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> The congestion pricing is not going to help anyone
The plans for the congestion charge funding were made very clear. It would have helped transit riders across the city. I don’t see how you can sensibly claim otherwise. To pick the most direct and obvious example that I can: the MTA has announced that in light of the loss of funding they would have gotten from the congestion charge they’re cancelling plans to add accessible entrances to a whole bunch of subway stations in the city. So right there we have a group that would have been helped.
The “real people” in NYC are the ones that take public transit. They vastly, vastly outnumber car drivers (who are disproportionately wealthy). As you yourself assert the roads are a mess. There are simply too many cars for the city to accommodate.
I think it’s valid to criticize the congestion charging plan but it’s notable that no one is proposing an alternative. The current situation is clearly not tenable but everyone opposing congestion charging just shrugs their shoulders. Why? At least have the courage to suggest Robert Moses-style highways slicing the city into pieces, because that’s what it would take.
It was also artificially and intentionally created by adding a massive amount of uber/tlc vehicles. Just stand on any block and watch the cars go by. 90% are not private passenger vehicles.
Before bike lanes and uber there was almost no congestion except for limited rush hours.
There are actually fewer vehicles on the road today than ever but it's an optical illusion of more for the reasons listed above.
This is just more long term political trickery just like the hudson yards project.
Walk around in London where this has been instituted and all you see are 100k+ vehicles on the road.
That's the end game. Serfs and the Elite. Emotional naivety prevents people from understanding this.
Congestion has always been around, independent of lane counts. If you managed to add more car lanes, traffic would not get any better, because more people would drive. Fewer vehicles on the road is a net win, as the air has been getting cleaner for everyone. I get it that you're not a fan of bikes, but a chunk of those are people that might have taken a cab ride, competing with your car for space. I'm all for capping ebike speeds (while Citibike agreed to lower them from 20 to 18mph in a deal with the city, the rest are still way too fast), but no matter how dangerous they are, more people in the city are killed by reckless drivers.
Here's the problem: the elite are the ones driving cars. The serfs are the ones riding bikes and taking Ubers. So you deride the changes made to benefit the serfs while also claiming class warfare. Your argument is incoherent.
there's definitely an echo chamber in urbanist-type spaces, but your notion of "real people" is even more out of touch.
> It's a congestion mess now without pricing....
Right, which is exactly why pricing is needed.
NYC has 650mi of bike lanes and 6300mi of roads for cars.
Because I look at your traffic and, god, it’s awful. I watched an ambulance and a fire engine get stuck behind traffic and basically grind to a halt, which seems…extremely not ideal to me.
> There are more bike lines than real roads now.
What's the point in exaggerating? This is nowhere near true. There are many more bike lanes than there were even a decade ago, but the city have several orders of magnitude more navigable roads than bike lanes.
> It's a congestion mess now without pricing....
That's the point of congestion pricing: to reduce demand on the street grid to those who actually need it. Congestion pricing makes the streets less congested; it benefits those who need to drive.
How, exactly, are stores supposed to get the things they sell, restaurants supposed to get the food they prepare, construction crews supposed to get the materials they use, garbage collectors supposed to pick up trash -- and a million other things that make a city possible -- without roads?
New York City has had roads since before cars existed...since it was a tiny little colony with a literal wall where "wall street" is today. This kind of rhetoric is silly and counterproductive.
(One of the virtues of congestion pricing is that it makes obligate uses of the road better: fewer personal cars on lower Manhattan's grid means faster grocery store deliveries, fewer construction trucks double parked, faster garbage pickup, etc.).
I don't know what to tell you. I quoted the parent post, in its entirety, at the time I wrote my comment. Doesn't seem cryptic to me.
Nobody? The post being replied to literally said:
> roads though, which shouldn't exist in a dense city
Arguably they mean “no roads for private vehicle traffic”.
Pedestrian plazas and walkable areas demonstrably result in higher foot traffic for shops. Nobody has the slightest issue with the garbage truck cruising through to pick stuff up-they’re not a big cause of gridlock and congestion. This is a pretty solved problem in parts in Europe.
But you're right: it is possible to have roads that aren't open to private vehicles; I've seen this in Amsterdam, for instance, where remote-control bollards will lower for certain vehicles (trash trucks, etc.).
Personally, as someone who lives in Tokyo, I think the easiest way to solve this problem is the way it's mostly solved here: simply eliminate all street parking, and require anyone living in the city who wants to own and keep a car there to prove they have a place to park it. We don't have roads banned to private cars, or congestion pricing (aside from tolls on the highways), but there's remarkably little car traffic for a city with this many people, and I think it's pretty clear why: if there's no place to park other than inconvenient and very expensive private parking lots, why get a car, or use it in the city if you have one? (To be clear, a lot of people actually do own them, but just don't drive them much because there's no place to park at the places inside the city where they want to go, so many cars are just for weekend use.)
It is easier to get by with things like Zipcar and Uber but I'd still probably find it had value so I wasn't structuring things around not having a car.
a) it's a huge problem in the canal district (thus making my point)
b) they have boats with trash compactors:
https://www.c40.org/case-studies/new-waste-collection-system...