the biggest problem. Waymo is already solving it in SF, though.
People can't afford to spend $20 every time they want to go anywhere.
The thing is, a transit trip's true cost is also around $20 in SF and Seattle. It's just that perverse incentives hide it from users.
Waymo taxis deserve the same level of subsidies. It won't be happening any time soon because it'll be a death knell for transit, and will leave thousands of city employees without work.
This isn ’t true, unless you’re willing to consider the subsidies that cars get when it comes to putting in and maintaining roads and doing urban planning around half the city being car surfaces.
It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures).
And that’s leaving aside all the issues with our of control transit budgets or crime on public transit in many cities.
The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else. A single car line can transport about 2000 persons per hour. A single bus lane about 9000, a single bike lane 14000 - if you dedicate the space to pedestrians, we’re at 19000 and light rail goes beyond that at 22000 and more. (See page 3, https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002265/News/Pre..., German only)
This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.
(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)
The problem is utilization: you can't get 9000 persons per hour via busing in most places, weighting by area. Fixed routing scales poorly compared to cars (or bikes which have their own drawbacks) trying to match many-to-many riders-to-destinations.
What's "most places?" This is a traffic flow that's achieved routinely in about every medium size european city. And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
A medium US city has the commute time of 15 minutes. It's unachievable with transit in any scenario.
> And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
Yeah. And it sucks. The distributed nature of the US cities gave people far more economic opportunities than in Europe. This resulted in faster economic growth (and still does).
> The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else
Bullshit. You are a victim of propaganda.
In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people. So with 10 buses per hour, you get just 180 people per lane per hour. Even at peak loads (200 people per bus) and a bus every 2 minutes, you get 6000 people per lane per hour.
Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math. Transit slowly consumes lives and increases misery. All it's good for is to move people to "misery centrals" (downtowns) where pretty much nobody really wants/can live in comfort.
> In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
The average car occupancy in the US seems to be around 1.5. How would increasing that be easy? You would have to somehow convince the majority of the population to change their habits, that does not sound easy in any way.
> A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people.
In the US, a country that has invested heavily into car infrastructure at the expense of public transport. All you're saying is the underfunded public transport in the US sucks. We all know this, but it has no relevance to public transport in general.
> Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math.
The simple math here is the number of cars goes up linearly as population increases, which is unsustainable. Meanwhile, public transport only gets more and more efficient.
Or just keep density lower and match the car lanes capacity.
2000 people per hour is really not that much. And reducing density will not buy you much - density itself doesn't mean anything. If you have a suburb with 50 000 people living there and an office park with 25 000 people working there (both not particularly high numbers), you get a traffic flow of 25 000 people moving both ways, during rush hour. That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.
What would buy you much is mixed neighborhoods (aka: the 15 minute city - everything you need for your daily life is within 15 minutes walking distance), because this will eliminate many trips. But mixed neighborhoods work better with higher density - because a supermarket in a low density place cannot be within 15 minutes walking distance.
Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.
No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.
And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.
> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.
I almost got into an accident today when a car swerved 4 lanes to the right because an absentminded driver wanted to take the exit at the last second. Like most attentive drivers, I don't like driving on public roads — it brings out the worst in us.
This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Thankfully, robots will save us. I wouldn't be pushing for cars, if it were not for the existence of Waymo.
> This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Yeah. They are waaaaay too good at allowing people to move, so urbanists wage an all-out war on them.
Transit has this inherent problem: it HAS to suck. You can't realistically build a fast public transit network allowing easy arbitrary point-to-point trips. It's just mathematically impossible. So transit does what it can only kinda-sorta do well: move people to Downtowns from dense living residential areas.
I don't hate cars. I own and drive a car, though I mostly take transit into SF to avoid the stress.
By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space (both while moving and while parked) to be compatible with even a moderately dense environment. You need some kind of rationing or metering.
The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars. There are more parking lots, which means less density, which means fewer people can choose to live closer to work, which means more cars, and so on. (Transit does the same in its own favor, of course. Transportation is quite fundamental.)
It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out. But it works quite well with the levels of density in pre-war "streetcar suburbs", like those built around the Key System in Oakland. I think the most reasonable solution for post-war suburbs is transit most of the way, and cars (robotic or otherwise) for the last mile.
> By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space
And? Buses also take a lot of space. A road footprint of a bus is equivalent to about 15-20 cars (because it has to stop often). It pays off when the bus is fully occupied, but outside of rush hours, cars are a more _efficient_ way to use the road space.
Cars force city designers to build in a people-oriented way, rather than optimize for bike lanes.
> The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars
Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
> It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out
It works nowhere. And yes, I lived in very dense areas (Amsterdam, NYC, Moscow).
Well, rush hour is what matters. As those of us who have worked on large distributed systems are aware, you have to provision for peak load. Peak load for cars is much, much worse than peak load for buses. Roads and parking lots are also relatively inflexible, unlike buses and trains where you can run more in one direction depending on time of day.
> Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
I appreciate the value in being able to move freely, but cars also constrain in many ways. They force more building to happen at the wildland-urban interface, to devastating effect as seen in the Palisades fire.
More importantly, current zoning and parking regulations make modern America very far from a free market. Not as far away as the Soviets were, but definitely nowhere close to reflecting people's true preferences once all benefits and costs are factored in. I doubt cars would be nearly as central in a market where single-family zoning was abolished and the full externalities of driving were captured.
Yes and no. Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them)
So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest.
However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput.
Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination.
This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)
The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)
> This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)
The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.
Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive. One good example to study is Germanys 50 EUR Ticket - now 58 EUR. It's a flat rate for all of Germanys public transport, including regional trains. You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car. Yet, while it has increased ridership, the majority of people drive.
The problem is that transportation system quality matters more for a lot of people. The problem ends up as people owning a car for the last mile - that is from the rapid transit to their porch. And once they own a car, the calculus changes - you already incure the cost for the car.
So what you need is a reliable way to get door to door - and that requires more than slapping down a few light rail tracks. It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable. In the end, building such a system requires the (political) will to regard public transport as a common good infrastructure like road that gets paid from taxes and is not considered an enterprise that (could potentially) make money. In the end, this could also be made free, but free alone will not make that happen.
> Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive.
This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math.
> You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car.
When most people have a car you have to compare it not to the amortized cost of owning a car but the marginal cost of driving one you already have.
The majority of trips might be suitable for public transport but then people have a car because it's such an inconvenience to go to Costco and carry back everything you buy there on a bus, or they occasionally go somewhere the bus doesn't. So they get a car and then the insurance, tax, depreciation, etc. are all sunk costs and to get them to take the bus instead of driving themselves it has to beat the cost of gas.
Which it can, if you make it zero. Which in turn increases ridership, allowing you to justify more routes, which reduces latency, which causes even more people to take mass transit. By making mass transit more attractive instead of making driving less attractive.
> It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable.
Or you can just handle 85% of the cases that would have a justifiable amount of ridership and then let people drive a car or get an Uber in the 15% that would be mostly disused, instead of leaving it how it is now where people drive the majority of the time.
> Which it can, if you make it zero.
But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners.
Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
"bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
> But you can't.
Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public. Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget. Meanwhile it would save the public money on net, because collecting the cost as taxes has lower overhead than operating a parallel fare collections infrastructure. And it benefits drivers by giving them exactly what they've always wanted -- an incentive for other people to use mass transit:
https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favo...
> Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it, so the amortized cost of the rail line becomes $30/trip because you have to pay for all the same fixed costs with fewer riders. But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Whereas if you set the price to zero, the actual cost per trip which is now being covered by taxes comes out to $4/trip, because at lower cost you get higher ridership and more usage to spread the fixed costs over. Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
> I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost? Subsidies are the thing where they're not paying the full cost.
Moreover, you want the same incentive for everyone -- if a free fare would get someone at the 70th percentile income to take the subway instead of a car, give it to them so they do that.
The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it. Means testing is effectively a scheme to impose high marginal tax rates on the poor.
> Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public.
Nope. A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).
> Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget.
So would be giving everyone a (cheap) car.
> Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it
Good, then don't build it! Easy peasy. Price is a GREAT signal. Subsidies, hidden fees, misplaced incentives and other crap lead to suboptimal outcomes.
You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
> But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit
Great, we need exactly that.
> which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Nope. People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
> Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
Nope. It just doesn't. Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit). Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
> You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost?
I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
Richer people should pay the full cost of rides. This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
> The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it.
That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
> A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).
If you have a city without any mass transit, there will be traffic congestion. Beating the "stuck in traffic" time for a car is not hard at all. Beating the car's time when there is no traffic is harder, but an express train can certainly match it, and anyway how do you intend on preventing traffic congestion in a city with no mass transit?
> Price is a GREAT signal.
Price is a great signal for incremental costs. If you're going to burn a gallon of gas, another gallon of gas has to be produced, so you only want it to happen if someone is willing to pay the incremental cost.
It works poorly for fixed costs, because the price then deters usage even though the fixed cost is fixed and deterring usage saves nothing. This is why you should charge for gas but not for roads or for occupying otherwise-empty space on a subway car.
> You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
The argument is that transit is good because it allows density and density is good because it makes more efficient use of a scarce resource (land).
> People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
The buildings in the downtowns are not going to cease to exist. Something is going to be in them.
> And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Houston Metro has a population around 8M. NYC metro is 20M, is the largest in the US, and the NYC government has been corrupt and incompetent for decades.
In particular, one of the things Houston does well is to have less restrictive zoning than most other cities, which allows for mixed-use construction that in turn lets people live closer to where they work. But that's something that helps regardless of what you're using for transit.
Moreover, the level of traffic in Houston is not good. In spite of their zoning advantage their average commute is worse than the national average.
> Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
There is nobody dictating how many people will live in a city nor should there be. You can tell from the geography of the continent that a city in the position of New York is going to be a massive port, and so it is. Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago are big cities for the same reason. Nevada is mostly desert so Nevada is mostly empty; Las Vegas metro was created from the combination of cheap power from Hoover Dam and proximity to California with legal gambling and it's three quarters of the state population. Inland states are disproportionately farmland.
You don't get to decide where the beachfront property is. The question is only, given that 38M people live in California, how are they supposed to get around?
> Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit).
That's where the traffic congestion is!
> Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
This is the BS "induced demand" theory. What it's really describing is that if you have an otherwise desirable area (e.g. it's within an hour of the ocean) but the local government is mismanaging the area so it's full of traffic congestion or crime or excessive bureaucracy or whatever else, and you do anything whatsoever to make it not suck as much, more people are going to move there.
Fixing the problem doesn't induce demand, the demand was there the whole time and was being suppressed by mismanagement. And you get the same result from anything that fixes the problem. The only way to prevent more people from moving in there is to keep the place a hellscape so people don't want to move in.
Compare this to building a subway in Wyoming where nobody lives and the presence of a subway is obviously not going to cause a population boom there, which is what would happen if "induced demand" was actually a thing.
> I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
The issue is that $20 is the amortized cost, not the incremental cost. The bus costs the same to run whether it has 5 people on it or 40, but if it has 40 then the cost per passenger is 8 times less. And if it currently has 10, the incremental cost of making it 11 -- or 30 -- is zero, so that's what you want the fare to be. Which would in turn cause more people to take the bus and lower the cost per passenger.
> Richer people should pay the full cost of rides.
The incremental cost is still zero regardless of your income level.
> This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
It does also apply to cars, but we usually get it right for cars -- the roads (i.e. the fixed cost) are free but you pay for your own gas.
> That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
The proposal is that you'd have free mass transit, paid for by taxes, which are predominantly paid by rich people. There is nothing prohibiting you from buying a car, which would cost the same as it does now, all it does is make one of your options less expensive than it is now.
Reducing your choices can only come from making one worse than it is now, so that it takes that option off the table. Making an alternative cheaper or more convenient can't do that -- you still have the option to do the other thing and then only reason you wouldn't is if the new option is going to make you better off than the status quo which is still available.
Oh hey, I actually agree! By all means, let's compare fairly and price in all costs and externalities of car ownership vs public transport. You may not like the result, but that's life.
San Francisco currently has ~54% of its eligible population having cars registered to them. There are a lot of one-car families as well as e-bike families who don't want a car.
If that increased to 100%, you wouldn't be able to park anywhere without paying a lot, and getting anywhere would be super slow.
It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
> It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
A classic case of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma .
> absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures)
I think they're intended to be anti-"getting killed by a car" measures. Traffic fatality statistics speak for themselves.
Safety and schedule. I've never had a safety issue with taking commuter rail into Boston but taking it home from an evening event is basically a non-starter given how seldom it runs and how much longer it will take relative to driving even if I catch my train.
I'm very hopeful that Boston commuter rail gets electrified with the associated speed and frequency improvements soonish. the inner half of the commuter rail network is absolutely dense enough to be worth running service every 15 minutes on peak and every 30 off peak
Why ask for 15/30? My schedule right next door for the Berlin subway is 3/10. During peak hours, you don’t even check when the next train runs. And they’re all full. I do believe Boston has more inhabitants than this small city.
the subway is at 5/10 or so (it would be very nice if we got it down to 3/10), the commuter rail, however is mostly hourly at peak and 2 hours to never of peak
Yeah. I'll usually take commuter rail in for the rare 9-5ish stuff because it's such a lousy drive. But catching one of the very few later trains, especially if I have to time it with the subway, just doesn't work and it's usually a <1 hour drive anyway at that time of night.
I'm also pretty far out and not all the trains run that far.
The Boston commuter rail network would be equivalent to Berlin's S-Bahn network, which is 10/20 minutes, and 30 on Friday and Saturday nights.
Top speed (mostly) comes from the tracks, not the method of motive power.
As it stands they're already maxing out and exceeding (when they're late) the max speed for the class of rail they have.
Some of the inner stops might get a few seconds faster with better acceleration but that's about it.
The grade crossings are also kinda f'd. At full speed you can be in the middle of the train and see the arms still be in the process of lowering at certain crossings. That ain't safe. Faster won't make that better.
Top speed, sure, but for typical commuter heavy-rail, a non-express train isn't running at top speed for all that long.
Diesel-electric trains take a LOT longer to accelerate compared to a modern EMU, so much so that Caltrain's electrification project shaved 23 minutes off the SF to San Jose local trip, from 100 to 77 minutes.
Videos [0] [1] make the acceleration improvement pretty clear.
The MBTA already runs top speed on most of its lines once you get outside of roughly I95 depending on the line. Getting there faster would help but I don't think it would shave as much time off the end to end trip as you think. And for the urban stops they already accelerate and brake at the limit of what is reasonable for standing passengers. They can't push it too much or an old lady is gonna bounce off a wall and get a nose bleed and that's a bad look. It's not like Acela where a ticket guarantees a seat.
There will definitely be some improvement from electrification but I don't think it will affect median travel times much and the affect on average will mostly be from reliability.
The Fitchburg line did do upgrades a few years ago. I think they double-tracked sections that weren't. It still take a while--hour+--from the outer reaches.
if there aren't enough seats and they're still running 30 minute headways, that's incredibly stupid.
Not enough seats is mostly pretty close into the city in my experience. At least on the line that I sometimes take, it's mostly Waltham in which doesn't have a mass transit line.
Reducing the number of daily commuters isn't going to "hurt" the city. Quite the opposite in fact. Actual residents make the city what it is, and reducing traffic/congestion/honking/pollution is going to make it a much more attractive place to live.
Or it could be argued that more people want to take the bus but it’s too slow to be practical due to car gridlock.
NY is probably the only city where this could work because it’s the only proper American city that has a real metro system. Every other city will require major upgrades to have modern public transportation, and the density isn’t there in most American cities that were designed around the car.
Chicago and DC? Their ridership numbers aren’t trivial
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_...
I live in Boston and I could see it working here, now that the T is on a path to reliability.
While it would be great if money wasn’t a concern, you don’t need to plaster the city in a grid of metro lines. Careful usage of bus only lanes has really made a difference in some areas of Boston that I frequent.
Edit: The link above is only for heavy rail - Boston’s numbers are better if you also include light rail, which is a significant part of the system:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_light_...
Please explain proper for us used to bart/muni/caltrain.
NYC Subway, Metro North, and LIRR have much broader and more frequent coverage to a lot more places outside the urban core than the bay area's network does. Iirc muni metro has passable coverage inside San Francisco, and Bart and Caltrain service a few linear corridors outside San Francisco pretty well, but a whole lot of the bay area is very far from transit. This means that bay area commuters could not as easily switch away from cars. Though SF is still probably the second best candidate for congestion pricing after NYC.
Every penny has to go back into affordable, subsidised alternatives or you're just fencing off Manhattan for the super rich.
There should be a daily quota on rideshare cars operating in Manhattan. They are a significant percentage of traffic, often with zero passengers.
Taxies in general. I know medallions already limit their numbers but if you've ever been locked in traffic surrounded by yellow cabs, count the passengers. Each one —mostly empty IME— is 120sqft of road. Cars trolling around for patrons is a bad system.
The Subway, buses, trams, etc, etc are all way better for passenger density.
Like airports already do, the city could provide rideshare "waiting area" parking lots in different zones. That would retain rapid response to on-demand pickup, without random trolling on city streets as defacto parking lots. Rideshare averages only 50% utilization of taxis, despite having the advantage of automated scheduling.
Instead the city added a per-ride fee, which will be covered by Uber/Lyft, making it useless as an incentive for ride reduction, https://archive.is/MtRgo
> Riding in a taxi, green cab or black car will now cost passengers an extra 75 cents in the congestion zone... The surcharge for an Uber or Lyft will be $1.50 per trip... cars for services like Uber and Lyft make fewer trips and are more likely to idle in the zone. In 2023, taxis made an average of 12 daily trips, while ride-hail vehicles made an average of six.
Only the super rich can afford to pay $9? I.e., roughly the price of a sandwich in 2025?
You buy a $9 sandwich for lunch everyday then you probably aren’t in the middle class
Do you think that's what the average American pays for their sandwich? Including bringing lunch from home.
If you don't understand working poverty, you won't understand how devastating only $3kpa really looks like on a low wage. Lot's of people right now can't afford that, so cost-neutral alternatives have to exist or you price people out.
Arlington, VA has had this for years. The I-66 10-mile segment to DC is dynamic pricing with no limit. I've seen it over $40. And they can pick and choose who it applies to. That was in part due to a lawsuit. The federal and state governments made hollow promises to Arlington to get I-66 built, then did little about the resulting traffic mess and noise for decades.
"The issue arises from a 1977 agreement between then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman Jr. and the state of Virginia. In the so-called Coleman Decision, Arlington agreed to drop its opposition to the construction of I-66 in exchange for certain promises, including a four-lane limit, sound barriers, and truck and car-pool restrictions."
https://www.arlingtontransportationpartners.com/services/i-6...
https://www.arlingtonmagazine.com/i-66-construction-protests...
A Long Road Bitter Fight Against I-66 Now History https://archive.is/oo06a
Arlington Board United In Opposing Wider I-66 https://archive.is/NMhbH
As with “plastic bag bans”, and any other progressive program like “congestion pricing” aimed at reducing our collective dependency on O&G, plastic junk, and general waste. The incoming administration, auto industry, and O&G industry are very likely to send their army of lawyers and paid off politicians to fight this from going nationwide.
Got to make sure the multibillion dollar oil companies, executives, and shareholders get their fucking nut.
> During rush hour, cars block the box
There's an easy solution to this: have ticket writers waiting at intersections to paper all the cars who do it. It's not like they can drive away. NYC used to be really good about enforcement, and it worked extremely well.
It doesn't solve traffic, but it does help stave off gridlock and keep intersections free for bus lanes to operate normally.
Thats the thing with socal traffic especially. Absolutely zero enforcement by the police. What do they do with their resources instead? There was a man with a knife caught in a burglary last week and the police sent like 40 suvs some unmarked with the blue and red lights through the windscreen, a swat team, and a helicopter. Probably in the millions spent for that operation alone for this guy with a kitchen knife. I wonder how little you could get a man with a knife disarmed for in some midwestern suburb in comparison. Oh and keep in mind they didn’t actually go in after the guy they just did a standoff till 2am when he surrendered on his own.
Meanwhile everyone blocks the box and there are cars without even plates on them.
That's hardly a SoCal phenomenon, sadly. In all the places I've lived, "protect and serve" seems to be abbreviated - "protect and serve our desk jobs and pensions" would be more accurate. If the TSA is security theater, the police are a circus, and the occasional show of force is them coming to town.
It's like those pictures of Luigi Mangione being perp walked in Manhattan with 20 cops and FBI agents behind him. Imagine if those officers were on the beat or enforcing traffic laws instead. That would make more of a difference in our communities than a photo op ever will.
No in the midwest they actually police for traffic. The cops will have the highway DOT actually pave little asphault pads when they resurface where they like to sit and take radar. They will get you for out of date registration. They will get you for traffic violations and they do actually send out police to monitor intersections for bad behavior when its bad.
They just don't do anything like that in socal. I've not once seen a cop take radar in socal. Not once. I can't even remember the last time I've seen someone pulled over in socal but it happens probably three times in my view whenever I go elsewhere to visit.
What I'm curious about is if business in the Manhattan will be lessened as a result of less people there. I know the goal is less cars, rather than less people, but I want to see if that's actually what will happen.
As someone who doesn't live in Manhattan I wish there was a better way to go basically anywhere in New York without entering Manhattan. Every single road, bus, and subway goes through this super dense area.
Like why do I need to go through Manhattan to get from Newark Airport to Flatbush? (Unless I have a car, then I can go over the Verazzano, but in a bus/subway/train? It's all via Manhattan.
I've thought about the same thing and concluded this basically reduces to "why do economies organize around dense urban cores"? pretty much any business that can afford to will want to rent space in the barycenter of a metro area. that's what manhattan is to the NYC metro.
when the vast majority of daily trips are into and out of that dense core, that defines the most economic routes for building transit. beltways/bypasses exist to relieve the already saturated surface roads of the core. you don't see the same thing with trains because it's not necessary. it sucks for the passenger to transfer between three or four different trains to get from EWR to flatbush, but the rail infrastructure has plenty of capacity to accommodate a few extra pax on that route.
I think it would be a lot nicer to have urban life/transit built around many smaller cores with everyone living much closer to work. but in aggregate, businesses want the largest hiring base, and people want the best jobs they can get in the area.
The downside is it creates a conflict between the city and the rest. The city is like "we want transit, everyone else go away". The rest are like "we want to give you business but your policies drive us away", and "we want transit, but we are forced to get a car because transit is only in the center".
It's an unnecessary conflict - just add some transit that doesn't revolve around the city center. This reduces the number of people just passing through the center and creating unnecessary stress, and it make transit possible for more people.
Manhattan is like a black hole - it sucks in every single transit from as far away as Massachusetts. Try to travel by public transportation from virtually anywhere nearby without going through Manhattan. You can't and it's unnecessary traffic.
>I think it would be a lot nicer to have urban life/transit built around many smaller cores with everyone living much closer to work. but in aggregate, businesses want the largest hiring base, and people want the best jobs they can get in the area.
I think that this is prevented in large part by local capture of state politics by leading cities. NYC money basically owns NY politics so NY will never neglect let alone screw NYC to the benefit of Buffalo and Albany and whatnot. Repeat for other states that have one or two big urban economic wells that run everything.
I’m not even talking about that. I’m imagining something more like LA county but with more trains and fewer cars. you mostly live and work within a 30 minute travel radius, but still visit friends and specialty shops in other nearby cores without too much trouble.
investing more into cities like buffalo would also be great, but I don’t think they could realistically become a first choice for people who enjoy the benefits of a large metro area.
Car people did the same hand wringing when my nations capital outright banned cars in the city center. After a few years it turned out, that the business grew because the place became more pleasant for folks to go to.
The issue is that Manhattan is not just a destination, it's also a transit - people often just want to go through Manhattan, and not into it.
If you removed all the through traffic, leaving just people who want to stop there, that change alone, would improve things dramatically.
$9 per day isn't going to make anybody change their route. A round trip on the subway costs $5.80.
IMHO, they would need to push higher than $50 to get drivers to blink.
The thing about congestion is that reducing the number of drivers slightly (e.g. 10-20%) could eliminate congestion by 100%! This is the same way it works for electrical congestion.
So you need pricing which will make a few people reconsider driving, who were on the edge of using public transit anyway.
Interesting point, I'd believe it. I suspect the demographic that is driving instead of using public transit is quite small.
Driving for a commute isn't really possible in Manhattan unless the company provides parking. And those parking spots are reserved for executives. This group of people are price insensitive.
Passing through Manhattan can frequently save an hour of time in traffic elsewhere, those commuters will just see the fee as a higher toll.
All three major airports never tied directly to a subway, opting instead for airtran systems which create complexity and cost time. I suspect this causes a base level of traffic.
ha, I drive / train into Manhattan from outside a lot so I'm by nature on the "edge", and this change if it reduces traffic makes me more likely to drive :)
Why can’t we have dedicated bus lanes. Seems like a more amicable solution.
Personally I find it weird that SF’s public transit is so under water it needs bail outs from car drivers. Yet it also doesn’t serve the car drivers with any compelling equivalent.
SF does have dedicated bus lanes
> During rush hour, cars block the box
i got a fine in London for doing this by mistake. i didn’t even block traffic, i just went into the intersection without the cars in front moving. bam, fine. lesson learned.
What you did is the definition of blocking the box - stopping in the intersection (even if your light is green). Blocking traffic would be if your light was red.
It's better this way that the law penalizes what you can control (your own vehicle movement) as opposed to what you can't (the cars in front of you)
yup, agree. the fine was just. the point is there are solutions to blocking intersections. namely cameras and fines.
Look at the carpool lanes in the Bay Area. It’s as much as $9 for a couple of miles around the Palo Alto / Atherton area and there’s no lack of cars. Then there’s like another $5 or something between that area and Santa Clara.
Maybe it will work in NYC, but in the Bay Area I can’t help but feel like it’s a regressive tax because people who already have the money will continue their ways and pay but people who are on a budget now have to wait longer to get anywhere in the peninsula.
SF has a ton of folk coming from quite a ways away and it can easily take 2x the time if using public transit. Outside of rush hour Caltrain can take 1.5-2h, and Bart from Berryessa isn’t quick (plus contending with BART delays).
Anything that costs money is 'regressive' if you use your definition.
Sure, we could means test every toll and fee, but there's a different solution for that already - taxation.
There's a secret third option to congestion, which is you disallow some number of people at a time from using the facility, and people really don't like that one.
Dig deeper and you find it's a housing problem anyway. People can't afford to house themselves/their families in the cities they toil in. Build housing near jobs and there's less need to commute in from Tracy.
Correct. You're acting like your statement refutes the point, though. Charging for things which are publicly shared is regressive.
If you're looking for non-regressive ways to share scarce resources, you're going to struggle. In Tehran, for example, only license plates ending with an odd number can drive on Mondays, even numbers on Tuesdays.
> If you're looking for non-regressive ways to share scarce resources, you're going to struggle.
It's not actually that hard. You fund them through general taxes rather than fares. Then how much you pay is proportional to how much money you make -- even a flat tax does at least that -- as opposed to the largely fixed amount that corresponds to the amount the average person has to move around in order to live an ordinary life, which is approximately a head tax.
That's how to pay for it, sure. But I said share the resource. Not everyone who wants to drive at a given time can do so, there simply isn't enough space. How does your plan help _share_ the resource? Who gets to use the roads at 8am when everyone wants to?
> Not everyone who wants to drive at a given time can do so, there simply isn't enough space.
There isn't space in the current design. That's the thing you spend money to fix. Build subways in high traffic areas -- the ones where there is currently congestion -- and make them completely free to encourage people to use them (and eliminate the administrative cost of fare collection to both riders and government). Build more dense housing near the subway stops so people are traveling fewer miles, removing traffic from the roads -- this one doesn't even cost money, just stop prohibiting people from doing it with zoning. Build pedestrian catwalks or tunnels in high traffic areas to prevent crossings from congesting the roads and road traffic from killing the pedestrians. And yes, you can even add more travel lanes -- it's not always the thing you need but it sometimes is.
You don't have to rate limit the resource when you actually build enough of it to satisfy the demand. There exist roads that aren't congested, the demand for them isn't infinite.
I've seen such policies in other countries. What typically happens is that the well off buy 2 cars, one with odd and one with even license number.
> I can’t help but feel like it’s a regressive tax
That’s exactly what it is. The richer you are, the better it is. Now people on a budget will pay taxes to subsidize infrastructure that’s only accessible to the wealthy. It’s a massive scam perpetrated by the rich for the rich.
Why stop with roads? Why not have congestion pricing for schools or hospitals or access to water? That way we only have to build enough infrastructure to serve the wealthiest half of society.
In NYC it’s nothing new. A parking spot is already completely unaffordable for the average worker so they don’t drive in anyway. The vast majority of folks affected by the congestion charge are wealthy, or businesses the serve the wealthy (who will pass on the cost).
> Now people on a budget will pay taxes to subsidize infrastructure that’s only accessible to the wealthy. It’s a massive scam perpetrated by the rich for the rich.
Huh? The revenue from congestion pricing is used to pay for public transit. The rich people pay extra to subsidize transit for everyone else, which is exactly how things should work.
There’s a progressive aspect to drivers (higher income on average) subsidizing transit, but I worry that framing leads to drivers feeling they are paying for something that other people use.
I prefer the framing that drivers should fund transit because drivers do use transit: NYC would be complete gridlock if transit went into a death spiral and straphangers switched to cars. Even if they never set foot on the MTA, drivers see a lot of the benefit of it existing.
The drivers are paying for something they use: less-congested roads. In theory, if this is priced correctly, everyone is getting what they want: the drivers pay to not have to sit in traffic, everyone else benefits from that revenue to have better mass transit.
> congestion pricing pays off in a big way
Define "pays off". Who benefits, who suffers?
As a New Yorker, a few things made me a proponent of congestion pricing:
- watching people have to squeeze between stopped (mostly single-occupant) cars blocking sidewalks on Broome or Canal on their own pedestrian light at rush hour, and realizing that it would be impossible for someone with a stroller or mobility aid.
- seeing packed busses miss light cycles because the intersection is blocked
- seeing ambulances or fire trucks with sirens blaring stuck in gridlock
“Pays off” to me means that transit users and pedestrians are no longer regularly inconvenienced by the fact that more people choose to drive than there is frankly room for.
All these issues have better solutions than congestion pricing.
Cars blocking intersections and/or sidewalks can easily be solved with automated traffic fines - that's how Zurich and London does it (the former without any congestion pricing!)
Many cities also have special lanes only useable by some classes of vehicles - e.g. busses (or sometimes taxis as well) - I guess ambulances could also use those.
In fact, congestion pricing doesn't solve any of those problems, it's just an irrelevant (as in, it doesn't solve any specific problem directly) regressive tax to "drive less".
> Cars blocking intersections and/or sidewalks can easily be solved with automated traffic fines
Rush hour traffic is so gridlocked that cars often can’t know if they will clear a light cycle, so fining would effectively just reduce to a stochastic congestion tax.
NYC does have some dedicated bus lanes, but adding more means reallocating more space from cars which is a political no-go without reducing the number of cars first. That’s what congestion pricing aims to do.
You're wrong on both counts.
Fining for blocking intersection isn't stochastic. You simply don't enter the intersection if you're not sure you'll be able to exit it. You wait at green light. Simple. That's how people in London and Zurich drive.
Congestion automatically reduces the number of cars (because they literally can't get into the city!), without congestion pricing. If you reduce 3 lanes to 2, then... 2 lanes will be blocked, instead of 3, so there will be complete gridlock & congestion - for cars. But not for busses! So public transport will work, even thought private is gridlocked. Combine this with (1) - empty intersections - and busses can drive very well!
My point with adding bus lanes is that it’s a political no go, not that it wouldn’t work to speed up buses.
People who oppose congestion pricing in NYC also oppose dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes because they "cause congestion".
It works well in NYC because it's hard to justify driving anyway. The transit system is just so extensive.
But somewhere like Atlanta, Dallas, etc.? Absolutely not. It's just a vice tax levied on poor people who are already not happy about having to commute long drives into the city center to find work. They have no alternative. They can't spend 3 hours each way on buses. They can't afford to live in the the handful of walkable blocks in the city with $3k+ rent that effectively serve as a little Disneyland for affluent residents who want to larp like they live in Brooklyn.
Build the public transit BEFORE you hit the poors with a giant stick. Because I guarantee you that hitting them with that stick is not going to effect change in any way, as these people have next to no influence on policymakers already.
> During rush hour, cars block the box and slow down busses, with cascading effects.
Then stop digging deeper and improve the car infrastructure instead of sabotaging it.
Gotta double all the road widths then. Doesn't leave room for any buildings in Manhattan, but will ease the congestion.
So they can block more busses?
>I really, really want congestion pricing in downtown SF.
But SF doesn't have public transport. This just makes driving expensive, without any real benefit. We already do this on 101.
SF has public transport. Here's the map:
https://www.iliveinthebayarea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12...
Yes, obviously every city has public transport. It is not a usable system like NYC. The recent central subway debacle stands as a testament to that.
SF public transportation is plenty usable. I hardly ever take my car to the city anymore; it's just not worth it. Sure, it's no NYC, but it's definitely the best public transit in California and probably top-quartile in the US.
Paying additional tax to save an incompetent public funded infrastructure (MTA in this case) never works well.
At minimum, all MTA executives should be payed off before any such measures can be considered.
SF is already half way there with its bridge tolls (which, funny enough, are higher than NYC's congestion charge, yet there is zero fuss about them). The rest of the city is too spread out and has no natural choke points, so I don't see how this kind of congestion charging will be possible.
> which, funny enough, are higher than NYC's congestion charge, yet there is zero fuss about them
That may be because NY/NJ have bridge tolls into the city that are often much higher than those in SF.
I think it's highly unlikely to result in positive effects. I would be hoping that it only harms NYC economic condition "a little", as the best case outcome.
This falls solidly in the "it sounds good but causes significant negative unintended consequences" bucket of regulation, like the rest of NYC's many regulations that led up to this point.
Why do you think that?
Congestion pricing is a way to price an externality, which is usually a good thing compared to externalities being free.
The externality is already "priced in" to the traffic. People who can wait in traffic or can't afford not to wait in traffic do so, and people who want to skip out can as well.
Congestion pricing, like many fees and regulations, is a regressive tax, because the overhead seeps into all goods and services and it impacts the poor most of all and the rich not at all.
The median income of a household with a car in the city is more than double that of households without cars [1]. In a city where public transport is a viable and relatively cheap alternative, it doesn’t seem obvious that it disproportionately impacts the poor, unlike for instance a flat sales tax on essential goods.
[1] https://blog.tstc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/how-car-fre...
If they only taxed passenger vehicles you'd have a point, but the cost for trucks is actually higher (up to more than double), which means that in the end it is a tax on essential goods, because those goods have to make it into the city somehow and businesses have to pass that cost on to customers. It's reasonable to be afraid that poor customers will see the largest change as a percent of their budget as prices go up to pay for the tax (though obviously we haven't had time to measure whether that to see for sure).
It disproportionately impacts the working lower classes. Poor in NYC likely means homeless. Dual income McDonalds working family is above the CarLess HHI median wage in the reports you linked. That same worker is heavily impacted by congestion pricing vs say a Quant trader
17$/hr * 50hrs/week * 52weeks/year * 2 earners = 88.5k/year
The dual income McDonalds worker was never driving into Manhattan. Though the fixation on “poor people” is fake. 100 studies could come out explaining that congestion pricing is better for poor people and the opponents aren’t going to change their view on it. It’s a fake argument used to launder more selfish opinions.
The externality of noise and smog for people living there is not priced in wait time for drivers.
In the absence of pricing, people who do not want to wait cannot opt out of traffic, so the rebuttal here seems imperfect.
> … the overhead seeps into all goods and services…
We have always paid a congestion tax on goods and services, it’s just been in the form of paying workers to sit in traffic.
traffic is a crappy externality that harms everyone, drivers, non-drivers. non-drivers are harmed by pollution, slower buses and cabs, noise, slower emergency response times. drivers are harmed by all those things as well plus the stress and inconvenience of extreme traffic. the point of congestion pricing is to reduce the so-called "traffic tax" that everyone pays into one that is just a toll, that only drivers pay. reducing traffic is a direct goal of the toll.
There is only one singular goal written into the enabling law for this Congestion Tax, renenue for the NYC MTA transit system's capital plan. They have to raise one billion dollars per year. Any reducing congestion or any altering of pollution were only part of getting Federal approval. Now the only purpose is to raise money with 5 years of hikes already scheduled. This is going to uave drastic unintended consequences. I predict a theatre and retail recession. And more office divestment if this regressive tax isn't repealed or forced to focus on emissions or some non revenue goal.
Sure it is going to have consequences, but so does not doing anything as well.
Not to be that guy, but from a European standpoint the clear answer is: If you make driving cars into the big city expensive, if you still wanna get people there you need to give them other, cheap, more space-efficient ways of getting there. Public transport, bus lines, trains, stuff that Asian megacities do as well.
Or you can build even more lanes and parking lots, because that worked out great and was without any consequences so far /s
I am not saying I trust in the success of NY congestion pricing, but that has nothing to do with the measure (it is fine) and everything to do with how how half-assed it might be implemented. But elsewhere similar concepts work just fine. But hey, so does healthcare..
It has been highly successful in London. Less congestion, better air quality, incentivises the most disruptive things like heavy good vehicles to deliver out of rush hour reducing impact on other traffic etc.
On the wiki page for the London charge they suggest that ten years after the introduction of the congestion charge, traffic levels have been reduced by 10% (ten).
So yes technically less traffic, but not really enough to make any meaningful difference IMO. It is still noisy, it is still congested, it is still polluted, it is still hard to cross roads, it is still hard to get anywhere on a bus in a predictable time, it is still very frightening to be a cyclist (and indeed it is still common for cyclists to get killed or badly injured), and it is still better to get the tube.
I view it more as a toll now really, rather than an attempt to dissuade people from driving in. If they were really serious about trying to stop people driving in, the price would not be £15/day but it would be £500/day or more.
As it stands at the moment, even on the weekend (yes, it runs on the weekend even though there is not much congestion e.g. on a sunday afternoon) if I want to go to central London with the family I will drive. It costs £15, but the price of a return tube ticket is £6, so x2 for me and the wife and it is already £12, then add in £1.75 for the bus tickets to-and-from the tube station (so £3.50 per adult return = £7), and you are already at £19 to use public transport, vs £15 for the congestion charge.
So it is approx 20% cheaper to drive, AND it is more convenient, AND it is quicker, AND it is more comfortable.
Like I said, if they were serious about it being a deterrent they'd price it way, way higher than £15. But actually they want to make cheap enough so that people pay it, and they get money for me using my own private transport and fuel to travel around, and don't have to pay for the running costs of more tubes/buses etc.
My ancedotal experience of driving around London once or twice a year for the last ten years is there hasn't been a huge change. I don't trust TFL data on this as the authorities are incentivised to report figures to support the gathering of the additional revenue stream.
At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions).
In my opinion, we should primary focus on improving the standards of public transport. Safety, cleanliness, punctuality and price. I'm a car owner living 15mins drive from downtown of a European capital city, and I refuse to drive near the city because the parking is expensive, there's always roadworks but primarily the public transport is excellent and comfortable.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
Why would there be a change in London within the last 10 years? Congestion charging was introduced in 2003.
ULEZ was introduced for a start.
That affects pollution, but very few vehicles were not compliant so it would have minimal effect on congestion.
You have to go back ~20 years to when congestion pricing was introduced. To my eyes, the change has been dramatic.
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-02-what-are-the-ma...
What are you talking about? It will have overwhelmingly strongly positive effects, while also raising revenue to fund stuff like more transit. Congestion charging is great and every city should do it!
You're both just asserting your positions as facts without even providing an argument, much less evidence.
Whether it's the government or corporations, big organizations are the problem.
We need a small business revolution in this country.
Side note: An economy made up of small businesses was Adam Smith's original vision (the godfather of capitalism). He also hated the idea of a corporation. What we have today really is very far from Adam Smith capitalism.
> We need a small business revolution in this country
New York City is filled with small businesses. When walking distance puts you in range of entire towns’ populations, that becomes much easier. Emphasis, there, on both the distance and walking. Someone who drives into New York to go to a destination doesn’t pass as many small businesses as someone who takes transit.
Maybe an interesting question: How can you have a big city without a large organization to logistically make it work? Especially if it has coherent and well-run transit, and similar services, such as garbage/sewer/power/water.
> How can you have a big city without a large organization to logistically make it work?
Is there a large cohesive logistical operation even present? It seems to me the city is divided into boroughs, precincts and "special offices" all with their own individual mandates and approaches due to the complications inherent in large organizations.
> Especially if it has coherent and well-run transit
Well run? Compared to what?
> such as garbage/sewer/power/water.
The municipality does offer these services but you can arrange to have them handled privately if you want. They still have to follow the law but they're allowed to operate in the cities "territory." If the city was such a logistical juggernaut then why would these options even be necessary or utilized? If the city stopped providing these services and turned it over entirely to private business would the city stop existing?
There are plenty of small towns with small governments in the US, and most of them are much more affordable then NYC.
I am going to assume that the most people who live in NYC are there exactly because they want big city (with correspondingly big government).
In retrospect, this was a knee-jerk reaction to a topic where I have no idea what I'm talking about. Please disregard my rambling.
Are the market dynamics such that effective small companies grow, and ineffective small companies shrink? Is this bad?
Surprised that on a forum for startups, this comment is the most downvoted. Have we lost all self-awareness?
The VC-funded startup model is predicated on becoming a large business, not staying a small one.
The storyline as I remember it, was that startups can uniquely disrupt the big organizations (private or governmental) and unlock growth that was otherwise unavailable, and that's what attracted VC money in the first place. Innovator's Dilemma and all that. Seems like an eon ago.
what's that got to do with congestion pricing?
Yeah, Adam Smith, famous libertarian, that didn’t believe the government hard part to play.
People could try actually reading what he wrote for once.
Someone gets shot outside a hotel, but damn it if we won’t figure out how to charge people more money.
There probably isn't a public street in America that could prevent a random assassination.
If the guy got shot visiting relatives in Park City, would you suggest that any contemporary public policy in Utah was bad?
I’d suggest not taxing the people of a city if they can’t be kept safe first.
New Yorkers, and Manhattanites in particular, live longer than most of the world. This is due to mass transit, public healthcare and being phenomenally rich.
Would also note that the shooter you’re referring to crossed into Manhattan with a gun purchased in another jurisdiction. This is a problem of other areas’ lawlessness crossing into New York as much as it’s a fantasy about cops being expected to thwart an active shooter on the spot.
A particular unknown person getting assassinated is not a safety issue. The only reason it happened in NY is because business happens in NY. Nobody's going to assassinate you, in NY or anywhere else.
It feels like you're being dense on purpose.
I like congestion pricing because it keeps poor people off the road so the middle can commute faster
/sarcasm
> it keeps poor people off the road so the middle can commute faster
Poor people aren’t commuting into lower Manhattan by car.
Poor people commute by bus/train, which is far higher capacity per lane and is also cheaper.
Congestion pricing is a luxury tax. The only downside is tradies who need to move their heavy equipment around the city, except this might be a net-benefit for them because getting stuck in traffic costs them more money in the form of longer turnaround times.
Regarding the tradies, could the cost of congestion pricing be tax-deductible or something like that?
It likely would be, just like any other business expense.
congestion pricing doesn't work. its simply a shrug for the wealthy, and reduces money for lower income.
in a short amount of time , commute times will recover to baselines, or worse, the city will waste the additional revenue , the residents will be poorer , and leaders will pat themselves on be back.
Expresslanes made commute times worse . Little of the revenue went to the roads . Few of the roads were fixed .
This doesn't show the number of cars and traffic within the area. The real test will be the amount of traffic within the zone
Will companies compensate workers for having to pay congestion pricing just to get to work??
Why? Do they pay you back for living two hours away, or driving an expensive gas guzzler that gets 5 mpg?
In a way, yes since a local employee will get higher salary than a remote worker. It could cost some people $40 a day just to get into and out of work. What will happen if you don’t compensate is people come to the office late and leave early to avoid the pricing, resulting in a loss of productivity.
> In a way, yes since a local employee will get higher salary than a remote worker.
But you're asking for the local employees to have their entirely variable commute costs covered. That's very different. If I want to helicopter to work for $2k a day, should work cover it? If not, why is wanting to drive in a city with robust public transit options any different?
People leaving work early is a fixable discipline issue.
I just love how everyone suddenly becomes transportation experts in this thread and pour out their opinions that are purely based on their anecdotes and beliefs but nothing else.
I just love how everyone suddenly becomes <insert_controversial_topic> experts <everywhere_on_social_media> and pour out their opinions that are purely based on their anecdotes and beliefs but nothing else.
FIFY. It's all the rage, you know ...
Tbh, most so-called "rational thinkers" are as emotional as "mouth breathers" if prodded sufficiently.
Is there some other way to participate in online discussion forums besides sharing ones own anecdotes and beliefs?
That's what happens with every single internet discussion to be fair.
This seems to be selling use of the public roads to rich people (who can more easily afford the tolls).
Isn't this a step backwards for social justice?
Do you know what it means to be rich? Serious question.
It's not "having a lot of money". It's actually "having a lot of options".
By definition, rich people will have more ways to get around than poor people. The rich can hire a limo, hop in a helicopter, and even take a trip to space.
Is it a social injustice that not everyone can afford a limo, helicopter, or spaceship?
I do not think it's bad to take steps to make driving an activity for richer people, to make it a luxury that it initially was when cars were invented.
On the flip side of things, look at what the dream of mass-market affordable cars, free highways, and free parking have done to society: Swathes of land wasted for parking, low density cities that kill walking/cycling/transit, millions of people dying in car crashes, endless congestion and lane-widening.
> Do you know what it means to be rich? Serious question.
A serious question that you immediately proceed to answer, with rhetoric that it's preferable for there to be only the relative few rich elite, who implicitly should enjoy all the luxuries possible in the world, but there should not be these luxuries for the lesser people, since our experiments in permitting the peasants to enjoy small amounts of society's wealth has been a disaster, encroaching upon the enjoyment of the rich, and making the poors uppity?
That might be the case in other cities, but in NYC the socioeconomic dynamics are less clear. It’s mostly affluent-to-rich suburbanites that drive to work from outside the city, with rich and poor city residents primarily taking public transit (and to a lesser extent using taxis and car services). Almost no city residents - rich, poor or in between - drive to and from a 9-5 job in Manhattan.
An alternative take is that people who can only afford mass transit options (without even adding congestion pricing) are now on a level playing field with most commuters, and should experience a better commute less affected by traffic.
(This assumes that the mass transit options are invested in, rather than overrun by people switching.)
Not at all, since those who aren't rich primarily use public transit to get around this area, which benefits massively from reduced car traffic.
Poor people don't drive, they're on the bus. This makes transit better for people who don't drive.
Their religion is punishing to middle class.
If NYC subways weren’t freezing/boiling, filthy, moldy, infested with rats and mice, and dangerous, maybe you wouldn’t have to brow beat people into using them.
There's a lot of interest in forcing people to use public transit but relatively little interest in making transit something people want to use. If people think they're going to be stabbed or assaulted they're not going to want to use it. Other countries don't have this problem and until the transit types realize this normal people are going to reject transit alltogether.
Close to 5 million people ride MTA trains and buses every day. And that number gets much higher if you include commuter rail, NJ Transit, PATH, ferries etc. operating in the city. Over 70% of daily commuters in NYC already use some form of public transit, and 90% of those commuting into Manhattan use public transit.
All the "the subways are too crime ridden to use" shouts are pure propaganda. If millions of New Yorkers can survive, so can you.
If it's so good then why do they need measures like this one?
Calling it "pure propaganda" is itself pure propaganda.
Counterpoint, this poor soul who was literally burned to death: https://nypost.com/2024/12/31/us-news/mystery-woman-torched-...
The subway is worse than it was pre-Covid. Congestion pricing will not address that.
"Suck it up cowards" is hardly good public policy.
Okay now let's similarly post about every single one of the hundreds of people who were killed in traffic accidents last year in the city (including plenty who burned to death in their cars). That should be enough to convince you that no one should drive here right? Or is safety suddenly not a concern anymore?
People seek agency and don't consider traffic deaths to be the same as random assaults. It's for the same reason most people think they'd do well in a fight. They value their agency and assume they would be able to prevent it.
Are you implying everyone who gets in a traffic accident has full agency over the situation? Because that is laughably far from reality. It is infinitely easier to consciously avoid danger on the subway than in a car.
I have some agency. I can drive faster or slower, more or less aggressively, choose a vehicle based on safety, not drive in bad weather or when the bars let out, drive more or less frequently.
I can't control if some batshit crazy tries to set me on fire, aside from riding the subway less.
I do ride the subway, BTW. But I definitely do not habitually walk as close to the platform edge as I used to given how public safety has slide the last handful of years. I blame, of course, de Blasio.
You have way more control over batshit crazies than riding the subway less. You can change the subway car, fight, ask for help, engage the police. And let’s face it - you never gonna be this person who got burnt.
> Are you implying everyone who gets in a traffic accident has full agency over the situation? Because that is laughably far from reality. It is infinitely easier to consciously avoid danger on the subway than in a car.
I would note that people can falsely believe things about how much agency they really have, and that this seems to be the case with cars vs. public transit.
Pedestrians outside of cars don't have agency to prevent injury to themselves from cars.
Situational awareness shouldn't be discounted.
I was hit by a car once, due to the driver's lack of situational awareness.
I was turning from a major road into a minor road, a car was stopped at the exit to that minor road, but they failed to look in my direction, and pulled out into me.
My bike was a write-off, fortunately I was uninjured — they had started from stationary, so probably less than 10 mph when they hit me, and I always wear a helmet.
Given the disparity of outcomes, I've always been vigilant of misbehaving drivers. This served me well as a bicycle messenger. Yes, drivers are responsible for violations of the official laws, but ultimately as cyclists we should seek to have maximum awareness. Otherwise you are surrendering agency to people who text while driving.
My kid was bumped recently, by a similarly unobservant driver. Fortunately unharmed. I don't think the solution is reducing traffic density in my town, however, through taxation. Rather, encouraging accountability and discouraging distraction.
Well, hell, let's think about everyone who choked to death in New York. Krazy Kat should levy a masticulation tax below 60th street. It'll be easier to get a table! Think of all the environmental benefits of not eating fancy foods!
>The peer who called out agency makes the right point. I choose to drive and I accept the baseline danger of driving.
Pedestrians get killed by car crashes all the time, and they never accepted that baseline danger of driving.
Apologies. I revised my comment after you replied. I did not notice the reply.
100% off all home invasions occur in peoples residences and can be a terrifying and often deadly experience. It is recommended that if you want to avoid these crimes you stay away from homes.
The USA needs to work on:
-- making the cost of employing a good staffing level of police more affordable (so that we can have more, everyday police doing a job as a neighborhood force and seen as a reliable presence against crime)
-- more certain prosecution and penalties for quality of life crimes that we all pay for in seeing petty but significantly confidence-decreasing incidents that reduce our willingness to take public transport
-- reducing the cost / increasing the frequency and usefulness of public transport services where you regard it equally as convenient as private vehicles
You go to some other countries (less rich ones particularly) and buses have 2 crew, trains have multiple staff, taking fares, making sure rules are obeyed. Giving people confidence that this is something they want to ride on. Not a system where it looks like the station is half abandoned, was last cleaned about 2 years ago, and if you were mugged or even just reported a crazy ranting homeless person, they would shrug and tell you to phone it in.
New York has an extraordinary level of police already. They're just bad at dealing with the actual problems. Including murdering a bystander in a totally unnecessary subway shooting.
Subways in nyc have 2 crew by union decree and I don’t think it’s helped public safety
I don’t think in NYC it’s fair to argue that there’s relatively little interest in making transit something people want to use. We can debate about whether the efforts are effective, and certainly many aren’t. However there are vast sums invested in the MTA and a great many folks at the MTA who try to make it pleasant and safe. Additionally there have been added police and military presence in subway stations around the city for months (again, no comment on efficacy). All I’ll say is that there is a ton of interest from leadership on down in making the subway and buses work well for normal people and far more money then congestion pricing cost to implement or will bring in.
The police just walked past the lady set on fire. It's on video.
Why is it that where I live all the tech companies built their own transit system just for their employees? Because they can control the experience and prevent the problems that turn people away from public transit. Either public transit is for the quiet people who are just trying to get somewhere or it can be for the nuisance types. They're incompatible.
Well, if you make the road a luxury, less people will be /able/ to use it. It's nice to see someone is measuring just how much luxury is being created here although I don't think these metrics are particularly useful outside of that goal.
Driving and parking in NYC is already a luxury, there’s no poor person driving and parking there.
So just exclude them from your civic thinking because you can't imagine them existing? You do realize there are special exemptions for this exact program for low income drivers? Perhaps you feel these shouldn't exist since it's already a luxury beyond them?
It's not literally zero poor people, but it's very few: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1d9sj6p/data_on_the_sh...
The "anything I don't know doesn't exist" crowd is very strong when it comes to congestion pricing arguments. It's weird specifically that many of it's loudest proponents come from transit thinktanks from out west, etc. Very little actual support amongst New Yorkers for obvious reasons.
There are like 400 housing developments in NYC for lower income folks. Saying that lower income folks don't drive in NYC is bananas.
The GP is incorrect, but using the absolute number of housing developments in NYC is also misleading (since NYC has lots of middle-income housing developments too).
On average, personal drivers on NYC roads skew towards wealthier and suburban, whereas city dwellers of all demographics broadly ride the subway and other mass transit. Congestion pricing will certainly represent a cost for poorer New Yorkers, but it will disproportionately be shouldered by wealthier demographics that are often on the road by choice (e.g. choosing to commute by car from Long Island because the city has inadvertently subsidized doing so with free parking.)
> 400 housing developments in NYC for lower income folks. Saying that lower income folks don't drive in NYC is bananas
The only people in the projects who have a car work in the trades. They’re largely not paying this charge and/or adding it as a line item to their customers’ bills. A car in Manhattan is an absolute luxury.
NYC != Manhattan congestion zone. Plenty of people in lower income groups (literally over a million) live and drive in NYC. A negligible number of them drive into Manhattan for work every day.
> A negligible number of them drive into Manhattan for work every day.
I think you're just making that up. Do you have a source?
> There are like 400 housing developments in NYC for lower income folks. Saying that lower income folks don't drive in NYC is bananas.
They’re not paying this.
On the contrary, they are! ~30% of people entering Manhattan a day are lower income!
> ~30% of people entering Manhattan a day are lower income
In a private car? Where they aren’t eligible for the low-income discounts?
They are eligible for discounts after their 10th trip each month.
I think people misinterpreted the point. Saying 'there are no poor people driving and parking in NYC' in an asinine statement when the data clear show that 30% of the drivers into congestion zone are lower income. Whether or not they should, are shouldering more or less of burden, and all of this other nonsense is extraneous.
How does "housing" relate to "cars"? They seem like completely separate things?
People in houses can have cars. In fact, ~30% of people entering Manhattan a day are lower income.
More specifically, lower income housing is often very far from subway stops. Often in outer boroughs!
Giving NYCHA residents free parking spots was bananas
Yes, living in NYC = driving in NYC
I don’t know if it’s fair to call this “making the road a luxury.” Congestion is a failure mode of a road system, not just more people getting to enjoy the road.
Although marginally better traffic might be a side effect of congestion pricing, its primary effect is a wealth transfer from lower- and middle-class residents of Manhattan, who must buy goods locally at higher prices, to MTA contractors and their labor unions, who already make construction on the New York subway far and away the most expensive in the world.
Where is the congestion pricing tracker that measures the higher cost of groceries to working-class lower Manhattan residents?
Why would groceries be more expensive? Do you think a $25 fee makes any difference to a delivery truck loaded with $10k of products?
Not only are delivery vehicles levied an additional toll of up to $32.40 under congestion pricing, but every employee, service provider and vendor who travels by car is also assessed the fee.
I don't even understand the scenario you're talking about now -- are you referring to a delivery driver that would be driving their personal vehicle to work in the congestion zone? And then getting on a delivery truck, which would then need to exit the congestion zone and re-enter in order to itself be charged a fee?
How many people do you think the scenario above applies to, in the real world?
Congestion charging started in London in 2003. I'm skeptical about the justification that it's intended to disincentivize unnecessary driving because people who drive frequently get a bulk discount rather than a surcharge as one might expect if that were the actual intention. A bulk discount is more indicative of a policy intended to maximize revenue. I'm also skeptical about the justification that it's intended to reduce pollution because the discount for electric cars is ending this year. I have a moral issue with it as well because the roads are financed by everyone's taxes. Around the time the charge was starting it was easy to find supporters for it on tv chat shows but I never met one in real life. I assume there are some but that they support it in a naive attempt to keep anyone poorer than them off the road. Otherwise, the supporter's problem of too much congestion would be easily solved by not driving. The charge has tripled since its introduction so maybe there's an element of poetic justice in it for some of them.
>I have a moral issue with it as well because the roads are financed by everyone's taxes
Mind elaborating on how this is a "moral issue"? Public transit is funded by "everyone's taxes" as well, but you still have to pay a fare to use it. Do you get similarly aggrieved?
>Around the time the charge was starting it was easy to find supporters for it on tv chat shows but I never met one in real life.
It's trivial to find polls that show a non-negligible level of support for the charge. eg. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/gla/page/0,9067,897312,... or https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-london-and-stockho.... Just because your small circle of friends don't support it, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Your points are well taken. I wasn't aware of the Guardian poll and I stand corrected about my implication that the charge lacks public support. With regard to the moral issue, I have less of a problem with tickets that are paying for something like running a train, or for that matter a bridge toll paying off the bonds that enabled the bridge to be built. I have more of a problem with someone demanding money for nothing. I haven't heard it claimed even by its supporters that road maintenance depends on the congestion charge. To my knowledge the main justification has always been that the charge funds the payer's behavior modification. Is it for the payer's own good? Is it for the greater good? You may well differ, but something about that doesn't sit right with me however noble, especially when it pertains to law abiding citizens acting within their rights.
>I have less of a problem with tickets that are paying for something like running a train, or for that matter a bridge toll paying off the bonds that enabled the bridge to be built.
What about on-street parking or municipal parking lots? Given how cheap they are to construct it's questionable to claim that the fees collected are needed to fund their construction.
>I have more of a problem with someone demanding money for nothing. [...] To my knowledge the main justification has always been that the charge funds the payer's behavior modification. Is it for the payer's own good? Is it for the greater good? You may well differ, but something about that doesn't sit right with me however noble, especially when it pertains to law abiding citizens acting within their rights.
How do you think most other taxes (eg. income tax, VAT, corporation tax) work? If you argument is that congestion charge is bad because "demanding money for nothing" and "something about that doesn't sit right with me however noble", then you should be rallying even harder against those sort of taxes. At least with congestion charge you can argue it's in exchange for the ability to drive, and unlike income tax, most can agree congestion is a bad thing, unlike people getting a salary (income) or businesses making/selling stuff (VAT). What is the government providing in exchange you paying income tax? Not getting a visit from the tax collectors? If it's something vague like "roads and schools", why can't the same justification be used for congestion charge?
