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Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

"We made something more expensive to do and you'll never believe that fewer people did it!"

You joke, but critics were literally saying this. Stuff like "it's only $9, people will just ignore that and continue to drive"

To be fair, they were mostly right, since 93% continued to drive.

This is commute tax for the wealthy, and a time tax for lower income people. B39 only crosses the bridge, so there's waiting/transfer on both sides. Commute is generally 2-5x more time by public transport there, with all the stops.

The key point is that traffic is basically exponential in number of cars. Roads have a capacity below which there's almost no traffic, and above which capacity stays constant (or goes down). The amount of traffic in a city without congestion charging is the amount caused by the last couple percent of drivers most willing to wait in traffic. By introducing a fee that switches the decision for that small group of people, everyone else's commute gets a noticeably shorter (including all the people that were taking the bus previously).

Yes, by dramatically increasing the commute time of the poor, we can reduce the commute time of the wealthier, and give the city revenue in the process. Morals aside, this is the desired function of the fee. Morals in place, I think making B39 free, funded by the fee, would have been a nice move.

> I think making B39 free, funded by the fee

Where exactly are these congestion fees going, if not to funding transit?

> The MTA is using the revenue from the congestion pricing tolls to issue a $15 billion bond to buy new train cars, install accessible elevators at subway stations across the city and other transit infrastructure improvements.

It's funding hardware. My point is that a free (or discounted), short, B39 commute across the bridge would have been a nice bone to throw to the poorer people who made this traffic flow improvement possible for the wealthier.

I suppose this was tongue in cheek, and I don't live in NYC - but where I live, a single ticket is 4 EUR, so that's 8 EUR there and back. So right now, parking up to a couple hours is already cheaper (if we ignore the wear and tear of driving 20km) per day in the city. If I manage to optimize for the parking price (or can do it for free) - the 9$ would still be a maybe 10% increase, not 'for the wealthy'. And I can imagine several of such scenarios, I guess you are only looking at "person commuting to work 20 days a month and thus paying 180$ extra"

Yes, monthly tickets exist but I've not used one for years because I usually cycle all the time.

It needs to be said, since there is such a big vocal group of people that are outright denying economic laws. Regarding rent control, minimum wage, price control etc.

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