On top of that, make transit faster and more frequent so people look at driving & transit directions side-by-side and see that there's not much difference time-wise. This is already true for many trips inside NYC.
For example:
- many people are afraid to ride bicycles because they are (justifiably) afraid of being run over by cars
- separated bike lanes cannot be created because the space is already used for parking spaces for cars
- street level trolleys or buses can move people very efficiently, but when cars block their path, they are slowed to the same pace as the traffic jam
I could go on and on and on. Unless you take back the space used for cars, it is very difficult to make space for anything else.
This is a daily occurrence in some parts of the city. Notice how unfazed everyone is by it, but also how untenable it would be to someone with a wheelchair, walker, stroller, or frankly anyone who isn’t young and thin and nimble.
Look at the height of the hood of that car, the driver would not even see a teenager trying to cross
Every single time I thought to myself I'm about 10lbs of foot pressure away from having my legs broken by a car.
They absolutely have a choice where their car goes. They've got a gas pedal, a brake pedal, and a steering wheel don't they?
If they can't clear the intersection they have no business entering it.
> If they decide not to move until there is a car length of free space on the other side, cars behind them will honk up a storm.
That's a problem with the car behind them. You shouldn't break the law because someone is honking at you.
> Ticketing them would effectively just be a stochastic congestion tax anyway.
Good.
(Personally I avoid driving and biking in midtown these days because I am uncomfortable breaking the law, but when I do have to choose between following the law and operating safely I choose the latter.)
In heavy urban traffic, it is impossible to know if you can clear the intersection before entering it. You can often predict it with some degree of accuracy, but only if you are already familiar with this particular intersection; forget about out of towners being able to make that judgment.
Your suggestion of dropping the cost just means the transit agency would have to make up the cost elsewhere - any suggestions? General revenues backed by a tax hike? Shifting burden of track construction and maintenance fully to tax-funded?
However, in 'failed states', where the government presumably doesn't subsidize anything, you often find independent minibus operators zooming around town, carrying ~20 passengers each, offering in aggregate a very good public transit service, charging a few coins adding up to barely more than the fuel cost for the bus.
How come poor nations and failed states can manage to provide good public transit so so much cheaper than anyone else?
By using badly maintained, very old vehicles, with low to no enforced standards of operations for safety.
By operators exploiting themselves because of only coarsely tracked costs and low level of reserves.
By not having to conform to strict schedules and not providing service in off hours, only when good business is expected. This makes the infrastructure virtually nonexistent, hurting the general economy by limiting the possibilities of those having to take these forms of public transport.
By applying demand based pricing, for example when working off hours charging more to cover the running costs which are split among less users.
By not working for peanuts, it is your false perception because you have far more income (and disposable income) than those who have to live on incomes local to that area. If PPP adjusted it is often quite a sum.
Just to name a few factors. In general well run welfare states, or at least moderately well run authoritarian states (also having some welfare aspects many Americans would probably call communism) tend to have good public transport, for different reasons, and share taxis are generally not considered a good public transit.
Let's also not ignore outright gang/mob style affiliation of minibus transit organisations that will then also actively sabotage government public transport on their post profitable routes.
These private entities in the third world fill a role, but often are also rent-seeking and carve it out for themselves from a government without the willpower to A) build proper public transit infrastructure and B) defend it from bad actors.
My memory was that the car had many warning lights on and turned off while we were driving. Somehow he was able to restart it without it being in park while we were coasting.
It was extremely cheap.
NYC actually has an analogue to this! (Had? I’m not sure how many of these routes survived covid)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_...
From memory, a politician claimed a few years ago that 40 km of highway was about as much as 1 JSF (~$110mln). Let's pretend that that is a rough proxy for what maintenance of NYC's streets & public parking would cost.
How often do you have to fillerup before you've spent about $100mln in fuel taxes?
If ppl drive more than use transit, they won't support improvements to transit. This is the first step to improving transit. Make driving less attractive, more ppl use transit, complain about its shortcomings, and then fixes get implemented.
I also don't see why we shouldn't make driving less attractive. As the grandparent comment said, drivers should be the ones paying for the problems caused by drivers, not residents.
It’s a worse fix. Studies prove that you have to make driving harder. Sticks work better than carrots.
It's surprising whenever these conversations come up that many seem to miss the extensive body of lessons that can be taken from the research and practice already done around the world. Is it a kind of "Not invented here" sort of thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad
Density is pretty similar as well.
We call both "city" but we might as well use 2 totally unrelated words given the differences.
As the other commenter said, NYC metropolitan area would be more comparable - 8936 km2, 19.5M people.
Many people in the Netherlands also need to drive and the system supports this while also offering alternatives. Many people means diverse needs indeed, so the reliance on and the defaulting of car travel runs counter to many of those needs.
People in the Netherlands made it hard to drive through their cities, which led to more people not driving. In NYC it's going to lead less people driving too, but still a massive clusterfuck on the roads that will be only worse if the solution of the Netherlands is implemented there.
It did not work in the Netherlands either; in fact, after WW2, they imported “traffic planners”, i.e. people who want — and create! — traffic from the US, and set out to destroying their old city centers to create highways etc, until people said: enough!
To a greater or lesser degree, similar solutions work in Copenhagen, and in some German cities, and are starting to work in Paris, once one of the most car-crazed cities in Europe, and in other places.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying that it can be done. It sure takes a lot of work, but it can be done.
To be clear, I'm not saying preserve the status quo. I just don't think the changes the cities you listed made have any chance to work in NYC. Most notably, all of these cities existed way before NYC and we're built with limitations of medieval technology. All the changes you mention are just rollbacks to last working state.
NYC is a new city built with comparatively godlike tech applied without restraint. The NYC-style solution "I guess I'll just commute by helicopter, no problem putting another skyscraper right here" was incomprehensible to the rich people who built the European cities - they had to go a little further away if they wanted their quiet comfortable life.
America is exceptional - in the literal sense, it's an exception compared to organically grown cities that existed for hundreds of years. It doesn't mean it's better, it's just very different and so naturally the solutions are going to be very different too.
I have no idea, can you share specifically why you think autoluw only works for certain levels of population per square kilometer? To the point that the lessons couldn't be adapted and would have to be "very different?"
There's also the problem of mass transit - you can't simply have enough bus/tram lines to cover people's needs if you have so many people who need to go everywhere around the city at one place. You'd have to build an incredibly number of subway lines like Chinese cities have, which is a huge investment.
Mine would be a tenth or less. When I lived in NYC the only people I knew who commuted by personal car in Manhattan were people who made mid-six-figures and lived in some NJ/Westchester suburb. Everyone else took the train/subway.
Beats me, I haven't been there since the late 90s. If 90% of the people who drive personal cars are rich people who can afford it, it's just a tax that doesn't accomplish anything (except revenue generation and keeping the poor/middle 10% off the road) because they will most likely be annoyed but not deterred.
It will hurt the Uber drivers and delivery drivers and whatnot too. Probably tourists as well. I wonder if the city will keep metrics up to see how well it's working. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem well thought out.
Why just Manhattan you think? I guess it's where are the businesses are.
> I wonder if the city will keep metrics up to see how well it's working.
Certainly they've talked about tracking travel times before and after, but I think the real test will be the long-term changes in land value. My guess is that eventually land value in car-dependent communities in the NYC metro area will decrease relative to those with transit access.
> It will hurt the Uber drivers and delivery drivers
That is a reasonable hypothesis, but I'm sure we'll find out. I would wager that the reduced travel time will allow drivers to make more deliveries which will make up for the daily $15 fee. In the end, the market will decide.
> Why just Manhattan you think?
That's where the supply/demand imbalance seems most acute. Well, there and many of the brides which we should be charging for as well. Any place that becomes gridlocked on a regular basis should probably have a price applied to ensure efficient utilization.
Finally, if we're worried that this fee is regressive, I think a better solution would be to use some of the funds to make the state income tax even more progressive. Subsiding driving for a small number of poor and middle class drivers seems less fair and efficient than letting people keep more of their money at tax time.
If you could multiply by 10 the number of people using public transport without changing the number of cars on the road, would the car make less noise, or pollute less, or take up less space? I don't see how.
So the two policies we are discussing really are:
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars directly more expensive
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars indirectly more expensive, by lowering the cost of the alternatives and funding this extra cost _somehow_ (taxing everyone whether they use cars or not?)
It seems to me that solution 2 is potentially less effective, definitely way more complex and basically make everyone pay rather than just car users.
Of course if the goal is either to be ineffective (just subsidy transit but don't make me abandon my car) or shield car users from most of the cost (create an expensive solution to reduce car usage by making everyone pay, not just car users); then sure, it's better.
It is clearly not fiscally better, and its probably not better in terms of speed of induced behavior change. The best mix is probably some of both; make transit better and make driving more expensive so that people who have preconceptions about transit nevertheless feel that the absolute cost of driving (not the cost delta of driving vs. transit) is sufficient that it is not worth the trip without taking transit despite their prejudgement against it.
I agree, but at least this makes them relatively correct, if not absolutely.