Exactly. ”A tax on drivers” as the parent put it is actually a failure scenario here. Everybody gets low-grade immiserated by the tax but congestion is not reduced enough to improve quality of life.
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.
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.