The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
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.
It isn't. It's vastly more expensive to ride in a taxi when you include the fare.
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.
Only partially right? Tax incidence depends on the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply.
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)
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 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.
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.
```
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.
```
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."
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.