Venice to introduce entry tickets and fees
euronews.com
euronews.com
Venice is an amazing city, and it's not as expensive as people think, if you plan to stay long term.
When the Covid-19 situation got better in early 2022, TONS of tourists came back, and Venice is now more crowded than it was before the pandemic.
Residents (of the historical city center, or the "main" Venice), down to a total of about 50,000 (from a peak of ~175,000 [0]), are really angry at the overcrowding and are looking for solutions.
In certain weekends this year, the number of visitors reached 130,000 per day, which is about twice as much as the city can support without deterioration of city life and services.
Entry tickets, if handled properly, could be a great way to fix the issue.
The current solution has some flaws, and I don't believe that it will solve the issue properly. (overnight visitors don't pay; ferry rides are not integrated in the ticket; etc).
I believe that the right structure should include a combination of:
1) expensive tickets (€50 per day per person) that allow you to come regardless of any other limitation.
2) advance purchase tickets (€5 per day per person)
3) progressive tickets (starting at €5 per day per person, but going as high as €25 when the number of visitors in a given day approaches 60,000).
Also, the parking system (Tronchetto and Piazzale Roma), owned by private companies, should introduce a similar progressive ticket, but the extra income should go to the municipality, not to the private company.
The extra money earned this way should go towards improving the logistics of the city, easing the pressure that tourism puts on the residents.
My 0.02.
I don't disagree with that, but we should be clear that this is what is being proposed.
> Do you think poor people should also be able to park their cars in Manhattan for free?
All community centers, pools, camps, etc for both cities refuse to give in-city rates. Since either my license says the wrong city, or my taxes go to the wrong city.
Tourism at this scale is a modern day privilege, you can some some nice vacations without going to europe’s most crowded island. My best vacation were far from the most expensive one. And my most expensive was one of the worst.
In my town , lots of things are cheaper for the working class of the town. Is this also unfair for the poor tourist, on his break?
Another aspect I'm thinking about is 'motivation'. High prices that require to really think about it and perhaps even to plan in advance also filter visitors according to how much they wanted to visit.
I'm sure some people really dream of visiting Venice once in their life and would be willing to save if needed be in order to do so. On the other hand, there are people who see that Easyjet has 30 euro flights at the moment so decide to go to Venice for the weekend just like that.
Adding a fee, at some point supply and demand will become balanced. The city will have the max number of tourist it can handle at the max price people are willing to pay. The resource will now be managed correctly.
If the income is absurdly high, then other areas may start expanding out into the sea to provide a similar experience. Giving tourist more options. See Islands of Dubai for example. At some point enough new tourist options are opened that Venice will need to lower fee until a new balance is reached.
Thus tourist have more options and lower prices overall. Wealth has been created.
Is this the backstory for the next BioShock game?
People will dine at fine restaurant as a treat. People will travel to the Bahamas as a treat. People will buy a SUV for comfort as a treat.
All those things are luxuries, and have nothing to do with wealth.
We'll have a coupon day, or something.
So there will barely be an entry fee for people coming for the day too. For a measure targeting people coming from thousands of kilometers away, I do not see how this is even going to make a dent in the tourist influx.
Looking for relatively similar cases like Machu Picchu or Tanzania national parks, I would have expected a fee between 50$ and 100$ to curb the tourism.
"The fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin was so worried by
accumulative erosion cause by over ten billion visiting tourists per
year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the
amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from
your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the
lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt." - HHGTTG
At a conference in Rome I met a Venetian who told me those cruise ships are the bane of their lives. She wanted to move out for health reasons, because the constant stinking miasma of marine diesel from dozens of ships. They are also HUGE, like floating cities, that literally darken the skyline. The tens of thousands of visitors dropping litter and blocking the pavement to take selfies are just a minor inconvenience.
Also funny we never hear from the people who are making money from tourism? Only negative Nancy's.
I'd wager that Marghera's refinery saved Venice much more than tourism did, at least economically speaking. Also, are you talking about Venice proper (the island parts) or the City of Venice more widely (including Mestre and Marghera)?
> Also funny we never hear from the people who are making money from tourism?
I can speak for that. My grandpa was one of the kiosks owner in Piazza S. Marco. After his retirement my uncles inherited it.
My grandpa used to make a lot of money from tourists buying souvenirs. In the last 20 years sales dropped, nobody buys anything from them anymore, they are now trying to sell sweaters and hats and (of course) they can't seem to sell those either.
But still, my grandpa complains both when there's plenty of tourists and when there are none.
EDIT: I forgot to type where this was going: my grandpa is against this entry fee.
/EDIT
It would be interesting to know who actually makes money in Venice.
Just my two cents: if the only people happy in a city are those that make money from tourism then it's not a city, it's a theme park.
A branch of the family owns two restaurants in Venice and they are making money hand over fist. The quality of the food is completely average for Venice, but the locations are good, the menu is optimized for consistency and tourist tastes (north american, southeast asia/chineese and european primarily), and most importantly (according to them) they spend a ton of effort optimizing their presence on food review apps like tripadvisor.
Not sayings restaurants are easy, but they are making a shocking amount of money from selling very average food.
They do now. Up until last year they docked at Tronchetto (https://www.google.com/maps/place/terminal+msc+venezia/@45.4...) traversing the Canale della Giudecca to get there (that big canal between the main island and the Giudecca island in the southern part).
As someone noticed earlier the introduction of a ticket to access a city (be it Venice or Florence) will probably only make a dent in the total amount of people visiting it (which is the actual problem, they are simply too many) while making a difference between the "wealthy" and the "poor".
If the issue is too many people, the only solution is to limit the number of people (within reason and using some common sense in the way these hypothetical limits are set and enforced), introducing a ticket won't make any difference if not - possibly - provide the municipalities with money to cover the expenses these tourists create (the first thing that comes to my mind is litter, but there is also water, street and bridges maintenance, etc.).
And that implements GP's suggestion, but it turns out this is not enough to limit the number of daytime visitors.
The problem with both of those schemes is that there are a number of exceptions: people who live in the region, people who spend the night in the city... You don't want to place the burden of checking your hotel reservation on a train employee during a 5 minute ride or at a toll booth.
I disagree.
This seems like a "great way" to damage the tourism industry in Venice. In other words, I think this is a terrible way to deal with tourists who are visiting Venice, yet aren't spending enough money in Venice.
I think it would be better to require every adult tourist to buy, say, €10 worth of "Venice Money" which they could spend at any restaurant or shop in Venice during the day they are visiting. Too many tourists? Then increase it to, say, €15. Too few tourists? Then decrease it to, say, €5.
Part of the goal is to require tourists to spend a minimum amount of money while visiting Venice. Charging an admission fee seems too heavy-handed. Sure, I realize that my suggestion is tantamount to an admission fee, but it's likely to be more palatable to tourists. The goal isn't merely to get tourists to spend a sufficient amount of money in Venice; part of the goal is to make tourists happy to do so.
Tourists are notoriously fickle. Furthermore, they have myriad places in and around Italy, Europe, and, well, the world where they can spend their money. The current problem of too many tourists could very quickly turn into a problem of a dearth of tourists.
"Killing the goose that lays the golden egg" would obviously be foolish. I presume the economy in Venice benefits immensely from tourism. This is precisely the sort of measure that people tend to look back at in hindsight and exclaim, "How could we have committed such a blunder! What were we thinking?!?"
Having opined all of that, sure, I can see why denizens of Venice would welcome a measure that would decrease the number of tourists generally, and particularly the number of skinflint tourists who visit Venice, yet don't spend a single euro in Venice.
Also, frankly, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Venice to enforce dress codes and behavior codes. For example, nobody wants an endless "parade" of motley dressed drunkards wandering around their neighborhood.
Personally I happily shop at Costco, but haven’t set foot in a Walmart in perhaps 20 years. I detest Walmart. Why? Part of the reason is this: Costco has a “greeter” standing at the enterance. Ostensibly the greeter’s job is to verify that people entering are members. In fact, that greeter is also eyeballing each person who enters and is empowered to deny enterance to people who don’t meet Costco’s minimum standards (which aren’t very high, but are still much, much higher than Walmart’s standards).
Similarly, one of the "secrets" to the success of Las Vegas strip is this: although they allow a lot of rowdy behavior, frankly, they actually keep a tight lid on things: a very, very, tight lid, which I presume you would have noticed if you’ve ever actually been there and paid attention.
It's a delicate balance which requires discretion bordering on sophisticated and subtle diplomacy.
For example, when dealing with "drunk idiots" the Las Vegas police tend to use kid gloves as much as possible. Why? The powers that be in Las Vegas want "visitors" (tourists) to tell their family, friends, and associates they had a great time on the Las Vegas strip. They also want most of the tourists themselves to return over, and over, and over again.
The same is true for a myriad of tourist destinations around the world.
This is about creating a livable city, and this implies balancing commercial interests with the interests of the larger local community. Tourism isn't unethical or bad, but it does become an issue as far as the locals are concerned when unchecked growth and a focus to maximize tourist spending pushes everything else out. That's when a city stops being a city and effectively turns into a theme park.
When it comes to local politics, it's clear to everyone that tourism is a cornerstone of our local economy. But at the same time, having millions visiting one's city does come at a cost regarding pollution, noise, mobility, safety, prices of goods and services, upkeep of public infrastructure, etc. Tourism is an industry and it needs to be treated as such in terms of policies and regulations.
Externalizing all of those costs to the local population simply won't do. Taxing tourists is just one tactic to do just that. Other strategies include toning down city marketing, adapting fiscal / grant policies for commerce and hospitality, a permit stop for hotels / airbn'b / B&B's, banning cruise ships from ports, limiting admissions to public venues (museums,...), regulating guided tours, regulating bars / restaurants (closing hours, terraces, signage,...)
At the same time, it's the responsibility of a city council to also enact policies / investments in alternate industries to ensure a healthy mix which makes it attractive enough for a diverse population to stay and live there e.g. invest in research, tech, higher education, local economies, etc.
I travelled to Venice as a student. My girlfriend was from Australia, that was the one chance in her life to go to Venice. We lived on low 10s of Euro a day and would have been eating sandwiches we made in Venice and pasta we cooked for dinner. We could have paid 10-20 Euro as an entry fee (as we did for the Uffizi, the Vatican museum, etc.) but not 100 Euro, even for 'Venice Money'.
The other thing this measure would encourage is higher prices and scams. People waiting near the train station offering to change Venice money for real money. Shops selling cigarettes and other high-value stuff at a markup for Venice money. Low-quality art and souvenirs being targeted at tourists who haven't spent all their money on the way out (as used to happen in Warsaw Pact countries which had currency controls). Higher prices on basic food and drink as cafes know that tourists will have a 'sunk cost' feeling.
I think that's overselling it. Greatly. I took a day trip to Venice from Ljubljana to meet family there. The whole place reeked of sewage, and the crowds of aimlessly meandering tourists were stifling. Like most tourist traps, it felt shallow, with little to offer beyond staring at old buildings, tons of shops selling worthless trinkets, and pricey restaurants. I wanted to try mingling with the locals more, but wasn't able to quickly find information on nightclubs/raves/etc. in the immediate area.
I took some nice pictures, rode in the gondola, went to dinner, then returned to LJ. I actually wish I had spent more time in Trieste, Zagreb, or had linked up with a casual acquaintance all the way in Zurich. My dad paid for everything we did while IN the city, but if I was spending my own money I would probably never return to Venice. So an entry tax is definitely a "nope" for me.
What did you like about Trieste and Zagreb (I've never been and I'm not familiar with them)?
I was only in Zagreb for a day. I took a train from LJ, then walked several kilometers to scope out a university with a Masters program that I was curious about. The city felt a little "rough", reminding me of Philadelphia but with much less urban decay. The staff and the students at the university were stacked with attractive and curious females. Being the only black guy in a 3-piece suit in probably a 1000km radius may have been a factor.
"unpolished, quiet, probably a little dangerous, but FULL of beautiful women". The Former Yugoslavia is kinda like the Thai or Philippine countryside, but with better infrastructure and weather.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be if I had applied to the Bled School of Business, setup shop as a defense consultant in LJ, and rotated through a circuit of bachelor pads in LJ/Trieste/Zagreb....
I'll suspect more people have Venice on their bucket list than Bhutan, so that would be a minimum bound answer for your question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_for_worker...
They can also regulate the amount of traffic, that's included in the sovereign rights associated with docks.
This means they can both charge entry, and limit access in a given day. I expect flatly refusing entry to specific people would be a different story.
Increasing hotel fees doesn’t stop day visitors. Venice also has plenty of Airbnb available, which in my uninformed opinion ruins any control the city has (maybe they require permits and tax?)
Increasing food prices hurts the locals, and just means many tourists will skip eating out.
Those gondolieres? Standard Venetians usually don't use them. Entry to palazzos? Ferries? Street coffees? Raise the damn prices! (Offer a highly discounted year pass to not affect locals).
Like come into the city? People aren't necessarily riding gondoliers. These are all independent businesses pricing things according to their own interests (as they can and should). The stated problem is that there are too many people coming in so they are directly addressing that behavior.
See also: the German "foreigner's toll road" scheme.
Tourism for the masses started in the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism#Mass_tourism .
Atlantic City was a popular tourist city in the 1920s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_City,_New_Jersey#Proh...
In the UK at the same time, Blackpool "claimed around eight million visitors per year, three times as many as its nearest British rivals, still drawn largely from the mill towns of East Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool#Towards_the_present
My grandparents drove their entire family to the Grand Canyon back in the 1950s, and they were farmers/blue collar workers.
Instead of money, cultural sites could use knowledge to gatekeep. Require prospective visitors to pass a nontrivial quiz on the history and cultural significance of Venice to be able to enter. Take a short college course on the City and receive a lifetime pass. Those who expend the preparatory effort to truly appreciate Venice are permitted to physically visit the City, and the rest get access to streaming videos and stock photos into which to edit themselves.
Some sort of access control is needed. If you think today’s Venice is bad, wait until the Chinese tourists, with their exceptionally high tolerance for crowded conditions, start arriving en masse by rail. Congestion effects are nonlinear…
That is, the culture you likely refer to is the 'the culture of an upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia)', quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_culture .
In the 1920s people went to Nashville to visit the Grand Old Opry and hear country music. People went to the Catskills to see vaudeville. How are these not examples of "cultural tourism" by the non-wealthy, pre-dating WWII?
19 million people went to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. How is that not mass tourism?
> cultural sites could use knowledge to gatekeep
They certainly can. But there are many such ways to gatekeep. The article mention cash. What about "Tourists to Venice must be able to read and write Venetian"? The very choice of how to gatekeep reveals much the gatekeeper.
A question like "Which James Bond films were filmed in Venice?" focuses on a different culture than "What famous club-footed author swam the length of the Grand Canal and across the lagoon to the Lido?" (And both question set the focus on foreigners, rather than locals.)
A more practical set of gatekeeping questions might include: "It is illegal to feed the pigeons on St. Mark's Square. What is the fine? A) 50 euros, B) 100 euros, C) 200 euros, D) 500 euros".
> wait until the Chinese tourists ... start arriving en masse by rail
The xenophobic comment is uncalled for. Just how many Chinese people do you think will travel several days by train from China to visit Venice? And why Venice, when there are so many other places to visit which are closer?
> exceptionally high tolerance for crowded conditions
Quoting "Are neighbour tourists more sensitive to crowding? The impact of distance on the crowding-out effect in tourism" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026151772...
] Some researchers claim that tourists from Asian countries, whose places of residence are commonly characterised by congestion, are more tolerant of crowding than those from Western countries (Pearce, 1995), yet contradictory findings are suggested by emerging studies. For example, Chinese tourists show unexpectedly sensitive attitudes and low tolerance of tourist crowding in China compared with Westerners (Jin & Pearce, 2011). In addition, in Taiwan, tourists from Japan, Korea, Singapore and the US have been found to be negatively affected by the large numbers of mainland Chinese tourists, while no significant impact has been found among tourists from Hong Kong, the UK and Australia (Chou et al., 2014; Su et al., 2012). These contradictions imply that the influence of cultural distance is more complicated than previously noted (Bi & Lehto, 2018).
Chinese tourists may be more likely to avoid a crowded Venice than American tourists.
I live in slovenia (neighbouring country), and venice, to me, is just one of those cities, lost to tourism... the number of locals is slowly going towards zero, and basically all of the cities infrastructure is going towards tourism.
We have a few cities going that way too, eg Piran or Kranjska Gora, where it's impossible to live in (since housing prices are way too high due to airbnb investments), the restaurants are pretty much all the same, catering tourists, prices are expensive, and there are very few stores with stuff locals actually need. Charging people a few euros to enter would still mean cities overcrowded with tourism (but a bit more expensive now), and still unlivable for locals.
Sadly, the same is happening to the city center of Ljubljana, where everything is slowly turning towards the tourists, and coming to ljubljana is pretty much the same as coming to Prague, Bratislava, etc... a few unique landmarks, and generic touristy restaurants, boat rides and expensive made-in-china souvenirs. ...and too expensive housing for locals, hard to find a general food store, noise pollution, etc.
Dubrovnik, recently famous as the set of King's Landing in Game of Thrones, was probably once a charming medieval town, but is now one enormous T-shirt shop.
Venice is absolute trash for common tourists. I've been there many times, never willingly
However, I do wish that the city managed to retain some of its former glory as a commercial center. It must have been an incredible place in the 13th and 14th centuries, long before tourism economics turned it into a place to visit and not a place to live.
Residents seem to have come to the same realization as it looks like they are going to outlaw selling drugs to tourists and move the red light district out of the city.
That being said, as long as there is still the museum/culture tourism and the many wealthy expatriates coming for the quality of life, I do not see the prices dropping back enough to make a difference for regular/local people.
Agreed on the wealthy expats and that the locals will likely not return to the inner city. There just is too much money involved. I grew up all over Amsterdam and checked the prices for each of the places where I lived (that info is public) and was quite shocked to see that in spite of being fairly well off I probably could only afford the smallest (a 55 square meter apartment on Ferdinand Bol straat).
If you're single and like nightlife then I can see the draw, but otherwise it no longer is for me. But it's fine, I live 20 minutes away (Baarn) and have the advantages when I need them without the disadvantages.
https://corrierefiorentino.corriere.it/methode_image/2020/06...
There was quite a bit of discussions last year when an ambulance called for a resident emergency took some 15 minutes to drive 100-150 meters to get to the patient.
I do worry that selling tickets basically legitimises the cruise ship hordes (and their behaviour, which isn't always very sociable) while perhaps discouraging casual independent travelers.
Trade routes and power centers were so different then, a different world. It likely will never reach that level of prosperity through non-tourism based economy.
In a way, it’s probably for the best. Italy doesn’t have a rapidly expanding population that needs more housing or denser urban centers. Freezing the cities as they are (and funding more research and archaeological digs) is probably the best outcome.
I guess it must suck as a resident though.
Our venetian friend explained they'd wanted to implement laws like this but have always been hostage to the surrounding lands which see it as essentially a cash-cow.
It was the metropolitan for example (according to our friend) that outvoted Venice itself to allow cruiseboats back to Venice which is almost the sole cause of the over-population. Native venetians seem to dislike the cruise-boats given their tourists have a very different spending pattern compared to stay-over tourists. But the cruise-boats pay huge taxes straight into the municipal.
At the same time, I am a bit perplexed. Tickets are enforced with random checks, and if you do not have your ticket you will need to pay a fine. I am not sure that you need to pay on the spot tho. If that is the case and you have 50 people from - say - the US or China, you can just avoid paying. Who will come looking for you anyway? Yes, they can kick you out, but again this won't work if they find loads of people without tickets.
Hopefully it also boosts income for the city and benefits people actually living there in a meaningful way.
> The local council has emphasised that there will be no limit to visitor numbers, only an increase in the entry fee should a certain number of visitors be reached on a particular day.
Now, unless you managed to buy a house very early, you're priced out. The amount of money in the town is crazy, and I would estimate that the amount of 1%ers is over 20% of the population. Compare this back to the early 70s and there wasn't nearly the same amount of variance in wealth.
It makes me sad that my childhood home has changed so much, but I don't think there's a way to prevent this from happening.
Time to look to the Dutch to help out with some levees/dykes sooner rather than later, as they did in the UD after Katrina
In both trips, I took a train to a dock and then boarded a small ferry with a bunch of other day-trip tourists and packaged tours, and we were all unloaded in a center area where we could spread out to all the attractions and rides / museums, churches and gondolas as the case may be, and the shops in both places were filled with the tackiest overpriced souvenirs possible.
The €5 to €10 ticket price doesn't compare at all though.
Imagine Berlin enforces an €1000000000 entry fee, except on people meeting certain criteria. All residents of Germany are exempt, everyone who gets what effectively amounts to a Visa is exempt, everybody else has to pay up, except the amount is so ridiculous that nobody will actually do so.
As an EU citizen, I'm a bit concerned by this.
Venice is tiny, old, decaying. You can just think of it as a museum. EU free movement does not give free access to all EU museums.
So it's not about overcrowding, it's just about getting paid. If it were just about overcrowding they could just limit the number and keep a flat fee, the way park systems do. Or a lottery.
If you are early or come at a slow time the price is low, if the number of people increases, so do the price. So it's not a first come first serve, but an actual price of demand.
Virginia did that on a highway used by commuters to get into D.C. where they want a minimum travel speed of 40 mph (might be lower) and the more people get into it, the more the price rise. From $1, up to $30 on a rare occasion.
"We found a variety of pollutants from several sources, with sewage-associated and faecal bacteria accounting for up to 5.98% of microbial communities. Sewage-associated pollutants were most abundant close to the city centre." - ["Partitioning and sources of microbial pollution in the Venice Lagoon" (2021)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...)
I also recommend staying a few nights so hopefully you get a day without cruise ships. Completely different city then.
After all, there was a royal publicity stunt a decade ago[1], part of what's now an annual event[2].
[1]: https://www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/201209109251/princess-...
[2]: https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/expat-events-festivals/acs...
And there’s also stuff like New York putting in all those clams to clean up a river or… something like that anyways.
This seems against basic human rights of free circulation.
Seems pretty common to not necessarily be allowed to go anywhere you please just because you want to. Maybe it is an extreme example, but I know I don't want people freely circulating inside my house.
If you think this wasn't a right have y'all never wondered why states don't simply ban people they don't want?
As for the justification for why it's a basic human right
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
> Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
https://www.usconstitution.net/constnot.html#travel
> It is interesting to note that the Articles of Confederation had an explicit right to travel; it is now thought that the right is so fundamental that the Framers may have thought it unnecessary to include it in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
Let's say you have a right to travel down a road with a bridge on it. Then 1000 people decide to travel across it at once and it collapses. Obviously each individual doing their own thing isn't a problem, but when a lot of people do that thing it becomes a problem.
We all love the idea of freedom, but it always requires responsibility. When individuals do not take this responsibility then issues like the tragedy of the commons manifest.
We generally solve these purely hypothetical problems that never actually occur by ignoring them.
It was overwhelmed... yes it was a design flaw. That's the point.
I think that's called "having a warrant out for your arrest" and it's always mystified me that each state keeps their own list of personas non grata
This is long overdue, I hope they succeed. Tourists has lost all respect for an old, hard to live, beautiful city, and for the (shrinking number of) people that still live there.
On weekends from april to october Venice is almost unbearable for normal people.
I get that there is the view of "but why should I have to?" but that seems like a fairly simple solution to people entering a door they shouldn't.
Plus obviously if it reduces violent threats from your friend then the world is also a slightly better place as a result.
Locks have been a thing for a long time so this is not exactly a new problem.
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4857329,12.4147932,3a,75y,34...
Does that seems a museum? That's the problem with Venice (stupid) tourists, they think it's a open air museum, it's not, it still is a city with people living there.
I guess what I am getting at is that people's cultural upbringing is different, and so their expectations are different. This is unconscious bias but for houses I guess. That is not to excuse people for entering someone's home without permission, but that does look like an attraction to me. Personally I would not just walk in unless it was obvious, but then everyone is different.
World cultures ignorance is staggering in some Anglo-Saxon countries...
Try to get to Manhattan without paying the city a toll, for a helicopter permit, or a public transit ticket. I'll wait.
> NYC DOT owns, operates, and maintains 789 bridges and tunnels throughout New York, including the Brooklyn, Ed Koch Queensboro, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, 24 movable bridges, and four tunnels. There are no tolls on bridges operated by NYC DOT. Some bridges in New York City are operated by other agencies.
Also, you can walk across many of the bridges to Manhattan:
https://foursquare.com/beelzebibi/list/bridges-to-walk-acros...
Also, if you could get to Staten Island (e.g. by walking over the Goethals Bridge), you could take the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan for free!
1) It might be true that you can get from other boroughs to Manhattan without paying a bridge toll, but getting to those other boroughs without paying a toll along the way is hard.
2) Walking or biking also limits the areas that you can come from
Both of these combined are equivalent to Venice's free tickets for people in the surrounding zone.
But, in focusing on bridges and tunnels, you missed the important new development in NYC. Manhattan is going to charge people a toll directly for using the streets to drive. I think it's six months old at this point.
So, yes, if you live close enough you don't need a car, you can get there. But I challenge a non-NYC resident to do so in a realistic way that doesn't involve mass transit.
On the tolling it actually hasn’t happened yet and it’s only applicable south of 60th. Free to drive anywhere in NYC at no additional cost except for the dense traffic riddled area of lower Manhattan.
You could also fly directly into NYC and move about by the magic of walking. It’s free. Unfortunately, airfare is also not free and so based on your logic NYC has an airfare surcharge.
I recently took a train from Rome to Tuscany. I was outraged that Tuscany charged me a train fee to enter the area.
I wasn't aware of the limitations on the tolls inside Manhattan to below 60th. I can see how you may have focused on the bridge/tunnel tolls (and maybe I should have been more explicit), but that's the word they have been using for those charges.
> Free to drive anywhere in NYC at no additional cost except for the dense traffic riddled area of lower Manhattan.
This is similar to how you are free to go anywhere in the PATREVE metro area except for the dense, canal-filled area of Venice.
> Unfortunately, airfare is also not free and so based on your logic NYC has an airfare surcharge.
Apparently LGA (unlike JFK or EWR) is considered walkable. I didn't think it was, but it is with 3 hours.
AFAIK, unlike tolls and mass transit, no portion of the airfare goes to NYC, nor does NYC have any direct control over the costs. So it's a good counterexample.
> Try to get to Manhattan without paying the city a toll, for a helicopter permit, or a public transit ticket. I'll wait.
Which was trivially answered. But now you want convenience.
I am not sure why you’re fixated on this. Venice charges you per person per day to enter and stay in Venice. This is in addition to highway tolls on the way to Venice and tolls to cross the bridge to enter Venice. Roads aren’t free. Bridges aren’t free.
NYC does not charge a fee per person per day, but you will similarly pay to cross bridges.
So to recap for you:
In Italy you pay to travel to Venice via your preferred method of travel. In Venice you pay a fee per person per day.
In the US you pay to travel to NYC via your preferred method of travel. In NYC you do not pay a fee per person per day.
Hope that simplified things enough for you.
So your plan works if you just want to raise money/raise the cost to discourage people. It doesn't work if you plan on increasing the cost to act as a soft cap on the tourists per day and you want people to know if they got in on a given day.
Meanwhile, baking the entry fee into modes of transportation bundles it all in one ticket, letting people make one decision to go/no go. Each of those entry modes has a given (or at least designatable) capacity, and would have its own increasing price curve administered by the ticket seller. This has the added bonus of reserving capacity on each transportation mode for the locals traveling at the last minute.
[0] Hotel seems to bake in the entry ticket, which actually keeps the book-factor at the standard tourism "2" (transport+hotel), and only increases it to 2 for day trippers.
Now you can stop waiting.
In what other civilized city in the planet is access charged? Disney? Cars in Manhattan? De facto taxes via taxi fare in some cities?
It isn't a huge deal in my opinion, but it is novel.
And places like Venice are rather special exceptions we can accept and live with. It is clear that something should be done for public good, also the now limited number of tourists.
I'm sure you can't freely wander onto a military base in any EU country and claim it's your right of free movement to go anywhere you want.
The question is where restricting access to an entire city lives.
I can't think of another time an entire city was placed behind a paywall, other than in communist countries where you need a passport to travel between cities.
Probably more will follow this terrible example and the world will be a worse place for it.
If raising money via tourism is the goal, a more widespread tourism tax on food and services would likely both raise funds and partially reduce tourism overload, without the burden of requiring visitors to go through the arcane process of booking a visit.
Basically Cruise Ships barge in (sometimes literally, hitting other boats or even buildings), then people climb out, make a mess, annoy everyone (including the tourists that are on hotels), then leave again, since they are sleeping on the ship anyway.
Lots of stories here on HN of how the day tourists often don't even spend any money, they probably paid to eat on the cruise ship, so they just climb out, take photos, roam around, pollute, then go eat and sleep back on the ship and don't buy anything.
Darn those people-who-arent-me wanting to go to the cool places I want to go to. They should be kicked out so that people like me can enjoy the places without all that riff-raff running amok
On a related note, I highly recommend the book "Do Travel Writers Go To Hell", written by a Lonely Planet author who reflects on the conundrum of publishing the best beaches and bars he finds, knowing they will be overrun with tourists as soon as the book is out. (I don't recall if the book is nonfiction)
It's about knowing the consequences - not just keeping the bar a secret for his own benefit, but knowing he's going to ruin the experience for everyone else who liked the peace and quiet (of course, the owners of the bar are likely to be grateful for the uptick in business)
It does seem to me that if the first is an inalienable human right, then surely the second must also be.
I do think that tourist areas are ultimately not “owned” by the locals, but there is a truth to tourism economies sucking the oxygen out of building a more sustainable economy that would benefit people more.
A hotel is maybe good for some jobs, but maybe some other commerces or industries would actually make a place less dependent on the whims of tourists. Externalities aren’t fungible of course (how much litter is having one more hotel job worth).
Places like Paris tend to work well because there’s huge amount of infrastructure built out for large population fluctuations like trains, and ultimately it ends up benefiting people well. Compare that to many island tourist destination where you basically have tourist-only infrastructure.
Even happens with internet forums, as soon as your growth curve hits "eternal september" there's no going back to that small town feel
The price and details seem pretty reasonable to me. Fundraising to improve the place and reduce burdens on residents dealing with but not profiting from tourism seems smart.
I visited Venice almost 20 years ago, and it was fairly miserable while the daytrippers were there tromping over bridges, but improved dramatically in the evenings and early mornings. I was a backpacker on the road for a year with a constrained budget, but would've been fine with paying $10 had we not stayed overnight.
Flat-out limiting numbers would be a greater restraint, I think. There are a number of places (many in the USA) where visitation is via limited permit - things like climbing Half Dome or visiting The Wave, now climbing Angel's Landing. Even driving through the main roads of Glacier NP or Yosemite NP.
That's absolutely fine, but I feel like a reservation/ticketing system such as the one proposed is not the best solution. Again, a tourism tax across the city might achieve the same effect without such a system.
In my opinion, the cost (within reason) is absolutely irrelevant. Raising money for the city and locals is a great effort and I applaud it. It is simply the requirement of yet another "hoop to jump through" that bothers me. After years of a pandemic with legally questionable restrictions and requirements throughout daily life, I simply don't want more "hoops to jump through".
Only in third world countries, or for third world visitors. Freedom of movement between countries and cities is a cornerstone of modern civilization
I wouldn't have guessed China and India are third-world. From a quick search, both seem to have visa costs. Thailand, Turkey, also. Someone from China visiting the UK seems to cop UKP100 for a Standard Visitor visa. I'm pretty sure I've paid visa charges for various not-overly-third-world countries in the past.
Perhaps I meant to say “non first world” rather than third world, as well
Is the EU third world too?
Why did you feel you actually had to say this?