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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

I’m probably being overly pedantic but it’s not a secret

I'd go with something more like "secretive" than explicitly "secret". It's a weird & immensely powerful place in the UK, with some abstruse governing structures, hidden entirely in plain sight.

Secretive? As in run by Committees that meet in public with agendas and minutes published on the City's website in accordance with the Local Government Act 1972.

Please. I've read Dan Brown's novels and I know that those are just phony and for confuse the proles. But just how the Priory of Sion is involved is still not clear to me.

That's defensible.

The secret isn't that the city of london has existed for centuries. Articles like this are designed to elicit your response. The secret is to what extent the social-political order in the West determined by the Finance and the extent to which they exercise power over nominally sovereign entities.

Well, it's not now!

p.s. the first rule of London is we don't talk about London...

I'm gonna add that it is not super super well explained why did it stay that way either which was the curious part for me.

I’ve read this exact factoid at least a few hundred times. I’m mostly just amazed that it continues to surprise people.

Obligatory xkcd: 10,000.

I'm glad people are learning a neat new factoid but it really wasn't a secret.

Equally obligatory: link to the xkcd[0][1]

[0]https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1]https://m.xkcd.com/1053/

You get a pass; the title was being overly gratuitous.

Yup. I stopped reading when I got to the bit where they explained that the "secret city" was the City of London. That's tabloid crap.

But it’s such an unexpected power structure in a modern democracy some people don’t really believe it even when told.

They are right to disbelieve.

It's not well known in America. Recent conversations on congestion surcharges in NYC regularly confused the charges in City of London (miniscule) with London as a whole (huge), and then tried to draw the comparison to the now-canceled charges in NYC, which would have affected more than half of Manhattan, and a large portion of the most significant commercial areas of NYC.

People are either being completely disingenuous, or they don't understand that City of London is a relatively insignificant portion of greater London. This fact alone illustrates how absurd the comparison actually is:

> As of the 2011 census, the City of London has a population of 8,072 and area of 1.12 square miles.

(For context, Manhattan has a population of 1.65 million people, with about 73,000 people per square mile. Even setting aside that lower Manhattan is more densely populated than upper, and that a lot of people commute in from the outer boroughs, the congestion pricing scheme would have affected at least 800k resident people, or about 10% of NYCs total population.)

Aside from the points others have made that the congestion charge introduced by the mayor of the large urban area of London which covers the whole of central London[1] doesn't really have anything to do with the City of London boundaries or administration, I don't think "it's not well known in America" justifies the use of "secret"

The jurisdictions of San Mateo and Santa Clara aren't particularly well known in the UK but I'd still think any journalist referring to them as "secret" was being ludicrously hyperbolic...

[1]an area with approximately 17x the population of the City of London, and I suspect the ULEZ emissions charge which now covers all 9 million London residents also gets dragged into the US debate...

I never said anything about it being a "secret", nor did I even use the word.

You seem to be having an argument with the title of the piece, not with me.

The London congestion charge is a much larger area than the City

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge/congestio...

You're quibbling. The portion covered by the congestion charges is a tiny, tiny portion of the whole of London, comprising mostly business and entertainment areas.

The point I am making is that Americans use the naming confusion to draw the fundamentally misleading comparison.

The congestion charge in London has absolutely nothing to do with the City.

Yes the City of London has a population of around 10,000 but employs nearly 1 million by some estimates since the legal and financial capitals exist within it.

So, it's midtown Manhattan, which is a small portion of the area NYC proposed to meter.

What are you talking about the London congestion charge is analogous to the NYC one, covering the core central business district.

Only in the most broad definition of central business district.

The NYC one was just a toll, which would have created a variety of problems without really solving a bunch of others beyond revenue generation. The people gridlocking the west side to get on the tunnels aren't going to blink at a surcharge for the most part. The alternative in most cases is a $100 Uber, so a $25 toll is an annoying bargain. But massive industries, like specialty healthcare, would have been boned by patients who cannot handle the fare.

In the healthcare example, advocates would be like "not a problem! just get an exemption permit!". When my wife was being treated at MSK for an aggressive cancer, it took almost 5 months to get a NYC handicapped permit -- she unfortunately didn't live long enough to benefit. The street closures during COVID were often cited as a quality of life improvement... closures don't require a toll.

No, not even close. The NYC one covered all of Manhattan south of 60th, and almost every ingress/egress to the island. As I said in my comment, even if you only consider people who live in Manhattan (which is a fraction of the NYC residents affected by the proposed policy), it would have covered about 10% of the entire city -- about 800,000 people.

They may be confusing it with London's ULEZ (ultra low emissions zone), which was expanded last year with no democratic mandate and has been hugely controversial.

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