Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow? | Hacker News Reader

Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow?

nytimes.com

84 pointswpasc84 comments

Extensive discussion last week (81 points, 110 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487815

The financial & car industries have been immensely successful at making cars accessible to all consumers. Anyone with an income, a bit of credit history and a pulse can roll out of dealership with a car. Roads on the other hand are publicly funded and physical constrained. It's inevitable that car owning will have to become much more expensive via taxes in the decades ahead.

The mayors listed are not however making their cities particularly more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. They generally sandbag those improvements on the slightest complaints about loss of parking or access. DiBlasio drives to a gym in Brooklyn everyday and has the NYPD run a war on ebikes/bikes, Durkan just canceled a long-planned bike lane on an important arterial, Portland's doing a massive freeway expansion. Most of these cities are failing on Vision Zero efforts.

The reason congestion pricing is catching on is that the wealthy & politically connected older generations finally settled on it as the way to reclaim their privilege to drive straight into the downtown from their suburbs. Congestion pricing is now just another way to maintain a vehicular status quo.

Is optimizing for bikes worth the disruption to traffic? It seems like a handful of bicyclists hold up a lot of people in cars.

(Also, the anti-suburb sentiment is quite ... problematic. Hint: There is a reason most of the good ethnic food in New York is in actually in Westchester and Long Island.)

The Bronx is not Westchester.

And Queens is not Long Island.

well, technically...

1) Gentrification has moved most of the lower-income folks in Queens away from the subway lines. And in the Bronx, there is not much subway access to begin with (the lines are spaced as far apart as the entire island of manhattan).

2) The NYC congestion pricing scheme would apply to folks entering Manhattan. That would seem to include folks coming in from the Bronx and Queens.

The overall point remains--the "bridge and tunnel crowd" aspersions always were classist, but the gentrification of manhattan has now made it quite racist as well.

As a daily transportation cyclist, I doubt I add any measurable amount of time to the commutes of drivers I encounter on the road. In fact, it's not uncommon to see the same drivers at multiple stoplights because the effective speed (due to the stoplights) is sometimes a bit slower than I ride.

That of course leads to another problem: Impatient drivers giving me close "punishment passes" only to wait at the stoplight. This is a common experience for cyclists.

Add on top of this the fact that most cyclists usually take different routes than drivers would from point A to point B. (Routes with less cars.)

You have to realize the number of bicyclists is significantly constrained because of the danger caused by the cars.

So, not mixing cars and bikes together would be a win-win.

That "handful" you perceive are way more than the number of people in cars using the same space.

A bicycle needs less than a quarter as much space on the road as a car does, it seems there are fewer of them because they are physically smaller.

The City of Portland is not doing a massive freeway expansion, the Feds are doing it. They deemed I5 going through Portland to be a bottleneck and required the expansion.

The majority want the bottleneck fixed. "massive freeway expansion" is absurd - it's less than a mile, and isn't adding more lanes than are already on points north and south of it.

This is the point being made by many of us here in Portland when congestion pricing is brought up. It makes vastly less sense here without good public transit, and it will disproportionately affect the working classes. While the wealthy will continue as usual.

Do you think congestion pricing would cause public transit to improve? (I'm interested in others' opinions as well.)

I think it's putting the cart before the horse. Improve the public transit first. I also have very little confidence that congestion pricing revenue would be spent wisely.

I ride buses. And the biggest reason the bus is late and slow is traffic. So yes, less congestion will help. Also the more riders, the more reason to add frequency.

It seems a lot of people here have never been to a larger city during rush our. Our traffic is nothing compared to say, LA or SF.

That's not to say it's not bad, but some people here make it sound like we're the only city with traffic.

I disagree. Pretty much any economist will tell you that the best way to reduce consumption of a good is to increase its price.

By implementing congestion charges only those with a good enough reason to drive will do so, and give an incentive to use alternatives.

Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

If people still decide they want to burn more of their money driving, they are welcome to do so. No one is telling anyone how to spend their money. We are simply adjusting the price of a good to price in things that aren’t taken into account (traffic).

People arguing that congestion charges dispropropprtioanlly affect the poor often also support pricing in the true cost of other things, like carbon emissions and plastic bags. Are you saying you wouldn’t support a tax on plastic? Or emissions? Cap and trade? Those things also increase the prices of things we want to discourage the consumption of and also probably affect people with lower incomes disproportiaonately. You can’t have it both ways.

> Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

This is all very well in the abstract, but what exactly are those people supposed to do in the meantime - you know, while the public transit that they demand actually gets built?

True enough. I think the point here is to reduce that marginal car. When the decision is to drive or not drive and there is a viable alternative (which in NY there is, unlike, say LA), then this takes that marginal car off the road when people say, ah screw it its not worth the extra couple bucks.

> They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

As a cyclist, I'm interested in how much congestion pricing (and related ideas like eliminating free parking) would promote cycling.

For a while when I lived in the DC area, I would use a paid bike parking service. I parked in a parking garage that charged something like $10/day for car parking. If I recall correctly, I ended up paying $0.53/day, which seemed very fair to me. I wouldn't mind more paid bike parking if it were good quality like this was. I didn't have to worry about theft. I parked in a cage that took up roughly 5 car parking spots, yet could fit roughly an order of magnitude more bikes.

Congestion pricing is great, but I am pointing out the underlying politics, its just being used to prolong the car first status quo in these cities. theres not really an earnest follow through for road/parking diets, protected bike lanes and 2x, 3x public transit that are actually needed.

Well, nothing being implemented. The details haven't been worked out. The only thing that's changed is the Governor has signed on (previous attempts were derailed as requiring state government approval). That's good but we're not there yet.

This is what I want to see:

- Similar to London, charge people for owning a car in areas served by public transport. This would include anywhere in Manhattan below 125th street (maybe higher).

- Stop giving free long term parking on the street. Have a parking limit. If necessary give resident parking permits. These should be expensive. Comparative to parking in a garage. You get the idea?

I'm not a big fan of what NYC has done to ride-sharing services. Ride-sharing (IMHO) should be encouraged. These cars are in constant use, not collecting dust in free street parking. What used to be a $9-10 Uber ride is now $19-20. What I can walk in 10 minutes now costs $11. That's... ridiculous.

My guess is congestion pricing will further drive up ride-sharing and taxi services for no good reason. It already costs $70 to go to the airport (JFK).

Let's target private vehicle owners in Manhattan. Those people basically have no excuse for this level of subsidy.

Great point. The fact that street parking is roughly free in NYC both encourages drivers to drive and causes unnecessary bottlenecks on congested major thoroughfares. Take, for instance, 86th Street. One lane taken up by parked cars, plus just one double-parked truck means most crosstown traffic along that latitude and in that direction (including packed busses) must single-flight. That the city chooses to keep commuters stuck in traffic to accommodate disused cars is a pessimal allocation of precious street area.

> What used to be a $9-10 Uber ride is now $19-20. What I can walk in 10 minutes now costs $11. That's... ridiculous.

That's... the market clearing price. It's pricing a scarce resource (road space) to demand. If you're not willing to pay that $19 or $11 but someone else is, they should get that ride while you walk.

The city should be looking to price transportation options to shift usage patterns toward matching available supply. Road space for cars is the scarcest, followed by space on subways and buses, then pedestrian space as the most plentiful.

> What I can walk in 10 minutes now costs $11. That's... ridiculous.

Walk, then. It is only 10 minutes, it makes you move which - assuming you don't have to breathe too thick an atmosphere - is generally a good thing and it means one less car on the road.

I'm surprised people are afraid this will decrease quality of life. In New York, cars are the greatest public nuisance. They create exhaust, they shore up traffic, you have to watch out for them when you cross the street. Semis drive through the middle of the city, engine braking and honking.

Manhattan can be unbearable at vehicle choke points like Canal Street. Any effort to lessen the amount of cars is going to dramatically improve the quality of life in the city.

Not to be a pedant, but can the headline be changed to what it actually is? I clicked it hoping to see how they were carrying it out.

Implements as a verb means they actually carried it out: threw in tollbooths, bill-by-plate, or EZ-Pass. Not done yet.

"Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow?" < real headline

Let's see: America generally has terrible public transportation and purposely laid-out most modern cities to require private car use, yet the "solution" is to ban cars. In reality, the unintended consequences are the creation of an economic apartheid because the rich won't be as affected as a proportion of income and further, it will disproportionately tax on already struggling poor people.

Layout cities and do public transportation better, policy-makers shouldn't just tax what's vital to live and work just because they think it will go away... it's BandAid, panacea mentality.

This is for New York, which has awesome public transport.

And how do you get better public transport in cities? By getting cars out of them.

And we should actually start getting drivers to pay for what they use, instead of subsidising them billions.

I think you should do the opposite: Make public transport free.

Transportation is a basic service cities should provide for free, that includes both roads and public transport.

"Free" isn't free - road use in private cars vs shared transportation in buses or rail have dramatically different costs and returns per person in terms of pollution, percentages of public space used for vehicle storage, peak throughput for a given corridor over time, fuel cost, etc. Congestion pricing is about adjusting the incentives between road use and transit use to encourage more efficiency with the lowest overall cost to society.

>purposely laid-out most modern cities to require private car use

This is only true of LA, Phoenix, and Tucson, cities established or seeing their principal growth after the invention of air conditioning.

Pretty much every other American city got its street plan decades or centuries before automobiles. New York's streets were drawn in 1810. San Francisco got its streets in 1840. The assertion that America is "designed for cars" is totally bunk. Cars are invaders in cities designed for walking and horse riding.

Bus trips in SF are easily 3X longer than car trips on the same routes. Traffic affects cars just as much - it can’t be the reason buses are so slow. Talking about the time people are wasting sitting in traffic is silly - now they will be wasting even more time standing on buses.

How about some parking protected bike lanes and encouragement for e-bikes, which can actually deliver reasonable door to door times?

Dedicated bus lanes fix that.

Slow traffic is created non-linearly, i.e. if a road has a capacity of 100, it will be totally fine 0-90, but traffic will rise sharply after that point. If you could reduce the amount of cars by 10%, you could massively reduce the traffic that everyone is experiencing. So in that example, 90% of commuters will still be driving and paying tolls, but with far less traffic, and the other 10% may be on public transit/bike/walk/wfh and also experiencing far less traffic.

> How about some parking protected bike lanes and encouragement for e-bikes, which can actually deliver reasonable door to door times?

I'm a daily transportation cyclist and I usually find parking protected bike lanes to be worse than no bike lane at all. In my experience, they greatly increase the risks at intersections due to turning drivers either not checking the bike lane for traffic or not being able to check it due to cars blocking the view.

I really hope this decreases number of ridesharing vehicles on the road. ridesharing is a cheaper and more convenient alternative to taxis but they didn't improve traffic. they made it worse because its almost always a car with TLC plates that has doubleparked, full stop in the lane to pickup/dropoff or engaging in some other kind of outrageous behavior in traffic. I don't blame them either, those drivers put up with so much shit that after a while they become immune to honking or people calling them assholes. they just do anything to make more money because uber pays for most of their tickets

Uber pays for its drivers’ tickets? Including things like speeding? Or just parking tickets? I wonder how much that costs them...

parking and other tlc related violations, not red light or speeding tickets. I actually never see uber drivers speeding, on the contrary, you will see them going 50mph in middle lane while everyone is passing them going 75 on 50 because thats what new york drivers do when they see room on the highway

I wonder if the pricing structure will be the same for taxis and ride sharing cars. I'd hope so, but something tells me the taxi lobbyists probably worked out a better deal.

The current deal from Feb 2 is $2.50 for taxis, $2.75 + $0.75 per passenger for rideshares. I'd expect it to remain given the lack of popular revolt.

The real question is how will bridge and tunnel tolls be credited given the multiple independent tolltakers that won't welcome any encroachment on their fiefdoms that threatens revenue.

The congestion price depends on the number of passengers? Ugh. That makes no sense.

no, that is a different fee unrelated to the congestion charge which wont begin until 2021.

previous proposals have had taxis and delivery vehicles only paying once per day

This is a preliminary congestion charge that was instituted now because NYC already had the hooks to extract these fees.

https://abc7ny.com/traffic/nyc-congestion-pricing-brings-hig...

All the news sources I can find call it a congestion tax.

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/02/01/for-hire-congestion-...

What about delivery trucks?

Could this just replace poorer drivers on the streets with richer drivers?

It could also increase costs for all goods and services, as the cost to get them into the shops and restaurants will increase.

Edit: Drivers in NYC can be from any surrounding area, as can rich drivers coming in. e.g., Some people in NJ who aren’t regular commuters don’t have useful train/bus access.

Higher fuel taxes would aid congestion without additional toll infrastructure and reduce the money sent to dictatorships at the same time. That revenue could be used to fix/expand public transport. Right now urban residents subsidize suburban commuters. Until the true cost of driving is reflected at the pump we'll keep going in circles.

Wow, this could have a big impact on ride sharing companies.

$2.75 + $0.75 per passenger for rideshares.

How is this supposed to work? How would they charge people driving into certain parts of the city? Something like EZ-Pass at every traffic light?

Very long article that basically says nothing.

"In New York, many details of a congestion pricing plan — including how much drivers will be charged — are still being worked out."

So saying "implements" seems rather premature.

My personal prediction is that this will lead people to move out of cities. I guess we'll see.

London did this a while ago and traveling around the city is much more pleasant. There is a case to be made that a congestion charge makes a city more habitable.

The way London does it does create some asymmetries which would be good to avoid. You pay when crossing the border between the outside and the congestion charge zone while driving inside the zone is not charged. This means that those who live inside the zone and drive inside the zone don't pay while those who come from the outside do. London real estate being priced as it is, those who live inside the zone could easily afford to pay for the privilege of driving private vehicles in that area - but they don't. Those who can not afford to live inside the zone but need to drive there for their work do end up paying. It would make more sense to tax the actual use of the roads inside the area instead of the mere fact that a vehicle crossed some imaginary border between the untaxed and taxed zones.

London introduced a charge of £10 a day for cars if you drive into the congestion zone. If you live inside it you get a 90% discount though.

Considering the price of properties in congested areas, the fee is negligible.

It certainly will cause people to leave. There’s a really high demand for walkability (that’s one reason cities like SF, NYC and Seattle are so pricey). As such, I have a feeling many more people will move in — especially as the city becomes less hostile for those on foot, on bike or transit.

You don’t spend much time with people that live in cities do you? I’d be less likely to move away if my city implemented congestion pricing, got rid of most street parking, and used that space and money for things like protected bike lanes, improving walkability and public transit. Significant improvement in day to day life, and relatively minor inconvenience occasionally when I do need to drive (picking up something heavy, out of city weekend activity, etc).

They have committed to doing it though, and this is a huge political change. Congestion charging used to be the kind of thing that social scientists would point out as the obviously right thing to do and that never got any traction. Then we saw a few very prominent experiments with it (including the London City area) which were quite successful, and now it's coming to Manhattan, NYC. Amazing.

I’ve known a few people who lived in New York. I don’t think any of them ever owned a car there. It’s outrageously expensive and impractical in Manhattan. I don’t see it affecting the residents negatively.

I'm not sure who drives into Manhattan-below-60th, but AFAIK it's very Uber/Lyft/Taxi-heavy, so this will probably get rolled into fares. It will be interesting to see how that ends up being priced. If it prices more trips onto transit while funding transit improvements, it will be a nice quality of life improvement.

people with free (placards) or reimbursed parking

Why would people move out of cities? Wouldn’t the majority of people entering a city (and being taxed) be coming from outside the city?

Because with fewer outside people coming into the cities there is less economic activity in the city.

So they will move to places with even less economic activity?

I hope cars move out of cities, the people can stay. And since cities are much more pleasant without cars, without constant risk, without the huge number of deaths and pollution they cause, more people may move in.

I hope other cities don’t actually follow suit. I don’t know about Seattle but SF’s public transport is rather poor. If it were as good as that in Manhattan, congestion pricing would be perfectly fine, but they shouldn’t be heavily taxing vehicles when the only reasonable mode of transport is vehicles.

Congestion pricing isn't (supposed to be) punishment for driving a car when transit is available, it's designed to internalize the actual costs that driving a car imposes on others (i.e., takes up room on the road, among other things). So what you're suggesting is that cars should be subsidized in cities where transit is bad. But this doesn't make sense. If you are worried about a negative shock to the poor-ish, you should just give them cash.

If there's less congestion, doesn't that a) help with clearing the streets so that buses run faster, b) broaden ridership so it's not just "those people" on transit, and c) help get a larger body of the population lobbying for no-brainer improvements like dedicated lanes, shorter headways, etc?

A congestion tax doesn't meaningfully improve congestion if there aren't good alternative modes of transport available (and buses are not going to run very fast as long as pedestrians are able to cross the street). It would just result in people paying more in taxes, unless they're price sensitive (read: poor and forced to take the hit to travel time).

SFMTA service is terrible because you’re on a bus stuck behind ubers in the bus lane and an intersection blocked by people trying to get on the Bay Bridge because they live in Manteca. Driving in SF is characterized by total lawlessness. The number one most effective thing you can do for transportation in SF would be to drag box-blockers from their vehicles and beat them to death on the spot. The next best thing is to toll the roads.

The problem isn't solely other cars, Ubers or any other scapegoats; it's the layout of American cities making MOST of them purposefully unwalkable and the destruction/atrophy of public transportation, leading to long commutes and gridlock. Recall that the auto makers bought/legislated their way to destroy an once vibrant local tram infrastructure in America. One "quick-fix panacea solution" isn't going to do much; it's going to take a concerted effort of many, integrated, holistic solutions to make things better.

There is no land-use issue that can be fixed by transportation but neither NYC nor SF has this problem. Their problems are entirely solvable by transportation policy alone.

NYC did solve this problem and then let its amazing system atrophy over the years (though I still give it credit for being 24/7). Its original sin is that the subway was built to get people in and out of Manhattan so parts of Brooklyn and Queens are in dead zones only serviceable by bus or car (to say nothing of Staten Island) and it's nearly impossible to create new track these days. NYC as a whole would benefit from more point to point connection in the outer boroughs instead of hub-and-spoke through Manhattan.

SF and the broader Bay Area transit policy make zero sense to me.

It will be faster but still annoyingly slow even if you kept all the cars off the bus lanes where they don't belong, or even removed them from the streets altogether. Can't really go fast with a bus without running over pedestrians at every intersection. Good public transit has dedicated rights of way.

I'm also curious how you think people from Manteca should be commuting to the city.

I don’t think they should be. _That_ is a land use problem.

One could tax single-occupant vehicles to encourage carpooling.

Nit: most public transit involves vehicles. Walking, swimming, skipping, jogging, etc. aren't usually considered public transit.

>One could tax single-occupant vehicles to encourage carpooling.

I'm not sure how the mechanics of that would work with ridesharing (e.g. if the driver has a passenger along at entry into the city, do they pay a tax?).

>Nit: most public transit involves vehicles. Walking, swimming, skipping, jogging, etc. aren't usually considered public transit.

Well, I had the NYC subway in mind, which while technically vehicular doesn't fall under the common usage of "vehicle" to mean "motor vehicle".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com