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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest thing CP is going to do in NYC is end toll shopping. There were previously some pretty obvious arbs available to people trying to get off LI.

The biggest policy failure of CP though to me is that they left taxi/uber relatively unscathed. Often the majority of traffic is taxi/uber, so make the surcharge on them a fraction of what individual drivers pay is kind of nonsensical.

Are we trying to minimize traffic (so tax call cars) or parking (so tax taxi/uber less since they don't have to park in Manhattan?). It smells of lobbying mostly.

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The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

if the passenger car pays once a day, it's only generating one unit of congestion.

And further, if I am already paying $50 fare to take an Uber, a $1.50 toll is not deterring me or reducing my usage at all. It is less than the rounding error on the tip I give the driver. I probably won't even notice it amongst the 5 line items of fees, taxes, surcharges, etc on the digital receipt.

This is where the dogma gets in the way of reality. Uber and cabs are the glue that fills the gaps that public transit has left unfilled for decades.

The policy goal is to reduce congestion by discouraging personal vehicles in the zone and generate revenue for transportation as a whole, not to turn the city into a pedestrian park. The state took an approach that does that without nuking the city.

Based on the fact that nobody seems to be giddy about this, I’d say they did a decent job at that. If the crazy transit nuts are happy and the angry Jersey people are happy, something went wrong.

The congestion relief zone is probably one of the single densest transit zones on the planet. Rideshares and cabs are definitely useful for filling in the gaps in the boroughs, but you basically never need one in downtown Manhattan.

You're forgetting that the transit zones themselves are not only affected, the main BRIDGES are also affected. So even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances

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Manhattan's Congestion Relief Zone starts at 60th Street and heads south to include the Lincoln, Holland and Hugh L. Carey tunnels on the Hudson River side, and the Queensboro Bridge, Queens Midtown Tunnel, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge on the East Side.

Drivers will be charged when they enter the Congestion Relief Zone using the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro or Williamsburg Bridges, or the Holland, Hugh L. Carey, Lincoln or Queens-Midtown tunnels.

Drivers coming from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan will be charged once they reach 60th Street.

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> even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances

Incorrect--if you take one of those bridges/tunnels below 60th street, then stay on FDR or West Side Highway to travel to a different part of NYC (i.e. you never enter the interior surface streets below 60th), then you don't pay the congestion fee.

"The Congestion Relief Zone includes local streets and avenues in Manhattan south of and including 60 Street, excluding the FDR Drive, West Side Highway/Route 9A, and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections to West Street."

https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info/tolling

One of the gaps is accessibility, rideshares are useful for people who have trouble getting around.

I live in Manhattan and I am decidedly anti-car. If I had my way private vehicles would be banned (with exceptions for e.g. people with relevant disabilities).

But cabs are important! This past august, I bought a new desktop PC (I did not want to build it myself for various reasons). I took it home in an Uber. Trying to walk to the subway with that giant box would have been virtually impossible.

A transit nut would have suggested a simple solution that does not destroy the planet - just use a simple cargo bike.

You don’t. Yet they are popular.

It’s only the densest transit zone in the US. Many international locales are denser and measurably better.

This issue highlights that people take for granted that things are permanent and people will accept anything. This is great for me — I’ll happily pay the toll to move faster when I’m in the city. But my guess is my customers will start melting away faster and I’ll be spending quality time in Jersey. That was happening even before COVID and I think will accelerate.

They would have been smarter to hold out for a few years and add a surcharge to the road mileage tax that’s coming.

Moreover, the parent misses the forest for the trees: yeah, the congestion fee is lower than the fare, but the fare is vastly more expensive than driving a car.

The current pricing model encourages resource sharing (this was true before congestion pricing as well), and the choice of whether or not you take a car or a cab is a function of the amortized cost of use per unit time. So yeah, just in terms of congestion fee it's a little bit cheaper to take an Uber for a single trip, but if you ride around in an Uber all day long, it's way, way less cost efficient than driving your own car.

The car takes up space in the city the entire time it's there, even if the congestion impact is less while it's parked.

The lengths this city goes to keep free parking...

Private passenger car driver is paying 12x Taxi toll / 6x Uber toll. Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider.

Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured?

Also your average Taxi may not even cross into the CPZ 12x per day, so unclear we are making it up on volume either.

Small correction, every ride that starts and/or ends in the zone incurs the fee so a taxi that enters, does 12 trips, then leaves pays the same amount as a private car even though they only entered the zone once.

That's great, but it's still too cheap

There's still a per-ride citywide congestion fee baked into each Uber fare. So overall there are still more overall congestion taxes paid by the taxi/uber in your scenario.

> Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured?

It isn't. It's vastly more expensive to ride in a taxi when you include the fare.

Because there are fewer cars in the system for each chauffeured ride vs private vehicle.

Fewer cars "in the system" but same (or possibly more) cars on the road actively moving. Take a look at some of the dwell times for ride hail vehicles in NYC. Can easily approach 20-35%.

Plus the apps are kicking drivers out at various quiet periods of the day in order to avoid paying them minimum wage. So true empty time is higher.

Again I'm not arguing for better treatment for personal vehicles. I'm arguing all the fees are too low, and the ride hail fee egregiously so.

I don't know any of the science or research, but it still seems like it could possibly be a benefit. The increase in cars moving seems like it could be more than offset by the reduction in parking requirements. Those people taking private vehicles have to park them somewhere. More taxis means we can use some of that space for something useful instead.

> Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider.

Only partially right? Tax incidence depends on the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply.

It should be cheaper. No circling the block looking for parking, no space needed at all for that matter. That alone is worth giving taxis/ubers at least a different pricing structure.

I don’t know about cheaper - this is already on top of the $2.75 per-ride NY State congestion fee. So now, if you take an Uber ride in NYC that’s even just a few blocks or few minutes long, it will be $2.75+$1.5 = $4.25 of just congestion fees for every ride.

> The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

The fee for cabs was actually set by dividing the regular fee for private cars by the average number of trips cabs make into the Congestion Relief Zone per day (because the fee is only paid once per day for private cars, but per trip for cabs)

> I think the biggest thing CP is going to do in NYC is end toll shopping.

Or toll beating. An old trick is taking a tractor trailer (or any big truck with more than a few axles) from LI to mainland without paying tolls: take the 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd, left onto 59th, left onto 1st and strait up to Willis bridge which leads strait into the Deegan.

Fwiw, we have other mechanisms for limiting taxis and Uber. We can actually put a hard limit on the number allowed to operate.

This ends up being a little awkward since Uber charges market prices, so what happens when the number of Uber drivers is capped is _Uber_ pockets the congestion fee instead of the city. But the taxi lobby is strong and we can't fix everything at once

How do you figure that? The amount of the surcharge for the average taxi/uber driver per day will be many many multiples of the cost for a regular driver.

In the case of a regular driver you you have someone paying $9 to bring a car into the congested area, probably serving one trip by one person.

In the case of a TLC driver you'll have them paying probably well over $100 a day (assuming the $2.75 charge x 4-5 trips an hour give or take) and aiding in the transport of probably dozens of people to their destination.

It seems completely obvious why this is a better approach to relieving congestion while still preserving the ability of people to get around.

I have a car and live in Brooklyn. I usually take an Uber anyway because parking is a pain and/or expensive.

So I was previously comparing: $0 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $0 car toll + $50 Taxi/Uber fare

Now I am comparing: $9 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $1.50 Uber toll + $50 Uber fare

That is - the fee is being passed onto riders anyway, so why should I pay a lower toll sitting in the back of an Uber than when driving myself across the bridge?

This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?

Think of the congestion charge as a charge on the vehicle, rather than on the person, as the stated policy goal is to reduce the number of vehicles in the CBD, not the number of people overall. The Uber is very likely going to continue to be used to service other passengers after dropping you off within the same calendar day, so one potential "fair" solution is to split the congestion charge among the many passengers using that one vehicle. That is your reduced Uber toll charge. But even in this case, it's not really an even split, taxis are going to generate a much higher congestion charge revenue than a single passenger car.

The rideshare toll is already a charge on the vehicle and not the riders. If you share an Uber with two other people, the per-person congestion fee for the trip drops to $0.50.

> This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?

It's not obvious that Uber is exclusively the higher-class option. Someone could easily make the same calculation you just did and decide that for them even owning a car wouldn't be worth it, they'll just do Uber every time they need to. You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.

I don't have data to back it up, but I would actually be surprised if the average Uber customer in NYC owns a car at all.

> You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.

This isn't really a different class.

The other class is the people who can't afford a car or Uber and can barely afford the MTA.

Agreed, I'm just using the terminology that OP was. The actual class lower than this doesn't pay the toll at all, whether the Uber toll or private car toll.

Once the Uber drops you off, it's available to take someone else somewhere they need to go. Car services are an essential part of a total system that enables people not to have to drive. Personal cars are the opposite of that.

It's one of those things about the way Americans think about transit that makes me insane, they try to assess the ROI of every single individual leg of a transit system rather than assess the system as a whole.

For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.

That's just one example. Here's another more suited to your example. What if you generally switch to taking transit into the city, and only take an uber when it's raining or you have something heavy to carry?

If I allow there to be a robust market for Ubers in the city then that's possible. If I aggressively charge Ubers then you can't do that, and you're back to driving every day.

There's plenty of examples. But in short it's clear that private cars are by a mile the worst and most inefficient thing occupying the roads. That's what we want to have the strongest incentives against.

>For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.

That's a cute anecdote but is there any empirical evidence behind this? I'd imagine the people who commute downtown, stay late often enough that this is a concern, is willing to take the bus even though they have a car and can otherwise afford daily commute downtown (gas/parking), but at the same time can't pay for an uber on those late nights, is approximately zero.

My empirical evidence is going to Europe and looking around.

I'm being somewhat argumentative on purpose but the concept I'm explaining actually is important. There's something similar to a phase change when a city/area becomes sufficiently well connected so that transit can basically solve every problem.

You go to somewhere like Switzerland and it just jumps out at you. There's a fundamental approach that everywhere someone wants to go should be accessible by transit in a way that's workable. There's also a fundamental decision that being able to bring a car somewhere isn't necessarily something that has to be supported.

It's just a different way of looking at things.

Can you envision an American town that literally does not allow cars anywhere near the actual town, like at all?

If that seems utterly impossible to visualize then you're starting to see what I mean. Now try to visualize a Swiss town that literally has no ability to connect to the broader transit system.

Service industry workers tend to get off between 2:30 and 4:00AM. If you get off at 2:30, great, you can take the bus or train back home. If you're held late to clean or do prep for the next day? You'll be waiting until transit service resumes in the morning (as late as 6AM).

So what do you do? You drive to work every day and pay the parking costs, because it's preferable to ending up stuck downtown with everything closed for several hours while you're exhausted from working a double.

This problem with public transit is the single biggest reason people who work at restaurants have to always drive to work. It's exactly as the comment you're replying to put it.

I guess to me it just seems like you want to deter end users picking taxis/ubers over trains a bit more, and $1-2 is not going to do that when they are already paying 5-10x subway fare for their ride.

I can see by your example how over the course of the day the taxi/uber collects a lot of CPZ fees for the city, I just don't see the fee reducing anyone at the margin from using taxi/uber.

At the end of the day I'd love to see transit improve, and if all this does is reduce traffic for the well heeled who already are taking taxi/ubers.. I mean I win there too, but it doesn't feel great.

For the record when I commute it's always by transit, the problem is weekend/night service has degraded to the point that I feel forced to take taxi/uber quite often. I've lived in NYC nearly 20 years and have found, if anything, night/weekend service to be less predictable and more perplexing. This again harms the less well off even more, as they are more likely to be doing shift work / non-traditional workdays than your M-F 9-5er.

Just this weekend, yet again, I was trying to get around midtown and Apple kept telling me what should be a 6min trip would take 30min by train even though I was 5 seconds from subway entrance. I couldn't understand why, and went to MTA website and saw no alerts for the 6th ave line. Then I went to the live train time page and realized the problem - the 6th Ave line was running at 15min headways, so Apple had me walking 2 blocks to 8th Ave then to wait 15min for the train (possibly 30min if its a B/D and I needed an F/M). This was Saturday around dinner time. Just awful service.

Agree that service in NYC these days is worse than it was about 15–20 years ago. At the time I didnt know that the MTA was the center of a political power play between city and state, depending on whimsical politicians in two centers to cooperate to get anything done. The main improvement in the last 20 years have been the time tables and the linkage to maps on the phone, which at least make the pain predictable at most times, even if not always explainable. I hope service can improve soon and more trains thrown at peak times. The current situation is borderline dangerous at crowded stations during my commute peak hours and if more people yet use the subways without improved service things will turns worse yet.

Alternatively, day parking rates drop enough (due to market forces) to compensate for the cost of the toll.

> In the case of a TLC driver you'll have them paying probably well over $100 a day (assuming the $2.75 charge x 4-5 trips an hour give or take) and aiding in the transport of probably dozens of people to their destination.

This is completely wrong.

First, the fee for cabs is different from the fee for private cars, and in fact, it was set at the value which is the private car fee divided by the average number of trips into the Congestion Relief Zone that cabs make each day.

Second, passengers are the ones paying the fee, not cab drivers. It's one of the fees tacked on to your receipt.

Third, this fee has already been charged on cab fares since 2019. The only difference is it's now being applied to all vehicles except taxis/FHVs. For cab drivers, there's no difference - it was the one part of the program that has already been in effect for years!

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