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Comment by schiffern | Hacker News Reader

>When I think of "suppressed" demand, I think of economically useful demand that needs to exist.

Because cars have so many unpriced externalities (smog-forming pollution, oil spills, noise-induced stress, tire microplastic dust, undercompensation for pedestrian deaths, etc), often the demand is not actually "economically useful" in the final analysis.

That's the elephant in the room. Since we apparently won't accept carbon/congestion pricing, then (as a fallback) any rational policymaker should want to suppress car demand. Paradoxically this improves economic efficiency, by helping counteract the perverse Externalization Subsidy.

EDIT: Policymakers can sometimes go too far, of course, or not far enough. Policy requires tuning. That's the downside of using central planning instead of Economist's Own(TM) straight sin tax, but again apparently we won't do that.

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You are vastly overinflating the negative parts of the a car, and undercounting the positive.

There are figures for the negative externalities of cars, they are not hard to find. They don't even come close to the economic activity made possible by cars.

A policymaker that suppresses car demand will kill his city. And we are going to get front row seats to see if I'm right: Manhattan congestion pricing is coming, so we'll find out. I predict it's gone within 3 years.

I also predict the New Jersey roads that go around Manhattan are going to get slammed as people who just need to go through Manhattan to the rest of New York avoid it and head North to go around it. This will add enormous congestion, and the net result will be far worse traffic everywhere except central Manhattan.

Worse traffic everywhere except Manhattan is the point. Whether it’s so bad that the policy is net-negative is an open question. Over a long period of time I think traffic patterns will shift as society structures itself away from NJ-LI commutes (people moving to the area or accepting new jobs avoid that route, etc)

So it's great if you live in Manhattan and never leave it. It will be worse for you in all other cases.

But since I assume people in Manhattan also travel I suspect it will be a net negative for everyone.

So there is no other way to get to and from Manhattan except driving?

For real, I'm laughing my ass off over here at these people who clearly don't know what they're talking about. Who tf drives in Manhattan unless they don't know better or are doing a day trip?

I don't get how you can be so ignorant that you actually forget public transit even exists. Man, they're missing out, I wish the Paris metro was the norm in any city over 500k

> A policymaker that suppresses car demand will kill his city. And we are going to get front row seats to see if I'm right: Manhattan congestion pricing is coming, so we'll find out. I predict it's gone within 3 years.

Famously dead cities, London, Paris and Tokyo.

I knew someone would say that.

But take a look at a map - how do you get to Brooklyn from New Jersey without going through Manhattan? That's the difference.

Those other cities have vastly different geographies. The congestion is about protecting the city center, but Manhattan traffic is quite different.

Do you have any example of a city that had the effect you claim?

And to push this conversation further into antagonism, why should the people of Manhattan prioritize people going from New Yersey to Brooklyn by car? The person doing that trip would prefer it if all of Manhattan were completely flattened and turned into a collection highways and bridges, but people live there. If anything, the current state of NY and it's surroundings is precisely the result of attempting to do precisely that.

In the cities I mentioned you have the same situation. If someone lived in Croydon but needed to get to Wembley or Edmonton, you're not gonna find a highway connecting those two places. But you will find a train that or tube that gets you there, faster than if you'd driven.

It's pretty normal in other cities to drive around the city center to get to outlying suburbs on the other side. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge (I-278) and George Washington Bridge (I-95) are far better suited to cross-region travel than cutting across Lower Manhattan on roads with intersections every block.

That said, NYC needs to get better at thru-running trains across jurisdictions to make metro area crossing journeys easier

NYC needs a Paris RER clone more than any city in the world. The tracks already mainly exist, it’s just the operating model that doesn’t (and is the true innovation of RER). Run the regional rail exactly the same way you run the subway/metro with through running, all day, high frequency service with short dwell times.

so i am writing this reply from brooklyn and do this regularly to visit my parents in central nj: the direct and perhaps cheeky answer to your question is "staten island," and the one time google maps duped me into thinking manhattan was a better route was one of the most miserable drives of my entire life

we street-park a car here most of the year - if i use the car to visit them the travel time is shortest (20m walk -> 1hr 5m drive)

but i feel very lucky to have a bunch of non-car options - if the weather is nice or i'm off-peak i can ride my bike to NYP in manhattan (8 miles), take my bike on the nj transit train to their stop, and ride the last three miles to them (~2h)

otherwise i can take the subway -> path -> nj transit (~2h 50m, but if schedules were more sensible it could be closer to 2h 20m)

and you might be like "the car is the obvious answer, look at how well you've proven my point!"

but that neglects the time requirement and responsibilities of keeping a car in NYC that i think should be factored into this - either 90m of your time once a week to move it for street parking, or a $65 ticket most of the time. if i'm returning to the city finding a spot can take 25-60 minutes and is often a 15-20m walk from my apartment.

there's a meaningful transaction cost each time the car is used AND in storing the car. and that's with free street parking once you've found a spot, which i don't think nyc should have in the first place!

There is something so blindingly obvious to me. Wish away every goddamn car out of manhattan and replacing them with an electric kei cars and vans, and it'd be twice as nice to live in, to work.

This will eventually happen, just a matter of time. All cities worth their salt are calming traffic. Manhattan is expensive right now, despite it being ghastly polluted by ice cars, it will be 10 times more when it's actually a nice, calm outside environment. The regional economy will not suffer, it will bloom even more.

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