New York City will charge drivers going downtown
cnn.com
cnn.com
NY will find it relatively easy to institute a new tax on drivers, but will the billions collected actually make transit better in any tangible way?
NYC is also hamstrung by having its streets controlled locally by our DOT, but our transit & bridges controlled by a state agency.
We just caved (again) entirely to the transit unions in the last contract negotiation. We have subway lines & trains wired up for 1 man operation but run them staffed with 2 due to union work rules.
We have for years instead of building elevators, paid 3rd party access-a-ride minibus/van drivers to provide Uber-like service to anyone in need.
We are planning to spend something like $3B/mile to expand a single train line a few stops further north.
The MTA estimates they can put in platform doors like other developed world cities in only 1/3 of stations, at an average cost of $50M/station.
We spent something close to $10B building an entire new terminal for LIRR underneath an existing Metro North terminal when there was enough capacity to serve both out of the existing station. Bureaucratic squabbles between divisions of MTA serving LI & NY/CT were mitigated by spending $10B. Oh and for the average LIRR rider, despite having 2 Manhattan terminals they can get a train to, the net service has actually been reduced in terms of trains per day.
We basically need a modern era Robert Moses to consolidate NYC DOT/MTA/Port Authority and whatever other agencies and bring us into the modern era.
Idk about that, maybe a less racist one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
But stuff got built.
The current inability to build anything is almost a direct result. They delegated decision making to an alphabet soup of agencies at different levels of jurisdiction so it's impossible to get anything done.
Because there are so many agencies, you can't for example easily put in a busway because you need NYC DOT, MTA, NYS DOT, city council and mayor to all be on board.
Too many people have veto, so nothing gets done.
Living in NYC for long, it quickly becomes apparently the vast majority of our built infrastructure was built from 1930-1960 and has frozen in time since.
So far we have reduced a lane to minimize wear & tear, reduced max tonnage for trucks going over it, and are installing advanced automated ticketing to ticket big trucks attempting to go over it.
That's well and good, but salt water corrosion and bureaucratic inertia are going to get some people killed at this rate. And let's not pretend it can simply be done away with. Where do we expect all the goods & services flowing in/out of the city via truck to go otherwise.. local roads through city streets.. how is this not a significantly worse outcome?
Right now we have a lot of vetos with different agendas - anti-car degrowrethers, NIMBY rich BK Heights owners praying on their lottery ticket if their park expands & view improves, and bureaucrats happy to not have to spend $BBillions to replace the thing.
Sometimes living in NYC feels like the opposite of an headline I once saw re: Japan & Italy, where their strategy was described as "Beautiful decline"... for NYC its Ugly Decline.
"I don't own a car" is often a mantra of folks who think we can simply do away with infra like the BQE for example. People live frictionless lives in their apps, clicking buttons and goods just magically appear at their doorstep. The gritty truth of how those goods get there is another story.
On another note, we apparently are incapable of putting trash in bins, for many reasons. One of which is that the DSNY unions would need to be negotiated with. So for our great push to reduce the rat infestation in the city, we've done the dumbest, least effective, most costliest stuff instead.
Rather than mandating containerized garbage or moving up trash collection times to be overnight, what did the city do? Mandate buildings put out trash after 8pm instead of 6pm. Mind you it's not picked up until 6am. So the rats have a 10 hour feast instead of a 12 hour feast, how does this make a difference?
And what is the cost? Every single building in the city now needs staff schedules shifted or expanded such that their super/porter/maintenance guy is around after 8pm to take out trash. For the city, it's "free", they don't have to budget anything. But for residents, its yet another cost of living with really no benefit.
Want a good example of Moses’s lack of foresight. Look at photos from the 40’s. You know why they look so different? It’s not the people or the buildings. It’s that not every inch of the curb in the 40’s was dedicated to parallel parking (and fully used) like it is today.
Source: a guy who lives in BK and sits on the community board of one of the districts that the BQE runs through.
That said… given how many trucks bring goods into the city, I don’t see how abolishing the BQE is remotely tenable.
But that’s a good first step. Lot’s of other Moses era boondoggles also need to be re-imagined
There's lot of infrastructure & services I don't directly use that I don't demand be torn down. I am also aware that I indirectly use lots of infrastructure when I order goods online, buy groceries at the store, have a plumber service my sink, buy furniture, etc.
No one alive in the city today can say the BQE was suddenly foisted upon them.
I live right next to a bridge in the city, I'd have a better view, quieter life, and higher property value if they tore down the bridge. I work remotely so I don't even use it. I don't believe I have the right to tear it down though.
Elevating (both literally and figuratively) car culture ain’t it.
Also, you aren’t getting rid of truck traffic on surface streets. They still need that last mile. Better traffic control designs on streets will go a longer way then shuttling all trucks to another superhighway in Brooklyn.
(Admittedly though, the situation is different in North NYC. The cross Bronx expressway needs to be re-examined, and a new, possibly larger route, for interstate trucking to CT, RI, and points North is needed.)
Obviously, the last mile is always going to be on the local road.. but do we want all those trucks going local surface road from the Verrazano to say Greenpoint or Bushwick?
Further, it seems a little too convenient to want highways you live near to be torn down but concede that the other highways far from your neighborhood are necessary, good and in fact.. need expansion?
So not quite the same thing as what you are alluding too.
You're right, I can't really think of anything important built in NYC after ~1955 yet we have a multitude of agencies that are supposed to fix things. The new congestion fees will not be used to build anything useful, perhaps another almost meaningless pedestrian walkway that will somehow cost $10billion to make.
* He had the chance to buy the land and put transit along many highways in queens and Long Island but said that people would prefer to drive so he passed on the opportunity. Acquiring those rights today would be unaffordable and likely impossible.
* Moses didn’t want black people going to Jones Beach (his pride and joy). To prevent them from visiting he built the overpasses on the highways that go to the beach lower so that buses from the city couldn’t fit.
I highly recommend the book The Power Broker which is a deep dive on the history of Robert Moses. The book is very long and can be a bit dry at times. But I learned a lot about the history of New York and why some things that we enjoy and suffer through today are the way they are.
I mean the first thing is a crime of omission, made in basically every other city of the country - where have we seen land be purchased along highways to build transit done anywhere in this country? Even new bridges built by allegedly progressive administrations continue to neglect putting in train tracks.
The second one is obviously morally wrong, though even that is in dispute. Many "parkways" built at that time had similarly short bridges, look to the Merritt Parkway in CT for example. Also, you can presently get there by bus - https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach In fact, it seems it was accessible by bus when it opened, including having bus drop offs advertised in the opening story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
Nixing the Staten Island tunnel is a pretty bad one[1]: you could argue, not unrealistically, that Staten Island would be a far denser and better integrated borough with mass transit access had that project gone through.
As a native UWSer, I'd also argue that the Henry Hudson Parkway was a pretty bad call on his part: it was an "obvious" highway to build, but it more or less permanently froze the expansion of a major rail line underneath it (the West Side Line) and means that one of the most beautiful parks in the city is semi-separated from the neighborhoods that are closest to it.
Moses' legacy can also be measured in part by the graveyard of projects that were too obscene even for his own time: his desire to build a bridge and highway over Battery Park, for example, or to divide Washington Square Park with an expressway.
Edit: I didn't even mention the CBE; Moses is arguably directly responsible for the generations of economic and environmental blight that accompanied that particular highway.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/nyregion/staten-island-su...
But also, it's easier to find fault in the actions of someone who takes action. And especially to judge them based on the values of our time rather than theirs.
It's hard to fault anyone since for bad major road/transit/bridge/tunnel projects because there really haven't been any!
And we look at things like projects NOT built by Moses and ask - if they were so good, so obvious, and Moses so bad not to build them, what has the city been doing the last 70 years and how many people are as bad or worse to not have built them?
More than a few of Moses' projects were egregious, even for his time. What made Moses a great (as in powerful) urban planner was his ability to mold policy decisions to his values, not the values of the neighborhoods that he bulldozed, much less the values of the elected officials who represented those neighborhoods.
> how many people are as bad or worse to not have built them?
This requires us to think counterfactually: we just don't know how the city could have turned out, because the political energy, financial capital, and plain old physical space that could have gone into mass transit systems went into highways instead.
I think this is key. Regardless of the values, we have built up a system where everyone can veto a project, or require more studies and concessions such that the price increases significantly. So we end up in an equilibria that nobody particularly wants, where nothing gets done, and the few projects that squeak-in cost too much.
We need better mechanisms to solve the collective action problems. A more consolidated transit authority, with more unilateral power, that nevertheless still had an elected odd member board with majoritarian decision making power would potentially do it. But a big part of the problem is that we can't fundamentally satisfy everyone. We need to optimize everyone's interests and compensate where we can't, but consensus on this stuff is rarely possible.
I don't really think this one is in dispute honestly:
Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the
use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place,
by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit he had vetoed the Long Island
Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this
reason. Now he began to limit access by busses; he instructed Shapiro to build
the bridges across his new parkways low - too low for buses to pass. Bus trips
therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging long and
arduous.
I'd encourage you to read The Power Broker, if you haven't. Some examples that aren't "policy decisions" we can disagree with given our knowledge of how it turned out (eg, building or not building public transit in a given place), but rather things that were clearly morally wrong at the time:
- repeated wholesale destruction of low-income neighborhoods through a variety of bridge, park, and highway construction projects
- evicting farmers and poor rural landowners through opaque legal methods to build highways and parks atop their land
- running a "slum clearance" program that primarily evicted people from slums and demolished them without providing any real place for the humans to go afterwards
- funneling vast sums of money into the pockets of collaborators, friends, and, in the end, himself
The Power Broker paints a nuanced picture, but he did some pretty terrible things in his time.
Unfortunately the Jacobs camp has won completely, and the idea of an inertia-less city frozen in amber is somehow the defacto good standard now. The city has insufficient development for its rate of population growth, and anemic transit infrastructure building.
So Manhattan becomes a playground for the rich only.
That route is absolutely awful. For a typical NYC resident - not even "typical working-class" but anyone - going one-way is 75-100 minutes, two transfers, and around $25-30 per person, while carrying everything you need for the beach. Only the last 20 minutes are actually by bus.
I mean.. what good beaches can you get to from NYC, even by car, in 75-100min?
That's like how long it takes me to drive to Jones Beach, from Brooklyn, on a good day.
Much shorter drive. Accessible by subway. Just a better beach than Jones -- far superior food and entertainment at the concessions, and way way bigger.
But even living in North Brooklyn, my travel options there are - 59min drive or 75min trains&walking.
People make these grand statements like we've purposely made it impossible for poor people to get to the beach by bus, but everything in NYC is impossible to get to for everyone, all the time.
Anyway, if you are in Manhattan, the real play is LIRR to Long Beach. Frequent trains, extremely clean, lots of space, long boardwalk, rental bikes, lots of food & restaurants, clean restrooms (amazingly rare at US beaches).. $15/person (kids under 13 free, and I think theres a family pass) to enter beach.
This is a true and interesting factoid, but I don’t see how it ties back to any transit issues. Unless you think buses having access to the northern and southern state would meaningfully improve regional transit?
There are commuter express buses, but often they are restricted to the Interstate (there is one for the entirety of Long Island’s millions of people) or the arterial roads with traffic lights
And why shouldn’t private buses be able to use the parkways either? Plenty benefit the public, like the Chinatown buses.
Funnily enough a factoid is something that is false but sounds plausibly fact-like.
At the time most of his projects were built, African Americans were only about 5% of NYC population rather than the 20-30% peak thru today. So it’s kind of backwards looking to assume they were top of mind in his decision making either way.
New lines get PSDs but there doesn’t seem to be a realistic prospect of retrofitting existing ones any time soon.
They built a new line on second Ave with cavernous station mezzanines and couldn’t be bothered with doors there either. Track, signals, trains were all new.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/14th-street-union-square...
Every station has lining boards that the conductor must check before opening the doors to ensure that the entire train is stopped along the platform:
So for a long time, drivers had to manually stop the train at alignment points. This did cause occasional delays and problems, but it wasn't unworkable. As a passenger you did sometimes notice that the train doors weren't aligned perfectly with the platform doors. Now days, of course, it stops perfectly every time.
You’d first need a strong governor to jam the necessary enabling legislation through Albany and DC. They only strong governor we’ve had in decades was too insecure to allow an independent personality anywhere around and forced out Andy Byford instead of promoting him.
Not just trains per day. The synchronization at Jamaica has been totally destroyed. Commute times during peak hours on several lines have increased by 20%. That’s a lot of hours of human life destroyed by incompetence.
The charge is $23 peak / $17 off-peak. Existing city tunnel tolls are already $17ish.
The fact that Uber publicly supports congestion pricing tells you everything you need to know about how it's going to impact ride hail congestion of our city streets. https://www.uber.com/blog/new-york/uber-supports-congestion-...
There's already a measly $2.75 per ride fee added on for congestion, which is trivial given choosing an Uber vs subway costs $20-50 more than taking the subway.
Further, given how expensive tolls already are to get into the city, whats another $20 for many people?
A lot of reactions I've heard from people have been either "great it will keep those bridge & tunnel people out" or "great, now I can pay the toll and have less traffic". Neither of these seem like the congestion pricing is going to work as intended. It probably needs to be 3x the price, and have onerous per-ride charges for ride hail users.
I think we can also expect a lot of arbitrage of people congesting up the area just outside the zone to hop onto transit there, which would be fine if we planned to actually build any or expand service to accommodate! Great if you live in SoHo, bad if you live in Harlem.
There's been a recent epidemic of defaced / quasi legal out of state registered / fake or illegally purchased paper temp tags so people could avoid tolls and tickets.. largely unenforced by cops as they are often the perpetrators..
https://www.streetsblogprojects.org/ghost-tags-part-1-the-de...
https://windowtintlaws.us/crossing-state-lines-with-tinted-w...
CAN YOU GET PULLED OVER FOR WINDOW TINT IN ANOTHER STATE? The short answer is yes, you can be pulled over by state vehicles or law enforcement for window tint violations that go against state tint laws."I demonstrated to the officer that Range Rover made them that way from the factory"
Am I supposed to break the windows out before going to NYC?
And no, you don't need to break the windows out. You could also just not drive your car that doesn't comply with the laws into that area. Much like how I wouldn't be walking around NYC with an AR-15 strapped to my back even though that's technically legal where I'm from.
The great american exceptionalism on show.
It should not be possible for a state to pass and enforce motor vehicle laws that override the federal government.
So is his car truly pure factory, or any chance it was a dealer or aftermarket mod to tint the front to match the rear.. as this is something people commonly do (I did not).
Yes, it DOES matter what factory it came from. Cars sold in the US must conform to federal regulations in order to be sold in the US, so it's impossible for a car to be built in a factory and legally sold in the US which is illegal to drive on US roads. No, states cannot override federal regulations.
Notwithstanding any other provision of any law or any rule or regulation of a State or any political subdivision thereof, any person who is not otherwise prohibited by this chapter from transporting, shipping, or receiving a firearm shall be entitled to transport a firearm for any lawful purpose from any place where he may lawfully possess and carry such firearm to any other place where he may lawfully possess and carry such firearm if, during such transportation the firearm is unloaded, and neither the firearm nor any ammunition being transported is readily accessible or is directly accessible from the passenger compartment of such transporting vehicle: Provided, That in the case of a vehicle without a compartment separate from the driver’s compartment the firearm or ammunition shall be contained in a locked container other than the glove compartment or console.
It's a city of 8M people. What's the difference between 1 and 2 here, really?
And further we have worst of both worlds. We paid for tech infrastructure costs to support lower staffing but are still paying for all the full staffing.
The argument is basically “NYC is flooded with transit money, but they can’t use it. Oh by the way, why are there 2 sub drivers?”
The issue OP is making is much larger than 1x or 2x on each train.
> The MTA estimates they can put in platform doors like other developed world cities in only 1/3 of stations, at an average cost of $50M/station.
> We spent something close to $10B building an entire new terminal for LIRR
I'd love to see the itemized bills that add up to these values. We all know this isn't what labor and materials cost. Defenders will say "oh, it pays for environmental studies, and lawyers, and consultants..." OK, itemize those too. Let everyone see the numbers for everything and that it adds up to $10B without $7B mysteriously disappearing, un-accounted for.
I wouldn’t expect them to buy a special section in The NY Times to publish them to the world but surely the numbers are available to someone willing to put in a little work to find them.
The use of authorities in NY law is pretty old, but Robert Moses was the one responsible for really widely encouraging their use; it wouldn't be unreasonable to argue that the MTA's culture of secrecy and opacity is largely a product of Moses' own power plays.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_state_public-benefit_...
I'm convinced, if they contract this out to first-tier construction firms from oversea that specialize in underground infrastructure (e.g. Europe, Japan, Korea), they can get the job done at 1/3rd the cost.
New York for some reason is spending 10× that.
The original Phase 1 was only about 1.5 miles and took something around 20 years on top of the existing half built stuff from the 1970s
There is a Phase 3 to expand the line a further 4 miles with all new tunnels, and there is a rarely talked about Phase 4 to go a final 2 miles again in all new tunnel.
I point to this project in terms of an example of those with a negative agenda "knock stuff down" without having a matching, if not pre-requisite "build better stuff" plan in place. The original 2nd Ave line was planned in the 1920s, they knocked down elevated train lines in the 1940s in anticipation, but didn't start the subway project til 1970s, which opened for service in 2017. By the time Phase 4 finishes in 2140 or so, we may have finally matched the transit removed in 1940s.
So any modern era "just knock down __" without first building transit / alternates / etc risks putting us in a net transportation deficit for a lifetime or three.
No, they can't, unless the US somehow temporarily makes NYC Japanese territory for the duration of the project. Any foreign firm would still be stuck with the same laws, and the same politicians and other corrupt people, that are in position today and prevent efforts at economical construction.
I don't think this is a good point to make when we've literally had several disastrous derailments thanks to poor regulations and rules around safety and train companies attacking unions. The transit unions are absolutely right to demand 2 workers for fail safes, "efficiency" isn't the be-all-end-all goal especially when you're talking about trains full of people who could die in an accident.
Nothing about having the two of them creates redundancy.
Subways all over the world operate with just one employee and surprisingly don’t just derail and kill millions. Maybe take your FUD elsewhere.
List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver-less_train_syst...
Comparing different systems overseen by different agencies with different regulations, rules and conditions without an objective data doesn’t seem that productive.
also comparing subways with intercity freight trains is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison in the first place.
In any other US metro area, there is perhaps a realist argument that roads work fine for 98% of trips and trains are too much of a boondoggle for their marginal contribution to capacity. But this is Manhattan. Forget for a moment about urbanism, environmentalism, etc. If the MTA melted down tomorrow, no appreciable portion of its riders could fall back on driving, as a matter of geometry.
To assign the congestion money to a specific project, like public transit, is an act of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting .
I would say that putting the money into the city's general fund is the least bad solution. This is because if congestion monies were put to a specific program like public transit / subsidies for the poor / etc., it becomes more complicated to ensure that those programs receive enough funding but also not too much.
We're gonna raise the cost of driving into the city so that we have less people drive into the city and then.... ?! and then.. !?
Presumably that will put more load on transit infrastructure that is under built and 10x reasonable cost to build. We can fund transit but we can't build it.
The MTA has already borrowed 15 years of projected congestion pricing revenue with the revenue as collateral. Great, so what does $15B get us?
If we want less drivers why don't we go HARD - announce one of the Hudson tunnels will now be 100% bus. Or we are going to retrofit it for a new train line. Or a new Brooklyn/Queens North/South line for less Manhattan oriented transit?
Even our most ambitious 20 year plans are like "maybe we can finally finish more of the 2nd ave line / prevent the Hudson tubes from flooding / add one more Hudson tube" and that's basically it for the entire city. If you don't live in NJ or the east side of Manhattan, too bad, no new transit for you.
The scale of transit investment you see in say London or Tokyo should make every NYer embarrassed and radicalize you on permitting/environmental study shenanigans/cost management/everyone having a veto on building anything.
Signal modernization, station accessibility, new subway cars (last 2x longer), escalator and elevator repairs, new tracks and the 2nd Avenue Subway's Phase II (taking it to 125th street) [1].
I can't put an exact date on it, but somewhere around 2010/2012 it started feeling like the transit system was getting consistently worse, year over year. Mostly in terms of delays, headways, etc.
I have some cousins in the industry, and one of the problems they point to aside from work rules is that city/state agencies have basically no expertise in house for infrastructure. This is despite the fact that there has been a steady stream of some amount of work for decades. That means everything from project design, planning, management, accounting... literally everything is outsourced. All the MTA does is essentially ask for designs & bids, picks one, and then bleeds money to contractors.
This is an interesting perspective.
Here in Sydney Australia most households will have a car or two, but most of the people I've ever worked with do not drive to or for work. Another large chunk of people will drive to get to a train station or bus stop, and then get public transport the rest of the way.
There are a lot of people who do drive for work, especially as you get to the edges of the city sprawl, but even then there are often viable public transport options. Those people tend to not work in the city centre or business parks I've worked in.
With working from home even less people are driving due to work.
Regardless, it’s not like everyone in the US has to drive for work, for the exact same reasons they don’t here.
It’s still an interesting perspective for me because I know that in some places it must seem like everyone has to drive, but it’s not something that I would normally consider.
With EVs being near useless outside of city centers and city centers are beginning to charge congestion fees then it’s quite obvious what’s coming next.
London congestion charge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge
Singapore Electronic Road Pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Road_Pricing
Stockholm congestion tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_congestion_tax
I expected this because of the push of toll roads to make people use EZPASS. Depending upon the City, I think this makes sense.
But, in the US, I wonder if this will cause another mass migration of people out to the suburbs ? In the US, people are more addicted to their SUVs than heron addicts are to their drug.
Cities in the US are creatures of their respective states, and the swing votes in states are usually the suburban voters who would be most impacted by a charge like this.
—-
It also helps that TfL has a track record of delivering many miles of projects and a future expansion plan. MTA is planning on using this to keep the lights on for another five years, at which point a new source of money has to be found to pay for capital investment. (The plan is currently to bond out the future congestion revenue to pay for today’s capital investments.)
You can generally make two generalizations about local governments in the United States: they are local governments and you can’t make any other generalizations about them because everything depends on the State and sometimes a locality’s specific circumstances.
In California, municipalities do not adhere to the counties they are in, the county is a legal subdivision of the State which might also have a charter and cities are municipal corporations with a monopoly on the land use within their cities. School districts are also a form of local government here, as are special purpose districts like BART.
In some parts of New England, and I’m not going to go into specifics because when I looked into this more than 10 years ago this had changed or some States were changing it, the State is divided into counties and the counties were divided into townships which are the basis of the New England township system. Somewhere in there, there are also cities, and Maine has a couple of severely underpopulated places designated as Plantations.
So, congestion pricing in the US: NYC, LA, San Francisco and probably Seattle absolutely have the power to this if they wanted to, although I’ll say for San Francisco that would have made a lot more sense to try before the pandemic than now, cuz now, well now downtown is dead so what would it really do? Fairly certain Boston could as well. Everywhere else, I’m less certain, like in Texas I’m fairly certain cities there could, but I’m also fairly certain the Texan legislature under their own laws has the power to step in and go “No. None of that. Shame on you.”
In general, counties are pretty weak in New York.
"You can generally make two generalizations about local governments in the United States: they are local governments and you can’t make any other generalizations about them because everything depends on the State and sometimes a locality’s specific circumstances."
That is good intel though. I thought NY was a home rule state, but is that only for municipalities which have had home rule enabled by legislation? This table doesn't really go into that many specifics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_rule_in_the_United_States
One weird NYC thing is that it is the only city I am aware of in the US that sits above the county level. The five boroughs are the five counties and mostly used for administrative management, since four of the boroughs are million plus cities in and of themselves; but the boroughs have no lawmaking powers.
So broadly, the rights of local governments only go as far as the whims of the state government and the courts anyway, across the board.
But yes, legislatures can change laws on a whim, which is quite a bit more of a process than when I do something on a whim. Given the half-a-hundred entities that are the subject of your comment, some variability in the laws and political processes creating different outcomes depending on their jurisdiction is an expected result.
Is that actually true? I mean, are there no vestiges of England, Scotland and Wales in the UK?
Firstly, note that all constituent countries elect MPs to the UK's Westminster parliament, because there are many laws that affect the entire country, and are controlled centrally.
Between 1707 and 1997 (20 years _after_ asking the question!), _all_ laws for Scotland were made in Westminster, and voted on by _all_ MPs. Laws for Scotland get their own bills because Scotland retains its own legal system. Likewise Northern Ireland, but _not_ Wales. Wales shares the same legal system as England, which is why the phrase "England and Wales" appears often.
Since Scottish devolution, certain powers were _reserved_ for Westminster, and the rest of the laws for Scotland are now made in a separately elected Scottish parliament. But there are still plenty of laws which affect Scotland, sometimes _exclusively_ affect Scotland due to the reserved powers having the ability to override choices that Scotland has made for itself. Those laws are still made in Westminster, English MPs can still vote on them and easily win, and so Scots still need representation in the Westminster parliament.
The main part of the West Lothian question, which is where there are sometimes laws that _exclusively_ affect England and Wales, why do Scottish MPs get to vote on them?, was handled by the Scottish MPs voluntarily not voting on them. They managed to do this for centuries without any formal process. Then after the 2015 election, the UK government brought in the EVEL process (English Votes for English Laws), which gave English MPs a "veto" on laws that only affected England. Since the pandemic, Westminster chose to drop EVEL, presumably because the voluntary system of Scottish MPs abstaining from voting on England-only bills worked just fine!
What's relevant for this discussion is that _London_ has an elected mayor, which makes it a special case. It has its own autonomy, within England, which supposedly doesn't have any special carve outs unlike Scotland/Wales/NI... in reality, it has quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directly_elected_mayors_in_Eng...
Did they? Wikipedia says this:
> In establishing foundation hospitals and increasing student tuition fees in England, Scottish votes were decisive in getting the measures through.[10] The vote on foundation hospitals in November 2003 only applied to England – had the vote been restricted to English MPs then the government would have been defeated.[11] Had there been a vote by English MPs only on tuition fees in January 2004, the government would have lost because of a rebellion on their own benches.[12]
In another case of shenanigans, it's an established procedure that if you can't physically turn up to the HoC to give your vote, you find an opponent and pair off with them, they abstain in order to give the equivalent outcome of you turning up to vote. What if they go back on their promise and vote anyway? It happened: https://theconversation.com/pairing-and-why-it-matters-in-th... - has anything been done about it? Not really.
The politics of Westminster are not in the habit of looking at every infraction and locking down process tightly. If Scottish MPs habitually voted on English-only legislation, and if it affected the outcome (which is very rare indeed as there are only 59 Scottish MPs versus 533 English MPs), there would be more concern, but as they generally don't and it generally doesn't, the formal process giving English MPs a veto on English-only legislation only lasted 5 years out of the past 316.
The once-English institutions of parliament, the crown, and its ministers became those of Great Britain first and the United Kingdom subsequently. But the remit of the UK government in devolved matters is limited in some cases to some subset of {England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland}, e.g., the first two and the fourth. Those powers are exercised qua the British government, not qua some English, English and Welsh, or English, Welsh, and Northern Irish (i.a.) government, none of which exist.
There is a body of law peculiar to England. It is administered by the English and Welsh courts, from which an appeal may lie to the UK Supreme Court or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the case may be.
A large exception to these remarks is the Church of England; the Churches of Ireland and Wales were disestablished in 1869 and 1914 respectively.
I've been interested in cities with rail trails and the like. For example, San Antonio with the many mile extension of the Riverwalk along the San Antonio river and Atlanta with the Belt Line have created non motorized vehicle corridors through the respective cities which have spurred incredible amounts of mixed use development for miles on each side of the walking, peddle biking pathways. The most expensive real estate butting the pathway with bars, restaurants, yoga studies in the lower levels of the new buildings and with less and less expensive real estate pushing away from the sides of the path ways out words. Rather than having concentration of wealth at a circular center, the concentration is linear which has a side effect of having lower income house available in closer proximity to the wealthy areas.
It was a huuuuuuge loss for IBM to implement, but I think their position was "we make a loss here, but then just need to do a search-and-replace for "London" to New York/Paris/Tokyo/Los Angeles and profit!" (I.e. no significant extra development). Suffice to say that didn't happen - it was built with zero customisation in mind. I personally blame it on the insistence that SAP was to be used for processing payments etc.
I would love to see London-tier transit in the United States, but until our bureaucracies can solve about a dozen or so hard problems, plans like this will remain all stick, no carrot.
The trains run extremely frequently - every few minutes during the day on weekdays. The parallel local-express tracks give the MTA a big speed advantage. And the inside of the MTA trains are extremely spacious compared to the Underground.
Depends what line you’re talking about. Deep tube lines are indeed pretty small due to the narrow tubes they run in. But the sub-surface lines (District, Circle, Metropolitan, etc) are comparable to NYC subway dimensions.
And have you tried our new 200m long Elizabeth line trains?
Yeah you either don't live in NYC, or you just have a lower standard for basic hygiene. But let's agree to disagree.
Was also the first place I saw an extremely locked down Duane Reade where I had to ask for help to get almost any product off the shelf. Understandable, given the above.
Were they drug/crime related & therefore targeted, so "well don't worry if you aren't a drug dealer". Sure, maybe! But also, shootings frequently have bystanders hit, as for example the outdoor cafe 2 blocks from said subway did during our covid crime spike.
Does it speak to a general level of violent crime happening in/near subways - obviously yes.
Do I think the city is a mad max chaotic wasteland of death? No. Do I want my subway station that I / my wife transit through a dozen times a week to have less murder? Yes.
NYC urbanists have an incredible level of Stockholm Syndrome with this city and cannot let their guard down to admit there are problems in need of solving that are not entirely "from the left".
This doesn’t have anything to do with traffic - it’s a way to try to extract more money for the MTA. Money won’t fix the MTA’s money woes; the unions will just slurp any available cash.
The MTA’s woes are death from a thousand cuts.
Structure the fares to charge a premium for low volume riders. Work two days a week? Pay for 5.
Collect fares.
Raise bridge tolls.
Drop construction cost drivers. Change liability laws, reduce MWBE requirements, mandated staffing levels, etc.
There’s lots of potential areas. Just politically expensive to do.
I think that would incentivize people to drive more, not less.
Commuting is one aspect. Tourism. Business meetings. Medical care. I live in Queens. Getting a family member to MSK for treatment or getting a meeting in the city via public transit is a 4 hour odyssey.
End of the day, folks are gonna say “fuck it” and move to Jersey.
I work in lower manhattan (in a high-income field). I don’t know of a single coworker that drives into work. Most of my friends also work in lower Manhattan. None of them drive to work.
Many other cities have implemented congestion pricing without killing their economies.
If businesses really do require employees to drive into lower Manhattan instead of taking transit, for most profitable businesses it will not be an issue to cover the additional cost.
I feel for you in Queens. I think we should absolutely expand public transit access. But that takes money. Congestion pricing provides (at least some of) that money.
My point is, which is definitely not being expressed well by me is that that are millions of exceptions and cost/convenience escalations that are going to impact lots of people and increase the friction and hassle of the place.
Rarely. Less than once a month.
I get what you’re saying, but there’s lots of friction/hassle associated with all of the cars too. Walk or bike around lower Manhattan on a weekend morning before all of the cars roll in. It’s so pleasant! No honking, no risk of getting run over at every intersection, etc. Biking especially is way better. And for those that do have to drive it’s way better and quicker for them too!
Every time someone drives into lower Manhattan they make life slightly worse for the hundreds of thousands of people that live or visit the area. I don’t want to ban cars, but I think it’s totally fine to discourage driving there.
I feel like I’m going insane reading this! There is nowhere in Queens that’s more than two hours from midtown Manhattan by public transit, and pretty much everywhere besides Far Rockaway is under an hour. Do you commute by car into Manhattan every single time? Have you ever actually tried public transit? If you think it’s a “4 hour odyssey,” you’re in for a very pleasant surprise.
Try taking a bus to a train then walking 6-10 blocks with a patient requiring the services of MSK. It’s difficult.
Off-peak, it takes about 20-40 minutes via car.
Commuting to the city for the daily grind is totally different. That’s what everyone thinks about - if you don’t have a conventional schedule or have a need that isn’t daily commute, your needs may be different. There are millions of trips every week like that.
A conglomeration of office-towers surrounded by suburbs with major arteries leading traffic in and out is not a real city.
It's going to do the exact opposite. Every city in Europe that has implemented measure to discourage or even BAN cars in some areas has experienced positive economic outcomes. Of course, every single time people like you had predicted that it would be bad for business.
If anything, I’d say the opposite is true in London. Reduced traffic levels and cleaner air are making the centre a more desirable place to be than ever. If only it were more affordable!
* The roads are pristine
* The take city planning to the next level (anecdote at end)
* Vehicles cost a boatload - but thats because all other transport is amazing
--
Singapore is a hot a humid climate - a small city-state with lateral constraints.
But they new that they were going to double their population in the next few decades, so they built up and down.
There are massive walkways under the city that are basically large mall-tunnels, that have shops along the way.
The city was really smart in setting large setbacks between road and building such that greenery, plants and general aesthetics are wonderful.
Their freeway / road over-passes generall have planter boxes along the sides - so instead of prison-fencing style over-passes, such as the US', even the freeway and most roads are beautiful to drive on.
The trains, ferries etc - put the entirety of the US public transit system in the toilet.
Imo, Singapore was hyped too much and also it doesn’t scale (it’s a small island city)
- Congestion charge, which applies to everyone, except residents, driving in the centre of London during weekdays
- Low Emissions Zone charge, which applies to everyone driving a vehicles older than emissions class Euro 5 (2009) inside nearly all of London
- Ultra Low Emissions Zone charge, which applies to everyone driving a vehicle older than emissions class Euro 6 (2015) inside the centre of London
And to make things even more fun: If you do not have automatic billing setup you are required to pay online on the day you trigger the fee. If you are even a day late, you will face penalties of hundreds or thousands of pounds, depending on your vehicle class.
The ULEZ standard requires diesel cars to conform to Euro 6, available since 2015 - the diesel emissions scandal notwithstanding. (The in-practice standards for diesel cars are much much more lenient than for petrol cars.)
The ULEZ standard requires petrol cars to conform to only Euro 4, required since 2005 but some cars manufactured as early as 2001 meet the standard including my 2002 MINI.
This means relatively few people are actually affected by ULEZ, compared to the implication that you need a car manufactured from 2015 onwards.
About late fees, I found this: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge/paying-th...
The daily charge is £15 if you pay in advance or on the same day, or £17.50 by midnight of the third day after travel. If you don't pay by midnight on the third day after travel in the zone, you will receive a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN).
If your vehicle is involved in a contravention on the red route, you'll be sent a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) for £160. You need to pay this within 28 days. If you pay this within 14 or 21 days (it will say on the PCN), the amount will be reduced to £80.I’d definitely like to charge drivers for their relative noise impact, but I’d start with the recreational sports car drivers and work my way up to industrial vehicle operators who don’t seem to give any fucks, before I even bat an eye at anyone on two wheels.
I don't think we live in similar countries. In the US an astonishing percentage of motorcycles are illegally modified to be louder. In NYC there are four loud vehicles, the Lamborghini Aventador, Nissan GTR, the Dodge Challenger Hellcat, and motorcycles. Of these only GTRs behave more obnoxiously than motorcycles (though Hellcat drivers are in close competition). In NYC they like to coast down the street in groups revving their engines, they especially seem to love triggering car alarms.
On the other hand in Asia I've never seen this behavior from motorcycles.
It's a congestion tax not a fumes tax.
Anyway, I don’t think the fees aim to improve pollution, just congestion.
Motos are certainly less congestive especially with most cars being single driver and no passengers going into NYC.
But, again, I don't think this proposed fee/tax is aiming at pollution or carbon emissions per se, more at the congestion itself.
The reality is that this ends up being a regressive plan where high income earners benefit and everyone else just has to deal with increased burdens.
Drivers always love to make this argument, but it presupposes that everyone already owns and insures a car.
At the end of the day it’s car dependence that is regressive.
Also, this is a deliberate choice. They can improve train services and lower costs. Idk why people who ostensibly are market oriented are so fixated on current prices and assuming they can’t change or be improved upon. Germany is an example $49 for a ticket for all (I think) transit.
Another thing while I’m at it - how much does your car, insurance, gas, maintenance, tires, and other things cost? How much money per month are you paying to pay for the roads and highways? Etc. It’s hard to do a fair apples to apples comparison here either way.
In the US, we have a weird obsession with all public goods/services paying for themselves. We should ditch that, operate at a loss, and pull the difference out of progressive taxes.
There's no reason your CEO or office shouldn't foot part of the bill to transport you into work.
Heck, were I king I'd fund public transport 100% from taxes and do away with ticketing. Imagine how much less money we'd pay on road maintenance, police doing traffic duty, running ticket stands/etc. Not to mention the air quality improvements and environmental impacts.
No, of course not. All of these things are essentials for the which the benefits are felt across the economy, but those benefits are far too diffuse to be individually tallied up and toll-boothed— which is of course why they are (generally) financed out of the general tax base rather than by private industry.
I think this is a toxic way of thinking of things, but I guess it allows even the most greedy politician to live with himself for not opposing schools.
In many countries, airports are privately owned and operated and make a profit. The US is, perhaps, a bit unusual in that airports are owned by governments and often subsidised.
I agree with your sentiment but let's not forget that people have been trying to fence off the commons for ages now.
This is how it works in the Netherlands. Transportation to and from work is required to be paid by the employer, and importantly, the employee gets to decide how they commute.
If I want to take the train from the other side of the country everyday, my employer needs to foot the bill. With a subscription, this is around €350/month for a 2nd class ticket. If I want to drive, the company must pay the kilometer rate set by the government.
To help control costs, some employers may offer company cars to employees, but in my experience it is mostly used as an employment benefit and a tax write-off. Both parties save on the tax burden while the employee also gets access to cheap and reliable transportation.
If the US implemented a requirement to reimburse employees for their travel to and from work, the amount of public infrastructure would explode.
The average commute is about 20 miles; 40 x 40 cents = $16/day (there and back). $80/week or $320 per month for an employee that lives, on average, pretty close to where they work.
A unlimited pass for the Dallas TX public transit system is $192/mo. So an employer could save 50% of the transportation costs by encouraging employees to ride the light-rail and the bus.
Unfortunately, we all know that there's a lot more that goes into incentivizing people to use public transportation. Walkable destinations, sidewalks, mixed zoning, etc etc all play into the decision, but if 3000 people are lining up to outside the same bus stop every day, some business is going to open up nearby to take advantage of the increased foot traffic.
To bring this back around, forcing employers to pay for transportation is a good way to incentivize public transit by making the companies goals in line with that of the municipality. If the city has better public transportation infrastructure, everybody wins!
So it’s a good way not to worry about how Berlin transit pricing works if you’ve already have a Deutschlandticket to cover a Nuremberg-area commute, but getting to Berlin from Nuremberg still requires an ICE ticket… or a lot of patience.
It might be interesting to people that if you buy early enough the prices get stupidly cheap. I bought a ticket in march for May and the ticket for a Nuremberg - Frankfurt ICE would have only cost me 12,90EUR. I splurged for 1st class (instead of just seat reservation) at 22,90EUR.
So if you say visit Germany by plane you are probably booking that early as well - do yourself a favor and just book a couple of train trips early as well. That way you can save on car rental for a couple of days. The website to buy train tickets at is bahn.de
Not to mention the driver’s costs are artificially reduced because they benefits from externalities that are distributed across everyone, particularly pollution and climate change. Driving would be a tad more expensive if you had to pay for carbon sequestration for every gallon of gas you burn.
On the other hand this presents a bit of a problem for, say, Boeing or Honda or Caterpillar who require workers to physically be present. I guess you could argue well then they should figure it out, but that probably results in private transit infrastructure and company towns and those probably aren’t a good path either.
One thing that kind of sits in the back of my mind is that you can effectively create a rat race about going to the office since ostensibly the C-suite team will have the company pay for their commute and then so on and so on as more people demand the company privilege of being able to go to the office.
Have you ever been to New Jersey? The entire state is set up to make it as difficult as possible to live without a car.
Why does New York have to accommodate New Jersey and not the other way around?
The main complication comes from the interaction between the states and the federal government.
In most of Europe, borders have had a whole lot of time to align economic development and political organization. But the US, unlike its corporations, is against reorgs. The fact that we even get to discuss state rights for something that could be a municipal matter is, in itself, a problem.
Just north of me is a car sewer though, so your point stands.
Making it worse for cars in the short term without any concept of how we will make transit better is not great.
Sure we're going to collect money.. estimated at $1B/year, and then what? More $3B/mile boondoggles? Maybe we'll have a new subway line funded by the year 2100.
2. The discussion is about NYC, not NJ, so it is material to the discussion.
[0] 11% of households in New Jersey have no access to a car, see https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-insurance/car-ownership-st...
90% is just about everyone. There are poor people that can’t afford cars and also NJ has cities like Hoboken and Jersey City that are more like being in NYC.
But yeah policy should be built around what 90% of people think. In this case it’s that people want cars. And it makes sense because they make life so much better.
You’re making a significant leap by assuming that car ownership implies car support.
I would rather see lots of smaller cars and more ridesharing services. I think that would be even better than trains. Its my unpopular opinion but I would say in an ideal world, get rid of the trains. NYC is a perfect place to roll out a driverless car taxi service. You can make it so that you don't need to own a car but when you're traveling with people there is no argument; a car is better however you get it.
I've lived in the NYC area my whole life and somehow, its always the people that just moved here from ohio or california that come up with the half-baked traffic solutions and push them.
Strong words, how do YOU know?
Get rid of buses and trains and replace them with 3 types of vehicles, 2 person, 4 person and 8 person. Keep reserves of vehicles in the train tunnels.
How can the contributors of HN not see a perfect application for variable packet sizes?
Also, I'd eat my shoe if more than 5% of cars entering Manhattan had 5 people in them. I'd guess the number is sub 0.5%.
They discourage journeys taken by car; reducing traffic, easing pollution and improving health.
Drive to a PATH station in newark, hoboken, jersey city, etc. Take the PATH train to manhattan and save $75. Profit.
The peasant class belongs on public transport, not on taxpayer-funded roads.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni*er, ni*er, ni*er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni*er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni*er, ni*er.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
---------------
And you also have New York City and the racist/classist bridges. Bridges were built too low for public transit to get out to Long Island. It did a VERY effective job at keeping black people and poor people away from the middle class and higher areas.
" In one of the book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised. The story was told to Caro by Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission."
Who would have thought that building a bridge could be racist and classist?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
A congestion charge will fall disproportionately on the wealthy, and allow the buses carrying lower-income folks to move throughout the city faster.
Anecdotally, we are well to do, chose our house location to minimize our commute and make it easy by bus (and ensure we can go to the grocery store by foot). Then I got the opportunity to work from home, my wife has a straight shot from bus to her office downtown, the kid’s schools (even high school) are all within walking distance. There is no way we could have set all that up without money.
Now they're not rich enough to drive, they're become poor enough to use public transportation. Maybe their votes will improve the convenience of public transportation.
To somebody who can afford to live in Manhattan, you'd have to charge $200 a trip to bother them. Just tax them, and use that money to build out public transportation.
Very weird to crusade for the right of people who can barely afford their cars to be better than those who can't afford cars.
And you want to tax these residents more, and dump the money into the black hole of state-run public transportation projects that take 10x the budget and 10x the time of any where else on planet earth? ...and that is with no guarantee that project would a) get finished b) not be a total clusterfuck like all the others.
That sucks more than having a car does by far. Even the last part about "your arms ache but you get used to it" - how is that for disabled people? How is it for the elderly? An extra hour and a half - what about if you have kids at home?
Honestly that... Blows?
If the options are to destroy the environment or to have to take an extra three hours daily to commute, I choose destroy the environment - smart people will probably fix it with science.
I thought about it - why would I rather destroy the environment than reduce cars? Because it's a lie - there's clearly no shared burden. Like as soon as humanity bans all privat jets, the entire cruise industry, etc, then maybe I'd consider it. But as it is, it's just one more "eh the poors will get used to it" - meanwhile we don't ban major contributions from sources that are rich people's enjoyment or profits.
If you want to reduce the relative privileges of wealthy people, tax them and redistribute or do a socialist revolution. Never crusade for the privileges of people with some money while ignoring the situation of the people with less money. In the limit, you'll end up crusading for the privileges of billionaires against the privileges of multi-billionaires. As activism, imo it's silly.
https://bikeportland.org/2016/01/25/low-income-households-dr...
https://medium.com/100-hours/is-congestion-pricing-fair-to-t...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/7/toll-roads-hurt...
The above studies seem to only focus on the poorest of the poor, and not the lower middle class. Congestion charges are going to hit people who are rich enough to drive but not rich enough to live in convenient places the most. There isn’t a binary distinction between rich and poor after all. Those links are pretty embarrassing actually, surely there are better arguments that this will impact rich the most than using the poorest of the poor as an example?
Per the article itself: "But out of a region of 28 million people, just an estimated 16,100 low-income people commute to work via car in Lower Manhattan, according to the MTA."
Probably easier to find a way to meet the needs of 16k exceptions. And having a safe fast public transit system, which the connection charge funds, is part of that.
(Hi, Sean! Hope you're well!)
My comment about poorer people being more affected I believe is still valid even if it’s the right thing to do. The people who are forced to commute by car generally don’t have better options.
It would be much worse if they tried this in Seattle, but we also need it as well, it just won’t be something only the rich are suffering (like in NYC).
Also (adding this a few minutes later), the evidence is clear that public transit is seriously beneficial for people with lower incomes - and the elderly and folks with disabilities that prevent them from driving.
So we may be taking about something that harms 16k people and benefits about three million other low-income New Yorkers.
As for it not encompassing midtown, that sounds a bit weird to me, but ok. I’m not sure it will have much impact on overall region traffic since most trips probably don’t involve that area in the first place.
Oh right it’s because it creates poor incentives and overuse (tragedy of the commons) exactly like we see with roads (and parking). If car drivers had to pay the full cost of the resources they use it would reduce wasteful driving substantially. And we could use money collected in that way to pay for transit (or just give it as a tax rebate to low income people if you prefer).
It’s also one of the few safe bike paths in the city where casual bikers would feel comfortable biking.
Additionally, we already have one Canal St in the area, we don’t need another.
Sorry for this small NIMBY rant.
(Yes, I know Europe and Japan build fancy incinerators with parks and whatnot that are very pleasant, but the odds of that being built in the US by penny-pinching private industry is nil.)
The only sustainable way to increase the supply of trips into lower manhattan is increased public transit.
Buses account for about 73% of people moved in the Lincoln tunnel, but only 10% of vehicles.
Let's get the poors out of safe cars. The peasant class belongs in beaters, while the rich ride safe.
Consider the choices necessary to make that statement untrue.
I drive by many parents taking their kids wherever in old corollas or kias or other small car, and I see many parents at my kids’ daycare dropping their kids off in large suburbans/F150/Sequoia/etc.
At this point in the current regulatory framework, safety and efficiency are in direct competition.
An argument that rests on equality should support the idea that all people deserve the same car irrespective of how much money they have.
People want to move around. Cars are only one way of doing so.
The group this will hit the hardest are those with de facto immunity from parking tickets. Cops, teachers, members of certain trade unions, and so on.
However, lest you worry too much about these folk in light of automated speed and red light cameras they’ve taken to obscuring their license plates or buying fraudulent paper plates on the internet. Of course nothing is done about these effectively untraceable vehicles.
Are you a fan of charging market rates for transit as well?
1. It has a higher CO2 footprint than small/medium EVs.
2. Transit forces people into smaller and denser housing, resulting in suboptimal living conditions.
3. Buses in particular result in excessive road wear&tear.
It's really amazing that people say things like "car owners should not get subsidized" (by whom?), while talking about transit that is literally infeasible without massive subsidies.
If road usage fees cover less than half the cost of roads then clearly someone is subsidizing roads.
This is too misleading to be unintentional. I don't know if you're comparing buses to small/medium EVs 1:1, but even if you aren't, the environmental footprint of replacing all bus services with EVs would be extraordinary.
> 2. Transit forces people into smaller and denser housing, resulting in suboptimal living conditions.
Transit doesn't force people into housing. It creates new housing options that previously were not tenable. Rivers don't create port congestion, rivers create ports. Not having enough ports, or enough rivers, creates port congestion.
> 3. Buses in particular result in excessive road wear&tear.
In proportion to human-miles, or is this a 1:1 comparison?
It's not misleading. On average, buses in the US carry around 15 people. A car carries around 1.5, so the raw multiplier is just 10.
But wait, there's more!
ALL buses have an incredibly polluting component that is fundamental to their functionality: the driver. You need around 3 drivers to cover the useful service time (from 5am to midnight). And drivers are POLLUTING AS HELL.
> I don't know if you're comparing buses to small/medium EVs 1:1
Yes, I do. Here ya go: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
> Transit doesn't force people into housing.
It does, via market forces.
> It creates new housing options that previously were not tenable.
No. It _destroys_ affordable housing to pack people into smaller and smaller footprints. Tokyo is a _great_ example of that.
> In proportion to human-miles, or is this a 1:1 comparison?
In proportion to passenger-miles. Road wear scales approximately as the 4-th power of the axle weight, and under-loaded buses still have to haul around their massive bulks even if there's just one passenger inside.
Honestly, it's amazing how bad public transit turns out to be when you actually start looking at its negative sides.
Buses in the US are largely avoided due to the last century spent prioritizing suburban car commuting over everything else. What you should be looking at are the averages on bus routes where the buses run regularly and aren’t blocked by solo drivers. That means that the floor for a bus is 10:1 but it can easily rise to 50-70:1 with cheap policy changes (e.g. put a $500 camera on the bus to ticket drivers and suddenly headways improve by 50%). In contrast, the large EVs people are actually buying will never become more efficient over the lifetime of the vehicle.
Le sigh. If you want more bus passengers in each bus, you either need to run buses with longer intervals (making them completely useless) or you need to pack people together. Packing people together densely enough to make buses work inevitably requires living in small apartments.
The US in the last century decided to focus on comfortable human-oriented housing, and not on building Soviet-style human anthills.
> In contrast, the large EVs people are actually buying will never become more efficient over the lifetime of the vehicle.
Large EVs have lifecycle CO2 footprint of about 70g/km. Buses are ~100g/km, and EV buses (trolleys) are 60 g/km.
Moving to mid-sized EVs, such as Tesla Model 3/Y, cuts that to about 35 g/km (it depends on the US state). This is definitely something that we should encourage. The US addiction to huge barn-sized SUVs is unhealthy.
This is not my experience. Living in a village of around 2000 pop in Sweden with pretty much only single-family houses with gardens. The whole village was within 15 minutes walk or bike within one of 3 bus stops to a bus service that went into the city every 20 minutes during the day, with double-length buses during peak hours. The buses had a very healthy occupancy rate.
You just have to make sure to design towns around the transit instead of around cars. US suburbs are really hard to retrofit transit into, with designs that actively subvert it
Also, everything about density in relation to quality of life is pretty subjective. Luckily, we have cities for both! You’re free to live in Houston while those of us that prefer dense urban environments can live in New York and take transit.
Road wear scales as 4-th power of axle weight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
The average loads: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/perso...
The CO2 impact by transport mode: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
Nothing I'm saying is controversial. Heck, even urbanists admit that, they just try to avoid talking about it.
> Also, everything about density in relation to quality of life is pretty subjective. Luckily, we have cities for both!
My problem is with people that try to remake wonderful cities like Seattle into Manhattan-style hellscapes. And this is a result of market forces, that need to be counteracted via political regulation.
I'd love to live in Houston, but I just can't tolerate its weather. I tried.
And feel free to argue about keeping Seattle the way it is. I have no interest in changing Seattle. Just leave my Manhattan out of it :)
Many people enjoy living in a dense environment, as evidenced by how much they'll pay to do so. It's objectively better for the Earth, and pretty enjoyable for the people that choose that path.
Densificatoin causes enshittification spiral. Each successive generation lives in worse conditions. This is an inherent property of densification.
> The sewer and water system to your house is subsidized.
It isn't. I'm paying for it from my taxes (that's why in Seattle my water is more costly than in the middle of a freaking desert).
> Snow removal from your cul-de-sac is subsidized.
It isn't. I'm responsible for keeping it clean, and I was once fined when I failed to do that.
> Many people enjoy living in a dense environment
The vast majority of people want to live in single family houses (90% or so - https://www.redfin.com/news/millennial-homebuyers-prefer-sin... ). They simply can't afford that. And of course, the psychological defense mechanism is: "I never wanted it anyway".
Could you uh, explain this a bit more? This doesn't seem to correspond with the desirability of dense cities atm. All of the most desirable places to live seem to either be dense or easily commutable to somewhere dense.
In turn, people want to live close enough to their jobs. So this drives up the price of housing in and around the Downtown. In turn, this incentivizes developers to build new buildings as high as economical, and to make units as small as feasible.
Thus the new construction in Downtowns tends to be smaller than the existing one ( https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-sma... ). This drives up the price of existing larger apartments even more, making them unavailable for younger people. So if you don't work in tech, you'll have to make do with a small apartment.
But no worries, by the next generation your small apartment will look positively spacious!
Obviously urban centers can be improved on, and many people living in them wish they had more personal space. But there are advantages too.
This is not a real thing. Please refer to factual, verifiable phenomena and not imaginings.
It's very misleading because you're starting from the supposition of EVs rather than the actual mix of personal cars. If you choose EVs for the cars, why not choose ZEV buses that are starting to enter the market as well?
> And drivers are POLLUTING AS HELL.
What? I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say here.
> No. It _destroys_ affordable housing to pack people into smaller and smaller footprints. Tokyo is a _great_ example of that.
It doesn't destroy affordable housing, though, it shifts it to other areas while increasing density near stations. You need to show why that's a bad thing. Most urban planners and economists would say that increased density is a good thing and that Tokyo is an excellent example of a city done right.
You seem to have a personal bone to pick with high-density cities that's just not shared by most other people.
If we're talking about planning, then we should look at least 10 years ahead. By that time, most of new vehicles are going to be EVs.
Mind you, the subway construction around here is planned 20 _years_ in advance. All the current proposed projects are going to be finished some time in 2040-s.
> If you choose EVs for the cars, why not choose ZEV buses that are starting to enter the market as well?
ZEV buses still retain the most polluting part of regular buses: the driver.
> What? I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say here.
One average US citizen produces around 20 tons of CO2 per year. A bus needs 3 of them working full-time. This completely dwarfs the emissions due to fuel use.
> It doesn't destroy affordable housing, though, it shifts it to other areas while increasing density near stations.
Bullshit. New density does NOT create ANY affordable housing. Never has, never will. And dense housing near stations is certainly not cheap.
Heck, here's an article from urbanists that admits that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
> Most urban planners and economists would say that increased density is a good thing and that Tokyo is an excellent example of a city done right.
Most oil executives say that oil is great and that the large trucks are good!
Tokyo is a great example of young people forced to live in "microapartments" while just a couple of hours away, beautiful old houses sit empty.
> You seem to have a personal bone to pick with high-density cities that's just not shared by most other people.
Most other people haven't heard ANY opposing opinion in their lives. And neither have they researched it themselves. Thus, I routinely hear utterly risible nonsense like "we need more density to allow affordable housing" going unopposed.
Are you trying to say that these people wouldn't already exist without the bus? So everytime we commission a new bus, 3 fully grown licensed drivers appear in a flash of smoke from the storage compartment of the bus?
No. They would be doing other productive things. But right now, they have to spend their productive power on driving buses.
This is simply a huge waste of human potential.
Car commutes are shorter than transit commutes in well-designed cities.
But even otherwise, you don't need a dedicated full-time driver.
First, you want to solve the problem of long bus intervals. It's still not economic to just buy more buses because they require a lot of power to run and do tons of road damage.
But you can make buses smaller! And by making them smaller, you can run them faster without incurring a lot of useless overhead.
Heck, you can just idle, dare I say _park_, these unused small buses when there is no demand. And since it's so easy to manage the fleet this way, you can make personalized buses for every passenger.
Hmm... It really reminds me of something...
Of course if the land is owned by other people, the increase in value provided by transit should be recaptured through a Land Value Tax which is then used to fund the transit.
So basically, you want to subsidize transit by making the transport authority be a slumlord. Got it.
There are no unsubsidized urban transit services in the US. Even operating costs are not paid from fares. And new transit construction is COMPLETELY subsidized.
I live in Seattle and I will have paid around $20k in car tab fees alone by the time the choo-choo subway train expansion here is done. It won't go anywhere near me and it will make my life worse, by inducing even more traffic.
My fire department, police, and parks are certainly not subsidized. I pay for them from my taxes.
Are you saying that if taxes pay for transit then transit isn’t subsidized?
Dictionary definition: "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive."
What I have is NOT a subsidy. I use the resources, and I pay for them.
I don't have people from New York paying for my fire department in Seattle.
> Are you saying that if taxes pay for transit then transit isn’t subsidized?
I use fire protection, and I pay for it. My neighbors receive equal fire protection. There are no subsidies, we all pay our equal share (based on the house value).
However, I won't benefit from transit that is being built (heck, it will make my life WORSE). Yet I have to pay for it, thus I subsidize it.
Clear?
Do your taxes go towards the public parks even if you don’t use them? (Subsidy)
Do your taxes go towards public schools even if you don’t have kids? (Subsidy)
Fire departments provide protection from fire. I absolutely do use and depend on it.
> Do your taxes go towards the public parks even if you don’t use them?
This is indeed a subsidy. A pay-per-use system would allow to remove the subsidy. However, it's so small around here that it's inconsequential in the face of massive transit subsidies.
> Do your taxes go towards public schools even if you don’t have kids?
Nope. I will eventually have kids who will need schools. So not a subsidy.
Also, if your public schools receive funding from people who do not currently have kids in school (no kids, kids already graduated, kids in private school, etc.) it’s subsidized. To claim otherwise is to redefine words.
In the context of transit, people talk about transit not being able to “pay for itself” and needing subsidies. That money comes from taxes… so people who don’t ride transit end up subsidizing people who do (via taxes) in the same way people who don’t go to parks subsidize people who do (via taxes) and people without kids subsidize public school education of those who do (via taxes).
Fire departments receive federal funding through federal taxes that everyone pays, so yes, you do: https://www.fireandemsfund.com/fire-department-funding-where...
Yes, it's better to have transit company use that money to fund operations than some numbered corp generating profit for wall street investors
Tokyo transit is highly profitable and don't require tax-payer subsidies because they own the land around stations
Is everyone who owns land a "slumlord" now?
It's well studied that transit generates huge economic value, but that value mostly manifests as increased land value near the stations.
So why shouldn't that value - created by transit - be credited to the transit that created it?
The fare recovery rate is absolutely terrible in the US. Expecting 100% isn't exactly necessary, but NYC is at 20%.
The subway system is only possibly used by those who live near a station and are traveling near another station, and tourists.
Around 80% of all commutes in the US are by car. You can't subsidize 80% of the population.
Drivers simply pay for their road use through various taxes, and not directly.
Taxes that are also paid by those who don't drive, yes?
If you want to be strictly true then yes.
In practice, if you are using transit in the US, then you are likely not paying much in taxes. There are exceptions (NYC, SF, DC), of course.
The metro areas of those three cities contain almost 10 percent of the US population.
(Edit: And the vast majority of transit users!)
It can be argued that rich people subsidize poor, since they pay more taxes. However, that's pretty much it.
Transit users in the US overwhelmingly do NOT subsidize car users. While the inverse is true, transit users on average don't pay even half of the true cost of transit. The rest is born by everyone.
> If driving wasn’t so heavily subsidized
BY WHOM?
> BY WHOM?
You’ve had multiple people tell you so at this point I would highly suggest doing some homework before getting angry. Here’s a summary:
* Roads are paid for around 50% by general tax revenue. Thar keeps the upfront price of driving low compared to alternatives and decades of studies have found this creates a massive number of extra car trips. If we used more efficient transportation modes we would also not need the massive highway projects sold to taxpayers as rush hour alleviation but delivering only more traffic thanks to the principle of induced demand. * Most cities subsidize street parking below the cost of providing it, much less market rates. This encourages driving but takes a significant amount of public space and generates a huge amount of congestion and pollution (emissions and noise) as people circle looking for subsidized spots rather than paying for garage parking. * Most cities require minimum amounts of parking to be provided for solo drivers even if the owner of a property doesn’t want it (we require bars to encourage drunk driving!). Everyone pays more for that even if they don’t drive because they’re paying for more construction and maintenance and many businesses have less revenue generating space because, for example, instead of a restaurant having tables for 40 more patrons they have parking for 8 vehicles. Since housing is required to have at least 1-2 spaces per home, a given piece of land will house fewer people and many large projects require expensive garages, which you’re paying for whether or not you want it and traffic is also a common argument against the density which would lower costs. Making housing more expensive causes more people to need longer commutes and the consequent lower quality of life. * Car owners are not charged for the negative health impacts of driving - a leading cause of asthma and all kinds of cardiovascular conditions – or to compensate city residents for the quality of life reductions their commuting causes. * Drivers are not charged for the expensive city infrastructure created to protect pedestrians and bicyclists from unsafe driving. All of that concrete, flexposts and barriers, various pedestrian light systems, etc. are car infrastructure. * Drivers are not required to have sufficient insurance to cover the full cost to anyone they hit. This intersects really badly with our horrific healthcare system and is a common cause of people falling out of the workforce or into substance abuse over chronic pain following collisions. * Last but not least, driving is the most expensive way to commute in common use when it comes to greenhouse gases. EVs promise a 50% reduction but that’s still far higher than any mainstream alternative. There are many other factors in climate change but driving is something like 30% so it’s going to have to go down a lot to reduce the trillions in economic damage we’re facing.
> Drivers simply pay for their road use through various taxes, and not directly.
I think this is the point, notably because those 'indirect' payments are also payed by non-drivers as well. Hence, the subsidy.
Even within drivers, some are subsidized by others (let alone non-drivers). To illustrate, first: most road wear is from weather [1]. This means any two lengths of similar roads will have about the same upkeep cost regardless of usage (not quite true, but if taking 30 people vs 300, it's about true).
Let's consider 10 miles of road to suburb A with 30 drives, and 10 miles of different but similar road to suburb B with 300 drivers. The city will pay for upkeep of 20 miles, collecting various taxes from 330 people, and those taxes are then spent evenly across those 20 miles. To do this proportionately, without any subsidies, the group of 300 could arguably have those various taxes reduced for them only by 90% and increase the taxes of the 30 people 9 fold. That would be an equitable upkeep system.
The fact the road upkeep payment per person is not equitable, means there is a subsidy (and this situation is not always a bad thing)
[1] https://lacrossetribune.com/what-causes-roads-to-wear-out/ar...
The fraction that doesn't work is either too young to pay taxes anyway, or they had used road commutes before they retired. Everybody else are within the margin of error.
Additionally, if you are not using a car for commute, you're likely to be in the lower tax brackets and thus not paying (much) in taxes anyway. I had a paper looking at exact numbers bookmarked, but I lost it somehow.
So in practice, car owners don't get substantially subsidized by transit users. While the inverse is overwhelmingly true, transit users are massively subsidized by car users.
> This means any two lengths of similar roads will have about the same upkeep cost
This is simply incorrect. Vehicles cause stresses in the concrete, allowing fractures to accumulate, and they also directly wear down the pavement. The weather then amplifies the damage, especially in areas that experience frequent zero crossings.
If you want to learn more, feel free to check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law and click the links about pavement engineering.
To the contrary, those in the highest income brackets are the ones most likely to walk to work,[1] and also the most likely to be paying more in taxes.
1. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0739456X18796652 page 9, figure 'Work Trip Walking by Income and Density'
Stop misrepresenting the data. High incomes are still most likely to DRIVE to work.
They are _more_ _likely_ to walk to work than lower incomes, but:
1. The difference is slight.
2. The absolute numbers are around 5% of trips.
> https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-little-known-fact...
While the absolute numbers for the rich paying a lot more in taxes is true, when looking at effective tax rates, the rich are not actually being taxed enough for there to be equity in taxation.
"Billionaires in the US pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and retail workers. "
"According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the US paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent."
> https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/do-the-rich-pay....
Indeed, that 8.2 percent is a whole heck of a lot of money; far more than the 13 percent coming from the average taxpayer.
> The fraction that doesn't work is either too young to pay taxes anyway, or they had used road commutes before they retired. Everybody else are within the margin of error.
If you buy anything anywhere in NY you’re paying taxes.
> Additionally, if you are not using a car for commute, you're likely to be in the lower tax brackets and thus not paying (much) in taxes anyway. I had a paper looking at exact numbers bookmarked, but I lost it somehow
In NY this wouldn’t suffice for the income level (6 figures bracket) we’re talking about. it’s infeasible for a majority chunk of residents living in Chelsea , Hell’s kitchen, Upper East Side , FIDI, etc, to own a car since the cost to have it , pay the insurance, and store it working make economical sense. Especially so since if you’re affording to live there you’re job is also on the island.
It a bell curve where the beginning are the low income residents living in Harlem and the outer boroughs that necessitate having a car (with the space to accommodate for it and wouldn’t be hit by congestion pricing), the middle curve of 6 figures+ making residents that would be in the best position to not have a car, and then the rich or dual income families that has the ability to pay this congestion tax anyway.
The argument that either everyone was already a tax-paying driver or will soon be one is hard to believe. Without data, I won't take that at face value.
Even that 'margin of error,' I think needs some examination. Any 'margin of error' means there is a subsidy. Notably, drivers are simply not paying the full cost of their road usage. If so, it would not matter at all whether there were retirees or not, the costs would be payed for entirely by drivers. That is not the case, ergo, drivers are subsidized. Now, let's argue about what that percentage is.
> So in practice, car owners don't get substantially subsidized by transit users.
This is moving the goal posts as far as I can tell. The statement is that car owners get subsidized by everyone else, not just transit users.
> So in practice, car owners don't get substantially subsidized by transit users. While the inverse is overwhelmingly true, transit users are massively subsidized by car users.
>> This is simply incorrect.
Per the reference: https://lacrossetribune.com/what-causes-roads-to-wear-out/ar...
“Cars usually do not have that much loading impact on the road,” said John Mueller, a DOT Highway Mainten-ance Engineer. “The main source is the water that sits in the joint that freezes and thaws.”
"It is once concrete deteriorates that traffic loads pack a punch. Large trucks can accelerate the process."
Thus, you have it the other way round. Weather deteriorates roads, then it is traffic that amplifies that damage.
We can still make the example more extreme, let's say that group of 300 are 1 mile away, and half take light rail. At this point, it's very clear that the 30 people living 10 miles away (perhaps even 50 miles!), are being subsidized considerably.
Regarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law, I think I understand what you are trying to get at. In my example, I was trying to keep things about equal and was assuming that both groups of people were driving similar cars. I would suspect in most realistic examples that are similar, that group that is 10 or 50 miles away are probably driving larger vehicles (and maybe farm equipment & logging trucks are more frequently on those roads).
Cutting to the chase though, we don't have to argue to what extent drivers are subsidized, there are numbers for that:
> A report published in the April of 2022 issue of Ecological Economics teased out the lifetime cost of driving a small car to be roughly $641,000, with society subsidizing about 41% of that cost. [1][2]
[1] https://stacker.com/society/how-driving-subsidized-america#:.... [2] https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/slideshow/How-driving-is-s...
Then there are more subsidies at play to keep oil cheap and gasoline artifically low in price, as well as the cost of purchasing cars, and the cost of parking is amortized to property owners [3]
[3] https://medium.com/radical-urbanist/cars-gets-billions-in-hi...
Doesn't this directly contradict your point that car commuters are subsidized?
A strict counter-example, myself, I pay a _lot_ in property taxes and put almost zero wear on the roads. When I did last own a car, I was averaging about 500 miles per year.
This is really the point. Drivers must be subsidized because the cost of driving does not go up linearly with miles driven. For example, if someone just spent 24 hours driving rather than say 4 hours, their payments for driving upkeep does not go up 6 fold (they do not pay 6 times on car tabs, 6 times on car tax, 6 times on property taxes, etc.. they only pay gas tax as extra).
Now, this is kinda a tired argument, because it then goes to, "well, even if you don't use the roads, you still benefit." I sure do. Though, the issue is that the way things are incentivized, by spreading costs across everyone, we are put in a situation where otherwise unsustainably low density areas become incentivized.
Which goes exactly to the point of charging people to drive through downtown. Seemingly it is a very rare example of a disincentives to car culture. The argument that mass transit is subsidized seems a bit obvious (and is it is true that mass transit is very subsidized), though.. given all the incentives to drive, not having to pay the full cost per mile traveled as those costs are spread out - why the hell not drive everywhere? Why at all would anyone take mass transit when the cost to drive 5000 miles compared to 500 miles are so similar.
Let's look at the math: Driving 5000 miles (my last car got about 400 miles to the tank, at about 13 gallons), requires about 130 gallons of gas. At about $0.50 per gallon for tax, that is a payment of just $65 dollars in tax to go 10 times further. Car tabs alone are over $100 in WA state.
This hopefully illustrates really easily that users of the road are not paying proportionate to their usage of the road. This is a mixed bag, as I would very much not want farmers to have to pay the full cost of the roads connecting them to the overall transit grid. Yet, because how costs are shared, driving in a lot of ways is "too cheap" and the overwhelming incentive is to (unsustainably) drive everywhere. Further, because everything in the US is built with driving in mind, it makes it so everyone has to drive, whether they would want to or not. This is compounded in city policy with zoning laws that force there to be parking, force residential to be segregated from commercial that would otherwise for walkable neighborhoods. All that is to say, it's the second order effects of how we pay for driving that creates quite a number of sustainability issues and really diminish the quality of life we could have (quieter, less polluted, less time spent in commute, less time spent in traffic jams).
If mass transit _and_ also EVs are incentivized over petrol cars, that is not bad [1]
> 2. Transit forces people into smaller and denser housing, resulting in suboptimal living conditions.
My anecdotal experience is that areas around light rail stations gentrify and luxery style condominiums pop up like mushrooms around them. A 10 minute and consistent train ride into dowtown is compelling when that same journey can take 30 to 120 minutes by car (this is Seattle, it can take 20 minutes to just cross the U bridge and travel a quarter mile).
> 3. Buses in particular result in excessive road wear&tear.
If a bus is actually taking 50 cars off the road, and is traveling on lanes that are built for the excessive wear; then it is still a net benefit.
> "car owners should not get subsidized (by whom?)"
Point 3 discusses the wear and tear of roads. Drivers do not pay fully for the wear and tear of roads (and road construction, etc). Road funds come from many funds and car traffic does not generate enough in fuel and car-tab taxes to fully pay for roads. Hence, it is subsidized by other people that pay those taxes.
-----------
The comparison perhaps should not be also strictly of just buses against EVs.
I’m all for better public transportation but strong statements and mishandled public funds just sways the support of the average joe.
Other cities should have been planned around density. Instead we have suburban hellscapes where kids can’t be kids and there’s no real community. The car has been the single most destructive piece of mass-adopted tech for urban planning and lifestyle.
If we have to start new cities to replace the disasters we created, better to rip off the bandaid now. Sucks that we used some of the best land in the country.
Going back to LA, it is exactly what you describe. Just a concrete hellscape. There are stretches where every single peice of the ground has a layer of concrete on it.
Don't even get me started with Houston.
And although community parks can be in short supply, there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of open space in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains.
I feel like step A should be to build better transit, not punish drivers.
My Camaro is pretty full for weddings though, where I’m bringing all of my equipment + backups.
I'm not American, but from my perspective that's just an easy target, and the real problem is here:
https://reason.com/2014/08/19/august-2014-reason-rupe-nation...
The title itself isn't particularly shocking - it's the 43% of Americans who are of the opinion that the law should require 12 year olds to be supervised while playing in public parks is, to me, the absolutely bonkers part here.
Not saying suburban sprawl is a good thing - personally I find this sort of zoning silly. It's just that this isn't the problem you want to focus on if you want kids to be kids.
The most expensive waterfront property in the world is cannibalized by 2 coastal roads in West St & FDR drive. Unlike Europe, the roads are littered with massive SUVs, clearly out of proportion from the roads and built environment around them.
When alternate means of transport and cars interact, cars get precedence. There are no BRT lanes, especially on the crowded LaGuardia -> JFK -> WTC -> Newark corridor. Cycling infrastructure in Manhattan is under-developed despite being completely flat and the availability of a robust bike-sharing setup.
Let's be real, nobody drives into Manhattan when a truly better option is available, so the only deterrent this offers is how much of a pain $20 really is for someone.
If I am a doctor or a wall street guy and driving saves me an hour a day, I am still gonna drive if that costs me an extra $20.
If I don't make a lot and $20 is a lot for me, maybe I'll suck it up and take the two busses and two trains that it takes to get to my job from my house in outermost queens.
Yeah 5% reduction in traffic volume sounds about right, it will come from the absolute poorest but of course the real play is the extra revenue from those who'll continue to drive in.
Presumably their story sounds different than yours .
And this really helps this WS guy who has freer roads without those who can't afford the pricing.
Assuming the tolls aren’t on federal highways, shouldn’t a state be free to decide where to enact tolls on its own roads?
[1] https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/congestionpricing/value_pricing/ind...
[2] https://new.mta.info/project/CBDTP/environmental-assessment
Obviously it can get annoying around bridges and tunnels, but outside those areas it’s pretty easy to get around, and I live on the west side of FiDi.
Not against this legislation, I think it’s a good idea, but I personally spent more time in traffic on Long Island, and upper Manhattan.
I don’t own a car though, I just rent when necessary.
There doesn’t seem to consistently be TOO much traffic when you’re just trying to get around Manhattan.
Suburban dwellers stuck in the automobile mindset automatically assume that big cities must have the most horrendous traffic. It's seems like a logical conclusion: if traffic in my 50,000 person suburb is horrendous, it must be downright horrific in the big city.
But that's not really how it works. In NYC one two track subway tunnel can handle 15 lanes-worth of car occupants.
Ironically, making transit, cycling, and walking more convenient than driving and "punishing" the automobiles actually makes traffic and driving more pleasant.
I think a lot of suburban folks would be really surprised that a two-lane 25mph road can comfortably handle traffic for neighborhoods that have 10x the density of a typical automobile-designed connected with large arterial roadways. When you design a place to only accommodate vehicles, vehicles are what you get.
Have you driven in Manhattan?
"Traffic" isn't just cars, it's also bikes, walking, and transit – it's the flow of people moving from one place to another.
Big cities do have horrendous traffic in high density areas. Even if it's free flowing, there are intersections so often and pedestrians everywhere and so speeds are necessarily quite low. You wouldn't drive through there unless you don't have a choice; maybe the ferry lets off downtown and you need to get to the freeway from there, but usually you're driving through downtown to get to somewhere downtown, which means you need to park, which is also terrible.
Of course, NYC is bigger than I think, and there might be some parts where density is relatively less, but the only reasons to have a car there are if you're a cab/limo driver or if you're doing the cannonball run.
I think at least in part that's due to the fact that bad drivers are scared away by New York so don't even attempt to drive there, or if they do they give up quickly.
NYC also has the only public transit system in the US that I don't mind taking so I'm sure that play a role as well.
This is an unfortunate reality of life: wealth equates to more available time.
The first part is true, the second part not necessarily so, if combined with improved subway. Theoretically, it should be even possible to setup the system, where these taxes on cars to downtown directly fund subway expansion and modernization.
Only if don't value your time.
I'm (sincerely) curious though, who are the poor people affected? Parking downtown is crazy expensive, and there are already expensive tolls around Manhattan.
There are easy solutions though: charge by the weight/size of the car (the weight should already be on the car registration).
Exactly. Just like more parking would improve it for everyone.
The core of NYC has walkable infrastructure and an amazing public transportation infrastructure (at least compared to much of the rest of the country). For those commuting in from suburbs, park-and-rides are already a far more cost-efficient option.
Chances are, even at well over $1000/month, the parking infrastructure is still effectively below the cost of the space it takes up.
As long as you are okay with spending all your time in the city.
The medium to long distance public transport for going out of the city is horrible.
They work as long as very few people take them.
Airports are far, but we have tons of buses and trains that take you out of the city (including a train that takes you to the airport).
That distance would be a 15 minute drive almost everywhere else.
Not every solution can or has to solve the wealth/income gap. Solve congestion with one solution, solve wealth redistribution with another.
It is a waste of time to bring it up every single time. We know being poor sucks, but that is its own issue with its own solution separate from solving too many vehicles in certain parts of Manhattan at certain times.
Increases distances between destinations, which means more energy and time to travel between them, which means higher cost.
> Or increasing capacity or lowering the price of public transit?
This would qualify as redistributing wealth.
Only non-poor people can say something as reactionary as that. Or people who are not friends or relatives with poor people. A populist backlash that will bring some of the middle-class egoism down is long over-due, and not only in the States.
There you go, point disproven.
Of course I don't expect such approaches to be a very popular approach in America, but there are ways to do it. All you need to do is let go of the idea that anything can be gained through purely monetary means.
Straight forward, simple, easy to implement and audit solutions are best for society.
Sure, let’s take wealth from richer people and give it to poorer people, but handle that via taxes, not via the road congestion pricing in certain parts of Manhattan.
And in all honesty, if you are driving in Manhattan, you should probably stop doing that.
If you're poor, you probably aren't getting your cancer cured anyway. And in all honesty, if you are getting chemotherapy, you probably should stop doing that.
See how none of this makes sense?
Congestion pricing is a compromise.
Someone from the Bronx or Harlem could drive there for work but both places have public transportation options that makes driving not make much sense and neither places require going through downtown in order to access south brooklyn.
I think we all know people find it, for one reason or another, more appropriate to take a car despite the already large cost of doing so in Manhattan. People aren’t just behaving completely illogically. If someone is driving, it’s not because they just didn’t even consider taking public transit.
And in the process, they are polluting the air, making busses run more slowly, and (on average across the population) killing pedestrians. On an individual level, this person may indeed have concluded that driving is better for them than taking public transit. For society at large, however, public transit is almost always the better choice.
By making driving in Manhattan more painful for individuals, we bring it in line with the real cost for society.
But even if we ignore this, by induced demand, open streets will simply invite more traffic. The difference is the wealth distribution of the present traffic.
Sorry, when I said "if you're poor, you probably aren't driving in Manhattan in the first place," I didn't mean to imply that zero low-income people drive private vehicles there. However, I do believe that the population of drivers in Manhattan is overwhelmingly higher income.
Separately, I believe that the vast majority of private vehicles should be banned in Manhattan anyway (which is what I meant by "if you are driving in Manhattan, you should probably stop doing that). If I was God Emperor of New York, I would close 4/5 streets in Manhattan to vehicles, and restrict the remaining streets to commercial trucks, busses, taxis, ambulances, and individuals who can park in handicapped parking spots. This would ensure that those who actually do need to drive can do so efficiently.
If congestion pricing gets us partway there, that's a huge win in my eyes.
> But even if we ignore this, by induced demand, open streets will simply invite more traffic.
Great, then NYC can raise the price. They should keep raising the price until the roads are clear. Then they should give that money to the MTA to improve public transit, and further tip the scales against driving.
Ironically I think everyone knows the answer which is that this isn’t about congestion. This is about lining pockets as much as possible.
stop freaking out about rich people being able to get something nice. they can already afford nice things. look at the overall costs/benefit analysis of the policy.
Also, the argument was never that rich people cant afford nice things. So while concluding they can is easy and correct, its not accomplishing anything.
Traffic is horrible, subway is more than usable. Just walk.
It’s not a particularly deep or useful insight.
What do you think should happen here instead since you’re so disappointed with the current plan? No charge for drivers going downtown? A dynamic charge based on social status/wealth?
That's one I like actually, maybe something like the blue book value of the car?
I recently moved out of NYC but I remember looking forward to the congestion charge because I loved taking my greyhound to the union square dog run, which was driving distance for me. 20$ wasn't enough to affect my plans to do that, and less traffic would actually make my life way easier when I took him there.
There were plenty of people like that: totally unaffected by whatever a reasonable toll is, and actually more likely to drive if they enact it.
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At the end of the day I don't buy that in a city like NYC we'll see the type of effect congestion pricing has had in other less connected cities. Here owning a car is already expensive, parking already cost more than people pay in rent in some places, etc. It's like stacking a regressive tax on a regressive tax, it doesn't really have the same effect.
Suppose two people make the same amount of money. One chooses to buy a cheaper car and pays higher rent for a nicer apt. The other, the opposite. Under your pricing scheme, you're unjustifiably charging two persons of equal means different rates.
You can adjust this many ways. One person gets a cheaper car but spends more on luxury vacations or invests more aggressively or spends large sums eating at nice restaurants often or buys expensive clothes or or or etc.
Edit: Lastly, why should we be charging expensive cars more? A BMW M4 is, by all measures, much less irritating to have to share the road with than a large SUV or Ford F-250 (god forbid it's also lifted). Tolls should scale with vehicle size and weight and when vehicles have poor fuel efficiency, not the sticker price.
Instead consider how you get the toll to actually do something: in the case of a congestion charge it's by making driving in Manhattan expensive enough to reduce how much it happens for as many people as possible.
Regardless of the corner cases you can imagine, there are more people who drive an M4 that would be unaffected by a $20 charge rate than there are people who drive an 430i. So increase the cost for the people with M4 and you've made your toll strictly more effective... even if there are people who can afford M4s and chose to drive a 430i.
The 'cost' of the action is the same. A vehicle in the city is a vehicle is a vehicle and therefore the toll should be flat, unless that type of vehicle in particular causes more damage to roads or empirically worsens outcomes like traffic or pollution relative to other types of vehicle. Charging people more because they are wealthier is unfairly discriminatory.
It seems you might not familiar the actual toll to start, it carves out a lot of special cases for that reason: people with certain incomes are exempt if they already live in the area, ride-shares have special rules, they excluded corridors around the edges of the city, etc.
You're also confused on cost here. It's not cost to the city they're trying to change with a toll (that'd be nonsensical) it's cost to the driver. If cost is hard for you to follow, think of it as "attractiveness".
They want driving to be unattractive, not impossible, not untenable... just unattractive.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
> most forms of transportation finance—fuel taxes, sales taxes, and tolls—are regressive forms of taxation in that they burden the poor more than they do the rich.
Midtown Manhattan isn’t Manhattan?
It could have been by girlfriend’s apartment was actually in midtown and I’m misremembering it’s proximity from the university? But even the more northern point is considered Manhattan, so I was mistaken on that count (even if it was on the border with Harlem).
Everything with a price is unkind to poor people.
So you can't do anything that affects poor people? What rule/principle are you suggesting then, to get anything done?
It has. It'd be illegal and extremely dangerous to design a city without properly functioning infrastructure for emergency services, garbage disposal, physically impaired accessibility. Also very inconvenient to not include commercial deliveries and public transit into that list of essential road use scenarios. Most of the vehicles performing these services are heavy.
For the most part only private ICE cars are light enough to be a drop in a bucket on the road maintenance. Private EVs, and especially EV SUVs, are likely making an impact on the maintenance schedule though.
You would essentially be cutting most of NY off from the rest of the world.
In India, you have to pass through a metal detector to ride the metro. It seems like in US, we are trending towards needing to do the same thing.
Fear can be driven by only a few extreme examples that get a lot of coverage, meanwhile a lot of the time it would be much more likely to be concerned for the likelihood you'll get into a terrible car accident.
I'd doubtful that there's some sufficient level of policing that would make fearful people change their mind, because they're not jsut overcoming what they perceive to be extreme risk, but also overcome what they perceive to be very comfortable travel. Much like how to lose weight, you can't just go and do a bicep curl once in a while, you have to totally change your diet and habits for the long-term.
Panhandling, for example, can make people feel unsafe. You can never be sure how a person will react if you say no. It's illegal to panhandle on the subway, but still happens all the time.
I never had these fears, the car I already had was just the easier option, until it broke down. If someone were to consult me about my transit experience (albeit in a very different place) I'd tell them "Ya, sometimes there are panhandlers, sometimes there are super drunk people, but tbh I can't remember any specific examples because they're just random background noise from time to time". Meanwhile there are plenty of times I've almost been killed by cars in relatively mundane situations that I can remember specific examples of, including those I almost caused while driving and making a trivial mistake.
Should people be more concerned about hypothetical discomfort resulting from someone asking for money, or the very predictable consumption of time, energy, money, and every day life altering risk of one wrong move by anyone around them?
The latter doesn't mean I never drive, but for the 2-3 weeks a year I might need one, I just rent it, and then I'm reminded of why I don't want one, but it's nice sometimes.
(My only experience with a "metal detector" on a metro system is Bangkok's metro. The detector was unplugged at the first station, and everybody was waved past it at the second station.)
I'm all for a safer subway but your tone seems to imply that this is some out of control thing whereas it's extremely unlikely, statistically, that you will have any problem whatsoever on the subway.
That seems pretty expensive to me, but maybe that's typical of toll road prices these days. There are none where I live, so I don't have anything to compare to.
It's unfortunate that it's effectively a regressive tax.
There's an alternative that I like in principle, but I'm not sure if there's a way to actually implement it that wouldn't be a dystopian surveillance nightmare. The idea is that everyone in a region gets a fixed number of "car trip tokens" per week. You use one token every time you drive somewhere, regardless of how many passengers you have. Parents get tokens on behalf of their children, because they have to drive them places sometimes.
Unused tokens may be sold to people who want them through a public auction system. Employers who require their employees to be in the office must provide their employees with the tokens. This shifts the burden of transportation externalities on to the employers. Employees can either use the tokens or sell them if they decide to take public transportation or ride a bike instead. This gives them an incentive to not drive even when they're provided tokens for free.
The total number of tokens in the system can be set low enough that congestion is rarely a problem.
Handling out-of-state cars is a problem. Maybe they can just pay a fixed toll if there's no interstate agreement set up.
Maybe there could also be some rules like non-peak trips only use a half token, or oversized vehicles use 2 tokens.
Sounds like a giveaway of use of public streets to the wealthy.
Here is a better idea: ban driving from downtown entirely, except for certain service vehicles.
As I mentioned in another post, this is mainly a way to extract more revenue from the 95% (their own projection) of people who will continue to drive in the city. The 5% that will be priced out... I am not totally sure how noticeable that will be. Busses aren't going to all of a sudden fly down the avenue just because a handful of poor shmuks now have to take 2 busses and 2 trains to get to their job.
In the parts of the city this article is talking about, there's no free parking during busy times. Those lanes are reserved for either special parking situations (teachers, police), business (loading/unloading trucks, taxi stands) or turn into driving lanes. It happens that on Sundays and evenings, that capacity isn't needed and is given over to parking.
30 years in NYC, I didn't ever feel this resentfulness that your post implies. I didn't have a car but I benefited from taxis, ubers, deliveries, ability for people to visit, etc etc etc. I assume that people who chose to drive into the city do so because it's their best option. For my lifestyle in NYC, I could always walk to work and taxi/train to get laid, but that's not everyone's situation.
The self-righteous hatred of cars and roads and parking is weird.
Toronto has considered putting in a congestion tax, but no one wanted to way in on how that tax would affect people living downtown.
Now slowly remove highways, reduce street ROWs, invest in bike lanes, bus infra, train infra, shaded areas, and make living in the city more attractive while penalizing suburban people with extremely long commutes.
Over time habits will change. Hopefully a migration back into the city and getting rid of costly suburbs
I wonder why this is not better designed? At least the public transit situation can be improved, I think. While public transit in germany is quite complicated, I think it stems from a similar federalistic design and maybe the solutions can be translated?
We usually have local public transit owned on the local level, with regional rail owned by the state or the federal railroad company. So different actors like MTA or NJ transit, as I've understood (are there more?).
But we usually have another layer, a transport association. For example in munich it's the mvv, which is owned by the state of bavaria, the city of munich and the neighbouring districts, or the VBB in Berlin, owned by the state of Berlin, the neighbouring state of brandenburg and the districts of berlin and neighbouring of berlin in brandenburg. The transport association usually doesn't own tracks or rail cars, but it's responsible for uniform pricing, ticketing, coordinating schedules and distributing the money to the actual transit providers, which can be federal, local or the state (or multiple states as with berlin).
It is quite complicated and usually in germany nobody knows the difference between the transit providers and the transit association etc., but maybe this system can be translated? It usually leads to a situation where the transport association is perceived as a uniform system and hides the federalists structure behind a common front, and also as a common actor and formal way to coordinate on the future of the system between the different actors.
They are actually talking about all of downtown and midtown - south of 60th street - which is yea the busier part of the city, just not what an actual NYer refer to as "downtown"
[1] https://www.amny.com/news/mta-bus-traffic-holland-tunnel-con...
When transit is faster and cheaper than driving, people don't drive as much. The individualistic personal freedom of the automobile doesn't outweigh those practical aspects of getting around. People generally make pretty logical decisions about what they want to do.
I'm definitely in favor of congestion charges in certain areas of NYC. If you're downtown in a car you are taking up some incredibly valuable real estate that could be alternatively dedicated to space for human beings.
I think about cities that have implemented taxes for disposable plastic bags. I find it somewhat hilarious how many people consider these policies to be anti-freedom government money-grabs. They make a libertarian's blood boil!
Even assuming those folks are correct, it doesn't really matter, because these taxes are incredibly effective. It's eye-opening to see how a nearly insignificant tax (literal pennies per bag) changes the behavior of everyone.
In cities with bag taxes, cashiers don't default to throwing your stuff in a bunch of bags, they ask you what you want first. Without the bag tax, some people who don't even have a strong preference to receive bags will end up with them just because the cashier put their items inside automatically. Then, customers start bringing their own reusable bags, use their existing backpacks and totes that they already own, and/or people will just carry a few items without a bag. The end result that the tax was going for has occurred regardless of how mad the individualists get: thousands of single-use disposable items stay out of landfills.
This is the same idea for congestion charges: people in NYC who might default to taking an Uber or taxi to get somewhere that's often the same speed or faster to get to on a subway or bus are going to think twice, because there's the psychological knowledge that their behavior is being punished, even if only by a few dollars or cents.
I agree with the rest of the post though, I think taxing externalities is the right thing to do. Cars have gotten a gigantic subsidy for far too long. A car is allowed to take up 140 sq ft of land for free in one of the most expensive places on earth.
But it doesn't really matter to me if my characterization of libertarians isn't 100% accurate because I have no respect for anyone who calls themselves libertarian in any way.
That ideology is a swirling bag of contradictions and people who claim to be libertarian usually just circle back around to being anti-regulation, pro-laissez faire capitalist, pro-consumption, anti-worker conservatives who don't want to admit that they share a bed with the more ugly side of that ideology.
> But it doesn't really matter to me if my characterization of libertarians isn't 100% accurate because I have no respect for anyone who calls themselves libertarian in any way.
Tell me you've never spoken to a libertarian without telling me you've never spoken to a libertarian.
Yep. People have discovered that it's pretty easy to make it a habit to carry a small bag if you live in a city and just keep some bags in the car if you're driving to the store--and it's generally a lot nicer tote than a pile of thin plastic bags. Yeah I forget every now and then if I'm walking in a city, but I still don't need plastic 95% of the time and it's a better experience once you get used to it.
Since the area where I live put in a paper bag fee and banned plastic bags a few months ago, I make far fewer shopping trips and I definitely don't go on a random shopping trip while I'm out walking because I'm not paying the bag fee as a matter of principle. Every single additional barrier you put up to people shopping in physical stores whether it's a bag fee or "you must wear a mask to shop in this store" or whatever just drives more people to online shopping and accelerates the death of physical stores.
It probably, in general, falls into the category of performative environmentalism even if it led me to change behavior in a way I personally prefer most of the time. (It doesn't apply immediately around where I live and mostly use recyclable bags out of preference.)
Also, cotton bags emit about 7000-10000x as much CO2 as plastic bags, while the re-usable bags made from recycled plastic are in the hundreds - you can actually break even on CO2 with those bags if you are careful with them and make sure they don't break before the ~300th use.
We've been using the same bags (less than 10) for at least a decade.
Do your cotton bags have over 5000 trips to the grocery store over the last decade? If not, you may be carbon negative compared to single-use plastic bags (not counting the re-usability as trash bags).
But maybe haphazardly disposed of plastic bags are fine. That's just the real comparison point.
I agree that nobody is cutting the handles, but the reuse is a lot more prolific than you think. Even so, they are indisputably more environmentally friendly than cotton bags.
Pros: Never spills my groceries onto the sidewalk when I'm walking home. Looks nice.
Cons: The CO2 emissions of producing... one square yard of cotton cloth. (Btw, how many pairs of pants do you own? Probably more than you need, I bet.)
Yeah, looks like I'll be sticking with my cotton bag.
How about we enforce that law?
Where I live now, plastic bags are very common at the grocery store, and yet none of them end up on the street. I have also seen police pull someone over for throwing trash out their car window. When I lived in New York City, even the cops threw their trash onto the street, and practically nobody gets a ticket for littering. That is why there is so much litter. It's not the bags.
Really? Well that's good to hear. Because earlier it seemed like you were agitating against cotton bags with remarks about their 10000x CO2 emissions and remarks like "god forbid reusable cotton bags". So you see, I get a little defense of my bags.
I know your anti-cotton remarks are not themselves proposals for legislative bans, but online agitation about an idea is how many such bans start. E.g. the plastic straw bans started as people making a big deal online about turtles getting straws stuck in them. So please understand, when you start using such strong rhetoric against cotton bags, I see fit to defend them.
> Even assuming those folks are correct, it doesn't really matter, because these taxes are incredibly effective. It's eye-opening to see how a nearly insignificant tax (literal pennies per bag) changes the behavior of everyone.
I am a libertarian-minded person who takes issues with these taxes and related plastic bag bans. My gripe is that the alternatives to plastic bags are pretty much universally less green, and both plastic pollution and total CO2 spent on grocery bags go up when a bag tax/ban enters. Flimsy plastic grocery bags get re-used as garbage bags. Paper bags, and god forbid reusable cotton bags, emit much more CO2 per use than single-use plastic bags, even if you re-use your paper bags a few times and re-use your cotton bag 100 times. They make no sense, from an environmental perspective.
They are effective at changing behavior, which could be what you mean by "effective," but they do not change behavior in an environmentally positive direction.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/plastic-bag-...
I think the "bailey" of plastic bag ban proponents is the sea life that gets stuck in plastic bags, but there is no way they would have gotten a ban passed on the back of the impact to sea life.
The thing that's interesting is that the average vehicle on the roads in lower Manhattan (in my experience) is not a luxury car. It's a taxi or a ride share or a delivery truck (or other commercial vehicle: contractors etc) or what is essentially an economy or mid-tier private vehicle.
EDIT: not a popular observation apparently.
"Drivers who make less than $50,000 a year or are enrolled in certain government aid programs will get 25% discounts after their first 10 trips every month. Trucks and other vehicles will get 50% discounts during overnight hours."
And instead politicians decide to tax the successful mode of transportation, which is cars. Note that given the density and NY gas taxes, it is a certainty that cars in this area generate surplus cash.
Meanwhile public transit: https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/research-r...
> The true scale of social costs is rarely considered…
Yep, that is pretty much what I was expecting. Some hand waving and lecturing about qualitative, subjective externalities.
This is social commentary and opinion pretending to be science.
The discomfort and cost of public transportation would be at least somewhat tolerable if there was anywhere near as much of an emphasis on timeliness as there is in, say, Japan. As it stands though, the public transport is the one thing I miss least and hate most about the city.
just to add some real numbers, we can look at the actual NYC subway data from MTA's march 2023 report[0] page 12:
* ~3.7m subway riders in march 2023
* 84.7% of riders arrived at their destinations within 5min of schedule
* 83.3% weekday on-time performance
* 85.6% weekend on-time performance
And for family groups the public transport is more expensive, even when including parking (or paying an Uber).
[0] https://www.curbed.com/2023/04/its-already-been-a-deadly-yea....
[1] https://wherewelive.cityofnewyork.us/explore-data/housing-co...