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I don’t understand this criticism. It seems completely normal for a large MTA to use debt financing to fund big projects and not unreasonable at all for 20% of recovered fares to go to paying that debt. I’m sure most of that debt was incurred before the recent spike in rates too so there should be no rush to pay it.

Also, I think there’s some fallacious reasoning going on here as if congestion pricing by itself will not help unless timed to exactly coincide with other projects completing. It can as long there’s slack in the system (there is) and it doesn’t need those other projects to be done before it starts helping.

The MTA certainly overpays for projects but that is a much easier problem to point out than to fix. It ties into a huge and longstanding corruption/graft scheme, that has in practice a lot of public support, that you can’t just fix overnight.

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The author is not giving you enough context, so your criticism is understandable. The NY MTA has major preexisting infrastructure problems, a big fate evasion problem, a pension obligation problem, and a decreased ridership problem.

He's not spelling out how he'd prefer they repurpose the new funding stream, but he's right that the new projects are expensive window dressing on a burning house.

> big fare evasion problem

I just don't buy this. The city could easily afford to just foot the bill with the economic traffic it drives. It's just a non-problem they trot out to work people up.

> a big fate evasion problem

Ahh, I was imagining a Final Destination scenario

This isn't pennies. Almost $700 million[0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/nyregion/mta-fare-evasion...

If I apply your logic to all taxes, maybe if none of us paid them, we could expect to see a compensatory rise in economic activity? Doesn't hold water. This is a relatively new problem, and it's costing the city big money.

The person you're responding to is trying to establish a distinction between fares and taxes. They're saying that the public infrastructure drives economic growth, and posits that the growth in tax base from these projects should be enough to cover fares.

Whereas you see all government revenue as going into a single fungible bucket, and some people with your view may believe that recovering $700M of additional fare revenue is both practicable and necessary.

It's really more of a question of "who pays", in my opinion. I personally think any revenue system with low overhead is a good one.

Completely agree with everything you said. If anything the biggest complaint I would have is that it seems like they only plan to charge people entering Manhattan and not cars that registered in Manhattan.

I agree with you that those are normal things for a public transit agency.

I felt like the core of the article was that NYC had ignored an established pattern (outlined in a report[1]) that suggests that, for this to work like they want, they would need to increase non-car ways of getting into and around the city. I also thought the article did a good job of talking about how the legally relevant metrics are focused on financial targets rather than transit targets.

I do think this kind of article is hard to write clearly, but I do not think what you said is in conversation with the content of the article. I can see why they are worried that congestion pricing must fund new capital projects (i.e. expansion) instead of the existing system. You didn't mention that in your critique and I'm curious because it feels like a central point of the article.

I also do not think this article was exactly criticizing the MTA for overpaying? More than it was noting that it HAD overpaid to situate the reader as to the MTA's current financial situation.

[1] https://rpa.org/work/reports/congestion-pricing-in-nyc#key-f...

> for this to work like they want, they would need to increase non-car ways of getting into and around the city

NYC already has the most non-car ways of anywhere in the country by a long shot. Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike.

What on earth more improvements do they want?

> Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike

By a long shot? Those, or an equivalent, are pretty standard in all major cities.

(Lime/Spin rental scooters are in the same category as rental bicycles, imo)

what other city has 24 hour non stop service for subways ? The Subway ‘s operation is not standard in all major cities of the country.

Los Angeles is the closest metropolitan area to me and there's no comparison. You can't easily live in or around Los Angeles without a car. Los Angeles actually has the highest rate of private vehicle ownership for a metropolitan area in the US at ~88%. NYC is at ~45% to give a frame of reference.

I agree with you in principle that you can rent a scooter or get an Uber in LA, but it's much more expensive in general to get around. You can blame it entirely on the lower density, but it doesn't change the fact that NYC is the only major city in the US with less than half of residents owning a private vehicle.

Sorry, I don't count LA as a city. It's endless suburban sprawl. It doesn't have the density to live up to the claim to be a city.

I'm not claiming that other cities are NYC. There's only one NYC. But there are cities, even in the US, where there's an urban core that has useful "Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike" or equivalent.

Try:

* Seattle

* Boston

* Chicago

* Washington, D.C.

* San Francisco

* Philadelphia

* Baltimore

* Denver

* Portland

* Atlanta

* Minneapolis-St. Paul

It's not uniformly the case for all LA-area cities, but many of the densest urban areas in the US are in greater Los Angeles[1]. It's the 2nd most dense "metro area" in the US.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles

Capacity. Trains are packed every morning and afternoon. TUNNELS are packed. There is no excess capacity to move people under the Hudson River.

The trains I take (6th Ave) aren’t especially packed. Pre Covid the Lex line and the L were always awful. Not sure if they’ve gotten back to peak.

Even with all that crowding there are still parts of cars that everyone avoids because Adams’ NYPD won’t do its job.

NJ Transit is packed every weekday now that people are back from the beach.

Well congestion pricing improves vehicle traffic in tunnels, that's the point.

And trains can be ramped up and down mostly in response to demand, no? It's not a question of underlying track capacity, is it?

I mean I've never heard of someone driving from NJ to NY instead of taking the train because the train was too full. It's usually the opposite -- they take the train instead of the car because the traffic is too slow.

I am talking about train tunnels, there is literally no more capacity.

Ah got it, you're talking specifically about the Hudson. Turns out the new tunnels won't be finished until 2035.

Still, congestion pricing seems like the best solution even for right now. Reducing car traffic underneath the Hudson means buses can run faster and we can add more of them, since that's literally the only short-term solution.

Oh I agree! We need all these things, we can’t have them, but let’s do what we can to make things better. Driving south of midtown Manhattan for me is a luxury and paying the cost will clearly show how it’s wasteful and costly to the neighborhoods I’m driving through. I probably just won’t do it.

If they were only over-budget that would be one thing. East side access has made commutes worse for Long Islanders, even those that work on the East Side!

How do you spend that much money and make things worse? The MTA isn’t just incompetent, it’s world-historically incompetent. Tens of millions of people’s lives would be significantly better if it was only as corrupt and incompetent as a typical metro system in Southern Europe

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