Congestion Pricing in Manhattan Close to Approval
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Eg. "New York's streets can optimally handle 1 million journeys per day. If the number of journeys is above/below that for 3 straight months, we increase/decrease the toll by 10%.
That way the roads stay near peak efficiency without needing the politicians to get involved every time the streets get too busy or too empty.
Now nearly all roads are jam packed with Taxis and Ubers, and no regular people drive at all anymore.
It is a very simplistic view to call it a mistake, as the the issues and policies related to the Congestion Charge have changed and evolved over the last 16 years. For example, the PHV (Private Hire Vehicle) will not be exempt from the charge from 8th April 2019. However, licensed Taxi's (Black cabs) were still deemed to be exempt from the charge, following a public consultation last year[1].
Amongst various other considerations, some of these decisions were made on the basis that the number of PHV's entering the zone has nearly doubled in the last decade, whilst some traffic has been constant.[2]
Manhattan will have to deal with similar issues, which will generally coalesce around the central tenets of easing traffic flow, improving air quality and reducing accidents.
[1]https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/phvs-and-...
[2]http://content.tfl.gov.uk/report-to-mayor-on-congestion-char...
But yes, it sounds like some kind of pricing scheme should be put into place to impose increased costs on taxis/Ubers driving into the zone first. I think that'd need app support first though; as an Uber/Lyft driver, you'd need some kind of toggle saying whether you're driving into the zone that day or not -- I'm assuming that the charge is once per vehicle per day, not once per entry into the zone. If it's once per entry into the zone, then just add that onto the passenger's fare.
This kind of system is already implemented in many major cities, including London, Singapore, Paris, Stockholm, and Milan.
It’s insane that it’s free in this city. Get cars out from parking on the streets and do something useful with that space like wider sidewalks or bike lanes!
Why do people between say 96th and 60th not count as congestion generators? Seems like they're "gerrymandering" the neighborhoods hit by the surcharge.
You need to give incentives for electric vehicles (especially if that's electric buses) and disincentives to diesel for it to really work.
You can't blame London's poor air on it having a congestion charge...
> driving in manhattan
I think you may be confused.
The book Deschooling Society has a good explanation about how the design of public roads is used as a means of social control. Ctrl-F for the section on mechanical donkeys. https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Illich_Ivan_Deschooling_Soc...
No matter what you do you could never change this. You will simply create an alternative (and/or parallel) system with its own poors.
Driving in NYC is already off-limits to the poor and has been for awhile. Congestion pricing will be a net benefit to them because it will get a lot of car traffic off the road, thus reducing the chance of being struck by a vehicle (as a pedestrian), making buses much faster, and making biking more viable. Some of the poorest residents of NYC just use bikes, for example -- even the $121/month MetroCard is too much for them. Building out the bike lane network more would help them the most.
"Though state leaders have not ironed out details, they had reached consensus on Monday that the plan was necessary to help pay for much-needed repairs to the city’s beleaguered subway system."
The Dodgers actually got their name from the high rate of pedestrian fatalities in NYC, albeit from trolleys.
Traffic has been causing problems in NYC for over a century.
You can't possibly deny that the intent of congestion charges is to reduce congestion. That's been the intent (and effect) in every other major city it's been implemented in across the world. The simple fact of the matter is that single occupancy vehicles can't possibly scale to meet all the transit demands of an urban area as dense as Manhattan, so they need to be deprioritized in favor of more scalable modes of transport. Reclaiming car lanes for dedicated bus lanes and cycle lanes would be a great first start.
Frankly, this doesn't go nearly far enough. All of the free on-street parking in this zone needs to be removed as well, with people paying the true cost of storing a vehicle on the most valuable property in the US. That'll get rid of a lot of the vehicles on the streets and we can reclaim that space for much more productive uses. Many of these vehicles only move on alternate side parking days anyway, so there's really no reason they should be here at all. Charge the $500+/month that space is actually worth and they'll be gone.
never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups with guaranteed income , i.e. bureaucracy.
having been a cyclist my wholelife, since childhood. i have no faith in the government to implement sensible policy. i have faith in them to tax more. and more , and more. uber and lyft have been DISASTERS for new york, but they were inevitable because of the disaster that was the method by which the tlc was creating artificial scarcity in the yellow tax licensing system.
and congestion pricing? no. it won't work. it wont' make the city more liveable or better. it's just a cash grab plain and simple.
This ridiculous cynism is counterproductive and defeatist. We know a fair bit about effective urban policy.
But gas isn't priced that way, because we don't do all of the above to offset its effect on our cities and the environment. So we're continuing to impose more disincentives to burn gas.
As one example, we do actually want less CO2 being released into the atmosphere, full stop. Or alternatively phrased, it's impossible to pay the true cost of the thing, as the true cost of everyone doing unrestricted emissions is that the human species goes extinct (which has effectively infinite cost).
Or, similarly, imagine an industrial plant releasing waste that spreads through groundwater and poisons adjacent properties. We don't just want the industrial plant to pay the entire cost of the thing; we actually want them to not do that at all, because it infringes upon the properties of others, who do not want it to occur.
So there's room for multiple times of frameworks that operate simultaneously -- Pay for the entire costs of some things, but also have less of or do not allow at all some things.
Earmarking tax dollars for projects is kind of meaningless.
Subsidizing public transportation is a good idea anyway. High costs of transportation disproportionately hurt poorer people. If you're not for public transportation then I'm not sure we'd see eye to eye on much of anything.
An EV pays no gasoline taxes, but has similar impact on the roads to any other car. Now, EVs are a good thing... but they do expose issues with paying for transport via gas taxes.
In the future though it probably will be a bigger problem. I suppose you could add similar sales taxes to public paid charging stations, but without separately metering home charging you'll probably still miss the bulk of EV users. Either the separate metering or a mileage reporting/road tax seem like they could fairly account for EV usage though.
In 1987, US average fuel economy was 22.0mpg. In 2018, it was 24.9mpg [2]. A 13% improvement in 31 years.
The idea that the US as a whole has made "great strides" in improving fuel economy, and that we therefore need to rethink the gas tax, is ludicrous. Even in California, it is mostly wishful thinking, and it is definitely not the case in New York.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/wisniewski/ct...
[2] Table 3.1 in the 2018 report Excel file, https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/download-data-automoti...
If there are eventually too many EV's to generate any road repair revenue, we can re-assess then. For now, the incentive structure makes sense, and should be increased if anything.
EV's already have plenty of tax incentives. Taxes need to be both a stick and a carrot. EV's get a carrot, all drivers get a stick.
Just as two datapoints, the Fed hasn't raised the federal gas tax in 25 years, and in my state voters have rejected state gas tax increases for 28 years. Whatever new funding source is identified to replace or supplement the gas tax, is going to have many enemies.
Do you think of buying a subway ticket as a tax on travel?
Money is fungible. The MTA budget most recently subsidised upstate boondoggles.
So to be clear, you do consider subway and bus tickets to be taxes? How about US postage stamps? Public utility bills?
The transportation funding earmark is just sugar to help get it passed.
Sure. There are likely many reasons why it's so bad. But the solution is to fix it, not penalize people because they use the obvious alternatives that are much better.
Because certain things are considered to be public goods, to greater or lesser extent, and therefore to follow the principle behind progressive taxation: that people aren't taxed by how much they use them, but that the rich pay far more in absolute terms than the poor.
The subway is the primary means of transportation that makes so much of the rest of the city possible, that it's certainly a public good to some extent. But it's also still so expensive to run, and people with cars have their own separate costs on top of it, that people don't generally feel it's fair for it to be 100% subsidized either.
But roads don’t really work like that. There’s no “social benefit” that wouldn’t already be priced into everything that derived benefit from the roads. If government road subsidies make road freight cheaper, charging those freight companies for their own usage would make prices reflect actual costs. We could still have redistributive social benefits for things like the road wear caused by police cars, but again, that’s a separate issue.