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Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

It also ignores the fact that people driving in Manhattan are disproportionately among the richest people in NYC.

From the first hand accounts I’ve heard on this, the rich love not having to share the road with the less rich.

The guy who gets shafted here is the middle to upper middle class with a job that requires driving into NYC.

This is the major point for me. It's a policy miracle for some. Delivery, construction, repair etc etc jobs will be the ones it will hurt as usual. The rich won't care.

Delivery and trades love congestion pricing because with the faster trip times they can now hit more deliveries and more jobs per day.

A business that functions on efficiently delivering services to Manhattan would likely benefit from getting there faster in exchange for some cost increases.

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.

From my experience living in central London they just jack the prices to compensate. It's expensive getting a plumber here. Although I guess the charge is only part of it. The congestion charge here is £15 and my last two plumbers were £400 a time.

I'd never dream of driving into Central London because it costs something like $90 to park. The congestion charge is pretty much irrelevant for that use case.

Or is land just far cheaper in Manhattan?

It's a different system. In NYC I think most parking is charged. In London most on street parking is residents only which makes the small amount of parking for non residents expensive.

Though those who need to drive to work are now seeing a reduction in traffic, a better experience, and shorter commutes.

For the working contractors that need to drive their van around no matter what, the reduction in transit times seems like a big benefit.

> richest people in the country

True but in most of the country even the poorest have to drive.

In Manhattan only 22% of households own a car, and the number is probably a fraction of that in the congestion relief zone.

More likely* but not always.

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