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.
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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
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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.