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Comment by williamsmj | Hacker News Reader

Length restrictions are generally looser in the US, but there's one very notable exception: 53' trailers may pass through NYC to Long Island on a couple of highways, but may not make pickups or deliveries anywhere in NYC https://www.dot.ny.gov/about-nysdot/faq/are-53-foot-long-tra.... 53' trailers are pretty much the standard large trailer in the US. They are recognizable because they have a little "53" written on the side. Don't bother reporting it to the NYPD if you see one though. They pretty much refuse to enforce laws meant to make NYC safer for its non-driving residents.

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Lol do you know how unsafe it would be for 'non-driving' residents if trailers can't unload food and necessary items to NYC? Non-driving residents depend on semi as much or more than anyone, since non-drivers rarely have the means to transport heavy loads without driving (some may have a team of pack dogs or horses I suppose).

>They pretty much refuse to enforce laws meant to make NYC [undeliverable by standard trailers]

Good.

Or, you know, they could use shorter trucks. What a concept.

It's nice of you to opine on how traffic enforcement should happen in a place you (clearly) don't live. The NYPD choose not to enforce traffic laws across the board, and it leads to some dire consequences. In any case, whether or not longer trucks would be better for New York, the decision has already been made that they're not allowed. It's not up to the NYPD to second guess the law.

Do you live in the entire city of NYC? Or do you just like opining on what the entire rest of the boroughs should do? How practical do you really think it is for the entire country to make special considerations for some special snowflakes that can't handle the standard trailer everyone else uses? If you don't like the long trailers, you're free to choose to not shop at grocery stores and other places that may be using them. Free market and all, maybe someone can open up a store than only unloads cargo from short trailers, we can experiment on what is more successful.

If the NYPD enforced (were somehow able to) every single law at every moment to everyone, New Yorkers would be crying to go back to discretionary enforcement in no time.

> If you don't like the long trailers, you're free to choose to not shop at grocery stores and other places that may be using them. Free market and all

The free market solution would be that stores that want longer containers can pay for private roads that don't have the length limits, and then we'd see whether the benefit to them is worth the costs that they're imposing on everyone else.

The free market solution would be to privatize the public roads, yes, at which point the owner of the road would realize it would be much more profitable to allow standard trailers through. Non-drivers would finally start paying their share that way too, as the cost is passed on to the consumer -- more on that in a minute.

As it stands now, non-commercial drivers subsidize non-drivers by paying fuel and other taxes that pay for roads. Commercial (semis et al) benefit everyone (especially non-drivers that depend on commercial drivers bringing in goods to them from outside the city), but due to exponential nature of road wear vs vehicle weight, it actually turns out regular non-commercial passenger drivers disproportionately pay for road maintenance. Non-drivers in NYC are taking drivers for a fiscal ride, and all the while at least one of them seems to be begrudging the very semi trailers that keep them alive.

> non-commercial drivers subsidize non-drivers by paying fuel and other taxes that pay for roads.

The costs of roads are far from fully paid out of those taxes though. So non-drivers are also subsidizing commercial drivers extensively in practice.

> Commercial (semis et al) benefit everyone (especially non-drivers that depend on commercial drivers bringing in goods to them from outside the city)

Only to the extent that their shipping is providing value, and it's hard to assess that given the distorting subsidy that they're getting. They might be outcompeting more efficient alternative modes of transport, or they might be making marginal-benefit deliveries that actually aren't worth the road wear and space that they're taking up if those costs were fully accounted for.

> Non-drivers in NYC are taking drivers for a fiscal ride

Nonsense. The land value of roads alone is a huge implicit subsidy to drivers.

As a non-driving resident of a city where the maximum vehicle length is 12m and this is enforced, I assure you that that is not a dangerous restriction.

Worth noting here that the law is ignored by the NYPD in the outer boroughs but it’s actually pretty much impossible to get a 53’ truck onto Manhattan because there are so few ways onto the island, and the only one of the interstates on which 53’ trailers are legal passes through Manhattan.

And yet here’s a fun fact: it’s actually possible to buy food and necessary items in Manhattan. The NYPD ignores the law but the national chain stores that cover the island do not. It’s actually so easy to make deliveries and pickups that those stores are well stocked and serve residential neighborhoods that are literally some of the densest on earth.

Turns out humans have ways of moving stuff around without 53’ trailers.

> residential neighborhoods that are literally some of the densest on earth.

“Some of” is flexible enough to be completely meaningless, but the top, well, many of the densest neighborhoods on earth are anot in North America and have densities in people per square kilometer similar to or greater than NYC’s densest neighborhoods do in people per square mile.

If I thought they were the densest residential neighborhoods on earth I would have said so.

And I'm sure none of those trucks going into Manhattan come from distribution centers in the outer boroughs, which are in turn stocked by standard trailers.

Sure you can get stuff around in things other than 53' trailers, but I think those in Manhattan have decided that's a bad idea when they actually buy stuff trucked into NYC on those trailers.

Look, 53’ trailers illegally entering Manhattan is a problem. I’ll be the first to admit that. But if you think life on Manhattan is only possible because of a huge illegal trucking operation then I don’t know what to tell you.

The US doesn’t have dense cities except NYC, so you may not realise this but rules against big trucks in dense cities are extremely common globally. I get that this offends you aesthetically and you therefore want to think the people of Paris and London and Munich and Hong Kong are miserable and starving because they don’t let trucks in. But that’s not true.

I acknowledge you're right, life is definitely possible without it.

New Yorkers have decided to keep buying stuff brought on these trailers. You probably have too. People voted with their wallet and decided they would buy the goods that came in on the trailer. The reason is because it's just way more practical, and cost efficient, to go along with the standard the rest of the country is using.

Until 1997 Hong Kong was a possession that functioned much like its own country. NYC is simply incomparable to this situation; NYC is less than 5% of the country. I'd also note the tariffs and regulations on goods coming into Hong Kong were way more liberal than NYC before the handoff, so Hong Kong as able to withstand some higher ground transportation cost than NY can withstand at same price.

I'm going to say one more time: there are > 0 illegal 53' trailers in Manhattan, but not by much. It's incredibly hard to get a trailer onto the island. The tunnels aren't tall enough and only 2 of the 21 bridges allow 53' trailers (they are the entrance and exit to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Manhattan_Expressway) at the far northern end (~170th St). The bridges are all controlled by Port Authority not NYPD. The trucks that end up on lower Manhattan are lost drivers, not making illegal deliveries to Target and Whole Foods. If the NYPD enforced the law _perfectly_ it would not be "unsafe" like you suggest. It would instead make almost no difference to the availability of goods on Manhattan.

I figured you'd focus on HK specifically. I don't agree it's incomparable, but forget I mentioned it. Big trucks are banned from big cities all over the world. The police forces that enforce those bans are not all sat in their cars playing games on their phones like they do in NYC. And yet life goes on.

I was mostly referring to 53' trailers that go into outer boroughs illegally, and then get shipped in by smaller trucks into Manhattan. Manhattan is still benefitting from these illegal trailers even when they don't go into Manhattan. I'd venture a great deal of goods in Manhattan come in this way.

Basically all your examples of cities involve places where the nation's trucking industry expects their major cities and a large portion of the populace (or in HK case, basically the entire territory) to require these shorter trailers. This isn't comparable to the situation in the US, and the result is that for pragmatic reasons NYPD have turned a blind eye to a poorly workable regulation. And it becomes doubly unpragmatic when we already in a situation where trucker drivers are scarce even before having to split their approach in two (travel NYC compliant, or travel rest of nation compliant).

They could be illegally transferring loads to smaller trucks in the expensive outer boroughs, or legally in Westchester and NJ where land is cheaper. It makes no difference to my point, which is:

There are almost no big trailers delivering goods to Manhattan. It works well, just like it works well all over the world. It allows people to move around more quickly and safely. It works well even though Manhattan is ~1% of the US population and doesn't dominate economically to the extent of some world cities. It's certainly not "unsafe" (?!) for the residents of Manhattan (a direct quote). I don't know what "unpragmatic" means when applied to a system that works.

Banning big trucks from places where there isn't room and they get in the way is great. I hope they ban them in more places. I hope they ban anything bigger than a Transit van. I hope they transfer enforcement to a less corrupt, lazy, anti-city/pro-suburb agency than the NYPD. In short: big trucks in cities suck. I'm done.

> It allows people to move around more quickly and safely. It works well even though Manhattan is ~1% of the US population and doesn't dominate economically to the extent of some world cities.

>There are almost no big trailers delivering goods to Manhattan

You keep focusing on Manhattan. We were talking about a regulation applying to NYC as a whole. If no one wants or finds it economical to take these trucks in, then the regulation isn't needed. Therefore you should be fine with deregulating truck length.

>I don't know what "unpragmatic" means when applied to a system that works.

A system that works so well, that people have to work around it, to the complaint of one New Yorker.

>It's certainly not "unsafe" (?!) for the residents of Manhattan (a direct quote).

An intentional misrepresentation, and modification of my quote; but nice that you cowardly run away "I'm done" after quoting me in this manner.

> I hope they ban them in more places. I hope they ban anything bigger than a Transit van.

You hope for a lot of odd things. I could hope you are banned from NYC, but instead of hoping bad things against people I'd rather just allow people to live and come in with the trailers that keep things simple and pragmatic for the trucking industry so truckers don't become an even rarer commodity at the expense of a few unusually fearful minority of New Yorkers.

"You keep focusing on Manhattan."

Because we were talking about what effect a ban on large trailers would have, and that's the only place in the US where there are no large trailers. We could have talked about ~all the capital cities of Europe if you'd preferred. Or the entire island of Britain.

"An intentional misrepresentation, and modification of my quote"

Well, it doesn't get better when I quote the full sentence, but here it is: "Lol do you know how unsafe it would be for 'non-driving' residents if trailers can't unload food and necessary items to NYC?". Large trailers can't unload in Manhattan. 53' trailers can't even be on freeways in much of Europe. It's not unsafe. No one starves.

Well if Manhattan is the only place in US not getting a net benefit from large trailers, you pretty much proved the point of how dumb it would be to enforce a ban on these trailers on the whole of NYC. Manhattan is just one borough of NYC. The regulation is pointless if the truckers already don't go there -- those who go there by accident would have broken the law anyway (didn't mean to go there) and those who are intentionally going somewhere to unload never end up there because by your own statement they can't even unload. Let the trucks go on to the outer boroughs so those in Manhattan can keep benefitting and buying the goods that come off these trailers.

NYPD are apparently acting 100% rationally and sober here by choosing not to enforce this regulation, and you've done nothing but systematically prove that point.

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