Congestion Pricing Is a Policy Miracle
bettercities.substack.com
bettercities.substack.com
You max out paying $34 a week, or $17 if you qualify for reduced fare.
It's not dumb to not want to be the sucker, the urban yuppies on transit routes are great at squeezing the working class that way.
> shittier transit access areas
Public transit advocates literally want to expand public transit to cover more and more of these areas. We also want to build more housing in dense areas, so it is effectively cheaper to live there.
The answer is not throwing our hands up in the air and forcing the poor to live further and further away from their jobs and economic centers, foisting upon them the exorbitant expense of roads, cars, fuel, and time spent commuting.
Your premise is false to begin with. In NY the roads are 60% funded by use taxes like fuel taxes, not majority property tax. It's hard to take your argument with much weight until it sits on the slightest vestige of factual foundation, which seems missing.
I'm not against mass transit, I'm saying maybe it should be privatized so the users bear the cost rather than shifting it on the poor. To expand on the status quo or make it even more 'public' is insanity.
Even by your own primary source, calling this out as fuel taxes is disingenuous. In New York, fuel taxes are 21% of infrastructure revenue. Tolls and charges—the usage fees you claim to be such a fan of–account for 59% of infrastructure revenues.
Further, you are grossly misreading and misinterpreting this data. These percentages are out of state infrastructure revenue. This definitionally excludes property taxes, which are not infrastructure revenue. You will note that every single state with the exception of Tennessee has a greater amount of highway spending than infrastructure revenue.
Further, your primary source is only considering all infrastructure revenue vs. only highway spending. Infrastructure revenue is allocated to other places than roads, as states have a variety of other transportation-related expenses. California (my state) for example collected $12.0bn in infrastructure revenue for 2021. They spent $12.0bn on highways. Both of these figures are from your primary source. However, the total California transportation budget for that year was $26.5bn[1]. Your claims are tantamount to asserting that 100% of infrastructure revenues collected went to pay roads, which isn't remotely the case.
I've well cleared the bar you set for yourself. Which even were it true, merely points back to my argument of public transit being a regressive welfare program disproportionately burdening the working class.
In California—a state where revenues from user fees approximates 100% of highway expenditures—that only accounts for 45% of the overall transportation budget. Where do you suppose the extra $14.5bn comes from?
Total - infrastructure = non infrastructure.
I have never doubted California might regressively tax the shit out of people for non infrastructure transit spending like metro busses.
This is doubly regressive in California due to their property tax increase capping that is well below inflation, highly benefitting earlier wealthier older entrants at the expense of the younger and less wealthy.
This isn't a very rosy fact for California or for collecting even more on non infrastructure transportation revenue under the current tax regime.
I do take multiple other rides a day and in the weekend though, so I hit 12 rides pretty quickly, probably in around 4 days.
Edit: well if you live in a part of the city that has good coverage - up in the Bronx it's not so great naturally so I wouldn't be surprised if those people didn't get as much value out of a monthly card.
I assume an "unlimited metro card" also includes unlimited buses too?
A 2 zone is $220. I think in size that's roughly comparable?
And in my experience people who mostly take the tube rarely make use of buses. They'll walk or take the tube
With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough.
Obviously the average meal is on the pricier side but there are tons of great options that don’t break the bank.
Driving in New York is for the wealthy. Who has money to pay for parking in New York?
People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible for a million people to each own a home in an area where there are only 650,000 homes which is why the price increases until a third of them can't; there is no other solution than building more housing. The people opposed to this are opposed simply because they already own property and want housing prices to remain high and then come up with various excuses to rationalize their avarice.
Congestion pricing is a trade off. The proponents will point out that it "works" in the sense that high taxes deter use, but that's ignoring the other side of the ledger. There are many other ways to reduce congestion than deterring use through taxation. One of them is to build more housing, for example, so that people can live closer to work and have shorter commutes. Another is to eliminate the fares for mass transit, so its relative cost advantage increases but the difference is created by using ordinary general purpose progressive taxes to fund the system instead of imposing a regressive tax on anyone with an unavoidable need to drive a vehicle. The latter also improves privacy for both drivers and riders by removing both mass surveillance systems that tie everyone's movements to them through the payments system, and increase government efficiency because revenue collection through general taxes has much lower overhead than transit collections infrastructure.
There are actually reasons to oppose congestion pricing because there are alternatives to it that achieve the same goal more efficiently with fewer negative externalities.
Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there.
Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston.
> many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.
There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever.
The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.
Is it also “taxation without representation” when NJ Transit charges me a fare to go to New Jersey or to drive on the Turnpike? Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.
Is it a tax, i.e. a fee charged by a government? Yes.
Do you have a vote in that government, as a non-resident of New Jersey? No.
It's taxation. Without representation.
This why roads used in interstate travel are one of the few specifically enumerated powers of the federal government (the constitution calls them "post roads"), and funding them from general federal revenue rather than tolls is completely appropriate.
> Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.
Infrastructure is dominated by fixed costs. Amortizing fixed costs per-use is economically inefficient because it deters productive uses whose value exceeds the (negligible) incremental cost but not the (sunk) amortized fixed cost.
This operates to the extreme in the case of mass transit because the incremental cost of mass transit use is negative, since its use remove congestion from the roads. Paying people to use it would be an obvious perverse incentive, but paying for a collections infrastructure in order to deter people from using it instead of just making it free is an obvious own-goal.
That isn't the commonly-held definition of a tax. The key thing about taxes is that they are compulsory. Transit fares are purely usage-based, and therefore optional, as you aren't forced to use transit. Fares are not commonly considered to be "taxes" in anything I've ever read.
I'm literally repeating what it says in the Oxford English Dictionary. What are you citing that equates transit fares with taxes?
Airfare isn't a tax, but Amtrak tickets are?
If I ride public transit in a foreign country, I'm paying a tax and the IRS will let me use the Foreign Tax Credit?
If I mail a package using USPS, that's a tax, but if I send a package using FedEx or UPS it's not?
No one I've ever met defines taxes that way. Nothing I've ever read defines taxes that way. If you want to convincingly define public transit fare as a tax, cite some reliable sources for this, because I literally can't find anything anywhere that supports this notion.
> If I mail a package using USPS, that's a tax, but if I send a package using FedEx or UPS it's not?
So let's get back to the word in dispute: compulsory.
What this means is, does the government service have direct competition? So the fee USPS charges for delivering packages isn't a tax, because you can have packages delivered by FedEx or UPS, and thereby subjects USPS to market competition and high prices or poor service would be met with loss of business. Use of USPS to deliver packages isn't compulsory. Whereas the price they charge for delivering first class mail is a tax, because the law prohibits anyone other than USPS from delivering first class mail within its jurisdiction, so then that fee is compulsory.
So, are road tolls a tax? Yes, because roads are a natural monopoly operated by the government and the fee is compulsory; there is no competing road network to use if you e.g. have to get your plumber's van to a customer site in lower Manhattan. Are transit fares a tax? Yes, for the same reason, when there is no competitive market for metro transit service; the only provider is the government.
You could make it not a tax by having competing private bus or rail service along the same routes, although if the government was charging money to the private buses or trains then the tolls would be a tax that the riders would ultimately be paying.
Which is why Amtrak tickets are a tax and airfare isn't, and also why airline tickets cost less than Amtrak tickets, when that otherwise makes no sense. The tax -- which causes the amount to be in excess of the price that would prevail in a competitive market -- being paid for Amtrak tickets makes them uncompetitive with airlines, even though they're not even direct competitors and trains should cost significantly less than planes, because being compulsory brings an inefficiency so large as to cross the gulf into a different market.
> If I ride public transit in a foreign country, I'm paying a tax and the IRS will let me use the Foreign Tax Credit?
IRS rules aren't exactly based on logic. For example, if a foreign government charges a tax to hotels that the hotel then incorporates into the price without explicitly listing it on the bill, are you paying the tax? Yes. Will the IRS let you deduct it when you stay in the hotel? That's a different question.
> No one I've ever met defines taxes that way.
How are you proposing to define it then? Give me a definition that can distinguish between paying the government when you ride the subway that they spend to pay for the tunnels and paying the government when you buy a sandwich that they spend to administer food safety regulations or prosecute anyone who tries to steal your sandwich.
No, it is a usage fee just like stamps.
Given that NYC's population density is already nearly double that of London, how exactly is housing construction being constrained in NYC?
Housing is expensive in NYC because it's a popular place to live.
> If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state
If you make the subway free, that only helps for travel within NYC, but not for the portion of travel from out-of-state e.g. NJ Transit rail, NJ Transit bus, Port Authority's PATH subway. These are completely separate from the MTA.
> Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation
Nonsense, this line of thinking assumes that everyone coming from out-of-state drives. I live in NJ, and am strongly in favor of congestion pricing, because I take public transit into NYC, and use public transit within NYC.
Most of the existing tall buildings in NYC would be illegal to build today under the current zoning. You also can't build buildings in the other boroughs of the sort currently in Manhattan. The supply needed is relative to local demand, not relative to other cities.
> Housing is expensive in NYC because it's a popular place to live.
Housing is expensive because there is more demand than supply. This happens when there is high demand and increases in supply are constrained. Otherwise supply would respond to increased demand.
> If you make the subway free, that only helps for travel within NYC, but not for the portion of travel from out-of-state e.g. NJ Transit rail, NJ Transit bus, Port Authority's PATH subway. These are completely separate from the MTA.
If you make the subway free, you remove the fare associated with taking the subway, which is part of the cost of using mass transit.
You could also remove the cost of the other mass transit. That might require you to do things at the federal level or in partnership with other states, but that doesn't mean it's something you can't do, it's just something you'd be doing in a different way.
> I live in NJ, and am strongly in favor of congestion pricing, because I take public transit into NYC, and use public transit within NYC.
You're in favor of congestion pricing because you don't pay it. This is unsurprising, right? It's the people who do pay it who are opposed, and that appears to be a majority of the people of NJ since the governor elected by the people of NJ is opposed, but then those people don't get a vote, which is the issue.
Citation please? I've lived in this metro area for 18 years, and the only constant has been that they keep building more giant buildings all the time, so clearly something there doesn't add up.
> You also can't build buildings in the other boroughs of the sort currently in Manhattan.
What type of building are you talking about here?
If you mean skyscrapers, they're plentiful in Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, among other outer-borough neighborhoods. But many skyscrapers aren't residential (regardless of borough) so I'm not sure if that's what you mean.
If you mean mid-rises, there are large high-density apartment buildings in all five boroughs, in quite a few different neighborhoods.
I must ask, do you actually live in NYC?
> Housing is expensive because there is more demand than supply.
Yes, and realistically there's no practical amount of construction that would cause NYC to become inexpensive, because the demand is too great.
> Otherwise supply would respond to increased demand.
That doesn't happen overnight and is subject to physical limitations: finite space constraints / a lack of purchasable land for development or re-development, finite limitations on building rate (e.g. the size of the construction sector), and the time required for infrastructure improvements to support an even higher population density.
> You could also remove the cost of the other mass transit.
Paid for how, and by whom?
> You're in favor of congestion pricing because you don't pay it.
No, I'm in favor of it because it makes bus commutes substantially faster, and the revenue will support the continued operational needs of the subway system.
> that appears to be a majority of the people of NJ since the governor elected by the people of NJ is opposed
Murphy very narrowly won reelection in 2021 and is now term-limited from running again. You're asserting that because Murphy is opposed to congestion pricing several years later, this somehow means a majority of NJ residents are also opposed? That's ridiculous and doesn't logically follow. In truth a majority of NJ residents don't ever drive into NYC anyway and don't care one way or the other about this issue.
> but then those people don't get a vote, which is the issue.
Why should people living outside of New York get to vote on something affecting local roads in New York City?
NYC zoning is public record:
The highest density residential buildings are zoned R10. Go uncheck all the boxes and then check that one to see where they're allowed. Spoiler: It's almost nowhere and the few places that have it also already have those buildings; there is basically nowhere to put new ones and some of the existing ones aren't even zoned for their current location anymore.
That is how zoning works to constrain housing supply. There will be large areas zoned R1-R5 and you can't put tall buildings there. There is a smaller amount of space zoned R6, which is kind of dense, but those areas already have those buildings too, so making them taller is still prohibited. That's the trick: In any given place, buildings are only allowed to be as tall as they currently are; little space is allowed for new buildings taller than what's already there.
Another giveaway that this is done to constrain the housing supply is that the land area allocated to each zoning level is inversely proportional to the density it allows.
In a dense city like NYC this means you can still see a lot of "tall" buildings, but you still can't put a 13 story building in the places where there is currently a 2-story one and you can't put a 30 story building in the places there is currently a 13 story one, so the existing density persists but isn't allowed to increase.
> Yes, and realistically there's no practical amount of construction that would cause NYC to become inexpensive, because the demand is too great.
Well that sounds like a testable hypothesis. Why don't we find out?
> That doesn't happen overnight
Best to get started then.
> and is subject to physical limitations: finite space constraints / a lack of purchasable land for development or re-development
Space constraints are solved by taller buildings. They can't be infinitely tall, but neither is there infinite demand, and you don't even have to satisfy all of the demand to cause prices to be lower than they are now or allow more people to live in the city than they currently do.
> Paid for how, and by whom?
By taxes, the same as interstate highways or law enforcement.
> No, I'm in favor of it because it makes bus commutes substantially faster, and the revenue will support the continued operational needs of the subway system.
You're saying different words that mean the same thing. You're in favor of it because you want improvements to the thing you use that come at the expense and inconvenience of someone else. It's the people paying the cost rather than receiving the benefit who are the ones objecting.
> You're asserting that because Murphy is opposed to congestion pricing several years later, this somehow means a majority of NJ residents are also opposed? That's ridiculous and doesn't logically follow. In truth a majority of NJ residents don't ever drive into NYC anyway and don't care one way or the other about this issue.
It's evidence that the majority of NJ residents who care about the issue are opposed to it, because the governor has reasons to satisfy constituents even if not running for another term in the same office if he wants to run for some other office or continue doing business with the representatives of various parts of the state during the rest of his term.
> Why should people living outside of New York get to vote on something affecting local roads in New York City?
Because they use those roads, have an interest in government policies that directly affect them, and are citizens of the country in which New York is a city.
How about it's done just to prevent having a massive building block out the sun and destroy the character of a lower-rise neighborhood? This is common sense quality-of-life stuff, not some mass conspiracy to constrain the housing supply.
> You're in favor of it because you want improvements to the thing you use that come at the expense and inconvenience of someone else.
No, again, that is not why I am in favor of it. I am perfectly able to afford to drive to NYC and pay the congestion pricing fee on a daily basis if I wanted to. But I don't enjoy driving in NYC, and it isn't much faster than public transit anyway, and parking is a nightmare, and personal vehicles are worse for the environment. So why do it?
As for inconvenience of someone else, the folks driving personal vehicles and causing all the congestion are the ones inconveniencing all the mass-transit bus riders, and adding pollution that affects everyone who lives here. Yet you think the pro-congestion-pricing bus riders are the ones externalizing the costs? Is this seriously your argument?
> Because they use those roads, have an interest in government policies that directly affect them, and are citizens of the country in which New York is a city.
So users of NYC local roads, who don't live in NYC or NY State, nor contribute taxes to the maintenance of those roads, should somehow have a say in NYC congestion pricing just by virtue of living in the United States? That's completely absurd.
> you can't put a 30 story building in the places there is currently a 13 story one
But in practice you absolutely can. I'm not familiar with the particulars of zoning variances in NYC, but this does happen all the time. For example when I lived in Manhattan, a 5-story building on my street was replaced by a 24-story monstrosity.
I can't help but notice that you didn't answer my question about whether you actually live here, so I'm going to conclude that you do not, and you aren't actually familiar with the amount of large building construction that actually happens in NYC. There's no real sense in continuing this discussion as you quite literally don't know what you are talking about, whereas I'm currently sitting in a room where I have a panoramic view of the city skyline and can actually see this happening with my own eyes in real-time.
Phrases like "character of the neighborhood" are... what to do they say these days? Problematic?
The places that have the massive buildings are the places most in demand. That seems inconsistent with the result being a detriment to the neighborhood.
> No, again, that is not why I am in favor of it. I am perfectly able to afford to drive to NYC and pay the congestion pricing fee on a daily basis if I wanted to. But I don't enjoy driving in NYC, and it isn't much faster than public transit anyway, and parking is a nightmare, and personal vehicles are worse for the environment. So why do it?
You're describing why it is why you're in favor of it. You already chose not to drive even before the congestion pricing, therefore you don't pay the cost and are happy to see it fall on someone else instead of yourself.
> As for inconvenience of someone else, the folks driving personal vehicles and causing all the congestion are the ones inconveniencing all the mass-transit bus riders, and adding pollution that affects everyone who lives here. Yet you think the pro-congestion-pricing bus riders are the ones externalizing the costs? Is this seriously your argument?
The sensible way to fund a transit system is with broad-based general taxes that apply to everyone, including you. You want to fund it through a tax that only applies to people who drive cars, some of them for legitimate and unavoidable reasons, so... yes?
Also, modern cars don't emit a significant amount of local pollution. Modern emissions control systems are extremely effective against everything except CO2 (a global rather than local concern), to the point that car exhaust in some of the more polluted cities actually has a lower particulate content than the ambient air, and hybrid and electric vehicles produce minimal brake dust because of regenerative braking.
> So users of NYC local roads, who don't live in NYC or NY State, nor contribute taxes to the maintenance of those roads, should somehow have a say in NYC congestion pricing just by virtue of living in the United States? That's completely absurd.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Who says they don't pay any other taxes in New York? Also, why should suffrage depend on where you sleep rather than where you work? If New York is excluding people by pricing them out through restrictive zoning who otherwise have a right to live there as US citizens, they also get to disenfranchise them as a result?
> But in practice you absolutely can. I'm not familiar with the particulars of zoning variances in NYC, but this does happen all the time. For example when I lived in Manhattan, a 5-story building on my street was replaced by a 24-story monstrosity.
The ability to do something at all, ever is not the same as the ability to do it at the level needed to make housing more affordable. The lots zoned for 24-story buildings mostly but not entirely already have them, and then the ones that don't are the few cases where that can actually happen. The issue is that the market would have done that 1000 times except that the zoning only allowed it in 50 of those places, and then you get only 5% as much new housing as you would have otherwise, which isn't enough to keep prices in check.
Go stand next to the exhaust on a “modern car” and say that with a straight face. Everything that you see, smell, and hear is pollution, and it’s really not hard to notice.
One other confound is that vehicle sizes have gone up massively: the car I bought in 2006 has equivalent or better smog ratings than the current non-EV best sellers I just checked because it’s not a truck/SUV and all of the extra weight/power comes at a cost. Yes, that’s a personal choice but if you live somewhere many people drive you’re breathing their choices.
Have you actually done this with recent cars? The exhaust doesn't really smell like anything once the emissions system is operating and that happens right away on newer cars with heated O2 senors and catalysts. Hybrids don't run the engine at idle or low speeds and might not run it at all at city speeds. Electric cars don't even have one.
> One other confound is that vehicle sizes have gone up massively
Particulate emissions are more related to the drivetrain than the vehicle weight, e.g. the Toyota Highlander Hybrid is a chunky beast but it's a "super ultra-low emissions vehicle" in the same category as the Prius or the Honda Insight.
Yes - I’m assuming earlier today counts - and it’s better but still quite noticeable. If you’re on a bike, you notice when you stop behind EVs and hybrids which are running on batteries because they are so much less smelly.
> Particulate emissions are more related to the drivetrain than the vehicle weight
This is true, but an awful lot of buyers avoid hybrids. I’d prefer it was otherwise as you’re quite right that it makes a nice benefit.
Now I'm curious what year the car was. There are obviously still a lot of older cars on the road (and they don't always look much different, since the aerodynamics-dictated shape of cars has been the same for >20 years).
Meanwhile people have taken to complaining about tire wear because the tailpipe emissions have gotten so low that the tire wear is actually higher, now advertised as "tire wear is more polluting than exhaust" as if the tires have somehow gotten worse rather than the exhaust particulates having been reduced to near-zero.
I'm also curious if it was cold. Heated catalysts address the issue where emissions controls don't work well until the catalyst is warm, but they're not that prevalent yet.
> This is true, but an awful lot of buyers avoid hybrids. I’d prefer it was otherwise as you’re quite right that it makes a nice benefit.
It's kind of surprising that anybody buys anything else. The main drawback of EVs is still range and charge time, but hybrids don't have any of that. Two-car households that don't have one EV and one hybrid are generally making a mistake.
It's probably FUD. Hybrid transmissions are significantly more reliable with fewer wear parts than traditional transmissions, but a lot of mechanics will say they're "more complicated" (meaning only they don't have the relevant computer or haven't learned how to do it yet), or less charitably that they prefer the cars that get them paid for expensive transmission rebuilds more often. And the purchase price is slightly higher but you more than make it back in fuel costs so the TCO is lower. It's hard to come up with a reason to buy a non-hybrid ICE vehicle anymore.
It's not problematic to discuss how a low-rise neighborhood is preferable in the architectural or aesthetic sense, let alone in quality of life. Or are you asserting that Jane Jacobs was a racist?
> The places that have the massive buildings are the places most in demand.
No, there's a reason why celebrities prefer living in Brownstone Brooklyn and not in Midtown Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, or Long Island City.
> You already chose not to drive even before the congestion pricing
I choose not to drive into New York City. I still choose to drive and pay plenty of tolls locally in NJ, pay my car registration in NJ, etc.
> you don't pay the cost and are happy to see it fall on someone else instead of yourself.
Between you repeatedly calling me cheap and saying my phrasing is "problematic", it sure seems like I'm wasting my time replying to a troll who doesn't even live here and isn't affected by NYC congestion pricing in any way in the first place.
> Modern emissions control systems are extremely effective against everything except CO2 (a global rather than local concern)
So when I lived right on 6th Ave and my windowsills would get covered in black dust any time the window was open, you're claiming that wasn't from the 24/7 four-lane traffic flow outside? Sure is strange then, considering that when I lived in other parts of NYC that weren't on busy roads, that was never a problem.
> hybrid and electric vehicles produce minimal brake dust because of regenerative braking
That's correct, but tire wear still produces a decent amount of air pollution, and it's especially bad with EVs due to their increased weight.
> Also, why should suffrage depend on where you sleep rather than where you work? If New York is excluding people by pricing them out through restrictive zoning who otherwise have a right to live there as US citizens, they also get to disenfranchise them as a result?
So congestion pricing is bad because our democracy consistently ties voting rights to residency? What?
> The lots zoned for 24-story buildings mostly but not entirely already have them
No, the 24-story building I'm describing is on a long block in the Flatiron District where literally all of the other buildings on the block are between 4 and 12 stories.
There is an intrinsic trade off here between aesthetics and poverty/homelessness. The beneficiaries and the casualties are different people. What does it say if the priority is aesthetics?
> No, there's a reason why celebrities prefer living in Brownstone Brooklyn and not in Midtown Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, or Long Island City.
"Avoiding paparazzi in denser buildings" isn't a common concern for ordinary people.
> I choose not to drive into New York City. I still choose to drive and pay plenty of tolls locally in NJ, pay my car registration in NJ, etc.
Driving into New York City is the relevant thing. NYC congestion pricing isn't modifying what you're paying in NJ.
> Between you repeatedly calling me cheap and saying my phrasing is "problematic", it sure seems like I'm wasting my time replying to a troll who doesn't even live here and isn't affected by NYC congestion pricing in any way in the first place.
I generally ignore personal questions in debates like this, so you don't actually know where I live or work, because the only reason it would matter is as the basis for an ad hominem attack or an appeal to authority. Does anything about the argument change if I live in New York? What if I live in Canada but have parents in New York? What if I live in Washington but might move to New York? None of that would affect whether congestion pricing is good policy or not.
We're only even talking about your circumstances because I pointed out that the people who live in New Jersey aren't being represented (even though they'd represent a disproportionate share of the people who drive into New York), and your retort was that you live in New Jersey and don't drive into New York. Which would only be relevant if your position was held by the majority of interested people in the jurisdictions without a vote, and even if it was that still wouldn't be an excuse to leave them unrepresented on an issue directly affecting them.
> So when I lived right on 6th Ave and my windowsills would get covered in black dust any time the window was open, you're claiming that wasn't from the 24/7 four-lane traffic flow outside? Sure is strange then, considering that when I lived in other parts of NYC that weren't on busy roads, that was never a problem.
Don't confuse roads with cars. Roads also have buses and trucks, and if you're looking for a source of soot, diesel engines are a scourge.
> That's correct, but tire wear still produces a decent amount of air pollution, and it's especially bad with EVs due to their increased weight.
"Tire wear" is the last refuge of people with nothing else to complain about. A tire will shed around 1500 grams of mass over its entire lifetime. By contrast, a single gallon of gasoline is more than 3200 grams and combines with air to produce more than 8 kilograms of emissions. Modern cars ensure that nearly all of that is (stable) CO2 and not other dangerously reactive carbon and nitrogen oxides as they used to be and electric cars don't even produce the CO2. So we've gone from >15,000 kg of tailpipe emissions over 50,000 miles in a 26 MPG car to zero and the only complaint left is the 6 kg from a set of four tires.
Meanwhile the "electric cars are heavier" thing isn't really true. It came from comparing electric conversions of traditional gasoline cars to the weight of the original cars. The conversions weigh more than the original cars (and even then not by much), but they also weigh more than cars specifically designed to be electric from the start, which don't contain unnecessary engine support scaffolding and are heavily optimized for weight to maximize range.
> So congestion pricing is bad because our democracy consistently ties voting rights to residency? What?
Voting rights are tied to residency for issues that predominantly affect local people, like local schools. Issues that affect people over a wider area, like transportation, are meant to be decided at higher levels of government to make sure that the people being directly affected are represented. But here we have a transportation issue directly affecting people outside the jurisdiction being decided by the local government.
> No, the 24-story building I'm describing is on a long block in the Flatiron District where literally all of the other buildings on the block are between 4 and 12 stories.
I see I'm not explaining this clearly.
You have some amount of land which is zoned for 24-story buildings, but all the areas you see which are already full of 24-story buildings? That's most of the areas so zoned. You can't add new ones there because they already have them. You also can't put them in any of the areas with more restrictive zoning.
What's left is a small percentage of the city where the zoning allows for something that isn't already there. That small percentage can include a contiguous strip of smaller buildings. But because it's only those strips, it limits development to only those areas. That might not be where the greatest demand is, and most of the buildings in any given area wouldn't be on the market at any given time, so the opportunities to do it are reduced to a fraction of what they would have been.
That doesn't mean it never happens, what it means is that it would be happening many times more often in the absence of those restrictions, and that reduction in construction significantly exacerbates the housing shortage.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you don't have to prohibit something through zoning that nobody was going to do anyway. Whereas if they were going to do it, where "it" is "increasing the housing supply", and the zoning stops them, QED.
I know these things because I own an EV, and did a massive amount of research before purchasing one, and also now have years of direct experience owning one.
Similarly, I know that Amtrak fare pricing actually isn't "uncompetitive with airlines" for popular routes.
I know this because I have taken many hundreds of Amtrak trips over the past 25 years, with destinations spanning 11 different states, and in every single case the fare pricing was better than flying.
Similarly, celebrities are far from incognito in low-rise neighborhoods, and their preference for low-rise buildings has absolutely nothing to do with avoiding paparazzi. It's not unusual to see celebrities in NYC, many even ride the subway.
I know this because I actually live here. The same way I know that there are many very large high-rise buildings in boroughs other than Manhattan, and I know that there's constant construction of new high-rise buildings in NYC.
This is why it's relevant whether you live here: you lack the frame of reference for many aspects of this discussion, and your comments frequently include objective falsehoods as a result. I'm not going to continue replying here, as there's no point in doing so under those circumstances.
This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling. https://www.fastcompany.com/90968891/estonias-capital-made-m...
Cheaper is relative. If transit costs $130/month and driving a car you already own costs an incremental $150/month but is $50 more convenient then you value the $50 in convenience over the $20 savings. If you eliminate the fares then the difference is $150 which is more than $50.
Collecting the money via taxes rather than fares also allows the transit budget to be increased relative to the same cost burden on the local population because you don't have to pay for the collections infrastructure, which goes to the article's point about increasing service contributing to the solution as another alternative to congestion pricing.
> This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling.
You're citing a study where the existing mass transit cost was only ~$20/month to begin with. Meanwhile their GDP increased by 50% over the period in question and the area underwent a shift in the location of employment away from the city. Having only a modest increase in car use against that context is evidence that it does work.
Most data is trash. If the data is contrary to reason then either the reasoning is wrong or the data is wrong, but for anything with public policy implications it's more likely to be the data because policy data is disproportionately generated by people trying to influence the result.
Also notice that the benefits of the policy aren't limited to the thing you're disputing. Eliminating transit fares still removes a regressive tax, increases the government's revenue collecting efficiency by eliminating the transit collections infrastructure costs and improves privacy by stamping out a mass surveillance system regardless of what extent it reduces traffic congestion. Which means that if you're trying to reduce traffic congestion, you should definitely start there because it very well could work and it's something you should be doing anyway.
Literally everything in behavioral economics is contrary to reason because people simply do not behave like rational utilitarians in the real world, either individually or as a collective.
We are a species where people routinely spend ten minutes circling around to find a parking spot that's thirty seconds closer to their destination.
People largely do behave rationally, it's just that rational behavior includes things like heuristics to account for incomplete information or trading the optimality of the choice against decision time costs.
This is one of the reasons the data is always such a mess. You make a change and people don't immediately notice because they're still applying their old heuristics or haven't recognized that the new alternative is available yet. Then the data shows nothing relevant. Meanwhile five or ten years later people have largely figured it out, but by then a dozen other things have also changed and there is no way to measure the result of the original change net of the others whose true effects are also unknown.
This is why actual science uses double blind randomized controlled trials, but this happens for policy data approximately never.
For the exact same reason it's often so difficult to tease out the impact of policies in data, it's even harder to reason through what will happen from first principles. And yet for someone who wants to hold up actual science and double-blind studies, you seem awfully eager to throw out what precious little data we do have to just go with your gut.
That's not how science works.
It's so imperfect it often inverts the sign of the result, e.g. cities that implement some anti-X policy have even more X than cities that don't, but the reason is that the cities that implemented the policy were the ones expecting the biggest problem. Then a policy that was effective in reducing the growth rate of X from 30% to 10% is accused of increasing X by 10%.
> For the exact same reason it's often so difficult to tease out the impact of policies in data, it's even harder to reason through what will happen from first principles.
The point isn't that you can't get the reasoning wrong, it's that most of the data is just mud. It's knowing that X = Y + Z and then someone gives you the value of Y, which is data, and asks you to solve for X. You still have no ability to answer the question.
But okay, fair enough, you have some data, you're maybe one step closer to solving the problem (even though you haven't yet). Here's what gets me. If the data contradicts the expectation, you should now have a theory for why. Is it because the data has confounders and hasn't really demonstrated anything one way or the other? Is it because you made mass transit free but it still didn't cover the path to where people live, and in order to be effective you have to do both? What's the reason? That is an important question because it determines what you should do instead, if anything.
Just "data says that doesn't work" isn't really refuting anything. If the reason is confounders then the data isn't even a counterargument. If the reason is that it doesn't work as implemented there but there is a variant that works, that's important, but then you can still do it by adopting the variant. And if it actually doesn't work at all then where's the explanation? How do you know what to do instead?
For example, if people don't respond to price differences then congestion pricing shouldn't work either, right? If price differences do work but part of the price has to be an increase to trigger loss aversion and then it's the total price that matters, what if you make mass transit free and then increase the federal gas tax instead of using congestion pricing? People see the higher price, compare it to the lower price and you get a double effect but still don't need to pay for separate collections infrastructure or have the privacy cost and the gas tax also encourages fuel efficiency.
But if the data is just some convoluted mud that can't answer the questions then it's worse than nothing, because it makes you think you know something you don't actually know.
Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. If people relocate from another area, rather than breed, you get expensive housing even more quickly.
After each round of the cycle, there is less nature, less beauty, more traffic congestion, less parking, more noise, more pollution, more crowded parks, more mouths to feed, and more hassle. Look at what happened to California as an example.
The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. The world population has almost tripled since 1960. The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.
The sustainable solution is human habitat control: keep housing supply at population replacement levels only. Don't build infinitely just to allow the human population to reach 20 billion (which is not a net benefit to anybody). 8 billion people is plenty. Be happy with that number.
It does, in both cases. Induced demand is a garbage theory. It's basically the idea that if you increase supply by 50%, and then lower prices increase demand by 20%, you would then have to increase supply by another 20%. Which would increase demand by 5%. But that just means you should increase supply by 80% to begin with so you have enough for both the existing and additional demand. The latter is finite.
> Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle.
More kids are good, actually? It prevents economic collapse as a result of an ageing population. The US fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate -- in significant part as a result of high housing costs.
> The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full.
You need to build more housing even for a given level of population because demand shifts around, e.g. Detroit has negative population growth so existing housing in Detroit doesn't satisfy demand in San Francisco.
> The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions are solvable independent of housing. You can heat a house using electric heat pumps and power heat pumps from renewable or nuclear energy without CO2 emissions. If you want to solve CO2 you use a carbon tax, not zoning laws.
If anything restricting the number of kids does the opposite because you get more childless retirees with little incentive to vote for preserving the future because they were deprived of the opportunity to have a family to care about the future of.
The difference is that using a road is free but having a house very much is not.
The fallacy is the assumption that the resulting increase in demand can never be met by any increase in supply. You need more supply to meet the demand at the lower cost than the demand at the current cost; that doesn't imply that the demand at the lower cost is infinite and can never be met.
The real question is, what's the best way to do it? But that's context-specific. If you could satisfy road congestion by building a single new subway line because all the traffic is really going between two points, maybe that's better than adding eight more lanes to the highway, even though that would also work. Whereas if you would only need to add one lane to the highway, but the traffic then branches off in every direction so the alternative would require eight new subway lines, maybe the extra lane is what you want.
Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.
Do you somehow have access to free fuel or electricity?
> Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.
You want to ignore the fixed cost of owning a car but not the fixed cost of owning a home?
in fact, it is a progressive tax since reinvestments into public transit are phenomenal for the vast majority of low and middle Americans (and ALL the rest too, but especially those who can't afford a car in NYC)
There could be, and are, (truly) progressive normal taxes that could be invested into public transit. And now there's a reduced pressure to use tax money for public transit, so it can be used for a nice tax break.
In Manhattan only 22% of households own a car, and the number is probably a fraction of that in the congestion relief zone.
The guy who gets shafted here is the middle to upper middle class with a job that requires driving into NYC.
I'm sure any repairman would rather be doing 2x repair jobs in the time it'd take to do one + sitting in traffic for an extra thirty minutes. Most don't get paid to drive between jobs.
Or is land just far cheaper in Manhattan?
For the working contractors that need to drive their van around no matter what, the reduction in transit times seems like a big benefit.
A tax doesn't have to hit just the poorest people to effect the poor. This probably hits middle-upper middle the hardest, and anyone taking a hired car (like a cab) as well* (There's a chance that sort of fee is elsewhere, like the medallion registration).
The correct place to levy the fee is on demand sources that draw people into the area at given times. Reduced fees should be offered to business that schedule shifts earlier or later to avoid the congestion windows.
The change here is also reporting when those hours are worked, possibly to local govs instead of just state/national, and then a zoned tax based on the start and stop times relative to 'congestion windows'. Similarly with 'open hours' for businesses.
That seems more simple and more direct than taxing individual people, taxing the drive of the demand instead.
City planning seems to be a particularly inflexible issue on this forum, possibly because the majority of this board are upper-middle income, urban, childless, 20-30s males.
Most in the thread seem to miss the fact that flat congestion pricing (even with the 50% reduction for those making <50K), is regressive, like a carbon tax. It's made progressive by allocating the revenues to transit upgrades, which would outsizely benefit lower income communities. But as you say, the redistributions aren't liquid, so progressive feels like a slight stretch.
Here in Canada, the carbon tax is regressive (carbon consumption is not graded as steeply as income is). However, the canada carbon rebate redistributes all revenues flatly, and makes this scheme truly progressive. Though some debate can be had about liquidity diffs of tax-at-use and rebate at end-of-year.
It is okay to admit a scheme is not progressive, and still support it!
I've made that very argument here in favour of higher tolls, but I'd like to see if it's actually happening.
1. Even the reduced $9 toll would have a larger-than-anticipated impact
2. Increasing the toll to $15 would have a smaller-than-anticipated impact
i.e. the presence or absence of a toll matters more than the dollar amount (obviously to a limit)
We'll see about #2 when it increases to $12 in 2028 but #1 seems spot on!
People are not good at making rational decisions when hit with nominal fees.
That's exactly the reason why pricing should drive services. The underlying reasoning is so complex, that most of the time you'd never actually be able to understand why things are going for the rates they are.
There's other factors in demand for trips, like congestion went way down during the peak of covid, and typically drops during a recession, and return to the office increases congestion, etc. But mostly it's more people; hold population steady and congestion will be more stable.
More relevantly though, it is a "Policy Miracle", i.e. the writer is saying it's a miracle that an effective policy was finally enacted. In the second sentence: "but Governor Hochul finally made the right decision". The writer also praises how effective it is, not just that it is effective.
I would have expected car usage to be inelastic and for this to basically just become a tax on commuters
These policies don’t affect me
That's the crazy thing. Driving into lower Manhattan costs society hundreds of dollars, but to an apparently huge fraction of drivers it wasn't even worth nine lousy dollars.
"The improvements lead us to believe that a large number of the cars in NYC were driving around with no particular reason"
Effectively, people were spending time in their cars that they DID NOT VALUE at $9.
From TFA:
“… congestion pricing is a policy unicorn - it accomplishes a key goal (reducing congestion) and raises money. This is in contrast with highway widenings which are the opposite: they cost money (often billions of dollars) and fail to accomplish the goal of reducing traffic due to induced demand.”
I'm in London and can't see myself switching back to a car. Public transport is so much more convenient.
Fewer cars -> fewer accidents -> fewer delays -> much better experience.
The p90 of the Lincoln tunnel trip is 100% a "when numbers match gut feel" experience.
The exceptions are providing parking and special spending accounts to buy a bus/subway/train pass.
Congestion pricing explicitly wants to move people to transit infrastructure. More people using buses allows buses to be more frequent which is more convenient, reduces transfer times, and reduces the impact of outlier slow buses. My understanding is that the NY Subway is near it's trains/hour capacity otherwise the subway would also be able to benefit (although with subways the reliability thing goes in reverse because a stuck train blocks others vs a stuck bus being saved by other buses).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3907023/ https://www.med.ubc.ca/news/living-near-major-roads-linked-t...
At this point it is clear you are trolling, either intentionally or not. You want to drive more people to cars, which are a leading cause of death in the United States. Trains don't even rank.
We've tried for decades to make cars safer. They still kill more people than virtually everything other than heart disease, lung disease, and cancer (which themselves are all positively correlated with car use).
Where is your concern about this?
No, and I never said that. Acting as if I just want more people to drive cars would be like me acting as if you just want to gas the poors in subway tunnels all so that you have less traffic to deal with while you drive into the city in your car.
By all means, let's get more people into trains and out of cars, but before we do that, let's remove the dangerously high levels of neurotoxin that makes the trains unsafe to use. It's not as if we can't, so why wouldn't we choose to?
~15% of the PM2.5 pollution in NYC comes from vehicle traffic, so if you're concerned about that then maybe driving isn't the solution to your problems. if you were actually concerned about your PM2.5 exposure levels, you should be applauding any effort to get cars off the street.
https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/data-stories/tr...
Mind you, overwhelmingly more people are killed by cars directly or through environmental pollution than from breathing in toxins while riding public transportation. Your focus on this is bizarre.
No, the pollution in the subway contains high amounts of iron which comes from the trains (the metal wheels, brakes, and rails) and doesn't come from the cars on the street. Cars have their own pollution problems sure, but they're also out in the open. The neurotoxins produced by the trains are building up in tunnels and flooding enclosed stations every time a train goes by.
If you have to spend an hour either standing outside on the sidewalk near the deadly and evil cars or down on the platform near the trains, choose the sidewalk.
If we're determined to use things like congestion pricing to strong arm more and more people into going into the subway tunnels the very least we can do is make them safe to breathe in first. Improved ventilation and replacing the wheel system on the trains should help to do that. Then we can reduce the number of cars on the road without knowingly poisoning more and more of the population in the process.
Do you have any idea of how many pedestrians are killed by cars every year? This is like choosing to drive across the country instead of taking a plane out of fear of the additional X-rays you get while flying.
This is not a serious argument.
If I knew that by flying I'd be exposed to radiation at levels 17 times higher than what was already considered unsafe* driving might start to look a lot better.
*Yes, technically, there isn't really a "safe" level of radiation. There is a range that is generally considered acceptable and a range which is basically unavoidable, but you know what I mean
I'm not arguing that cars are ideal and we should all use more of them. I'm just saying let's not force people into tunnels filled with neurotoxin when we can just remove the neurotoxin first.
Acting as if I just want more people to drive cars would be like me acting as if you want to gas the poors in subway tunnels just so that you have less traffic to deal with while you drive into the city in your car.
Congestion pricing and carbon taxes.
So easy. Nobody will object
No way. Adding an additional $4800 a year expense is not nothing. And if you aren't at least thinking about that cost, that's crazy to me. That's a significant chunk of potential investments.
Right, saving them the obvious 400 dollars we tacked on, and then an additional ~15% of their gross income by not operating a car.
Operating a car is unbelievably expensive. The subway is significantly cheaper, and it’s not even close.
It is too bad the rates could not be set based upon the income level of the driver. Make it hurt for everyone.
For example, if you make say 100,000 per year, it is say 100/day. I am sure it was thought about, but was ignored because the people in power want the best of both worlds. Cheap access and low traffic.
I think some countries in Europe use a graduated rate for this.
The arguments that this is a way to penalize poor people should be immediately seen for what they are, absolute bullshit and propaganda.
The only real refinement to this is there's a large and vocal community of people in NYC who work for the city (mainly cops and firefighters) who aren't all that rich and get free parking, almost always via illegal or questionable means, through use of city placards and parking by police stations and so on. But there's literally no reason to reward those people for anything, they've been gaming the system for decades.
"Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer. If you're luck enough to live by a cheap ones like Trader Joes, they are ridiculously crowded so you're paying in a different form. Or you can try your luck with Bodegas but they're often sell expired food, are overpriced and rarely have anything fresh . Then you're stuck with how much you can carry or try to use one of those granny pushers. Kids could be very difficult to wrangle as well and there are plenty of unpleasant things you have to explain to them or ignore. It's very dehumanizing
My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things. They don't belong everywhere, like NY. But overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation.
Then you maybe haven't spent too long thinking about it.
Climate change is a big one.
Microplastics from tire wear.
Asthma rates in children.
Obesity rates.
Etc etc etc.
Car centric design makes us poorer, fatter, less healthy. It makes our cities and towns poorer, less resilient, and uglier. I can go on.
It'd be better to make sure that people can still access the things they want conveniently while minimizing the harms. I think it's a good thing to improve and promote public transportation by making them the more attractive option rather than just punish drivers and restrict their options until they have no choice but to settle for something less than what they have.
It doesn’t, it does the opposite. It pushes everything further away which means you no longer have the freedom to not have a car. It, quite literally, redesigns our cities to become dependent on them.
It’s like heroin. Sure, it feels good, but at what cost? How do we stop now?
Yes, society should help those in wheelchairs, but shouldn't we aim to give everyone use of their legs?
If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives.
You might not know what an analogy is. If cars actually were legs that wouldn't have even been an analogy would it?
> If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives.
If people could live without cars (which is to say that they were able to do everything they can do currently with cars, but without them) then yes, everyone would be better off because they'd still have all the benefits having a car gets them (the ability to quickly get to where they need to go with the things they need) without any of the downsides (costs, maintenance, pollution, giant parking lots etc)
The exact same thing is true for legs though. If we could all live without legs and not miss them because we floated around or something, we'd also have all the benefits with none of the downsides (no leg diseases/injuries, no knee replacements, shorter pants, etc) but that isn't terribly helpful because right now most people in the US can't live without a car or their legs.
No matter how much we might wish we didn't need our legs, as long as people still have and need their legs, we should probably design our cities to accommodate those legs. Even once we have a working alternative for legs, we should probably still design our cities to accommodate legs until the majority of people have been able to transition to not having legs.
Right now most people in the US don't have an option to replace their legs with something else that works just as well for them, just like they don't have an option to replace their cars with something that works just as well for them. We should probably fix that situation before we start punishing people for having legs and/or cars.
Yes, I do know what an analogy is.
It doesn't work because cutting off your legs is bad, obviously. But reducing dependence on cars is good for people who drive cars. It, quite literally, makes driving better. Less traffic, more parking, less accidents, less deaths, cleaner air.
> No matter how much we might wish we didn't need our legs, as long as people still have and need their legs, we should probably design our cities to accommodate those legs.
Our cities ARE still designed for cars. Moving away from car design is slow and painful. It took 100 years to get into this mess. There's no reason to lose our heads because of a fee, a fee mind you that still does not get anywhere close to covering the true cost of cars.
> Right now most people in the US don't have an option to replace their legs with something else that works just as well for them
You know where they do? New York City! Feel free to live in whatever suburban hellscape you like. This entire comment and ideology simply does not apply to New York City. There, car drivers are a small minority.
Give people something better and they'll line up to take it. The problem is that doing that requires a major public investment. It's a lot harder to say "We're going to spend billions to make public transport worth taking even for people who already own cars" than it is to say "We're going to punish people for using cars and take their money and make many people's lives worse, but mostly just the poorest people so you probably don't have to worry and in fact you'll have fewer cars on the road when you drive them"
The auto industry had no problems spending a fortune bribing politicians in order to make cars more attractive to people by redesigning our cities around them and hurting anyone who didn't own a car. We need to be ready to spend the money to undo what they did.
Yes, and the way you do this is you siphon off funds given to car users and instead invest them in public infrastructure.
The reality is car users don't actually pay the price for anything, the costs are externalized. For example, we've spent over 25 Trillion on the interstate highway system alone. The gas tax and car sales tax doesn't even make a dent in this. Car users are paying cents on the dollar for what they're doing.
Another example, the average parking spot costs 7,000 dollars a year to maintain. But we have free parking everywhere. That cost is externalized, and paid for by you and me. And then, of course, carbon.
It's not so much a punishment, but rather a small nudge towards a fair distribution. If car users had to pay what it actually cost, they would be in an uproar. They've been on the welfare of everyone for a long time now. We're only asking them to pay closer to their own fair share. Keep in mind - they're still not paying what they should.
The claim was: "The only inconvenience [of not having a car and only using public transportation in a dense city] is that sometimes where you're going is a bit of a walk."
This was refuted with examples of other sources of inconvenience like: "Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer." which was followed by "My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things." and that pushing public transportation for the sake of public transportation (ignoring the limitations it would bring to people's lives) doesn't make sense, which brought us to "lose your freedoms because it's better for you and less ugly"
Having a car means being able to go where you want, when you want, how you want. It means you can shop at stores that are out of walking range. It means you can pile your two Mastiffs into a car to take them to the vet. It means you can go to visit a loved one at times when public transportation doesn't run, travel to places it doesn't reach, and avoid adding large amounts of travel time (either waiting or walking) to your trips.
Giving up cars would very obviously mean a huge loss in people's freedom, and introduce large impositions on their time. That's a hard sell when the argument is just "it'll be better for your health, less harmful to the environment, and cities will look prettier"
Public health and environmental concerns are good things to address, but cars solve a lot of problems too, including many that public transportation doesn't solve, and public transportation introduces other problems that cars don't have. If you care about encouraging the use of public transportation it'd be very worthwhile to acknowledge those things and take them into account.
Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water
Figure out what's causing asthma in children
Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply?
A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive.
Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?
Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions.
They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.
Public transportation can be improved to be better than it is and cities can be redesigned to make using public transportation easier, but until both of those things start happening, people will resist replacing all the good things cars offer with something that is much worse for them.
When car companies wanted to sell cars, they changed the roads and cities. The more they changed the roads and cities to make cars more attractive the more cars they sold. Cars already solved a lot of the problems people had, but car companies went even further to create many new problems that only their cars would solve. Making life worse for people without cars just to increase car sales was a dick move made by a bunch of assholes. Why is everyone so willing to make life worse for people with cars to sell public transportation now?
What we have now are people selling public transportation without bothering to change the roads and cities. There is no priority on making public transportation more attractive, instead the attention is all on how to make cars more painful to use.
Nobody has worked out how to get public transportation to solve the problems that only cars do currently. Nobody has addressed the problems that cause people to avoid public transportation. The entire attitude is basically "We're going to keep punishing car drivers until they put up with something far worse than what they have now so that maybe eventually we can have something better".
All the discussion is "take away parking" and "narrow the streets" and "charge drivers more money" but nobody is saying "We've made our public transportation systems clean, safe, pleasant, and dependable" or "No one ever has to wait more than 7 minutes at a station" or "We've expanded service to new areas and put in stations every three blocks"
It's true that in an ideal world we would be far less dependent on cars, but we'll never get there without making the alternatives more attractive and until that happens, punishing drivers is only going to piss people off and rightly so. It's a dick move.
Physically impossible to have them pollute less than methods of mass transportation. Mathematically, even. Just divide the number of people carried per pollution caused by cars vs trains, bikes, or even buses. There's nothing you can do to make cars competitive.
> Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water
"Just figure it out", ok. But even then, an ounce of prevention is worth the pound of a cure.
> Figure out what's causing asthma in children
A little random but ok. I'm guessing grinding up rubber and metal particles into the air right next to where said children live isn't the best for their lungs.
> Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply?
1. Wake up
2. Walk 30 feet to your car
3. Sit as you drive to work
4. Spend 8 hours at your desk
5. Walk 30 feet to your car
6. Sleep
7. Why am I fat?! Maybe improve the food supply?!
> A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive.
Virtually none are, an electric car is still a car, see point 1.
> Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?
Highly dependent on your definition of worse; I'd argue the sort of streets and environments you can find in the Netherlands [1][2][3] are way better than in the US.
Not everything is a technical issue that can simply be solved by better engineering.
[1]: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=862
I'd argue that if you were correct people would have already been using alternatives and there'd have been no need to punish people for driving. When you give people a better option they take it.
NYC could have improved alternatives to make them more attractive, but they choose to make driving worse instead forcing people who can't afford it to use less convenient ways to get around.
The convenience of driving depends on traffic. If you're the only car on the road then it's very convenient. In gridlock, it's very inconvenient (but also takes the convenience of buses down with it).
So you reach some equilibrium of traffic levels where the marginal person opts for walking / subway rather than driving in all that traffic. But if you could magically reduce traffic, then driving becomes the better option and people take it.
If you want to sustain an equilibrium of lower traffic, you need to add a penalty to driving to stabilize the convenience of being the marginal driver in that equilibrium.
There are knock-on benefits to doing so, including that it makes alternatives to driving such as busses more effective.
Road congestion is only one factor. If you ignore all the other things that keep people from wanting to use public transportation then punishing drivers is just going to piss people off.
People want to do what works best for them. Make public transportation work best for them and they'll use it no matter how deserted the streets are. Better yet, as traffic dies down, roads and parking lots can be reclaimed and nobody will care. Start closing roads and parking lots without solving the problems public transportation has, and people will be upset.
Increased ridership (as people are pushed to alternatives from cars) also leads to increased bus frequency, which also greatly improves the experience for all riders.
So it's actually a big step towards solving some of the major problems with public transit, but of course not exclusive with other steps being taken too.
Plus, reduced car traffic directly increases comfort and safety for walking and cycling as well.
Punishing drivers until they have no choice but to accept that their lives will be worse is not a good way to promote public transportation, even if you pinkie promise that the pain will lessen over years/decades.
It's not necessary to strong arm people into using alternatives to cars if you make those alternatives genuinely better for more and more people in an increasing number of situations. As people naturally choose the path of least resistance, everything just gets better for everyone.
Even when those policies actually improve the driving experience by getting more people out of cars and reducing congestion for the remaining drivers, many drivers don't tend to compare against the counterfactual where those road users become car traffic blocking their way when evaluating the impact of those policies on their drive. They just see bike and bus lanes being prioritized and react like it's a war against cars.
So how do you imagine that transit can be improved, without drivers reacting like they're being punished?
I'd start by holding off on policies like congestion pricing, narrowing lanes, refusing to add/update roads where needed, and eliminating parking options. These things do nothing to make alternatives more attractive, even if they strong arm more people into using them.
From what I've seen of public transport options around the country, there is a ton of room for improvement that would go a long way to help without punishing drivers.
Generally buses should try to minimize wait time on busy routes, routes and schedules should be clear and consistent, transfers should be minimized and when needed there should be no wait times going from one line to another. Most importantly I wouldn't put as much emphasis on buses as I would on trains since they move way more people much faster and don't compete with cars on the road or add to street traffic.
The busses and train cars themselves should be clean, well maintained, safe, and inexpensive to ride. Offering free rides for certain routes/times is a great way to get people using them even if it requires taking a loss in the short term. I wouldn't expect a new/improved public transportation system to pay for itself for a very long time. Transforming our cities and streets is a long term investment that can't happen overnight.
Busses and train cars should be comfortable and provide storage for things like bikes, bags, and groceries (bonus points if it has a freezer). Bus stops and stations should be added where possible so more people can access them by foot with less than 15 minutes of walking. They should be well lit, and provide seating, shelters, vending machines, phone chargers, trash/recycling, and information.
Bus-only lanes can be nice, but not if it means closing off lanes that would back up regular traffic. That might mean adding lanes in some cases and reclaiming them later.
Bike lanes should be added to existing roads where possible (and not by reducing lanes from already crowded streets) and be required when building new roads. Bike lanes should be well marked and protected/separated from cars. Drivers hate bikes because they have to share the same roads. Protected bike lanes actually decrease friction between bikers and drivers.
Priority should be given to bike routes that connect and travel through useful places for foot traffic. It'd be nice if they follow bus routes so that bikers can stop for rests/drinks at the the bus stops or even take the bus for parts of their trip.
The biggest thing would be to find and improve the places that would be most likely to attract people to alternatives then prioritize those sites first. Adding bike routes in a downtown area or adding bus routes that bring people into and out of the areas that are the most congested/annoying areas to drive in.
I've lived in several places that had popular areas I'd actively avoid driving into because of the cars and/or foot traffic. I'd have loved a alternative, but most of the time my options were a bus system that would have added at least an hour to my travel time and involve long walks down non-pedestrian friendly roads on top of it, or a train system that was expensive, dirty, smelled like a bathroom, and would still require a drive to the station where parking was insanely expensive and not an overly safe place to leave your vehicle. I've also been in cities overseas with great public transportation. Clean trains that ran every few minutes, a seemingly excessive number of stations a walkable distance from each other, etc.
I know good public transportation is possible. It just needs a lot of investment and tax payers hate investing in their cities while politicians are heavily lobbied by car companies not to make the situation better. A bunch of ineffective badly planned half measures only add to taxpayer/driver outrage.
(Yes they do! I explained why a few posts above in this very thread! If you disagree, I'd appreciate if you could articulate your disagreement, rather than reiterate it!)
Even with no infrastructure upgrades, cycling becomes safer and more comfortable when more people are cycling and fewer people are driving! Transit service improves through increased ridership and less congestion, even with no attached funding increases or infrastructure projects! Taking cars off the road actually makes every method of transportation more attractive, including driving itself!
> Schedules should be clear and consistent
The #1 reason why bus schedules are not consistent is: drum roll congestion! And when it's difficult to keep a schedule, transfer waits are unavoidable. The only way to implement what you say is to either give busses dedicated lanes, or Thanos-snap cars offthe road.
> I wouldn't put as much emphasis on buses as I would on trains
I love trains too, but where are you going to run them? Trains have a large turning radius and run best with grade-separated crossings. You can tunnel the entire thing underground but that's a big project and how will you fund it? In Asia they fund it through property development but how will you do it in a city that's already been developed and had its passenger rail stripped out for highways in the 1960s?
> The busses and train cars themselves should be clean, well maintained, safe, and inexpensive to ride.
I agree! And these days I'm often opting for the car because it's cheaper than bus fare, even when I'd rather not drive. And yes, it does have to be a long-term investment, but one that will never be recouped through ticket sales. So where is the money to fund this level of service coming from? Are car-driving taxpayers who don't ride transit going to approve this much taxpayer funding? Even when those same voters are so die-hard opposed to congestion pricing?
> Bus-only lanes can be nice, but[...] adding lanes in some cases and reclaiming them later.
Are you suggesting to pave over sidewalks? Or to cut holes through buildings? I don't understand how you would add new lanes to a congested city road. I have the same question for your suggestion about bike lanes, where you suggest adding them to existing roads but not by reducing lanes. Do you propose to add elevated bikeways?
I think I don't disagree with you about how good these things are, but I must be missing something about your vision.
If taking public transportation adds an hour or more to your trip because you're waiting on a bus or train to show up, then taking badly planned routes to places you don't need to go making stops all along the way, then fewer cars are on the road aren't going to help you. Your life is still worse than it was driving directly to where you needed to be.
If public transportation isn't safe and you get assaulted using it or have to spend your trip sitting on urine soaked seats you're not going to care if there's less traffic for the bus driver to deal with or what traffic conditions richer people are enjoying.
Bikers probably see the most benefit from some fraction of the population being forced to use bad public transportation, but that won't make up for a lack of clear routes and dedicated lanes when the roads are still filled with cars who aren't looking out for you while you navigate dangerous intersections.
> The #1 reason why bus schedules are not consistent is: drum roll congestion!
From what I've seen the problem isn't always late times, although that can be an issue, it's things like routes only running on certain days, routes changing depending on the day, or the times they run changing day to day because cities don't want to spend the money to give them set schedules. The absolute best schedules are no schedules, where the bus/train runs every x minutes all day long going the same route so you can catch it anywhere on any day of the week and know where you'll end up. Navigating the transit system in some cities is such a huge chore there are people making 3rd party apps to try to make sense of it all.
> I love trains too, but where are you going to run them? Trains have a large turning radius and run best with grade-separated crossings. You can tunnel the entire thing underground but that's a big project and how will you fund it?
Funding is a major issue but it'll be worth it to get cars off the streets. Underground in some places is good, but more involved so you'd ideally have a mix of both. A lot of cities could see an improvement with just one line running back and forth from one end of town, through downtown, and to the other end, but it's going to cost a lot of money up front. The car industry put us way behind the rest of the developed world and we've got to eat the costs to catch up eventually.
> So where is the money to fund this level of service coming from? Are car-driving taxpayers who don't ride transit going to approve this much taxpayer funding?
The way things are now? It doesn't look good. I've seen several proposals to build up public transportation fail because people didn't want the tax burden. There's a lot of costs to the mess we have now though and a lot to be gained by putting in the money to improve the situation, but that means educating people so they know why it's important to make public transportation worth taking, and it means that people need to have enough faith in their government to do the job without just screwing tax payers over.
> Do you propose to add elevated bikeways?
I hadn't considered it but... maybe? We expand roads all the time already but to add lanes for more cars. Sometimes that means reducing the distance from the sidewalk to the street. Sometimes it means buying (or renting) property or taking it through eminent domain. If you're looking to redesign a city to no longer be centered around cars, those are the kinds of thing we'll need to be wiling to do. The alternative to redesigning transportation infrastructure for a future with less cars is to keep expanding highways and roads which requires the same thing but also kills property values.
If cities can be redesigned well enough and there are fewer cars on the roads property values should go up, and property owners would have better air quality, and less noise pollution. I think some people would happily put up with an easement or sell a couple yards of their property for that.
The ultimate goal is fewer car lanes, more space for everything else, but that means improving public transport while accommodating the cars we have until we can reclaim the space they no longer take up.
If transit were the same speed or faster than carpooling, it wouldn’t be nearly as significant. In NYC it is not.
Once I got to college, I was so happy to move to a tiny basement party near university so I could live a better life. When I lived in Beijing, everything was accessible by subway, but we also had a mall a couple of blocks away that had a grocery store in the basement. I chose this lifestyle for my kid, we walk to school in the morning, he's in 2nd grade of a K-8 but the highschool he will go to is about the same distance. He is now the opposite of me, wanting to drive places instead of walk...ugh.
Car dependency reduces the efficacy of public transit, so it actually does the opposite of what you say. If we didn’t build around cars you’d still have farther flung residential development. It’s just be close to a train stop so you could easily get around.
There’s really no benefit to car dependency outside rural areas. Entirely a mistake with no benefits at all, because the alternative design that would have arisen without car dependency is better in every way.
Children can take buses and trains by themselves. Children living in towns and cities with public transport can access far more services.
And yes, a lot of this is about a level of privilege. My wife doesn't have full time paid employment, so she has time to cycle to the kids' school, get them, walk them to a brilliant extra curricular over the other side of the city and back after, walk them back after, then cycle them all to our house. And she takes another kid with her whose parents both work full time, and that's amazing. It's just not normal in the two-parents-working world we live in.
Living near good services is a privilege. Having the time to take children around, regardless of mode of transportation, is a privilege. Having a work from home job where you aren't in a van to a nearby town to do some construction work, but can just relax all day and have a cycle ride be the hardest thing you do is a privilege. Privileged instincts about what's possible for those with that privilege are not generally applicable.
While transit infrastructure isn't perfect and many areas are underserved, this doesn't really change that calculus that much. The Staten Island Ferry remains free. There are plenty of express bus routes for people with long commutes, and the express buses now move more quickly. (New Jersey seems to benefit most from this. Commuting on NJT to the Port Authority Bus Terminal is a shockingly common, but unloved, commuting pattern.)
Celebs on the subway isn't that unusual in NYC. https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
[0] https://www.trenitalia.com/it/le_frecce/frecciarossa-per-il-...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/12/04/that-time-the-pari...
I've never seen it on a purely urban or suburban train within Europe, but then encountering a "screamer or crazy person" is something that happens perhaps once a year, and only if travelling at unusual times like at night.
However, if one car costs $3 and the other costs $6, the person who is statistically likely to urinate on the seats is more likely to pick the $3.
I will honestly pay double fare just to sit in a car with others that can afford to pay double fare.
I've been to other countries where the public transportation was amazing, and unsurprisingly there were almost zero people urinating (once in Japan I saw a drunk salaryman passed out with his pants around his ankles at a station and he was quietly whisked away less than a minute after I spotted him) so it's not as if a nice train system for everyone is some pipe dream that can't work in reality.
Making cars preferentially affordable for the poor isn’t ever going to work.
I wish traffic fines worked like this as well.
All sorts of fines and fees and many underpinning laws would evaporate overnight if the HN and up tax brackets got hit as hard by them as the people who are usually targeted for selective enforcement get hit (and they will because there will be huge revenue potential in doing so).
The only people negatively affected are those moderately wealthy who are unwilling to pay the charge for improved times and highly dislike using public transport. It's the same people that will circle around a block for 20 minutes to get a free parking spot instead of going to a garage.
Moving away from car centric urban spaces makes it better for everyone, including the poor. Owning a car shouldn't be a precondition to live in a society.
(Yes, I know you could haul all your stuff on public transit; I’m simply observing that many workers choose not to and they probably have a good reason. Those of us whose tools are limited to a MacBook Air in a designer bag should hesitate to dictate how other people live.)
The people really negatively affected and the ones screaming their heads off are city employees who scam free parking via dubious placards and parking illegally. It’s a whole NYC subculture which is hard to miss if you live here. That’s what Hochul was scared of, it’s what everyone is scared of since they’re often somewhat connected. But fuck those people.
I support not wanting a regressive tax, but there are just so many complications in trying to do that.
Sitting in gridlock already does this. The more valuable your time the harder it hits.
If you haven't lived in NYC it's a bit weird to wrap your head around vehicle ownership vs public transportation here. The subways run 24/7. Manhattan, the borough with the highest income, has the lowest vehicle ownership at about 22%. Staten Island, the second richest borough, has the highest vehicle ownership at about 84%.
A typical parking spot is $500-$800. Spread amongst 4 workers, that’s “only” $125 a month, plus the tolls, fuel etc., and then is a significantly higher quality of life (mostly due to a shorter commute time) than trying to take public transit, particularly from places poor people live. (They could obviously use high occupancy vehicle lanes which makes a big difference going from NJ->NYC.)
I used to park alongside quite a few people doing this. Everything from construction workers to people working in restaurants. Rents were much cheaper if they were willing to drive an hour.
You’re conflating short term change with long term change. In the long term reducing car dependency is hugely beneficial
To the extent there’s any truth to this at all people drive to suburban bus and train stations from very far out. That’s definitely a thing.
But even if what you are saying is true the congestion pricing doesn’t change the math much for each person when split four ways.
CSS studied the outer boroughs and found roughly 4% driving into Manhattan versus 57% taking transit, with a 50:1 ratio of low income workers benefiting from the congestion charge versus paying it.
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/congestion-pricing-outer-bo...
https://www.replicahq.com/post/whos-paying-the-literal-and-m...
> Compared to those who take transit, those who drive into the zone have an average household income 11% higher ($189K vs. $171K) and median income 15% higher ($136K vs. $114K).
There are some poor people who drive in, but it’s a tiny fraction of the total and there is a generous discount for them. It’s almost certain that transit improvements paid for by the mostly affluent drivers will help a fair number of them stop driving to work, too, and losing that expense is a big financial win.
And probably quite a bit larger majority after a while of congestion pricing.
Also AFAIK apart from being a bit better on schedule, there have been no material improvements for public transportation.
And while you're right about the charge itself being regressive in nature, the reality of NYC is that the vast, vast majority of poor people (and middle class people) are already taking public transit.
https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that...
Roads and signaling infrastructure are an expensive public good whose value is enjoyed unevenly. Attaching usage fees to public goods is never popular but makes sense when they are not limitless.
That's the point of policies like this. It's always about penalizing the poor.
Alaska does that with its Permanent fund.
Even Elon and Trump caught on, wanting to give 20% of the DOGE to people.
That makes the program popular, and people say "more taxes, please!"
In fact, maybe if they do it enough, they'll realize that funding a UBI with pigovian taxes is an economic and environmental policy miracle!
It’s analogous to a movie theater that is free to enter, but with no capacity limits, so zero people have a good movie viewing experience. When you start charging for tickets, and only sell one ticket per seat, it’s true that the poorest people may get priced out. But I do still recommend that movie theaters sell tickets and limit capacity to prevent congestion.
I could even imagine a more program that allows a certain number of free rides per day.
What about the poor people who live in Manhattan, who are negatively affected by increased pollution from increased traffic in their neighborhoods?
What about the poor people that will have better access to public transit, with the funding derived from the congestion zones?
I hate to break it to you, but congestion is primarily caused by "the poor", which is to say, the middle class, because the poor in cities are usually taking public transportation anyway. If a city is 50% poor, 40% middle class, and 10% wealthy (to pick arbitrary numbers), then the wealthy only comprise ~20% of the traffic on the road. You need significant reductions in traffic from the 80% of middle class drivers in order to significantly reduce congestion.
If you reduce the congestion tax to make it easier for the middle class to afford, so that they can get on the road, then you haven't achieved anything.
I don't own, or plan to own, a car, but I still oppose congestion charges based on the marketization of basic public goods.
In general the primary purpose of these pricings is to discourage people from using the priced thing, revenue from the fees is a bonus. The price naturally is more painful to pay the less you have money, so the less you have the more you are discouraged.
It's unfortunately mutated from the Economics definition to a more loose "good for the public" in public discourse, confusing everyone.
Street space in Manhattan is not a public good, because with enough cars using it, it becomes more and more useless. To fix that you have to make fewer people want to drive there some way. There are other methods than pricing, but they have problems of their own.
Very widely used methods are e.g. reducing lanes, reducing speed limits, banning (private) cars on some roads and decreasing parking space. These are used a lot more widely, and probably a lot more succesfully, than pricing systems. Notably these all are about as discouraging regadless of how much money you have.
this kinda just exposes the depth of car-centric bias. to any competent urban designer, in a place like Manhattan, public transit is the "basic public service" and cars & roadways are a LUXURY.
(Because the wealthy can easily afford the extra cost, but non-wealthy cannot, making travel on public streets more convenient for the wealthy, while denying public streets to others?)
I'd want to explore options that are more fair, but that the wealthy wouldn't like, because it doesn't give them preferential treatment.
For example, start with only public mass transit, emergency vehicles, delivery vehicles, workers needing to transport equipment, and walking. And then figure out what else needs to be added in, and how you prevent it just being gamed. (Nope, the public streets don't necessarily owe ride-hailing apps, taxis, and limos use of the public streets; nor is anyone necessarily entitled to use of a non-mass-transit vehicle on public streets when in Congestion Mode, no matter how wealthy or royal they are.)
Note that you dropped the word "public".
* Anyone who takes a Bus benefits as well
* The wealthy pay with their fee to make public transit better for everyone
The trickle-down we've been seeing is the wealthy urinating upon everyone else from a great height.
Wouldn't increased bus ridership and lower car traffic point to the opposite?
I take issue with the framing of this. Sure public transport is "safe" as in you are very unlikely to get assaulted or murdered. But I think most people use that word as a stand in for general unpleasant experience. If you have to avoid a train car because someone decided to camp out there, or you nearly get kicked in the head by a subway dancer, you're not exactly not "safe" but you'd rather not be there.
In the realm of major inconveniences, I'd much rather deal with someone being aggressive on the subway than be in a major car crash.
Also drugs are dangerous. I really don't want to see someone die, pass out, fall or vomit on me.
It's kind of bizarre I have to make this point.