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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
You max out paying $34 a week, or $17 if you qualify for reduced fare.
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.
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 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
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.