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Comment by superseeplus | Hacker News Reader

A big proportion of the opposition is coming from New Jersey where former Governor Chris Christie systematically diverted public transit funding to constructing more roads leaving NJ Transit with a maintenance backlog, inadequate infrastructure and unhappy workers who were poached by the MTA. This resulted in a mismatch where the infrastructure is designed to favor driving on one side of the river and a fee designed to discourage driving and encourage public transit on the other side.

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There's more reason for NJ residents to take issue with this. In central jersey, it costs at least $20/person for a round trip ticket. If you go with your family or a group of friends filling a 5 seat car, the train costs $100 just to get into the city and then get hit with whatever additional costs you have for the next few subway rides. Gas, parking, and carpool bridge/tunnel toll prices don't add up to anywhere near that amount.

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.

Regressive if you ignore all of the other costs associated with driving.

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.

Yea it also ignores that if everybody stopped riding the $100 train then you’d never actually be able to drive into the city, let alone park anywhere for under $100.

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.

Yeah, everyone also ignores that public transport can be supported through taxes and operated at a loss.

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.

The weirdness of the obsession is even stranger when you compare it to basically any other public service. Like, are schools supposed to pay for themselves? Airports? City infrastructure like streets, parks, and rec centers? The military?

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've heard an argument that schools are supposed to pay for themselves. The idea is that people who go to school end up in a higher tax bracket, so it's an investment, not merely public good. Similar arguments are made for parks and recreation; more open space, less noise, so less stress-induced heart attacks, which means more years being a taxpayer.

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.

But then you can make the same argument about transit. It facilitates people coming into the city to engage in taxable activities.

Exactly— that's a "diffuse" benefit, and indeed the same logic that most of the world also applies to healthcare, though introducing that to a US-centric discussion just muddies the waters, for obvious reasons.

In much of the world, yes, airports are supposed to pay for themselves through landing charges, retail, etc.

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.

Honestly though, you see a strong movement, especially on the right, to privatize and have those perks "pay for themselves" all the time. I've been to many state parks that require an entry fee, many city parks that require a parking fee (and are impossible to get to ootherwise). School vouchers are a first step toward full privatization of schooling.

I agree with your sentiment but let's not forget that people have been trying to fence off the commons for ages now.

> There's no reason your CEO or office shouldn't foot part of the bill to transport you into work.

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!

The 49 EUR/month ticket in Germany covers all local transit, and you can generally piece together regional trains to get across the country if you’re patient, but it doesn’t cover the InterCity Express, InterCity, or some long-distance regional trains.

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.

I agree - takes almost 3 times as long than with an ICE.

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

Price orientation for those of you who don't regularly use German trains: the impulse buy price for me for this route today, a BahnCard 50 holder, is 35.50 EUR, while it would be 71.00 EUR without the annual discount card, which is expensive enough that it only makes sense for people who live here and use long-distance trains a fair bit.

> 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?

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.

Even better would be if office workers whose jobs can be done from home could fill out paperwork to pass along that carbon sequestration to their employer when they are required to come into the office. Why let the companies that are responsible for all of the transport and traffic off the hook?

Very neat idea. I think if employers were required to realize economic impacts of commutes they’d be a lot more open and judicious about who they require to come in to the office. Being able to effectively price in the cost of the commute and potentially saving money via tax credits or something is cool.

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.

That doesn't address the underlying issue of family groups being priced out of transportation options altogether.

NJ Transit allows kids under 11 to travel free with a fare paying adult on weekends and holidays. MTA charges them $1 but makes the discount always available.

How do you get the $1 price for kids in 2023? Currently the rule is “Up to three children under 44 inches tall ride for free when they’re with a fare-paying adult.” https://new.mta.info/fares

> Drivers always love to make this argument, but it presupposes that everyone already owns and insures a car.

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.

And that's the problem. Not any fees NY may introduce.

That’s the point.

Why does New York have to accommodate New Jersey and not the other way around?

Yes, but it’s complicated by the fact that a lot of infrastructure funding is done at the federal level, which should in principle care about people in NY and NJ equally.

We aren’t talking about infrastructure in general though, we are talking about a relatively small area in Manhattan.

At least one of the entry points to that relatively small area is a border crossing between NJ and NY, so I think even if the feds don’t own the infrastructure involved (IDK if they do or not), they at least had to sign off on it.

Just because infrastructure crosses a state boundary, doesn’t mean it requires federal sign off.

Because people from NJ put billions into the NY every year via income tax (no reciprocity with NY, hell they’re even coming after new work from home people) and tons of tourism etc. Its in NY’s best interest to accommodate NJ.

but on the other side people living in NY have to endure it. You can not just make the people living downtown dependent on the woes of the commuters. I can not imagine driving into NY as a large share of commuting mobility to make sense...it's just too big and dense

Excuse my European understanding, but isn't it the state's right to make such policy, and isn't it NY's not to care about it too?

Yes. NY and NJ are fully independent and equal sovereign entities from one another. In general, most of the public road infrastructure is built and maintained by state and local governments (though there is some federal funding provided). Same with public transportation.

The main complication comes from the interaction between the states and the federal government.

This is a great example of how, even when one buys the idea of giving rights to individual states over the federal government, the US state borders are rather unnatural. Someone living in Jersey City and someone living in Manhattan have an incredible amount of shared economic interests. However, the Manhattan resident shares a state government with people living in Buffalo instead. This happens in plenty if places in the US: We have more than one multi-state megalopolis, and along with it, metro areas over a million residents that are split in such a way that they count little in their respective state governments.

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.

It's unevenly distributed. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia and I can generally get around by bike, with a relatively frequent train into the city. I use my car something like once a week.

Just north of me is a car sewer though, so your point stands.

A substantial majority of outer borough households own a car compared to much wealthier median income non car owning Manhattanites. It is regressive.

It's because the public transit in outer boroughs tends to be much worse.

Yes, and that's sort of the point. We have become unable to build transit infrastructure due to cost disease.

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.

Everyone in NJ already has a car though so it’s not material to the discussion.

1. Everyone does not own a car in NJ, just the vast majority.[0]

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...

The parent you replied to was talking about NJ and people in NJ who own cars being accommodated by NY. Your comment was about how people choosing to drive in don’t consider the cost of buying a car. I’m saying no one buys a car to drive in. They already have one because having a car is awesome if you live in NJ.

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.

10% is an absolutely huge number when we are talking about making public policy, you can’t just round that up.

What else do 90% of people agree upon? We should put 90% of transit funds to car things but we don’t. That 10% is basically over served when you look at it this way.

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.

I have a car but that doesn’t mean I want things built around cars. I have a car because I need it not because I want it. Having to have a car makes my life actively worse.

You’re making a significant leap by assuming that car ownership implies car support.

NYC transplants always like to make this argument.

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.

That’s not even remotely feasible. There isn’t nearly enough road space to accommodate all of the trips via train right now.

"That’s not even remotely feasible"

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?

Would you also ban all private automobiles? I don't know how you're going to accommodate 1.3 million _extra_ car trips per day that currently (well, pre-covid) are handled by just the Lexington Avenue line alone. That's an insane amount of traffic. Streets would be completely gridlocked.

But if there are 5 people in a car, the congestion pricing ends up costing each person less than it would cost someone driving alone. In a way, this discourages people using the road space inefficiently in favor of people like you and your friends who are using it more efficiently.

You really think traffic is filled with 5 people in a car? Try looking around in a traffic jam, it’s like 95% 1-2 people occupancy. At 5 people, just paying the congestion charge starts to make sense. Also you could always split the difference, driving some of the way and parking along the PATH line, ie at Harrison parking is $10-15 per day and PATH fare is $2.75 per person, it’s still possible to get in cheaper and faster by public transit even in contrived situations like this.

Heyyyyyy!… It should be $100 minus $20 per extra person in the car.

that would be true if it was all of New York City and not just part of Manhattan and only during certain times.

Managing to leave out parking costs, which could easily be $50 in a garage is very convenient.

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%.

Yep. I used to work next to the Holland tunnel and the vast, vast majority of cars leaving the city at rush hour have exactly one occupant.

In addition to what others have said: everything you've said is a reason to lower end-user public transit costs, not lower car tolls. A well-structured scheme here would simultaneously disincentivize individual car traffic and use some of the funds from that disincentivization to subsidize public transit.

yeah, but - guess what? - nobody is even talking about it, just inventing new ways to punish the car owners offering no improved options.

Congestion charges work.

They discourage journeys taken by car; reducing traffic, easing pollution and improving health.

This is great for New Jersey, let's keep those dining and tourism dollars local, build up more businesses, create jobs so people don't have to commute to NYC. Time to bring in a new NBA team!

I live in NJ and in work downtown Manhattan. No one is commuting by car into downtown Manhattan. The rich take a helicopter. PATH is $5 per person roundtrip without discount. The only people (with enough time on their hands) going to that area by car are tourists, party goers, and college students. For businesses (e.g. trucks) the toll cost will be minimal.

If there's 5 people in the car, clearly the optimal solution is to pay the congestion fee. You'll also have less traffic to deal with.

> In central jersey, it costs at least $20/person for a round trip ticket. If you go with your family or a group of friends filling a 5 seat car, the train costs $100 just to get into the city and then get hit with whatever additional costs you have for the next few subway rides. Gas, parking, and carpool bridge/tunnel toll prices don't add up to anywhere near that amount.

Drive to a PATH station in newark, hoboken, jersey city, etc. Take the PATH train to manhattan and save $75. Profit.

The opposition from NJ is the double dipping of already high bridge and tunnel tolls along with the new congestion toll. They also have a really meager fixed discount for motorcycles which has diminished in value as the tolls have risen over the years.

Why should motorcycles have a discount? How big should it be in your opinion, and why?

Not OP but: mcycles don't contribute as much to congestion given their smaller size and maneuverability. Also they get about 50mpg.

Motorcycles should be charged according to the decibel volume of their engine.

I’m extraordinarily noise sensitive and I find this appealing for emotional reasons. But I don’t think it’s good policy nonetheless. IME motorcycle drivers are generally among the most respectful about the noise they make, relative to all drivers of all vehicle types. They scoot through and move on.

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.

In NYC specifically, by far the loudest vehicles are dirt bikes — people ride them through streets with absolutely no regard for safety or pedestrians, running reds and honking and revving their engines. I think what you have said is generally true in other US cities I’ve been to though.

I can definitely acknowledge this varies by location! I’ve been in Seattle for 20 years, and only in the last year or so have I come to terms with the completely superfluous sports car noise as a normal thing here, but it was everyday life in Virginia when I lived there the 20 years prior.

> IME motorcycle drivers are generally among the most respectful about the noise they make, relative to all drivers of all vehicle types.

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.

That’s lower mileage than the car I bought 25 years ago, and it made far less noise pollution.

For motorcycles, London gives 100% off the congestion charge. The NY thruway is half off but PANYNJ tolls are just $1 off.

Less wear on the roads (due to dramatically lower weight). Less space taken up, more efficient in urban scenarios. Tolls, especially bridge tolls, should scale with the weight of the vehicle.

I think the size of the vehicle is more important because the main issue is the congestion

Motorcycles don't cause congestion. Motorcycles can travel through congestion when permitted to lanesplit.

They’re not as bad as cars but they still take up a fair amount of space and pollute (noise, fumes) heavily. A modest discount seems appropriate but they definitely should still cost more than transit.

When moving, they take up the space of about 2 bicycles riding safely. When parked, about 4 bicycles.

It's a congestion tax not a fumes tax.

I'd be keen to charge vehicles based on noise pollution, but I'm not sure how feasible it is. Does anyone know if it's ever been trialed anywhere?

Seems like it would be easy enough - you register your car, each model has an average and max decibel rating. Your congestion charge includes a factor for that - Harley's pay a bigger markup and EVs pay next to nothing for that particular thing.

It’s too easy to modify the exhaust on a motorcycle, so I don’t think this would be practical. Local laws here are very strict about noise levels, and vehicles are inspected regularly, yet still there are a lot of drivers with modified machines that can wake up the dead when revved.

They do not pollute heavily fume-wise, and most motorcycles other than Harleys or sport bikes with racing exhausts with the dB component removed are not that loud. I get 60 mpg and the engine is efficient. A car gets half or less that mpg, so is 2 to 3X more polluting than a motorcycle when you have 1-to-1 driver/passenger comparison. 2 people on a moto is even better than a car.

Most motorbikes I’ve been near have had significantly more smelly exhaust than a modern car. I don’t think their catalytic converters are as efficient, or maybe they’ve been broken?

Anyway, I don’t think the fees aim to improve pollution, just congestion.

Motos emit less CO2, but more NO, however, most motos are now adopting the EU emissions standards with Euro 5 for motos, so I think that gap is not as bad as when Myth Busters did their episode on it.

Motos are certainly less congestive especially with most cars being single driver and no passengers going into NYC.

If you do the math on the CO2, the emissions per passenger mile is significantly worse for a motorbike than for subway or bus -- regardless of the power source for the train or bus.

But, again, I don't think this proposed fee/tax is aiming at pollution or carbon emissions per se, more at the congestion itself.

Do you have a citation for the MTA poaching unhappy NJT workers? I've only seen people leaving the MTA for NJT, and not a single instance of the opposite.

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