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
- [deleted]
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.
- [deleted]
>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.
- [deleted]
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.
[dead]
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.
> 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.
- [deleted]
> 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.
- [deleted]
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
- [deleted]
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.
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.
You're right...I was only looking at internal Manhattan, but the bridges and tunnels seem to show a significant reduction in transportation times
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.
[flagged]
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.
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.
- [deleted]
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).
- [deleted]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- [deleted]
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.
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--
- [deleted]
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
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...
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?
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.
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!
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
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.
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).
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
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!
for a bus-centric system like SF, congestion pricing intrinsically makes public transit better
For what it’s worth a folding bike and BART is a great combo
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
- [deleted]
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.
[flagged]
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.
- [deleted]
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
- [deleted]
- [deleted]
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
[dead]
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.
[flagged]
License plate concealers are illegal in NYS. Being able to read license plates is critical for identifying vehicles involved in crimes. I hope you are eventually caught and punished!
No see I believe the people who created speed/red light cameras and congestion pricing are the criminals. I punish them by concealing my plate. Illegitimate system.
You cannot opt out of laws you don't like, at least not legally. This just sounds like selfishness.
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.
- [deleted]
[dead]
pornjizzer is offended by “damn it”?
This is the funniest comment of its type that I've ever seen.
Sure as shit it fucking was.
[flagged]
What about people who work for a living making service calls who can make twice as many because they don't sit in traffic as long? What about poor people who may choose to carpool to save money but who get an extra hour of leisure time each day to spend with their kids?
Meanwhile, if slightly wealthier people end up riding the subway, that will help a bit with public safety -- I lived in NYC a few years ago and never felt remotely in danger on the subway any time of day or night.
You know what’s more unsafe in than the subway in NYC? Walking across a road in NYC.
You sound like you don’t live in the area.
> All congestion pricing does is dissuade people from driving
That is true. And that is the point. Well, it also dissuades people from driving at specific times to even out traffic.
> Subways are terrible and highly unsafe.
Is this really true? Unsafe compared to what? To driving?
> Do you think your average Wall St Bros and White women are going to take subway just because there is congestion pricing?
I'd imagine everyone gets from a to b the quickest they can, regardless of income. No one would do 1h in a taxi if 20 minutes on a subway does it, even to Wall Street.
I’m a wall st bro and I work with a lot of other wall st bros. We all use the subway to get to our job in manhattan.
Either you are lying or not good enough to drive car. What about White women? Are they going to take "subway" because there is congestion pricing?
YOU are naive or in for big surprise.
You are absolutely wrong. Do you even work in Manhattan? If you stand outside Fulton St. or Wall St. stations at 8:30am you’ll see that the vast majority of “Wall St. Bros” take the subway to work.
I’ve worked in the World Trade Center for 5 years now and I don’t recall any coworkers who drive to work.
Oh vey! YOU don't know what you are talking about. You are average investment Bankie who claims to make dollars.
Your response is emotional and not practical. Tell me how Congestion Pricing is not a tax on poor and does not take away their hard earned money for no reason? Does it not comfort for rich people who make money on stocks mostly?
Why are poor people who own a car and can pay for parking driving into Manhattan often? Does your premise even make sense?
Because they have a job, dummy. Are you for real?
Subways are not safe and it is terrible to go by subway when you can travel with car everywhere.
If you make $120k in NYC supporting a family of 3 (husband, wife, 1 kid), you are left with almost $1k with extremely tight budget. Now, $9 a day will cost you (22 days * 9 * 11 month) = $2,198.
Not everyone values time. Poor people, lower middle class and middle class need money and food on the table and not additional expense out of pocket for comfort of upper middle class and rich people.
Upper middle class and rich people value time because that is the only thing they can optimize. Money is imaginary and can't do better beyond certain level (think $2 MM Net worth).
America NYC is now so arrogant that it is making roads exclusive for people who make lots of money (>$150k).
Subways are very safe, you obviously don't live or have spent much time in NYC. Millions of people ride them daily. Office workers making $$$, teens, everybody.
Driving is likely less safe. And you still didn't tell me why somebody is driving into Manhattan below 60th st, 5 times a week. To commute? What type of job would it be?
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
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.
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.
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.
- [deleted]
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.
- [deleted]
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?
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.
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?
- [deleted]
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.
> 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.
How does "housing" relate to "cars"? They seem like completely separate things?
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.
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?
