Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I see a lot of talk of other cities that don't have good public transportation. For example, between Flushing in Queens to 8th Ave in Brooklyn, there are privately run buses at affordable rate and get you there at half the time of trains. There are buses from a lot of residential areas in NJ that are closer to NYC that go to port authority (west side, 42nd st) very quickly. In fact, those buses are getting there faster and more comfortable than ever due to congestion pricing.
I'm curious, do other larger cities where commercial is concentrated into one area not have a private mini-bus(es)? I know public transportation would be great, but having a competitive environment for privately own bus services might be the answer to a lot of cities.
It turns out, there are some private buses. Take for example, Santiago, Chile. It succeeded in terms of profits and customer satisfaction. The problem is they do not survive. There comes a time when they don't pay sufficient "political capital" and get taken over (nationalized) by local politicians.
The result of the private bus system nationalization by socialists is macabre, at least this the Santiago case. First, the newly minted public bus service went from $60M USD profits, to massive $600M in losses [1] overnight. That is a negative 10x return. And service declined as well. [1] But that in itself is not a new story.
Now, fast forward ~12 years. The system bleeds so much money that the govt is forced to increase bus fares. The increase in fares activates the biggest riots the country has seen in decades [2]
Out of the riots, one young protester rises to the top. He comes with ideas of a new constitution. He is a young socialist leader. A certain Gabriel Boric [3], who had ran and won for president of University of Chile Student Federation against the leader of the Communist Party of Chile [4]
So now we come full-circle: A working private bus service was replaced by socialist politicians into a public bus system that hemorrhaged 10x more money than it earned previously in actual profits. The public bus funding crisis and subsequent fare hikes led to massive riots, which were a direct on-ramp for a socialist to ascend to power as president of Chile. In short, successful private local bus enterprise was replaced with a socialist bus system, which then proceeded to implode. This implosion of a socialist idea led to the spread of even more socialism, but now at a national level.
This chain of events from beginning to end, only took 20 years.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-the-political-economy-of-...
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3033688/cha...
[3] https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-03-12/gabriel-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_boric#Role_in_the_Esta...
Now, I'm not in the "free market will solve all our woes" camp, either, especially when it comes to what we call "public service" in France. Over here, transit systems are facing a push from the EU bureaucrats for "opening up to competition". I'm bracing for the shit to hit the proverbial fan.
Sure, our national rail company is world-famous for being on strike all day every day and twice on Sunday. But, when they do run, they work fairly well and serve most of the country, including random, middle-of-nowhere towns. New companies coming in for the competition only serve the most profitable routes. Of course, I don't know all the laws, but I haven't heard of any obligation for new companies to serve the less profitable routes. So, the SNCF will have less money from the profitable routes to subsidize these lines. This means that either service will degrade, or the State will have to increase funding [0]. Now, I'm generally fine with paying (reasonable) taxes and whatnot, but I'm less fine with having to pay more taxes just so that some random foreign company can make money.
So, what will become of these people? When, at the same time, there's a push to restrict private vehicle ownership, and, especially, to limit access to town centers for older cars? Think these people can afford brand spanking new electric cars? Think again.
---
[0] I think the EU doesn't allow States to directly subsidize the rail company, it would be some form of unfair competition or similar. But the State is allowed to spend on social programs, so there could be some kind of program to help with transit, which, in the end, is the same thing: the people will have to subsidize service for less profitable routes because a chunk of the income from profitable ones has moved to a private company which doesn't care.
SNCF operate those unprofitable routes in the middle of nowhere only because they get told and paid to do so by the state (Intercités) or the regions (TER). Private operators can bid to operate those routes too, and some do (soon Keolis, an SNCF subisdiary operated as a private company, will operate the first non-SNCF TER network).
Besides that, any operator with a license can apply to operate any route they deem profitable. And so far this has been a roaring success, with Trenitalia on Paris-Lyon (and now Marseille) and Paris-Milan being better and cheaper than SNCF. SNCF added low cost (Ouigo) trains on multiple popular routes mainly because they knew competition is coming (postponed by Covid), they probably wouldn't have bothered otherwise. This is a win-win-win for the average user.
The services that need to be maintained will be, regardless of who is the operator. Some of the profits of the private operators will pay for them (because they pay for network access, which covers the costs of the infrastructure + profit margin).
That would seem true of any organization other than a self-funded one. All corporations, banks, governments, etc. use investment by others (including taxpayers) and cease operations if that investment stops.
The bland generalization about 'socialists' isn't meaningful without some evidence and a specific falsifiable claim. We can make statements like that about anything.
In other words, why are you trying to use one cherry picked example of gross mismanagement to argue that all publicly run projects are doomed?
1) the biggest riots in 4 decades. 2) the requested resignation of all cabinet ministers 3) a new (socialist) constitution.
My point was not "you will die every time you play russian roulette" .
Because that's not the point. My point is, Santiago was playing it safe for many decades. Then they switched to russian roulette. Bad idea, and it showed in less than 1 decade (9 years, to be exact)
The busses in general are some form of public-private partnership. Several private bus companies operate the city busses. There are some annoying edge cases. For example, pre-purchased tickets are a mess -- better pay cash. If another operator takes over your route, even temporarily, your tickets can't be used.
Mostly it seems to work though, I take the bus fairly regularly and it's quite nice. It's clean, has OK air conditioning, and arrives frequently enough that I don't have to check the schedule. There's someone to help elderly people and children on and off the bus. Elderly people ride free, reduced price for students, etc. It's pleasant.
Some of these busses are mini-versions for less popular routes. I think I've even seen a couple of other vehicle types, like some form of van (rarely). One or twice a sort of truck with benches.
It's really great for tourists though, it does a good job of connecting one of the major tourist areas (Thao Dien) to the city center.
I'm hoping that later extensions will do more to alleviate traffic, e.g. head out towards Nha Be or something. Although I hope to move to a quieter city long before any of that.
Hong Kong has public and private mini busses. They are distinguished by the color of their roofs, green or red.
They are operated by companies for TFL (though they are all red, you can read the company name).
I'm not sure at what point that arrangement happened, somewhere between the outright privatisations of the 80s, or the stealth ones of the black years, which used PFI.
https://citymapper.com/news/1800/introducing-the-citymapper-...
I vaguely remember hearing about it but never tried it out. Not sure when it was canned. The software part sounds very interesting but could also be sold to existing transit companies and government agencies to improve their network.
The experience of bus deregulation in Britain outside of London tended to go one of two ways. In most of the country it simply created a private monopoly while in a few cities like Manchester there were routes so popular (busiest bus route in Europe!) that multiple companies competed for custom and the city council had to employ stewards to ensure fair play.
This level of success was really an admission of failure. Anywhere else would have built a subway or at least a tram. (Metrolink is great it just doesn't even attempt to serve the busiest transit corridor in the city.)
London was of course treated differently. While the operators were privatised they remained regulated by government. Public transport in London is simply too important to the UK to be allowed to fail as it was in other parts of the country.
Anyway it's good to see central government allow Greater Manchester to regulate its buses again. After smashing it up local transport in 1986 the Tories finally relented in 2023 and allowed Greater Manchester control. Quite what Labour were doing for local transport outside of London between 1997 and 2010 is open to question. But it certainly resulted in renaissance of London public transport.
This means you get private companies trying to lower costs and so costs are privatised, but the profits (if any) are socialised into a public authority.
This then allows TfL to offer system-wide passes making bus travel over all 43 boroughs cost effective.
Perfect is the enemy of good. This is the #1 thing other progressives need to learn. Everything is a tradeoff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty,_dangerous_and_demeaning
Now their an app which shows you when your next bus will arrive tracked by gps so you can leave the house on time to get there, and fares are standardised at £2 per trip or £5 all day. Before the standardised pricing you had people on minimum wage who would be paying an hour or two of their wage just to get to work.
All this came due to the local Government mandating it, these things could have been implemented before by private companies as they have existed in London for years but they simply chose not too.
I remember having a meeting about a completely unrelated matter with TfGM many years ago, and they bemoaned not having the same sort of sway as TfL to fix public transport - buses in particular.
The bus situation was madness for decades: there was weird operator specific passes on the Fallowfield/University corridor (the busiest bus route in Europe when I was a student there), so you had to choose at the start of the week if you wanted a Stagecoach or a Finglands pass and then you were stuck with it. The North/South operator divide meant that everyone trying to get from say Cheetham Hill to Rusholme, had to pass through Piccadilly Gardens because that's where different companies "owned" different stands. That just led to all the problems of... well, Piccadilly Gardens...
I've not tried the Bee Network myself yet on any of my recent visits, but it looks like the fix that was needed, and it sounds like they have at least one happy customer in you. I genuinely believe it will contribute to better working conditions, cleaner air, and even economic development for Manchester.
And all it took was fixing the buses, something everyone knew needed doing more than 20 years ago...
When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is.
The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling.
IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars.
I live in Berlin center. The only reason for me to own a car is prestige. So I don't.
During rush hour any destination I go to, even outer city, would take me the same time by public transport as by car. At least.
During non-peak hours going by car can be from 25-40% faster than by public transport if you trust Google Maps & co.
But these estimates only consider travel time. When you add finding a place to park at the destination (and walking to the destination as the place may not be right in front) this shrinks to either negative numbers or max. savings of maybe 25%.
My average travel time is around 30mins by public transport. This includes walking to and from the station.
Why would I own a car to save maybe, on a lucky day, 5mins?
At the same time bike infrastructure is being improved. Lots of side streets have been declared bike streets, cars may only enter if they have business there (you live there or deliver something).
The city has enforced this with blocking off intersections on such streets with permanent structures that let only bicycles pass.
Big streets have bike lanes that are often separated by a curb or bollards from car traffic.
This makes it also less nice to drive a car. You can't use Waze any more to guide you through side streets to avoid congestion because these streets can't be passed through any more by car, only on foot or by bike.
Which means the chance of being stuck in traffic increases. When at the same time you have options to be there just as fast with public transport and almost as fast but more healthy and with less likeliness of being ran over by a car, by bike.
These ideas are not new. And there are many more things other cities do to reduce car traffic/need for cars.
If you think of private mini busses, the best examples IMHO is actually ridepooling, e.g. Volkswagen's Moia in Hamburg and Hannover.
All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268
Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square.
Its a slow process but its getting there.
Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.
One street in a city the size of NY?
I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;)
On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.
NYC needs more, but I think the tide is turning the right way.
There is no restriction of through traffic. Effectively pedestrians are still confined to tiny and overcrowded sidewalks.
By comparison, here’s what a pedestrian street looks like in the non-US city I grew up in: https://sana.ae/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Corso-Italia-Stre...
Keep in mind that cars are still allowed for emergency services and (night time) deliveries. But the difference is night and day.
This is exactly what “the US can't imagine itself without cars” means to me.
If you think population density is an excuse for public transport infrastructure not coping or need for more people owning cars I suggest taking a long hard look at e.g. Japan to have that hypothesis reality-checked.
I'm btw. not saying you did, just reading between the lines.
As I wrote in an earlier reply to parent, NYC hasn't managed to even build ring Metro lines around its city center – since a century!
And that is for one reason and one reason only: not nearly enough (political) pressure from the public to improve public transport infrastructure.
And that in term gets us to the root cause again: the US can't imagine itself without cars.
This is not a critique. It's just an observation that is very plain to see if you grew up in Europe (and possibly many other places, too).
When/if that changes, ever, the above things will just happen naturally.
Many metro systems in other big cities with comparable topological constraints have metro lines that are orthogonal to those going out in roughly a star pattern from the center.
But NYC almost only has the latter.
Underwater sections are not an issue, really. There are many cities that have metro lines going under bodies of water.
And even the length or depth required is not an issue if you want to build it.
That's why you can go from England to France, by train, in roughly half an hour, under the English Channel.
They just don't look like streets anymore, as they are turned into plazzas or parks.
EG: E25st at Lex, Baruch College is truned into a plazza/walkaway. No cars. 8th/st Saint Marks, by A Ave, is off cars, (It is part of the Tompkins park). Irvin Avenue is part of a park (gets interrupted by Grammercy Park)
etc...
There are plenty of places like that, but over time they turn into plazzas or parks, and you think they were not streets at some point.
Ps https://maps.app.goo.gl/Df6U3DkPpUxirG5B9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6
You can see throw time that it used to be a street at some point.
Anyways, there are plenty of examples like that. Just stop exaggerating.
A less abrasive approach than congestion pricing might just be pedestrian streets or narrower streets/wider sidewalks. If you make the city unattractive for cars, there will be fewer of them, and I am willing to bet that programs like these are less likely to trigger the outrage congestion pricing has, because it doesn't target car owners directly and en masse. You can sort of pick away at it, street by street. There will be less of a show of solidarity, because, hey, it's not my street.
The only thing that seems silly is penalizing delivery trucks. This only raises the costs of goods and services. This is one reason I would favor narrower, one-way streets over pedestrian streets. You still want vehicles. The issue is that many if not most vehicles in NYC are a luxury item and do nothing but negatively impact the common good. They don't even make transportation easier for their owners, on the whole. Of course, this should be combined with other policies that improve public transportation and improve availability of good and services in the city to reduce the burdens that cars alleviate.
That being said, it takes me nearly an hour to take public transit between my home near Forest Hill and my office in the dogpatch whereas it takes 20-25 minutes to drive (plus an extra five minutes to park and walk from the parking lot to the office). This is not a long distance, on a map it looks like it should take me 10 minutes but San Francisco is so incredibly inefficient.
I would love to not own a car but it’s just not realistic. Also when going to Costco or when the weather is bad, public transit becomes a lot less of a fit as well. I got a bike, only to find out that you’re not allowed to bring bikes on the Muni train which is frustrating, and in the end means my commute isn’t any faster than not involving biking at all. I tried a scooter, and I got in an accident because apparently the brakes don’t work well in the rain, especially when there’s an intersection at the bottom of a hill, so I’m not doing that anymore. I guess they’re trying to make driving as bad as all of the other bad options. I wish instead we could make some good options.
Certainly I've seen delivery vehicles on Grafton Street in Dublin and Shop Street in Galway in the early hours.
There is probably no other city in the US where you can truly eschew car ownership (this includes metro "dense" regions like San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston). Maybe you could include Chicago where there is a heavy amount of density/walkability in most of central Chicago neighborhoods.
E.g. I. Berlin metro timing is about 5mins between trains and that is long compared to Tokyo metro timing.
But when it comes to density/how direct a public public transport connection exists between two arbitrary points in the city, Tokyo and Berlin are very close (and far ahead of NYC btw.).
What I'm saying is that the feasibility public will be seen as a real alternative or even improvement over using a car only if both topological as well as temporal improvements are blatantly obvious to commuters.
This used to be a regular street at some point https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6
There are plenty of other examples, just now they look more like plazas, and not streets.
In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe.
Biking is also safer in European cities that have proper bike infrastructure.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-r...
However, the point is that these incidents, along with the BART one, are unusual. Avoiding public transit because of them would be like avoiding flying because of air accidents or avoiding going to a theater or musical event because of the various massacres that have happened at them over the years.
I'm sure it's similar for many other metro transport options in the USA. California in particular has a rough go for many reasons.
It doesn't even have to be something bad or happen to you. One "my buddy had his bike stolen off the light rail" and several people will be turned off of ever trying to use it.
Police and policing culture is heavily biased in the United States to the protection of property and the interests of capital, so it makes complete sense they wouldn't give a fuck about keeping public transit or spaces that aren't highly trafficked by the wealthy very well protected. Maybe a little tinfoil hat, but if you take that into account, I think it makes perfect sense.
In the mean time, the number of shooting deaths by private car drivers in the US has more than doubled since 2018, to more than 1 per day. That doesn’t count threats with other weapons, nor any other kind of road rage, nor does it count accidental crashes. There are more than 120 deaths per day in the US in cars (the vast majority of “private transit”), and more than 2 million ER visits by injured riders per year.
And public transit is sketchy? Not compared to driving cars it isn’t.
A man died while riding the train, one person robbed the corpse, then another had sex with it..
For that matter, how many who came to harm on the highway were speeding vs random subway assaults.
Speed is absolutely a huge factor in driving injuries, one of the biggest. Again not sure how or even why to compare that to assaults on the subway, but googling briefly, the result I got suggests there were around 2k reported assaults of any kind. It’s a drop next to the nearly 3M ER visits, which may leave out large numbers of unreported, uninsured, or less serious injuries.
Not where I live. the comparison/debate is:
> In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe.
I think the point is, although (public) necrophilia is rare, so presumably is access to dead bodies, so the fact this happened is telling.
> does your example actually count as a “robbery” if they died first?
Of course it fucking does. picking someone's pockets is also robbery even if no confrontation is involved, and I'm pretty happy this guy is being charged with "attempted rape"; the fact the guy was dead doesn't make it not rape.
> The anecdote you brought doesn’t seem to reflect on safety
you don't see a correlation between safety, and the presence of people you cannot trust to be around?
> speed is absolutely a huge factor in driving injuries, one of the biggest. Again not sure how or even why to compare that to assaults on the subway
Speed, or speeding i.e. inappropriate levels of speed. The comparison is that an individual can control their speed, and the authorities can police it. There's not much you can do if you run into the wrong person on the subway.
Still not sure what the argument even here is. You’re being pretty forceful about one single, weird incident. Fine, but the fact of the matter is that driving in cars is causing a lot more injury and death than public transit, by several orders of magnitude.
Anything disparaging public transit is played up to the extend even sitcoms will have disparaging scenes that are essentially "you took public transport? Are you poor?". The tax system is basically privatised, it's a pain to do anything without paying for tax software now with a lot of lobbying and propaganda that it's the only way. A lot of US citizens actually seem to believe that anything government run is inefficient (despite the lack of academic data on this) and demand the dismantling of all government institutions (see DOGE). Even utilities are often privatized with no competition (you just pay what you're told).
It's a bit crazy coming from a country where i had fibre internet at my regional home (the recently rolled out national broadband network) which is faster than the best connection i can get in the middle of silicon valley, i had affordable public transit with a universal tap on/off card that worked for all of them so no change/cash needed. Universal healthcare. A free online tax system that would start pre-filled by the numbers my employer+stockbroker entered in, i just had to quickly check through any federal or state specific exemptions i might qualify for. Etc.
Like it's madness the level of propaganda for this viewpoint that privatization is better and it's blatant why that propaganda is there - you privatize something essential like healthcare and you can leach vast amounts of money from everyone.
To this day my home country pays a fraction of US salaries yet the median wealth per capita is more than double the USA (Australia's 261k wealth per capita vs USAs 112k wealth per capita) since we don't get leached at every turn by privatized essential services. Yet in the USA they are clamouring for more of this as if that makes them wealthier.
Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations.
Again, not the only explanation, but it's the simplest for a number of things.
To disguise the project, terms like "white flight" were invented in order to frame the disintegration of these European neighborhoods as a racist reaction. This worked especially well during the Civil Rights movement, because it played on black/white categories in the forefront of everybody's minds. But were these European ethnic groups "white"? We already know that the Irish and the Italians weren't considered "white" until recently.
Perhaps you've seen videos of "white people" in Chicago throwing rocks at black marches led by MLK into these ethnic neighborhoods? These were people, like Lithuanians, who were defending the integrity of their neighborhoods from an invasion. That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant: any mass migration of another cultural group into a host population harms and destroys the integrity of the host population. And that was the point. White flight destroyed the ethnic neighborhood through mass migration and the subsequent dispersal of them across the newly created suburbs. This process hastened their assimilation into an amorphous mass shaped by the mass media. These assimilated groups formed a buffer between WASP neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the new black arrivals from the South. The construction of highways played a similar role by erecting psychological or physical barriers between these neighborhoods. They were also used as excuses to demolish "undesirable" neighborhoods.
LOL. sure it was.
The real reason America has so many cars is people like cars better, and America developed in a time where people were rich enough to make it happen. People don't like public transport. I asked someone who grew up in another country, in a huge city with only public transport--and reputedly good, clean public transport at that--what they think of public transport, and they said it's gross and for poor people. (It wasn't a code for racism, their country was ethnically monotone.)
People like that don't visit threads like this though. You just get this echo chamber of young, childless, cosmopolitans who only care about a certain kind of efficiency in transport.
The system can prioritize either method of travel. It's no surprise that when this happens, one is faster than the other.
The entitlement of drivers to think they have a right to park a metal box wherever they want for free in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world is staggering.
The neighborhood is also quite clearly full of cars that basically never get used—given there's no cost to store them, the owners save them for an occasional trip and in the meantime they accumulate snow/leaves/pollen etc the rest of the year, in proportion to how long they sit without being used.
The dysfunction of this system is particularly aggravating when you have an actual need to park nearby your home, e.g. if you're loading/unloading heavy things, and there's never any space. I would love if every block had temporary loading zones, but people freak out about the idea because it requires taking away some free parking.
As someone who’s deeply frustrated by the lack of progress on projects like high-speed rail between SF and LA, completing the BART loop around the Bay, improving public schools in San Francisco, and addressing homelessness, I find it maddening. These are real, urgent issues, and yet they often seem sidelined.
Of course, Republicans generally oppose these kinds of initiatives altogether.
Trying to push for change within the Democratic Party has been incredibly difficult for me. It often feels like the space is dominated by highly educated, well spoken, intellectually confident people (far more so than myself) which can make it hard to even participate, let alone influence policy.
So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now. And that is not going to make public transport any better.
So this is why…
Complain and vote all you want but the best way to fix the government is to become the government.
https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administ...
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-ad...
How can I blame Trump for what is happening with public transport in SF and CA? Both CA and SF are 100% democrat for last 20 years.
California's so-called Democrats are in love with the idea that private industry (i.e., Silicon Valley) will swoop in and do the government's work for them. And they'll sideline any government project if they think someone else might shoulder the burden. LA almost elected a real estate billionaire as mayor whose solution to homelessness was to build a bunch of "housing" out in the middle of the desert.
Also the average voter is a flip-flopping idiot who throws temper tantrums when they don't get low or no taxes, when costs rise for them right now even if lowering them is at the expense of later generations, etc.
Also US politics are a lot more complicated than who held majority within and area or state. As far as I can see if senate/congress has a huge bearing and those lip between majorities constantly.
I mean keep propping Trump up though, as a foreigner it's interesting to watch the show. It's a shame that countries are making deals with the US now, I would've loved to see us ban export of pharmaceuticals, weaponry, rare earths to the US just to educate Americans on why we should all be working together.
Don't get me wrong, China & Russia are much worse for it. And NK is an absolute disgrace, all those millions of people...in a thousand years we're going to look back on this period of history as "they had the means for peace but chose oppression and violence". Future humans will look at us as barbarians as we do many of those who lived hundreds of years ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberal...
Manhattan is a long rectangle, whilst Berlin has a more rounded shape.
Its faster to cross the small width of the rectangle than to go all the way around.
The MTA still has a gap in the funding for the 2020-2024 capital plan due to Andrew Cuomo's raiding and Kathy Hochul's incompetence, so I wouldn't expect much from the 2025-2029 capital program! It is $48 billion short of maintaining existing levels of service, "with a focus on areas in need of urgent investment".
I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.
Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.
And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.
That's why we "love our cars"
And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.
And, as you say, Urban != dense city downtown.
my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains.
and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.
So a lot of people tend to translate 80% urban into 80% cities which is manifestly not true, and even less dense cities.
> The use of housing unit density instead of solely population density. The minimum population threshold to qualify as urban increased from 2,500 to 5,000 or a minimum housing unit threshold of 2,000 housing units.
> The jump distance was reduced from 2.5 miles to 1.5 miles for 2020. Jump distance is the distance along roads used to connect high-density urban territories surrounded by rural territory.
> No longer distinguishing between urbanized areas and urban clusters. All qualifying areas are designated urban areas.
We agree (i think), i'm just quoting the census bureau document.
So you've explicitly chosen to live far away from everything, in effect you've chosen to have to own a car. What bearing does this have on anything?
> The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.
Unless you drive across the US on a regular basis, this point has precisely zero relevance.
The topic was about public transit in cities, where many millions of people gather. Nobody has said that the US needs to ditch cars and only use public transport between states or cross-country.
I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?
I'm not complaining BTW, love the train system here, it's only when someone tries to describe them as either a purely "private" or "public" company it's never so straightforward IMHO, so wanted to clarify.
But its also important to note there are other still big but much more private players like Kintetsu, Hankyu, Keio or Tobu that also follow the same playbook - having not just rail lines but also malls, hotels and other businesses, like: * cableways (like the Kintetsu Beppu Ropeway) * zoos (Tobu Zoo) * theaters (Takarazuka Revue - all-female musical theatre troupe based in Takarazuka - a division of the Hankyu Railway company - all members of the troupe are employed by Hankyu)
And you can see this replicated on the smallest level - when we went to Izumo, we found out the Ichibata company does not just run the line to the Izumu shrine, but also owns a hotel next to the Izumo station, runs local buses and even runs the gift shop in the Izumo museum. :)
I think this can to a degree explain why public transport is so well connected with other services in Japan & why the stations are clean and convenient - it has a direct benefit for all the many side businesses the public transit companies have.
Even if they are consessions I think they are a positive. They provide a positive feedback loop for the train companies. Better trains = more customers for their other interests and visa versa. If the trains start to suck people don't want to be on that line and choose a different line for their businesses, houses
Compared to public transporation where it's just politians who decide budgets and with few exceptions (Netherlands for example) they almost never decide well.
So in theory there was a schedule with buses from lines 1,2,3 interleaving every 5 minutes - but in practice line 1 was going slower and line 3 was going faster and all buses were there at the same time and then you had to wait for 15 minutes for the next round :/
The worst part was that people outside the most profitable routes had no access to public transport - because public transport had to be subsidized more because the profitable routes were taken over by private buses.
Basically it was a mistake, don't do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_me...
I saw motorcycle taxis and minibuses that run between cities and have the cobrador hanging out the side to rustle up passengers and where you might sit next to somebody holding a chicken. I rode in a "public car" which was painted red and drove in a circle and got out at a place that I thought was a bus station until I realized the tickets on the wall had the names of US college football teams and it was really a sportsbook.
In the developing world it is common to see many forms of less formal transit. Maybe standards aren't that high and maybe I'd feel different if I'd missed the last bus to Ocoa, but it struck me as an economical, fast and efficient system.
The success in s.a. highlights how much of a problem cars are causing in n.a. cities. Even if a well financed public or private bus service wanted to run frequent lines at rush hour, those buses would be stuck in slow car traffic. In nordic countries, the bus and trams have dedicated lanes, and mass transit is generally faster than cars.
And in the 20+ years the evidence seems to back up how much of a net positive it has been.
NYC congestion pricing took way too long because the New York Democratic Party sucks and, as usual, legal efforts were made to block it, much as how well-intentioned laws like CEQA (designed to protect the environment) are actually just weaponized to block development of any kind.
What's so bizarre to me is how many people have strong opinions on NYC congestion pricing who have never been and will never go to NYC. Americans love the slippery slope argument. It's like "well, if they make driving cars slightly more expensive in Lower Manhattan then next the government is going to take away my gas-guzzling truck in Idaho".
What's also surprising is how many people who live in outer Queens and Brooklyn chose to drive into Manhattan and were complaining how this changed their behavior. Um, that was the point. I honestly didn't know how many people like that there were.
What really needs to happen but probably never will is to get rid of free street parking below about 96th street or 110th.
Also, either ban or simply charge more for combustion vehicles. Go and look at how quiet Chinese cities are where the vehicles are predominantly electric now.
(Regardless, I think the answer is simple: congestion pricing is only economically viable when an area is simultaneously congested and has alternative transportation methods that would prevent the local economy from collapsing. NYC is one of a very small handful of cities in the US where this is true, although that's largely a function of 80 years of car-centric design. Maybe it will change.)
This is currently happening with cigarettes. Banning them at workplaces and other public places is one thing. But we live in a capitalist country that celebrates individual freedom. Or do we? Beverly Hills CA and Manhattan Beach CA have both banned the sale of cigarettes entirely. Massachusetts banned all flavored cigarettes and is trying to permanently ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone a born after a certain date.
These go beyond "normalization", it is exactly slippery slope... get a small foothold then keep expanding the position.
Sounds like an arbitrary distinction, but in any event, it was the OP who used "slippery slope" to refer to going from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car."
To make it obvious: universal suffrage is a change that happened, but it wasn’t a slippery slope towards giving dogs the right to vote. Some changes result in new stases.
The answer is actually quite simple: It won't be different. Prove to me it won't spread, because almost every new tax spreads.
When is the last time a tax has existed in one state, and not spread to other states within 5 years?
There are a ton of roads with "turnpike" or "pike" in their name. Some cost money [1] others are free. What's the big difference between NYC's congestion pricing and the Florida Pike?
I guess you can fight congestion pricing in order to slow the spread of toll roads but it's not the beginning of a slipper slope. Usage fees are a very old concept (price discrimination by time is pretty old as well).
The EU ICE phaseout is set for 2035.
I grew up on a goddamn island, I've seen what an inability for people to travel easily or when the cost of doing so has to be seriously weighed does to an economy and it's not good for anyone or anything except a very select lucky few who are well positioned to take advantage.
While the NY government can probably extract this rent from this area without damaging anything serious but it is not something that should be allowed to proliferate.
INB4 environment/pollution, the richer we all are the better custodians we will be of the environment. Nobody cares if their energy is clean when they can barely make ends meet.
Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.
These artificial price distortions wind up most benefiting the people who were in the best position to alter their behavior.
The other replies point out that different forms of transit compete with each other, so the more cars we have, the fewer bikes and trains.
You're also, it seems assuming that investment is a one-time thing. Once an investment has been made in a train line or a car, you still need to afford maintenance over the thing over the lifetime of the thing. Including the opportunity costs of doing other things instead.
NYC is one of about 2 places in the US that actually has usable public transit, barring certain outer boroughs where car ownership dominates. It's largely a hub and spoke model though so it's good for going into and out of Manhattan but not so good for, say, getting from Red Hook to Flushing so driving will dominate that kind of travel.
But that's why congestion pricing is targeted at Lower Manhattan and can't really spread beyond it. Like see how far you get trying congestion pricing in Houston or Dallas, let alone Bakersfield, Boise or Lexington (KY).
Economic incentives work. They're probably most responsible for the drop in smoking. Congestion pricing consistently changes people's behavior and every metric shows it. Some bus lines in NYC now move nearly 30% faster.
I don't know what island you're talking about and what happened but will generally agree that people are struggling all over. It's well-known that real wages have largely been stagnant for 40-50 years.
But that's not a problem caused by gas taxes. It's caused by capitalism.
California has quite the gas tax, but it seems to do little to change behavior. Likely because the alternatives to driving are generally not great, but rolling the taxes back shouldn’t be the solution.
Growing up on a remote island is basically the opposite of New York in all regards except that Manhattan is technically also an island.
Here in Sydney Australia, we don't have any congestion charge (there's been some talk about introducing one, but it's not really on the cards at this time). But it's pretty much impossible to find parking in the CBD (Mon-Fri 9-5) for less than around AUD$60 (USD$40) per day. There is literally no un-metered street parking anywhere in the CBD (also the parking inspectors are everywhere). Plus many of the routes in are tolled (although by no means all routes). Plus, things like the numerous one-way streets, bus-only lanes (with cameras), and ultra-low speed limits, makes it an extremely unpleasant driving experience (with a high risk of getting fines), for folks who are used to just driving in the suburbs. All of that effectively acts as a congestion charge - most people choose public transport over driving, when heading into the city centre, because in practice the cost of regularly doing the latter is prohibitive.
Is that true? I was surprised when looking at the actual stats (most people in Sydney drive to work), but maybe there are many more people working in places other than the CBD skewing this.
When I was cycling in from Balmain, there were a huge number of cars stuck in traffic getting into the CBD every morning. Despite it only being an easy 15 minute cycle (or a 15 minute bus ride) from the peninsula.
And yes, there are still enough people who drive into the Sydney CBD in peak hour, to cause massive traffic (and to keep the carparks, aka parking lots, being very lucrative businesses!). Nevertheless, they're a minority - more than 75% of people commute to the Sydney CBD on public transport [1].
Also, re: traffic from Balmain in peak hour. Plenty of places you can be going to, eastbound on the Anzac Bridge, apart from the CBD! I'd say a significant number of those drivers would be heading north of the harbour to work (eg North Sydney, St Leonards / Crows Nest, maybe Chatswood, maybe Macquarie Park), and they'd be bypassing the CBD thanks to the Western Distributor (could also be connecting to Cross City Tunnel to eg Bondi Junction, also Eastern Distributor to Randwick / Waterloo).
[1] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/d...
Because NYC is gonna be used as a case for selling congestion charges elsewhere. This may cause decline in more effective and equitable policies like car bans and restrictions that are working really well in many places.
All kinds of seemingly local issues are getting sucked into the vortex of the national political scene in order to stoke outrage against "the enemy." See also all the people who have never been to SF and will never go to SF who have very strong opinions about SF homelessness/street crime (or, on the other side, the various "library in a small town you never heard of banned some books" stories that were popular a couple of years ago).
That alone tells you this is the right path. All that infrastructure and work for cars to not actually allow anyone to travel fast.
9mph is very very slow even for the weakest/most timid cyclist.
I avoid cars as much as I can and commute by bike in my European city. I used to live in NYC: I've been mugged there, and I've seen cyclists injured by cars. I don't want to cycle there and I do take cabs in the evenings or nights.
TLDR; speed isn't the only factor
I’d absolutely love if I could get away with having no car. I can’t. My life would be markedly, instantly, and demonstrably worse. I feel like a lot of people in the “no cars” camp neglect these issues.
If you design your city to be more pedestrian and biking friendly, there are more people walking and biking compared to cars, which naturally reduces the amount of mugging and car-bike accidents. For example, as number of cars on the road go down, police can invest resources into stopping muggings, instead of investing resources into catching car traffic violations.
* Some people have mobility issues and can't bike or walk but can drive.
* Cars give you environment isolation when it's freezing, sweltering, or pouring rain.
* Cars isolate you from other people, which can be important especially for groups that are more likely to be on the receiving end of unwanted interactions.
* Cars make it much easier to haul stuff around.
* You are much safer being in a car when hit by another car than when not being in a car. This is something a lot of bike commute advocates sweep under the rug. They talk about how biking is overall safe, but then you ask them if they've ever had an accident and so many have been hit by cars and broken bones.
I fully support more people biking and walking. But I think the optimal solution is multi-modal. Cars aren't bad, they're just one piece of the puzzle.
(The reason I'm not a bike commuter right now is because I slipped in a puddle biking to work and destroyed my ankle. Non-fatal accident statistics for cycle are actually pretty scary when you dig into them. People always point out that overall mortality statistics are better for cyclists, but you can still have a really fucking bad time without dying.)
> (The reason I'm not a bike commuter right now is because I slipped in a puddle biking to work and destroyed my ankle. Non-fatal accident statistics for cycle are actually pretty scary when you dig into them. People always point out that overall mortality statistics are better for cyclists, but you can still have a really fucking bad time without dying.)
While true that injuries exist, halving your chance of early death is a pretty remarkable statistic, and would make me say that you are (if you are a statistically average person) much safer bike commuting than commuting by car: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2024/12/18/18-year-...
The solution to this problem is not to have more cars, it is to have less (and probably stricter standards on obtaining and maintaining a driver's license).
Kinetic energy=0.5mv^2
The two variables are orders of magnitude smaller in one scenario, and the function grows quadratically.
My face doesn't have a few feet of crumple zones on it, just a couple of millimeters of skin over bone.
Which is the direction the car size and weight war is going anyway, after all "My family is safer in a massive SUV". Well then. Who cares about everyone else anyway. People outside of vehicles should just stop being poor and get one.
Most people saying "cars are bad" are actually saying "cars are bad at their current rate of utilization"
This is like "black lives matter" usually means "black lives matter as well"
People with mobility issues have every right to use motorized forms of transport. That could be cars or other smaller vehicles (like motorized wheelchairs).
However, we should recognize that the number of people with mobility issues in a society where everyone grows up walking and biking a lot is less than one in which everyone travels by car. There are two opposing feedback loops here. In car-society there is feedback towards more mobility issues which cases even more motorized transport. In a walk-society there is a feedback toward less mobility issues leading to less motorized transport.
But, yes, obviously everyone generally being healthier because they walk more is good.
Does this refer to celebrities / public figures? Or what's the subtext here?
Anyone at a greater risk of being harrassed/mugged/assaulted/etc.
But on the Internet, people are either BAN CARS or BLOCK TRANSIT.
In reality, I want both.
These points always appear in reaction to urbanist policy and all of a sudden care about the minority transit user.
The problem is that the assigned proportion of road space is unfairly weighted to cars and is impossible to shift because people often say things like “cars make it easier to shift things around” and “some people have mobility issues”. Yes, this is true. What is also true is that people with mobility issues can more likely ride (cheaply) modified bikes than drive motor vehicles and people regularly haul heavy loads on cargo bikes (couches, refrigerators) in places where bike infrastructure makes it safe to do so.
If you care about speed in a densely populated city, you’d bike or walk. Flip it around; comfort isn’t the only reason why people prefer to use a car over walking or cycling. You said it yourself already, it’s because you can literally get hit by a car all because drivers won’t give up 1 lane out 4 for a segregated bike path that would stop you getting hit by a car.
If you want to convince people, you need to understand their actual motivations.
Yes, but if we did that we would have to deconstruct the history behind the American fixation on private automobiles and, of course, the racism and "think of the children" rhetoric that comes with it.
It's a losing battle. I can't convince people driving is more dangerous than the subway even if all the stats in the world make it plainly true. This is a culture problem, and much like every single one of America's cultural problems, it stems from hundreds of years of systemic racism. It has to be brought down slowly and deliberately.
Are you serious? That's a lot to type without realizing what you're saying at some point. You could not get a more backwards argument - so many cyclists have had crashes with cars, so lets have more cars. Wow.
> I fully support more people biking and walking. But I think the optimal solution is multi-modal. Cars aren't bad, they're just one piece of the puzzle.
Your idea of "more people" is clearly still massively lopsided towards cars. You're thinking on the order of increasing the current 1% of people walking&biking to maybe 5%, whereas you should be thinking 80%+. Completely wrong mindset.
I am a bike commuter. I biked to work for years. I fill up my gas tank about three times a year.
I'm on your side but you are so gung-ho about bikes that if I'm not as zealous as you, you think I don't even understand how "backwards" my argument is.
I never ever said there should be more cars. I said that if you want to get people out of their cars you need to understand why they are in them in the first place and speed is only a fraction of that answer.
A simple bullet, but with many nuances buried. There is no single answer. Below are several observations. No one of these is intended to be an answer. But there are a panoply of choices a city can make that improve access and mobility for all.
Yes, and good bike/ped infra is good for them, too. Everything that makes a good bike lane (smooth pavement, wide enough for passing, minimal bumps and potholes, at grade without having to go up and down to cross streets) also makes a great place for a mobility scooters.
Not everyone uses a mobility scooter. Cities with extensive pedestrianized areas typically do not close these to deliveries, and many leave them open for pick-up/drop-off for those with mobility issues.
The items mentioned above are about stopping general car traffic either in portions of a street or on a whole street.
Not all traffic reduction necessarily means a reduction of car-navigable streets. Traffic reduction can take the form of reducing through-traffic. There are many implementation mechanisms for this. One mechanism is a modal filter, which allows through-traffic for non-motor vehicles, but prevents through-traffic for motor vehicles (side note, such filters can be constructed such that emergency vehicles can still pass through). Thus through-traffic is prevented, but door-to-door vehicle traffic is still possible.
But modal filters can make routes more circuitous. Yes. Optimizing a city does not mean optimizing just the transport infrastructure, and optimizing transport infrastructure does not mean just prioritizing a single mode above all others. That said, generally reducing traffic improves driving experience and reduces times, because there is less traffic. A more circuitous route can be made faster with sufficient traffic reduction.
But circuitous routes increase emissions. They increase emissions for those cars which make the trip, but save emissions based on all trips that are shifted to other forms of transportation. Even those marginally longer trips for the remaining cars may be emission-neutral (or at least not as bad as naively expected) based on reduced idling time and smoother travel.
Nothing above is to say cars should be banned. Just observations about design choices that are routinely made around the globe that are generally considered good urbanism and have not led to major negative outcomes. Nothing to stop you or any individual to choose a car, just design decisions that do not prioritize cars above all else.
> * Cars give you environment isolation when it's freezing, sweltering, or pouring rain.
Yes, so do all forms of public transit. Shelters are routine in good transit systems, and any form of metro or rail will typically have buildings or underground stations.
There is, of course, wait time for transit, which is all the more reason to optimize a system for frequent service with dedicated rights of way or grade-separation. Frequency is also one of the greatest drivers of ridership.
In urban areas it is common that a vehicle is not directly outside your front door or in a covered garage. Similarly, that parking at the destination may be some distance from the door of the destination. This is analogous to the walk to a transit station. Obviously this varies by person and situation.
Cars avoid the dwell time at a station, emphasizing the value of shelters and facilities at transit stations.
Certainly a car is more convenient than transit in inclement weather. This is not a reason to design transportation infrastructure optimizing solely for personal vehicles.
> * Cars make it much easier to haul stuff around.
The vast majority of day-to-day trips do not require hauling, unless that is part of your job. Certainly, if it is part of your job, you either have such a vehicle or it is provided by your employer.
Such hauling-based jobs are vastly improved by traffic reduction measures. Less traffic means better delivery times, and more importantly, more reliable time estimates for delivery. I know of no one in logistics who would decline to trade a small fee for improved times and reliability.
For personal use cases, as I mentioned hauling is rare. For the vast majority of people, the justification of hauling is better met financially by a van or truck rental as needed than by owning and maintaining a vehicle full time.
To be 100% clear, I am not saying, "you should not have a car, because vans are good at hauling." I am saying that "I occasionally need to haul things, so I need a car" is a specious argument. I am not saying you or anyone else should not have a car. I am simply pointing out that "occasional hauling" is not a good reason to own a car. If you want a car, have a car! If someone else wants a car, let them have a car! If you value the convenience of using your own vehicle for hauling at a per-use rate that is a large multiple of the rate of renting a van/truck, that is your own value judgment and you are welcome to it.
This is simply an observation that for the vast majority of people, the financial analysis suggests not a car, but a van/truck rental for hauling purposes. If you are not part of this majority, then please recognized that I am not trying to say that you are.
Hauling is a totally valid use case for vehicles and I've never seen anyone make an argument that the transportation of goods and stuff should be forbidden. Certainly I hope no one interprets my statements above as such an argument. The need to transport things, again, is not a good reason to build an entire transportation system in a city to optimize always for personal vehicles.
Again, a very common feature of reduced traffic, and even traffic-forbidden areas in cities is that they are close to most traffic, but still allow deliveries and mobility assistance vehicles.
And also, again, a reduction in traffic is a boon for those use cases.
> * You are much safer being in a car when hit by another car than when not being in a car. This is something a lot of bike commute advocates sweep under the rug. They talk about how biking is overall safe, but then you ask them if they've ever had an accident and so many have been hit by cars and broken bones.
And you are much safer not having an accident in the first place. If we want to observe the world, there are cities that have done a great job at reducing all vehicle related fatalities and injuries: those injuries to drivers and passengers in any vehicle involved, and also those injuries to anyone outside of the vehicle.
There are two commonalities in these cities: 1) they have many viable options for transportation, including high quality bike infra, pedestrian areas, trains, buses, metros, trams, and personal vehicles; and 2) they reduce traffic and speed in all areas where personal vehicles are potentially in conflict with other forms of transportation.
You'll recognize in the first point the same refrain I have been repeating: optimizing a transportation system does not mean optimizing primarily on just one mode of transit. It's not about forcing one mode or banning another. It is about options. There is a near universal observation about transit times within and into/out of urban areas that the time for car travel tends toward the time for public transit. This is generally understood to be because humans optimize their transport, and if one option is faster or more convenient, enough people choose that until it is not.
The second thing those cities do, though, is the leading cause for the reduction in accident frequency, lethality, and severity of injury: the reduction in traffic quantity and speed.
The road-street distinction is very important here. If you are not familiar with it, the distinction is this: roads are high speed connections between places, optimizing for vehicle throughput; streets are complex environments where a wide assortment of destinations are, where living is done, businesses exist, and the general activities of life and city happen. If you want more detail, this video is a good primer (linked to a relevant portion: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM?t=536); the video is coming from a very strong place of opinion. I am not asking you to accept all the opinions, but am simply sharing the video, because it provides lots of good real-world examples in laying out the distinction.
It is essential that, within a city, there are affordances for people out of cars and people in cars. This is simple reality. If we recognize this reality, and we understand that humans are imperfect and prone to failure, then the conclusion is that if we want to reduce the injuries and deaths associated with traffic, we must build systems that tend toward this outcome. The practical implementations of such systems that are proven to be effective in achieving this outcome are:
1. separate through-traffic 2. ensure mixed-mode areas force low volumes and speeds of cars
The first is by designing transportation networks that force through-traffic to roads designed for it.
The second takes many forms, generally known as traffic calming. I have mentioned a few already. You can search for more. The other side of this is recognizing that cities are for people (the people in the cars and the people out of the cars, though at some points the people in the cars become people out of cars). There must be areas where people want to go. And those areas where people are must minimize the risk of negative interactions with vehicles. Again, traffic calming and pedestrianizing.
Regarding injury: the most likely cause of death and severe injury for a shockingly wide swath of adults in the US is a car accident, whether in the car or out of it. I do not make this as an argument against cars. I make this as an argument for design of car infrastructure in ways that makes me safer regardless of which side of the steel I am on.
With e-bikes and e-scooter, I would actually argue that New York City should build underground tunnels, well, the overall goal of being able to enable these types of very efficient compact transportation to get from various parts of the major boroughs at an average speed of about 15 mph
I believe this will provide enormous livability benefits. Or you elevate the entire tunnel.
The centre is much more pleasant to walk in, as are most places in the zone.
Pollution is much, much better: if you came to London and travelled on the underground you would have black snot when you blew your nose, this hasn't been the case for a few years now.
I hope NY gets the sake improvements.
These comments and the article made me see how much of it is/was due to braking. TIL.
It is quite likely that the lower income users are mostly retired people, and students, and they shouldn't be crowding the system at peak times unless willing to pay.
The non-charge eligible trips of the low earners declined as well. The paper did not differentiate between sources of income, and I'm not sure how relevant that is.
So the "poor off the zones" stands. Of course it's a matter of opinion whether this is desirable or not.
The paper is available without paywall here: https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/Craik-Balakrishnan-TRR2022.p...
I treat “income” with a healthy dose of salt
Car-centric urban planning is hell with kids. You have to load them up into the car for any small trip. You can't walk or bike anywhere because cars make it so dangerous.
My only regret about living in the US is this car hellscape that is so hard to avoid. It's mandated by law, not chosen by the market.
Cities aren't loud; cars are loud.
EVs have entered the chat
Still, I'd always prefer less cars and more transit.
It comes from honking.
The issue that people apparently think that the horn makes the red light turn green faster or will magic away the car blocking the box.
At 30km/h or so, the main noise is the engine, so EVs are quieter (as the video says).
Guess what forces emergency vehicles to fire their sirens, or garbage trucks to linger.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav...
[2] https://www.mns.com/manhattan_rental_market_report
[3] https://inhabit.corcoran.com/nyc-residential-rental-market-r...
[4] https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/nyc-manhattan-brooklyn...
[5] https://www.elliman.com/corporate-resources/market-reports/n...
I agree there are places in Seattle one can do this, but boy one certainly needs the paper to do this.
If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millionaires in the 90s and 00s. You won’t save much money there.
The real cutoff point for commuting to Seattle is just past exit 34, because that's where they close Snoqualmie Pass when there's too much snow.
My mom commuted to Redmond from Bothell when I was in high school, horrible traffic…and that was early 90s. You don’t want to do anything on 405 during rush hour.
You can also head west if you dare. I have a coworker commuting in from Vashon Island. I don’t think prices are that great on the islands though, maybe 30-20% less than Seattle, but you live by the ferry schedule and if you want something near the ferry dock you’ll pay a lot more for that walk on convenience.
I remember coming here mid-pandemic and having white picket fences in my eyes as the company pointed me to a real estate agent. Thank god I didn't pull the trigger and buy because I would've been financially trapped (upside down) in some very unsafe urban area (e.g. south Seattle) or far-flung place (like Sultan).
I wonder what % (presumably low) of the population can live in SFHs and achieve this cities like Seattle.
I should try finding if there's available work that's made visualizations of this sort of things ("How many homes could be within X miles or minutes of A B and C" for SFH, Quadplex, 5-over-1s etc.)
Everything will be connected and commutable, especially the suburbs. Automated, on-demand delivery will become a part of everyday life.
Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.
All the clamor for trains and rail will go away when our roads become an even superior version of that. Private commuting to any destination, large homes with lots of land, same day delivery of everything.
In the case of CPUs, there's sync and communication overhead; for highways, there's more turbulence and slowdown generated by lane-switching.
The problem with self driving cars is that they can only optimize road bandwidth a bit more than they are now (and even then, only if you outlaw human drivers), they aren’t a magical shortcut to increasing bandwidth beyond indicated demand (like mass transit can).
If you’re sensitive to commute time, you’ll want to live in the same ‘city’ as you work, for instance, or at least nearby. But it will cost you a lot of money, and you’ll get a closet.
If you want the ‘big house with a lawn’ experience, you’ll pick a distant ‘city’ or even another ‘state’ (in this case, a city in a nearby suburb).
Typical case, it’s an hour+ end to end from one side to the other even on the fastest transit for Tokyo or London, and they have really good transit systems.
Singapore similar when it’s busy (which is actually quite a feat considering how small of an island it is).
It’s been awhile since I’ve been in Manhattan, but I remember it being roughly 1-2 hrs too.
Mega cities like Mumbai? Double that.
As you say, the solution of course is to not go that far on a daily basis. You can make your life convenient, as long as you are living alone.
As a mode of transportation, self-driving cars already exist--they're basically a taxicab service, the main difference being that some people hope that self-driving might magically make the cost of providing a taxi service cheaper.
> Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.
"Lots of small things going point-to-point" is a much more difficult problem to route, especially at high throughput, than "bundle things into large containers that get broken apart near their destination." In the space of transit, your idea is known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), and PRT systems have invariably underwhelmed every time they've been built, as they struggle to live up to their promise.
Rail transit is incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people--a metro line can easily move a dozen lanes of highway traffic--and there is nothing that you can do to roads to make them approach that level of efficiency, in part because the routing problems are insurmountable.
When the MTA prioritizes accessibility projects they take this into consideration and prioritize stations that have few options for alternatives.
I will also point out that buses exist in NYC.
And of course there are different types of disability. You’d much rather be blind in NYC than blind in Omaha Nebraska in regard to your ability to get around.
Another kvetch: using car seats in taxis. Maybe it's different now with Uber but 20 years ago the drivers hated it because you have to find the seat belt and secure the car seat...
Ubers/taxis with car seats are no big deal as long as you’re quick about setting them up. And even then, kids are only in full blown car seats for a few short years.
The only people I see carrying a pram up/down stairs without help are dads who were happy to do it themselves.
(When they're teenagers who knows, you have new problems)
People who live outside of Manhattan have more space and sometimes the optional car.
The professionals are paying an absolute fortune for child care, a salary's worth, and more for bigger apartments in nice neighborhoods.
It's no joke. You'd better be obsessed with the city, or a short commute, because otherwise you're moving to Westchester or NJ or LI.
I have no doubt that Manhattan is expensive, but my greater point is that it would be great. A lot of very expensive things are great.
For all of the doom and gloom that I expected on my trip there, I thought that system was amazing. The rest of the city was too, if anything there’s more vacancy in Manhattan, but more crazy people in SFO.
Lifting a 2 toddler stroller up and down narrow, crowded NYC subway stairs is the exact opposite of bliss. Perhaps you are unaware that many subway stations still don't have elevators (or escalators, for that matter) - only stairs. And where the elevators exist, it seems half the time they are out of order...
You have 2 toddlers. You frequently wish to take them to visit friends / parks / supermarkets / libraries / doctors / coffee shops / whatever other places near your location. Such places happen to be 10-20 minutes adult-speed walk from you. Kids are young enough that they cannot reliably walk towards a fixed goal for 10+ minutes, and certainly not at adult speed; they often get either tired or distracted or decide they want to go somewhere else. Kids are old and heavy enough that neither of them can be carried in a carrier. Optimal solution: 2 toddler stroller.
[1] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/projects/transport-access-p...
I used to work on the second floor. My colleagues would all push the button for the elevator, and wait, wait, wait. I'd be at my desk before they reached the 2nd floor. (Some of them were jocks.)
In my 20s, I worked a stint on the 6th floor. I'd run up the stairs to try and beat the elevator. I'd poop out on the 5th and have to walk the last flight.
I don't understand why I am the only such person. It's just pure joy to run up and down the stairs. One day I won't be able to anymore, and that will make me sad.
this was charming to read!
He passed away from a heart attack.
Like, yeah, eventually you will die, so yes, the number of heartbeats you'll have is finite. But it's not like you get some limited allocation and when you consume them all, you're toast.
The reality is the opposite which is counterintuitive to those folks: The more heartbeats you use, the more you get. At least, that's true if your extra heartbeat usage is from aerobic exercise, not just being unhealthy and having a high resting heart rate.
Chicago has (recently?) put a lot of focus on their bike infrastructure (protected bike lanes, bike signals, bike only paths, etc) and it seems pretty widely used.
Do you put the kid in that seat?!?
[0]: https://betterabound.familybikeride.org/img/winter-kit.jpg
When I was bike only I had my arm damaged in a way that it took close to a decade to get back to normal. On another occasion I was knocked unconscious. Both occasions were drivers who left turned into a parking lot without looking, crossing a lane then going right into me in the bike lane.
A car provides a nice cushion for those sorts of happening. I think if I had a child in either case there is a good chance they would be dead.
While I support the right of people to make their own risk assessments for their family, I fear it is only a matter of time until they come to understand what I did about Chicago biking.
I'm certainly not opposed. But my observation in the relatively nearby city when I go in and sit on the sidewalk at a restaurant is that the fairly new protected bike lanes have a fairly terrifying combination of transportation modes (bikes, ebikes, things that I guess are ebikes but look almost like small motorbikes, escooters, and pedestrians crossing). And then, because they're in a bike lane, many seem to assume the signal at the next street doesn't apply to them.
Not sure of the best answer.
Younger kids, you need to live where you can reach everything you’ll need to acceptable quality within walking distance or a limited number of subway stops, unless you really like dealing with a Stroller in the subway. Not always an easy feat.
Areas like that tend to be very expensive, and be very difficult to actually find spots. You then are susceptible to quality changes hurting your ‘investment’. People who can afford that can also afford one or more Nannies and other helpers.
In my experience, a lot of the skill set required is to be very competitive and have a lot of money to throw around, which requires a mindset that most would not call ‘cushy’ or easy going.
The ‘mandated by law’ bit is a bit of a misnomer. It’s structural due to a number of other market conditions, including available land (leading to lower population density, etc), which are impacted by laws, which also impact market conditions.
It’s an ouroboros, not an arrow.
South Asia has ~ 8x US pop density, Western Europe ~4x, and East Asia roughly 3x.
It’s no surprise it is how it is. The US is low density. The math generally works out differently.
With fewer cars on the road, thanks to the congestion pricing, we'll probably see safer roads for all users, as well.
Just saying it is possible, and certainly not everyone’s choice.
Hope you don't mind me asking, I'm just super curious about this topic!
If you are considering a move to NYC with young kids the real thing to look at are the public elementary schools and the zones for them. That should be the north star for choosing where to live unless your kids are older.
I think it really depends on what will keep you and your family happiest. We have friends that determined they want more space and privacy and ended up moving to the suburbs and are happy. Know enough families that moved out and couldn’t handle the sedentary lifestyle and moved back. Feel free to message me if you have more questions.
My social life as a teenager was incredibly limited by the fact that I couldn't just jump on a bus and meet up with everyone else who lived in areas with PT coverage.
The idea of walking/biking to school or walking with your friends to the cafe after school to hang out, or bumping into friends while walking home from a bar is so alien to Americans that it's not even on their radar.
We get a glimpse of it when we go on vacation to Prague or Disneyland or something. But when we return home, we immediately relegate the experience to something exotic you do on vacation rather than something you can actually have.
With regards to children, some couples do have them and concluded that a car in the city is not worth the hassle; famous example:
* https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs (interview)
Car share would also be handy in some situations. Or even going from two cars to one.
Are they? Based on what?
Many people can't reasonably ride bikes for many reasons, especially in NYC bike lanes with delivery people flying around on e-bikes. Public transit isn't always sufficient - people end up switching buses four times, etc.
The roads are a public good; again policy 'innovation' is merely dismissing responsibilities and difficult requirements - as long as the rich people's requirements aren't the ones dismissed.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case. The largest burden of this tax is falling on low income commuters who live off the train lines and have to drive into Manhattan, yet all of the money is going to... the train lines (MTA). Understandably they're not too happy.
Already 85% of commuters to lower Manhattan take public transit. Of the remaining 15%. An analysis found that only 2% of working poor New Yorkers would pay the charge. Otherwise low income New Yorkers would overwhelmingly benefit from the better transit funding
https://www.nrdc.org/bio/eric-goldstein/busting-myths-new-yo...
It's not like NYC doesn't have cameras everywhere and couldn't probably figure it pretty easily in an afternoon by crossing the ALPR DB with the tax DB (after spending 48mo of political wrangling to allow that to happen).
Why? Do you want to know something other than the second statistic?
Like, it's 20-goddamn-25, everyone with an IQ above room temperature should be instantly red flagging these sorts of minor but potentially very meaningful omissions.
Like maybe the number is 10% of something instead of 2%, IDK, but with the surveillance dragnet and statistics firehose NYC policymakers have access to it's hella sus that they didn't just give an outright or more preciously bounded answer.
To be clear: you're basing your understanding of the effects of public policy from an offhand conversation with a person who has no reason to know any of the actual details of the policy, and who has a vested personal stake in the matter, rather than on any of the many numerous objective sources of data, whether that be the 4000 page report that was issued last year before the policy took effect, or any of the many studies and analyses that have come out since?
Yes, I'm sure that some bartender told you that he is unhappy with it. But that doesn't mean that anything he's saying is based in reality. Congestion pricing opponents have routinely repeated talking points that are verifiably counterfactual or even nonsensical, and it's silly to take them at their word when the objective facts are so readily available.
This is factually inaccurate on so many counts. People who drive into the congestion pricing zone have a higher income than the median in the city. Not only is the number of low-income people who commute by car into the zone is incredibly small, but those people are already eligible for a waiver, so they wouldn't have to pay it anyway.
On top of that, the money is all going to the MTA, but that is not synonymous with "the train lines", because the MTA is also responsible for the robust bus network throughout the five boroughs, and the money raised from congestion pricing has already been earmarked for a whole number of projects, several of which would apply to people who are reliant on buses.
Source: me
Car infrastructure takes up a huge amount of space and is incredibly hostile to any kind of mixed use. Having near-zero cars means there is suddenly space available for an order of magnitude more pedestrians. It's why reducing car traffic almost always results in a significant increase in revenue for local shops and restaurants - which means more taxes are being paid.
Converting all of NYC into a huge pedestrian-only zone obviously isn't going to work, but having a few pedestrianized superblocks could greatly improve the quality-of-life.
The dreamer in me immediately asks “why not?” and while I agree it will never happen, it felt good to imagine it.
America addiction to cars is a human construction, so it can be changed.
I have spent over a decade without owning a car in multiple cities. It's definitely possible but I've been fortunate enough to have friends and family with personal vehicles I can use.
Small errands also completely defeats the point of Costco. Running to a corner store to buy 4 rolls of toilet paper ends up being way more expensive than going to Costco and picking up 30+ at a time.
Alternatively, you rent a car from a car sharing service for the few times a year you want to do this.
Philadelphia is also an odd choice to bring up since there's a train from the center of Manhattan to Philly, and it's even a common commute for people to go back and forth.
Driving is almost always more convenient on many levels, so it’s not really the best argument start from “it’s just easier”
Just take the 15% gross salary raise and move on with your life.
And anyone who takes a taxi. Or needs an ambulance. Or orders anything delivered during the day.
So most people aren't happy (yet). Why is that?
There could have been a lot more. The 1929 IND Second System expansion plan is depressing, especially the parts where provisions are already built:
- https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2021/01/ind-second-...
- https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Second_System_-_1929_Plan
If there were traffic laws, nobody knew them and people wouldn't know which way to go to avoid a head on collision.
If you'd just replace cars with horses today it would go a lot different.
And it wasn't just horses. It was horse-drawn carriages. There wasn't that much difference, traffic wise, between carriages and cars. There were traffic jams, out of control vehicles, drunk drivers, street racers, collisions, etc. all back in the 19th century.
Stated another way, if they made congestion pricing $1000 instead of $15 or whatever it is, all those numbers mentioned in the article would go way way up and it would look like a smashing success. The article doesn't make any attempt to measure anything that could potentially be a downside.
I notice empty storefronts and anecdotally, I feel like there is an increasing number. I have a friend who opened a store downtown just before this happened. I don't dare ask yet, but I can't see it being a benefit for small businesses.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/traffic-down-business-gover...
Anecdotally, I notice a lot more foot traffic in Fidi than last year and far less traffic when I do need to take a taxi or uber. It seems like greater foot traffic would be a benefit for your friend's store unless it's a destination store that sells large products (furniture/appliances/etc).
Keeping a car in Manhattan is the closest thing to having superpowers most will ever experience - and I’m sure with congestion pricing the equation is even better.
Have you ever ridden a bike? Taken the subway? Heck, you can just use a taxi to get around. Why would you want to deal with having a car in somewhere like Manhattan? Do you hate your fellow citizens so much you need to be constantly insulated from society?
Building proposed: "It will be too expensive! We need housing for those making 10% of median income, not for those making the median income!"
Building mid-construction: "This building is unbelievably ugly! How could we let this happen to our town?!"
Building completed: "This building is completely vacant! Why did we allow this to be constructed? It's just proof we should never build anything again, it's not needed."
18 months later, building fully occupied, lots of happy residents with mixed incomes: Silence, because they are too busy complaining about all the other buildings.
And now people have forgotten that almost all the problems cars solve today are problems caused by cars in the first place.
Of course every other metric section is beaming but the one about affecting lower income is "it's too early to tell".
It's not fair economics or policy making if it always skews one way. It's like "carbon tax to force people not to fly or move, while elite private planes are essential".
I think you have a distorted sense of what fairness is. Charging the same price to the rich that you charge to the poor for the same service is fair. Charging different prices would be unfair.
Charity/philanthropy is a good thing, because human life is inherently valuable, but it's not a matter of fairness. People don't have an inherent right to benefit from the labor or ingenuity of others.
Nice strawman. No. Charging for something that changes behavior in the poor but not in the rich because it's an exclusinary device is definitely not fair. I also didn't suggest different prices but simply not doing exclusion via money or taxation, which doesn't affect the rich.
> Charity/philanthropy is a good thing, because human life is inherently valuable, but it's not a matter of fairness. People don't have an inherent right to benefit from the labor or ingenuity of others.
What are you on about? I'm sorry to tell you but the likes of corporate magnates and rich politicians don't create more value just bend the rules to stay on top. It's easy to throw money at things to create more money when you have it. When you can put your capital in a tax haven and the rubble pays it in full.
Next time you come with inspired strawmen takes, prep a bit.
but also the current setup has income based exemptions / lowered rates
Effectively we added a barrier to travel (this IS a tax), with some positive externalities for some people (including me), but whether that tax revenue will be deployed well is doubtful given MTA track record.
(Yes, it was/is underfunded; but also somehow everything is 10x of what it “supposed” to cost)
Then people question whether they are going to go through, or pay a little bit to keep up the infrastructure if they do.
Did she think that New Jersey residents vote for New York candidates? Do you have a link to the narrative?
Here's an article about it, she hasn't admitted the election considerations so we can't know for sure: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/09/nyregion/hochul-congestio...
The congestion charge is nowhere on the DNC's radar nationally. The mayor of the largest city in the country engaging in blatant quid pro quo with a president from another party, certainly is.
Remove him from office? That's a power the governor has, and which the previous governor (Cuomo) threatened to use for petty personal disagreements with the previous mayor (DeBlasio), so actually invoking it to remove someone who has been indicted on federal charges is clearly fair game.
> The DoJ suit against Adams didn't happen until a month after the DNC.
The indictment didn't happen until the fall, but Adams had his home raided and phone seized long before that. The perjury also happened before that, I believe.
I honestly have no clue what beef you have with me, or if you even disagree, but thanks for calling me cool.
> What was the reason she gave for not ratfucking it a second time?
Still waiting on an answer that it seems you might be capable of providing rather than acting like a dick
It took a lot of time and effort to bring the stakeholders together for congestion pricing. And to withhold her approval at the last moment was shocking. It's hard to imagine what she was really thinking and even harder to understand how she felt she would be rewarded for it. That's not a real answer to your question, but her reasoning on both congestion pricing and Eric Adams just seems opaque.
If only they could also write with a heavy NYC accent, their comment would be even cooler. Forget about it.
Accordingly, it’s a dc
I wish they would start this, but its politics is such a mess nothing really gets done there. New Ideas there gets implemented far slower than then ideas in Roman Catholic Church.
Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
Shanghai. Amsterdam up to a point - they never completely lost their transit, but it was in pretty bad shape.
> Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
It can help. You need improving transit and densification to happen together so they can reinforce each other, so you need coordination between transport policy and housing policy, I think that's the key.
For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.
Within city limits, there are no roads with speed limits over 50 km/h (30 mi/h), lots of traffic lights, lots of bus/bike lanes, and lots of congestion. The Trans Canada highway skirts along the side of the city but does not enter it. Things get slow, very quickly.
There are complex historic reasons behind this. Politics, activism, lack of federal funding, etc.
This is a decent article:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/09/story-cities-...
I think Detroit is an amazing example in the US of how much a sole focus on building our highways can cripple a city for decades.
> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
It also wasn’t really a major city historically over the types of timeframes as London, Paris, or even New York.
Modern Tokyo is more of a ‘new’ city, and the subways were constructed along with a lot of the new construction - that central Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in the war certainly removed the friction that would otherwise have made that hard, eh?
Make no mistake, bikes are much, much, better for urban centers than cars. But the overall problem isn't cars, it's individual traffic in densely populated areas.
Certain policy here in Europe simply assumes that people stay in their surroundings ("15 minute city") and rarely, if ever, visit parts that are farther away individually.
Public transportation, however, is naturally biased. It can be much quicker to get 10km north-south than 5km east-west, or the other way around, depending on the city. And, of course, public transportation is often lacking quality compared to individual traffic. (Taking a bike across a bicycle road vs. getting into a crammed subway train in July, for instance.)
Well, it doesn't have to be like that. Riding a bike in July is atrocious where I live, even with an electrical one. I'll end up drenched after my 20-minute commute, even though it's mostly flat.
Cars didn't use to have AC, either, now they do. Newer metro lines where I live also started having AC a few years ago. This can be improved. They also automated some lines, and we now have trains every other minute during rush hour. They're still full to the brim.
What's missing, however, is some kind of reasonable policy. But not only of the government kind.
Why do we all have to commute at the same exact time? Yeah, some people have kids and need to get them to school on time. Others need to absolutely be physically at their work place at a given time.
But huge swathes of the population are not in this situation. Why do they insist on taking the metro at the same exact time as the others? When Covid was still a thing, the government tried asking the people who could, to move their work schedules a little before or a little after rush hour, so as to lower density. Nobody cared. I had already doing this before covid: the commute was much shorter; I had ample seating available. Yet I didn't see any change after this recommendation.
But damn, every time I hit my hand with the hammer I have, it hurts like hell.
I'm not saying there should only be transit and no bikes. I think each means has its own merits, but my point is that these should be improved such that we can take full advantage of them. Just like bikes require infrastructure, or else they're much too dangerous, so do trains require maintenance and being kept up to date, or else they're a PITA to use.
[0] Those who do typically could well be working remotely instead.
Among my colleagues (~20 people) nobody has a customer-facing job, and only one needs to manage children. The others either don't have kids at all, or the kids are old enough to manage on their own. They all come in the office around 9:30 AM. We rarely schedule meetings before 10 AM and after 5 PM. I'm pretty sure that if even 10% of the people would change their schedules a bit, comfort would improve for everybody. It's the same thing with lunch. Everybody goes down at 1 PM on the dot and complains about there being too many people. I go around 12:30 and never have to wait in line for ages.
Of course, WFH would be even better, but I understand not all people like it. The company I work for is actually quite flexible, but the people do tend to prefer working from the office. I, personally, prefer WFH (which is what I do generally). But my point isn't to push a particular working arrangement, rather to point out that even when there is some inherent flexibility in the system, people seem to choose not to use it.
But US cities today actually push back against this because more people coming to work at the office from suburbs = more sales tax for the city.
The 15-minute city idea is now a real trigger issue. It's originally urban planning concept so I understand it's more about design the city in such a way that you /can/ live most of your life within a 15mins journey rather than assuming that's already the case (or worse as some conspiracy theories assume).
I disagree; it’s cars.
There is a natural limit to how far people want to bike (in a statistical sense, as the distance increases the number of people willing to bike that far drops). The highest density ends up occurring around train stations which is a focal point for foot and bicycle traffic and necessitates large bike parking lots. Those people then switch to trains although they might pick up a bike on the other side. Some people prefer bike rental for these reasons, since when you drop off your bike someone coming the other direction can take it and you can pick up another one at the end of the train ride.
Bike and bus take the same amount of space. Cars take up far more.
That combined with some anti-rat-run measures in Oxford (and any anti car measure ever) into outraged paranoia.
The problem isn't so much density (I think NYC is much denser), as much as it is the existence of really popular destinations; you'll see this close to some big train stations in rush hour, for example. Solutions are smarter road layout, and providing more and more attractive alternative routes, and alternative destinations (e.g. more train stations nearby).
I think you have causality backwards there — 15 minute cities are to make it possible to live a life where going further is rare by ensuring it is not necessary.
To quote the wikipedia page: "The 15-minute city (FMC[2] or 15mC[3]) is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city."
I was born and raised in a place that matches this description: Havant, on the south coast of the UK. 15 minutes from there is the entirety of not just Havant itself, but also most of the surrounding towns and villages including the majority of Portsmouth island. A lot of the people I grew up with, never moved out of the area — but they can all travel whenever they want to.
My dad's commute 20-30 years ago would have been something like this: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Havant,+UK/BAE+Systems+Broad...
I now live in Berlin, which is likewise. The "work" part is mostly dependent on the specific employer, and perhaps even if they're happy with WFH, because the travel time between any two randomly selected points of the city is about 45 minutes; but all the other stuff is replicated so much all around the city that I have five stand-alone supermarkets a building supplies store and two shopping malls, a couple of schools, five doctors (GP/Hausarzt), an entire hospital, some historical sites, a huge lake, a beach, several hotels, lots of woodland that's great for pleasant walks and cycling, and a few public parks within that travel time — and that despite being in one of the quiet backwater parts near the city limits.
As far as I can tell, any two places in Davis CA are within 15 minutes of each other, so for people who both live and work there, that too would be a "15 minute city".
I mean, there's only so much more dense you can make Manhattan.
> Certain policy here in Europe simply assumes that people stay in their surroundings ("15 minute city") and rarely, if ever, visit parts that are farther away individually.
... Eh? Which country is that? Like, in any city with any sort of mass transit system, that is presumably not any sort of policy, because the mass transit system is explicitly for going to places that you can't easily get to. The idea with the "15 minute city" thing is that you don't _need_ to travel far from home for essentials, not that you don't travel far from home. Like, I live within 15 minute walk of all essentials, but I often go places which are further away.
That said, I've never missed a light cycle while bicycling, even in rush hour in major metro areas with many people on bikes. The busiest bike intersection in the world, in Copenhagen, devotes less space to bikes than most US streets devote to one lane of vehicle traffic.
Every single US city I have seen has ample space for bicycle infrastructure. Many have lots of roads with sufficient space for dedicated transit lanes, and bicycle lanes, and widened sidewalks while still maintaining space for personal vehicles.
Even if we take your hypothetical to the extreme, with only bicycles and no personal vehicles, every US city has enough space for the bike traffic on its existing streets.
Now ban AirBnb, Lyft and Uber. Basically anything funded by YC.
Is well outside the Overton window of YC's private discussion forum.
If it works in a country where the auto is so ingrained in the culture and lifestyle, it can work anywhere.
It does this by sweeping a lot of negative externalities under the carpet of society. There's no magic here.
Impressive how public transport does not enter the mind of Americans.
I currently live in NYC and am very congestion pricing. Cars are a major negative to most people in the city.
But I have also lived in rural parts of America. Yes, it is annoying you can't walk to a corner store, but cars are not that big of a deal. You can bike or run in the streets without concern that cars will come by. And housing is so cheap it makes it so worth it.
Of course people would rather commute in a gas guzzling SUV. I don't even know how it's controversial. It must be a form of Stockholm syndrome to think that this would be attractive to any normally adjusted human being.
1. A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train), is unacceptable to bear, when there exist alternatives.
1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly or wrongly, people feel more in control when they're driving compared to when they're using public transit (or similarly, taking a commercial flight), which makes them feel better about it. And there is some element of sense here: accidents do not occur evenly among the population, because some drivers are better and more alert than others.
2. If you're traveling with small children, the various (however rare it may be) unpleasantries of NYC public transit become an order of magnitude more unpleasant.
3. There certainly is an element of Stockholm syndrome among NYC transit users, in that other very large cities around the world with ridership comparable to NYC have very little antisocial dysfunction, but in NYC it often gets waved away as "part and parcel of living in a big city".
how common is it for people to be thrown off the platform into an oncoming train in NY?
You and everyone else of course has their own barometer of what is an acceptable tradeoff. I'm not trying to convince you in particular that NYC transit is a good or bad experience overall; I'm explaining why it is reasonable for someone to come to the latter conclusion.
What longer distance does is make the closer areas more valuable, because people will pay $$$ for a shorter commute. And for those who can't afford the closer housing, they get to pay $$ on a car and gas instead.
Cars are only helpful in exactly two scenarios:
1. You live in a remote rural area where any sort of transit infrastructure is comically infeasible. 99% of the people posting here do not quality for this.
2. You live in a city so maliciously planned out that living without a car is unthinkable and that any other option to get to where you're going is not available.
I use the word "malicious" because the gutting of American cities' transit infrastructure was a deliberate act by American car companies giving their competition the mafia bust-out treatment.
This is not true. It is true in some circumstances, but definitely not in all. The fact that it’s presented as absolute fact hurts the point you’re trying to make imo.
Public transport hasn't caught up because these places developed too fast and even though their inhabitants live and pay taxes there, the businesses they work for don't, so the tax base is all the lower due to that.
I moved out BTW, because I figured that being able to afford at most a 1-bedroom, 55m2 apartment as a software engineer is a deal I'm not willing to take.
Real estate has been going up in price all over the world in the past decade and it doesn't matter if it's apartment blocks or detached homes.
My new place is a city 40% the size and far from there, but my friends by and large drove until they qualified. Typically less than 30km, but that's already a 1h commute by car.
In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so comically car-dependent. You might as well just raise the gas tax. Most cities don't even have a downtown to protect from cars, they're just suburban sprawl forever.
The actually radical solution for places outside the Tri-State Area is as follows:
- Ban mixed streets and highways ("stroads"). That is, any road in the network must either be built to exclusively service local properties, or carry high-speed thru traffic, not both. Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.
- Level the zoning code. Allow mixed commercial everywhere, get rid of lawn setbacks, and allow up to four story buildings basically anywhere the soil won't collapse from it. The only limitations to this policy should be to prevent existing tenants from being renovicted immediately.
- Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.
I'm not sure how any of this would play in the motosexual parts of America, though. Even nominally blue states like California would shit themselves if you tried to even slightly inconvenience car owners.
[0] To be clear, Tokyo as we know it today was basically rebuilt by America after we leveled it with firebombs. It was specifically built in the image of Manhattan.
[1] I can imagine several reasons why NYPD cops might not want to take public transit which I won't elaborate further on here.
This is completely untrue.
Nah. Almost any city built pre-motor-car has a decent downtown that can make for a starting point. And these things grow when policy supports them.
> Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.
Nah, this would just result in a wave of urban highway building that also drained transit budgets.
The way forward is to make street parking permit-only, give permits to existing but not new residents, and allow development. Do that and the rest will sort itself out.
> - Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.
BRT is a spook that has never worked (or rather it's worked very well in diverting transit efforts and stopping effective transit).
> To be clear, Tokyo as we know it today was basically rebuilt by America after we leveled it with firebombs. It was specifically built in the image of Manhattan.
Dense cities are also the only places where public transit works, so it kind of balances out.
> This is just a small example.
New York city is a small example? New York city is the largest city in the US, and pretty much the ONLY city where you can do this. And the mediocre results (10% is very little) from even NYC show that this will not even come close to working anywhere else.
Dense cities are too congested for speeds to get that high. As an example, I felt safer biking in downtown San Francisco than I do on the country roads near me because people are constantly speeding and on their phones.
More expensive cars, also, probably.
test B - after
what are you talking about ?
But sometimes it’s the only possible approach.
But in the absence of the ability to run them simultaneously, "A is before and B is after" can be a fine proxy. Of course, if B is worse, it'd be nice if you could only subject, say, 5% of your population to it before you just slam the slider to 100% and hit everyone with it.
in such big scale a/b test is tool to deceive, not to get to right conclusion
(Purely hypothetically: one could identify 10% of the island as operating under the new rules and compare outcomes. This is politically fraught on multiple levels and also gives messy spatial results.)
The problem is that for A/B testing to really work you need independent groups outcomes. As soon as there is any bias in group selection or cross group effect it's very hard to unpick.
A more valid design would be randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it. Obviously not feasible in practice, but that's at least the kind of thing to strive toward when designing these kinds of studies.
In any case, not every policy change needs to be an academic exercise.
I've got a textbook on field experiments that refers to these kinds of questions as FUQ - acronym for "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions". You can collect suggestive evidence, but firmly establishing cause and effect is something you've just got to let go of.
Cities are stupidly heterogenous. These data wouldn't be more meaningful than comparing cities with congestion pricing to those without. (And comparing them from their congestion eras.)
"Our treatment units are stupidly heterogeneous" is exactly the problem it solves. A century's worth of developing increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques for making do without random assignment has thus far failed to accomplish anything than provisional mitigations that are notoriously easy to use incorrectly in practice.
I wish more laws would pre-state what their intended outcome and success would look like.
Do you A/B test your comments too?
Policies have different effects depending on how likely people judge them to be long-term changes. Construction along a route will cause people to temporarily use alternative forms of transportation, but not e.g. sell their car or buy a long-term bus pass.
Yes, the inability to know counterfactuals will make judging policies more subjective than we might like. The closest we get to A/B testing is when different jurisdictions adopt substantially similar policies at different times. For example, this was done to judge improvements from phasing out leaded-gasoline, since it was done at different times and rates in different areas.
but we have before and after data to compare - that's what this article is about. and the congestion pricing plan included requirements to publish data specifically for the purposes of comparison between last year and this year.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
These aren't subtle infractions of the law. Tell me why automated traffic enforcement cameras don't target them.
As a motorcyclist, e-bikes piss me off to no end.
Gotta give those automated systems something to use
Lawyers have a saying about blood and stones. Government doesn't like to talk in those terms because they know it's bad optics but...
For private use, rescind the license for non-payment.
For extra fun, surcharge the dope ordering DoorDash when his e-bike driver breaks the law. Tips will dry up. Problem solved.
This is easy.
Beyond the obvious lack of registration plates, it's basic physics.
A fat guy on an e-bike is what, 100+30kg of mass? How fast do they go, maybe 35km/h (22mph) tops? That gives us the kinetic energy of roughly 6242J.
Let's compare with a silly lightweight 1,400kg car + 100kg driver moving at the same speed: 72,030J - 11 times greater.
At 50km/h (31mph) that becomes 144,907J - 23 times greater.
70km/h (43mph)? 46 times.
100km/h (62mph)? 94.
So the worst case possible for an ebike compared to the best case for a car has the car be 11 times more dangerous. More realistically, a car will be over 20 times more dangerous, with essentially infinite potential for more (do cars in cities travel at 31mph tops?).
Now, in another comment [1] you went ahead and said speed limits are set too low and mild speeding is all good and fine. Does it still seem so?
Whatever $OPERATOR on $CONVEYANCE at $SPEED works out to, I would hope that each jurisdiction has a vested interest in safety on their roads. Indeed, the lack of registration plates, and the lack of licensing is a huge impediment.
I find that motorists with licenses tend to obey all relevant traffic laws. They are not prone to running red lights or swerving around or otherwise operating their cars dangerously. And I attribute this behavior mostly to the fact that driving is a privilege that can be restricted or revoked.
If you fine a pedestrian for jaywalking then they can pay that fine or not. You cannot prevent a pedestrian from walking around in the street. You apparently cannot prevent people from riding bikes or scooters, either. Since there is no licensing and no "privilege" to do so, it's more or less anything-goes on the streets with such conveyances.
Nevertheless, I've been that fat guy on an electric scooter, and I'm telling you, it would not be surprising to maim or kill a vulnerable pedestrian (and my own self) if I'm going along at 17mph in the road.
Perhaps the cameras can't catch or target them, but hopefully some enforcement can be brought to bear on such dangerous activity.
It sounds like measures to limit the danger of electric bikes might be warranted, but that’s a separate issue. Even if electric bikes are a problem I’d be shocked if they came anywhere close to causing the pedestrian fatality rate of cars (even when controlled by frequency of use) in an urban environment, not to mentioni the additional impacts of things like emissions (including non-tailpipe), noise, space, etc. of cars. I don’t know much about motorcycle statistics. I can imagine the group that rides motorcycles might be less likely to hit pedestrians than those of e-bike riders, but I don’t know.
If we have to choose only one of these problems to tackle at a time—which we don’t!—I’d rather they tackle the one which is killing hundreds of people a year.
Had a car killed my wife or unborn child, there would have been a legal trail and insurance.
Had the e-bike killed my wife or unborn child, there was neither. I doubt I could ever find the killer of the unborn child if the baby died later due to injuries-- there's neither license nor registration on an e-bike.
Pushing powered transportation into the unregulated, uninsured space is madness.
Having been a juror on a civil trial against the MTA, I assure you that the New York public is perfectly willing to hold people accountable for injury.
Drunk driving was reduced over my lifetime [1] by calling attention to it (e.g. MADD), shaming the practice, lowering BAC thresholds, and increasing enforcement.
Similar approaches could be done for pedestrian injury by vehicles. Sure, it takes more time (and does not scam $9 from my pocket in the meantime) but public behavior can be changed.
[1] https://www.responsibility.org/alcohol-statistics/drunk-driv...
The punishment: His driving license was revoked: https://www.berlin.de/generalstaatsanwaltschaft/presse/press...
Germany has a reputation as strict and bureaucratic, and yet, it's apparently still legal to murder people with your car.
You'd have to be an utter asshole (like a kid totaling three cars in a year, all going 70-100+ mph on urban streets), or the world's dumbest criminal (motorcyclist out on parole running a red, killing a pedestrian, fleeing the scene, and ditching the motorcycle in a field) for killing someone with a car to be more than a 'whoopsie daisies, at least nobody important got hurt'.
In my town, just last year, a cop running down a young woman when she had right of way in a crosswalk, while doing 74 mph in a 25 mph zone at night, with no sirens, got a $5,000 fine for it.
That's how much the life of a grad student is worth.
---
Look, I'm all for traffic enforcement, but anyone who thinks that bikes are the big problem on the road is nuts.
Reckless behaviour in traffic should be prevented, and
The same reckless behaviour is more dangerous when performed in a car. (People rarely actually get killed by an e-bike. It happens all the time with cars.)
That’s ridiculous. How many e-bikes do you think caused fatal accidents last year in the US?? Are you legitimately scared of this happening?
(At least in the US, having a driver's license is in no way, shape, or form an indication that the driver is capable of driving correctly, much less their willingness to do so.)
Perhaps if there is a no bikelanes and cyclists are bothering you on the sidewalk you should walk in the middle of the road, as the real danger is bikes, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Googling it, I found a second one in London with the same methods (surveying CCTV footage of multiple intersections) and they get the same findings
In both:
- Motorists break way more traffic laws
- Motorists mainly break the law for speed or convenience
- The infractions by motorists are generally more serious and pose a threat to others (the main one is speeding)
- The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk - which is because of cars, and it doesn't happen when there is a bike lane
- The second one is turning right on red without causing inconvenience to other road users
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/traffic-note-8-cycling-red-lights...
For the danish government report unfortunately they moved it and I can't find it anymore
http://api.vejdirektoratet.dk/sites/default/files/2019-05/Cy...
Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits. Unless the speeding is bucketed, this alone is enough to skew the results to say motorists are worse than bicyclists. Remember, speeding tickets are a revenue source and the incentive is to set limits that produce revenue.
> The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk - which is because of cars, and it doesn't happen when there is a bike lane
This is still illegal. Blaming it on cars is lame-- these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
A motorcycle likewise can ride on the sidewalk to avoid car congestion but it doesn't because it's illegal and we would hold the driver accountable. Bikes, not so much.
This is still illegal. Blaming it on what you feel the speed limits "should" be is lame - these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
...okay, okay, that's a bit too forum-argument, but hopefully it demonstrates the contradiction here.
Further, I'd argue that, while speeding is universally a response to perceived inconvenience, sidewalk cycling can sometimes be a response to perceived safety problems, not just inconvenience.
Obviously it's still illegal and unsafe for pedestrians, but I think handwaving car-based lawbreakers and assuming their violations are justified, while also assuming the least generous intentions for cyclists... just hammers home the initial claim: people perceive car lawbreakering as forgivable when it's common and rare when it's worse, and cyclist lawbreaking as both egregious and universal, because they emphasize more with drivers than cyclists.
And you think the average driver is qualified to make that assessment on a moment-by-moment basis?
Hell, I don't know you, but given the chances I'm gonna go ahead and say you don't know the intricacies of road design either. Most drivers do not even fully grasp the concept of line-of-sight, much less anything more complex than that. Hence, the easy to understand speed limits decided by experts.
But hey, go ahead, tell me specifically where the speed limits are commonly too low in your opinion and why.
> these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
No, "inconvenient" is e.g. what drivers find yielding to pedestrians. Riding a bike amongst cars is dangerous and unsafe.
> A motorcycle likewise can ride on the sidewalk to avoid car congestion but it doesn't because it's illegal
Speeding is illegal too, so clearly "illegal" is not the reason. It'd be unreasonably dangerous to pedestrians to operate a motor powered vehicle on a sidewalk in a way that a bicycle isn't.
> Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits.
>> The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk -
> This is still illegal. Blaming it on cars is lame- these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient
???
The dissonance is insane
Also, between cyclists and motorists, which one is always grown adults, who passed an exam to use their vehicle, and which one includes children, the mentally disabled and all of those who can't drive and their right to the road cannot be stripped away?
Whoops, I gave it away.
You can in fact blame it on cars
Actually, do you remember that the report mentioned bike lanes solve this problem? You can blame street design, too. Except if cars weren't there, you wouldn't even need the bike lanes.
In London it is now just a toll. It started off at just the busiest times but now you need to pay it 24/5, and even on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when there is no rush hour. Not only have the hours expanded, but so has the size of the zone. So now even right out in the suburbs you need to pay if you drive a diesel but I fully expect them to include petrol cars, then eventually all EVs too.
The prices are quite cheap too - the price is like 2 adults return tickets on the tube so you may as well just drive it since the price is the same but public transport is so utterly utterly awful and unreliable and slow and dirty and just terrible in London.
If they were serious about changing people's behaviour and serious about trying to prevent congestion and/or pollution they'd price it so that it is a real deterrent to usage (so instead of £15, it would be like £250/day or something). But if they did that then no one would pay so they'd not get the revenue. So they price it just right so that people pay.
They say all the proceeds are ring-fenced for reinvestment etc etc. This is disingenuous - it's not like transport suddenly gets 125% extra funding, they just set the budgets so the "extra" they get from congestion charging and cameras etc tops-off the budgets so things balance out at ~100% of what they'd get anyway and the difference just used for other vanity projects by TfL.
They are forced to share air with obviously poor and non-white people and that is simply intolerable...
One of the biggest adjustments I went through in moving from SF to London was accepting that busses were a viable mode of transit for any time of day. In SF I would crawl over broken glass to avoid having to take a Muni bus while in London my wife and I have taken a bus in dinner jacket and couture dress to an event at a club. There will doubtless be people to chime in with examples of bus systems that are better, but TfL busses are not 'awful and unreliable and slow and dirty and just terrible' by any possible metric.
You might be right though: what is your commute/experience that made you describe it so? Am genuinely curious to understand in how much of a privileged bubble I might be in.
I've lived here all my life, never owned a car, and I have no idea what you're talking about
Completely disagree with this statement. Living in London for 4 years now and despite the occasional late train or "ghost" bus it is quite reliable and at reasonable speeds. Unsure what you mean about "dirty", the buses and tube rarely seem messy.
However I agree that the toll should be higher and applicable to all private vehicles.
Slow: many many journeys via bus are usually at least 4 to 5x slower than driving. Typical example for me to go to the nearest large supermarket from where I live (approx 2 miles) is a 7 minute drive (so average 18mph) and pennies in fuel/energy costs or a 44 minute bus journey with a 9 minute walk at the end (each way) that requires changing buses half-way and costs £1.75 x 2 = £3.50 return unless you get a hopper fair. it's actually quicker to walk-tube-walk (38 minutes) but that is I think £4.20 return just for a quick shop at the big Tescos! It would only take 41 minutes to walk the whole way, so a bus is actually slower than walking.
Unreliable: just this week the tubes all stopped due to a "power blip" meaning I missed an appointment. This morning the train I was on changed it's destination after I got on it, meaning I had to get off and go back to a junction and get another train, which incidentally I had to wait 7 minutes for and it was packed. There is a joke about "TfL minutes" because the minutes they show on the countdown clocks at bus stations and tube stations are typically significantly longer than real minutes. There barely goes by a month without at least the threat of industrial action either, meaning you have to reschedule things just incase (and usually these are called off at the last minute meaning the union got what they wanted, TfL can say they avoided the strike, but you and I have already had to alter our plans or rebook meetings or pay for extra childcare etc already but because it is called off within 12-24 hours you are too late to cancel your own plans without penalties etc etc)
Dirty: look at your hands after getting the tube and holding onto a handrail. Or blow your nose. It's dirty. No one can deny this. The air in the tube is worse than the air on the street in terms of PM2.5 etc - there have been many studies on this
General awfulness: try getting on a rushhour train. If you can physically squeeze on to a train that is. And if you do, it's a pretty unpleasant, sweaty, gross, frottagy horror story.
People who think that it is this amazing nirvana are deluding themselves. Are there worse places? Sure. But let's not delude ourselves that it is by any regard "good". I guess if you are visiting from somewhere else on vacation then there is a novelty-factor, but if you have to do the 9-5 grind for decades at a time, if you have appointments to keep, a boss that yells at you if you are late, kids to collect on time from school (or they grass you up to social services because you can't answer the phone because you are trapped underground), or anything that requires a cheap and reliable service that you can count on then it sucks.
I find transit and traffic to be a complex topic and sometime I see changes to a road locally and "yeah that makes sense to do taht there" but the next street over "no way". The New York City dynamic, I've zero clue how that plays out...
1) make a dedicated lane for public transport on every street so that traffic jams do not affect it
2) let car owners vote if they want to pay for entering the city or would rather spend some more time in traffic jams but save the money
Restaurants, Broadway Holding up
Pollution Too soon to say
Lower-income commuters Too soon to say
Public opinion Not great, but improving
The reporters sought information from everyone they could think of, including the M.T.A., the Fire Department, restaurant-booking platforms, researchers and one yellow school bus company.
How about from low-income commuters?
When I bought a NJTransit when I started working a monthly ride card for a 1hr commute cost $500/month approximately. The same commute with a car was 45 minutes and fuel/maintenance was $250/month + I needed the car anyway.
A 1hr commute in Switzerland costs me like $1.5k per year.
The congestion charge changes the math, but I’m not sure it changes the service.
Public transit improves regularly and continuously in my experience, usually incrementally.
It's reducing congestion by removing the people who don't want to pay $9 to drive to town.
Paying to be there: what a lovely concept! It works wonders for reducing density, too. Fewer people live in a desirable area, and they are richer and more pleasant, what are the downsides?
Maybe it should not be linked to affordability; it should be a lottery, for fairness.
For instance, if your license plate ends with certain numbers or letters (changing daily, and known months in advance for any given day), you don't get to drive into town.
Knowing well in advance the days when your car is admissible into the city allows you to plan. E.g. reschedule certain appointments so they occur on an allowed day, or else make alternative transportation plans.
Imperfections in lottery systems:
- Not fair toward people who often have to drive to town for whatever reason: they drive everyday or many days out of the week or month. Still translates to an extra cost, like driving to some parking lot outside of the city core, paying for parking there, and then paying for transit into the city. This could be people who are not well off: they work some job in the city that is not well paid, and have to live far away. In America "have car" != "affluent".
- Unfair advantage enjoyed by people who own multiple vehicles; we have not entirely eliminated pay-to-drive-here.
Our infrastructure isn't there yet. We are doing poorly. This is a first step. Yes, it will favor the wealthy for now. But its longterm effects will be to favor everyone. Stop being shortsighted. I don't believe that the ends always justify the means, but this is not a particularly horrible short-term sacrifice to make.
Or do you mean that declining any opportunity for a rent-seeking cash-grab is categorically short-sighted? I can accept that.
If you have a car, you can already afford purchase/lease, insurance, registration, fuel, maintenance, etc., so affording a reasonable and variable toll is not an issue. If your need to take that vehicle into that zone at that specific time is so great, a $9 toll will not be a deterrent, and if it is just convenience, then rearrange your schedule or transport mode to a time/mode that balances the cost and convenience.
Sure it sounds nice to have it done by lottery system (e.g., plates with the rightmost numeral = "3" are banned next Tuesday), but that is much harder to tune and could present a far more serious impediment.
Far easier to tune it with price: Tuesday mornings have an extra-high traffic spike, ok, "Fee increases to $11 Tuesdays 0:830-13:30". We want to get to 15% less traffic instead of 10%, now we need to say "plates with the rightmost numerals in the range '00'-'15' banned Tuesdays", etc. etc.. Every time they make a change, everyone must check... what a mess.
And for people who MUST be there at a specific time, e.g., your cancer treatment center has only a Tuesday 10:20 AM slot for you, being banned because of a license plate is a real hardship, whereas an extra $2 toll is a trivial inconvenience compared to the reason for the trip.
Sounds vaguely like, why are you begging, and why should I give you anything, if you can afford cigarettes?
A lot of low-income Americans drive cars, and would be way more fucked without them, because of the way things are.
> that is much harder to tune and could present a far more serious impediment.
What impediment, and how is it harder to tune?
In principle, you can tune the system to such a fine granularity that, for instance, one specific license plate is permitted to enter the city, every four years on February 29th. And that is no easier to declare than any other tuning, like alternating daily between two halves of the license plate space.
The expense profile of a motor vehicle in the USA in 2025 is quite different than cigarettes. And yes, if you are buying two packs per day of cigarettes, at $11.96 NY State average [0] you can skip one to drive into the congestion zone in congestion time.
>> A lot of low-income Americans drive cars
Yup. It is near-absolutely critical to have a car in rural America. But that is a long drive from Manhattan. How many of them NEED to drive cars into Manhattan during congestion periods? When I lived in Manhattan long before congestion pricing, I sold my car because it was such a hassle to have while living there.
>>What impediment, and how is it harder to tune? In principle, you can tune the system to such a fine granularity that...
I already provided such an example. There are many types of appointments that are very difficult to get, and adding the hassle of being ILLEGAL to drive your car on that particular day will be a real hardship, not a mere inconvenience.
Sure, the city planners could tune any license plate scheme down to an individual vehicle, but only at the cost of a massive hassle to everyone involved. The general algo of "ya, it'll cost me to go during congestion times; oh woah, they just added $2 to the 11h-14h time slot" is waaay different from "I have a doctor appointment Tuesday, is the third character of my plate 4, 5, M, or N?...[runs out to look at plate]...damnit, I've got to change to... oh, no appointments for another seventeen weeks?... (real example from my own doctor)" The person who could have taken care of it for a $9 fee is now either seriously delayed or needs to pay $80 for an Uber.
Meanwhile, you want to add all that burden to everyone to accommodate a population of low income people, near Manhattan, who want to drive their cars into the city on a regular basis. But they will NOT be able to do this to get to their job daily, so will still need to make other arrangements initially every other day anyway.
This convinces me there is even less of a case for lottery allocation than even the first post.
edit: add LF for formatting
About appointments, there could be a very simple website where you punch in your license plate, hit Enter, and see a calendar with all your days highlighted, for the next 6 to 12 months.
There could be some flexibility in the system. Everyone gets a small number of tokens (which expire: must be used in a year or something) that provide a free pass on any day whatsoever. You use those for those situations like getting a sudden appointment that couldn't be planned around the regular system (e.g. someone canceled and you were next on the waitlist, and the time is the time).
The token system could be automatic in fact. You just drive to the city on an off day when you aren't supposed to, and your "ding count" increments by one. On the same website where you punch in your plate number to get a schedule, you can see the number of dings against your license plate. (The system wouldn't have to track all license; just ones that triggered a ding.) (Not sure about the privacy implications. Someone who enters your plate number and sees a ding count knows that your car has been to the city sometime in the past few months on an unassigned day. If that's something you need to hide from someone, then maybe just don't go by car on those days.)
1) random selection creates both substantial unfairness and cost on people who through no fault of their own have schedule issues, when compared to a modest congestion toll,
2) random selection creates widespread inconvenience for everyone especially when changes are made to 'tune' the amount of traffic; everyone needs to check if the new lottery numbers match their plates, vs just increasing prices at specific which will at most cost someone a few dollars extra if they don't check in advance, instead of a costly ticket
3) The lottery system would not help anyone who wants to commute in everyday, since they would be banned on whatever days they are banned. In contrast, the cost system is trivial for one-off trips, but a significant cumulative cost to people who want to use cars in the congested zone every day. The one-off trips are not the problem, the GOAL is to reduce habitual trips. The toll system addresses that most specifically and gives no advantage to two-car households, whereas a lottery is basically a free pass to two-car households to continue congesting.
Having a lottery system with ~4 free passes per month may solve some of these, but at the cost of a lot of additional tracking and overhead. Still thinking basic economics is a good solution here. More ideal in some ways would be a sliding per-visit scale (e.g., scaling by some exponent per visit per month...), but again likely not worth the overhead.
Does not the congestion pricing setup in N.Y. rely on license plate cameras?
Under the lottery model, the same cameras are used. When a license is scanned which is permitted on that day, no further tracking is required. The event contributes to statistics, but otherwise can be dropped.
When a license is scanned which is not permitted that day, it added to a local database with a count of 1, or else has its count incremented if already recorded. Further processing deeper in the system is only applied to licenses which are over a threshold. The counts are periodically aged down, and records which hit zero are deleted.
I'm talking more of the overhead for every single person who might want to come into the city on a given day — they will need to check and work their schedules around 1) being sure to check the current permitted/denied license plate character pattern and 2) work their schedules around that.
As we've already seen, we already need substantial work-arounds for critical can't move medical appointments. Events can be even worse; working in a business displaying at the biggest trade show for their industry all year, they've got to come in all four days, using their personal cars. Oops, nope, banned two of those days... etc. It is bullshit. Whereas with congestion tolls, it's just a trivial expense part of doing the show. We can think of thousands of such examples where a toll is simply a trivial inconvenience whereas a traffic violation is not. Of course, for each one, we can find a work-around ("just add another layer of indirection...."). And each one of those work-arounds adds to the workload of everyone who might come into the zone.
In contrast, the congestion toll workload is always simple: "Is it worth the extra $X to go in during the busy time, or can I go in a different time?"
And, traffic violations — especially accumulating traffic violations — are a LOT worse for low-income people, as the consequences tend to compound.
You are definitely convincing me even more strongly that congestion tolls are the better idea and lotteries are both far more inconvenient and more unfair.
Ideally, they wouldn't change it more than, say, nine months out. I.e it is set in stone for three quarters of a year. A month is added each month. No "tuning" anything closer than 9 months.
> we already need substantial work-arounds for critical can't move medical appointments.
Trivial workaround of free passes associated with counters tied to license plates, together with the stability of the schedule being set in stone for months into the future.
> And, traffic violations — especially accumulating traffic violations — are a LOT worse for low-income people, as the consequences tend to compound.
What's the difference? Low-income people will just drive past the cameras and get a shocking bill in the mail. Isn't that how it works?
It's not a "violation" because you called it a "toll": word semantics.
I think, go easy on the violations under the lottery system. E.g. send a warning to first time abusers and whatnot.
So, the system is highly unresponsive compared to adjusting a toll +/- a small amount for changing conditions
The system is also completely unresponsive to time-of-day issues, so e.g., if they want to dampen traffic in 11:30-15:30...
>> free passes associated with counters tied to license plates Right, another entire kludge system to attempt to accommodate a weakness, and then it only works for one-offs. Nevermind the week-long events that often bring people into the city, which now need yet another work-around...
>>traffic violations ...What's the difference?
The difference is a bill for a $9 toll vs a $150 violation for driving in the congestion zone on a forbidden day.
Yes, a toll is different from a violation. OFC, if you fail to pay the toll, it can turn into a violation, but that is NOT the same thing
>>go easy Right, which reduces the effectiveness of the entire system because the abusers will game it even more to take advantage while the poor people will get hammered even more.
I love technology, but I also know that adding ever more complex tech to "solve" a problem is often a bad solution. In this case, it will literally not even help the poor people, and will help significantly the people with two cars.
If you want to work better for low-income people, just scale the congestion tolls to the value of the cars; those are already only one lookup away from the license plates. E.g., the basic toll is $9, but for cars over $100K value, it scales proportionally.
Now you aren't handing out traffic ticket violations to people who must come in on the 'wrong' day.
Says the person who wants to adjust prices by the hour in response to real-time data, LOL.
Why would we care about fine tuning by the hour, when we can just make 75% of the cars disappear, all day long.
I would apply the ban 24 hours a day. If your car is not allowed tomorrow and you don't want to use a free pass, and you must absolutely drive, then get there before midnight tonight and sleep in your car.
The point is to use the simplest practical system that does the job, in this case managing traffic congestion.
With no system, the costs of making extra traffic are externalized from each driver onto every other driver and city resident.
A congestion toll puts back on every driver coming into the zone a small fraction of those externalized costs. The toll costs are small, typically a fraction of what it would cost to even park for any time in the zone, or buy fuel. This system allows EACH INDIVIDUAL to freely, for themselves, decide if it is worthwhile to bear that fractional cost. And the system is paid for largely by the drivers making the congestion.
In contrast, a lottery system is a government agency controlling everything with an extremely blunt instrument (or, if it is tunable, a blunt instrument with a kludged-on rat's nest of spaghetti-code to handle every fairness exception).
The entire burden is on the city and the NON-driving residents to foot the cost of implementing it. It costs the drivers massive inconvenience (as discussed earlier), gives a free pass to multi-car households, and people who need to come in on "off" days are penalized with moving traffic violations, which have a much higher cost, especially for low-income people.
Lotteries are even worse for your dude wanting to drive in and sleep in his car to avoid the 24hr ban; with a lottery, he still cannot drive anywhere the entire next 24hr day, but to avoid the toll, he needs only come in before the congestion time and park until the congestion time ends.
Seriously, this discussion has clarified that a lottery is worse in every way, for the drivers, including the low-income drivers, overhead for the city and it's residents, and for the system itself which will work much less well.
"What do you mean our transit is bad, look, our ridership numbers are 3x higher than all our neighbors combined!" *Does not mention the fact that congestion pricing in neighboring cities is 3x lower.*
In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts. If your city has safe districts with good transit where rich people live, and unsafe districts with terrible transit where poor people live, congestion pricing will allow rich people to choose between the convenience of taking a car with no traffic jams versus the cheapness of transit, while forcing poor people to choose between a car they can't afford versus walking down a street where they may be assaulted.
It's even worse if you have rich people living in the city center where they work, and poor people who also work there living in towns much further away. Then, only the rich are able to vote on congestion pricing.
This probably doesn't apply to New York specifically (not an American, have never been), but it's definitely something to have in mind in general.
Speculation based on incentives is all fine and good, but empirical results beat it every time.
When I lived in Atlanta, there were people, mostly YIMBYs and other urbanists, who wanted to charge a significant congestion fee to anyone living in surrounding towns like Alpharetta, Roswell, Duluth, etc., who commuted into the city to work.
It would effectively be a car vice tax paid by the working class, as most of the people I knew out there lived there because Atlanta rents and home prices are insane.
Congestion pricing is ok when there are alternate methods of transportation that are usable enough that you could expect a person to just switch to them rather than pay the fee. But when there's not such an alternative, the people will simply pay the fee because they have no other option, and now you've just further immiserated peoples' lives.
The closest thing to a response I've heard is that they think such a situation would encourage people to vote and push for better transit options. I just don't see it though. Ignoring that in my case, Atlanta, the city was a de facto one party city in which primaries were mostly determined by media endorsements and more emotional issues than transit and urbanism development, I just don't see that this kind of policy making that shapes the incentives (both carrot and stick) for the masses works in practice. Peoples' decisions are so much more complicated and subject to tons of other factors that this approach can't control.
It may be true in Atlanta, but it wasn't passed in Atlanta. I'd want to see a ton of data before I believed your claims though. Typically suburbs are where the wealthier people live.
The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like highlighting how many fewer chicken deaths would occur if we created an omnivore or meat tax.
IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. How much fewer social interaction is happening across the distances that those car based trips used to occur. And how much harder is it to get goods into the areas. Is less economic activity happening.
In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.
Quality organic dry chickpeas, lentils, beans, soy etc… already are around 2€/kg where I live and when you add water they double/triple in weight so you end up at 1€/kg. You’ll probably eat a bit more weight than meat but still the price is nowhere comparable. Add some whole cereals instead of white bread for nutrition and better satiety: they’re more expensive but you got the price back on the quantity you eat (you won’t stuff yourself that much T165 bread or brown rice: the fibers will make you feel full super fast). And for the vegetable you usually can find stuff super nutritious for cheap : apples, leak, cabbages and alls sorts of oignons.
Even fancy organic quinoa is like 10€/kg but also double in weight and you only eat ~1.3 times the meat weight you’ll eat in meat-meal.
Industrial chicken is 5€/kg un the shop and "good" one 15€/kg. Quality beef is nowhere in that range.
The only thing that would make me look at the vegan options would be if I felt I couldn't afford the meat options.
One thing I realized a number of years ago is that my childhood instilled biases in me.
A Few Examples:
Sushi/Raw Fish/ethnic/spicy food == Bad Apple Products == For Suckers Ford == Found On Road Dead (bowtie life) AMD >>> Evil Netburst Intel empire.
When I realized just how irrational I was on soo many subjects (I had never seen sushi or really any ethnic food until I was at my first SDE job as a 20somthing) - it made me re-evaluate.
> pointless to spend time considering it
Since then; Anytime I've ever considered something pointless to consider - it's been a trigger to consider it. Has honestly been kind of life changing revelation; has led to a much more varied and interesting life than I would have led otherwise based off my upbringing/predispositions. I'd even venture as far as to say it's made me inherently happier as a person as I no longer sneer at the apple user/sky diver/snow boarder/ebike rider/mountain climber/etc - now I look into it and possibly plan a trip.
I'm not saying "vegan > Meat" - I myself BBQ fairly often; but I'd also advise one to consider the vegan entree you sneered at prior; it may well just surprise you. And if it doesn't; the punishment is a deeper understanding! (.. and maybe paying for second lunch. but that's the risk)
This is a great motto, probably a root of self-actualisation path. It has been one of my value too but its too easy to forget, thanks for the reminder.
As you talk about barbecue and you like experiences, have you tried Tempeh [0] ? It's off the radar in some parts of the world but a daily staple in others. God for at marinade of your choice for the first time (not raw) or crumble it in a sauce you already know. That stuff is really surprising at first (like... cheese maybe?) but it's really an interesting ingredient. If you can't find it in your "health food store" you may google it for a almost-local seller that ship, for exemple [1] in UK.
Heck, my breakfeast at the moment is vegan, because I'm on a diet and cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute. But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals.
It's not even that it's always bad. It's again that cost isn't going to get me to consider the vegan options unless the cost difference is absolutely brutal. Other factors might on occasion, such as diet.
Way off topic now, but: emphasis on few. Surely you don't use more than a couple ounces on a bowl of cereal? You might lose about 20 calories this way - but if you find it that unpleasant, you'll surely find them somewhere else.
> But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals.
Sure - perhaps an extra third of an ounce of steak.
(Also, I realised I was wrong - I forgot my breakfast has plenty of whey produced from milk in it, so vegetarian but certainly not vegan)
2. Speak for yourself. "People like me" doesn’t mean much, you may share some thought but everyone have a whole life of different experiences. Your argument on price and affordability makes sense may be shared by others but is probably more complex and nuanced than only that sentence, and others sharing that thought with you today may have a slightly different one yesterday and tomorrow.
3. Not many admit it, but people do changes opinion sometime, framing it as a logical conclusion to thinks they discover, read etc… nobody wakes up and become vegan out of nowhere. They had experiences, process it and make they own arbitrage just like you’re doing. In that sense I know my message has been read by more that only you and hope it helps understanding that many vegans eat more that impossible-burger only.
4. Genuine questions : why do you eat meat ? I guess it’s more than the affordability only. otherwise you’ll smoke, fentanyl yourself and drink only sodas if you can. When I have long talk with someone it usually comes down to habits or tradition. I’d be happy to read your opinion on that question.
Good for you. For those who are trying to convince, the cost increase on meat needs to be substantial, is my point. When I was a child, we didn't have much money. That didn't mean we chose to eat vegan. It meant there were smaller amounts of meat, or cheaper types of meat (such as whale; back then whale meat was a cheap beef substitute in Norway - you'd buy meat if you could afford because whale meat is a lot of effort and tough).
To your argument I should speak for myself: We have clear evidence on the basis of seeing that people rarely end up on a vegan, or even vegetarian diet even when meat is expensive - such as it was during my childhood - to suggest that this is the case for far more people than myself.
> Not many admit it, but people do changes opinion sometime
Yes, but my point is that if you want people to change opinion, it isn't going to cut it if the other options are cheap, as long as people so strongly prefer the more expensive option that they will buy it anyway.
> why do you eat meat ?
Because I enjoy it. I don't need any other reason. I love the taste. I love the texture.
I know not aimed at me, but honest answer: because I grew up eating it. Environmental/moral concerns have never been a prime concern as I don't consider them problems reasonably solved or helped by individual choices. Having sat don for a lengthy talk with an adherent, veganism itself comes off as smug self righteous delusion to me.
But that's my opinion, and opinions are much like assholes in general cleanliness and presentability in public.
If?
Getting protein from vegan sources can already be done much more cheaply than getting it from steak, though the quality of the amino acid profile may be lower.
Getting protein from "the vegan option to a steak" - i.e. something marketed to be a direct substitute for a steak, with its vegan nature as an explicit selling point - is a different story.
I presume that, generally, people eat steak because they subjectively enjoy the experience of eating steak, and perhaps because they don't enjoy a carefully planned out plate of legumes and whole grains in the same way. But some seem to be much more extreme about this than others.
I personally eat meat (and dairy) regularly - but probably overall less than the local average, and usually not beef.
I don't know know what would replace it though.
Also steak is a terrible example, cows eat alfalfa which is a nitrogen fixating crop and reduces artificial fertilizer usage that doesn't require pesticides and is basically free to grow anywhere it rains. And we don't grow alfalfa in arid places to feed US people meat, we grow it in arid places because it is near the ports and container ships need some sort of cheap bulk weight to send back to China as ballast.
You have some evidence of this?
Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.
There is no objectively neutral baseline of preferences here as long as civilisation exists.
Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ).
Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that.
All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety.
I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.
Every time my mom comes to visit us in the city, at some point she says she could never live here because she couldn't imagine having to drive in city traffic every day. And every time she does that, I remind her that her car hasn't moved even once since she first arrived a week ago. Mostly we walk everywhere. And every time she responds, "Oh, you're right. You know, that's been really nice."
She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.
I'm in a suburban area. When I was a child, I got driven everywhere - until I was old enough to take public transit by myself.
I'm about to walk ~3km (2mi) each way to a grocery store, something I do regularly. I save thousands of dollars annually like this. I could feed myself several times over with that money.
It will never stop being strange to me that people actually get that car-dependent mindset ingrained into them.
> When Getting Out of Jail Means a Deadly Walk Home > Nearly every day in Santa Fe, N.M., people released from jail trudge along a dangerous highway to get back to town. Jails often fail to offer safe transport options for prisoners.
2. You must have a preference for walking, since a bicycle would be at least 3x and as much as 10x faster than walking.
3. The thousands of dollar number seems misleading. If you bought a car solely for this purpose, yes, I believe you're right. But that seems unlikely. The actual marginal cost of using a car you already owned for this purpose is on the order of $3-500.
I commend and support what you do (though I prefer to use my bike when I can). But I don't think the financial benefits should be overstated. There are, of course, other benefits.
Obviously owning a bike, taking public transit and taxis, and occasionally renting a car isn't free, but if you live in a walkable neighbourhood and can take public transit to work it's easy to keep your monthly transportation expenses under $200. The great part about not needing to own a car is that there's no sunk cost that incentivises you to choose one option over another.
To use an extreme example: Does the homeless alcoholic divorcé really prefer to be homeless and divorced?
For a more abstract example, consider games like the Prisoner's dilemma, where "both defect" is worse for both players than "both cooperate" but choosing to defect always improves the result for a player. Surely both players would prefer the "both cooperate" solution to the "both defect" but without some external force, they end up in a globally suboptimal result.
And you did see that they had a section on restaurants, right? Those are up. They polled stores and found only 25% that report a negative impact. That looks concerning, I agree. Would love more polling on it with quantification.
Could this still be a bad policy? Of course. Could it be a good policy today that trends to bad some day in the future? I'd think so. But we have tools to monitor this stuff that flat didn't exist before. We should be in a good place to try stuff like this. And, again, these results look amazing.
In Wellington, New Zealand, failing business love to blame cycle lanes for their woes. The government sacking a significant number of people and an economic downturn is apparently not the cause.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
I think the article mentions this?
> In March, just over 50 million people visited business districts inside the congestion zone, or 3.2 percent more than in the same period last year, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (its estimate tries to exclude people who work or live in the area).
See also the "Other business measures are doing OK so far" heading.
There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up.
If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users.
IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.
I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
It may also make running a business more expansive. It limits locations and pushes rent up.
Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.
It’s not about bringing fine dining to every neighborhood, but if it costs (money or time) more for the poor and rich alike to leave their neighborhood business owners could be incentivized to step up their game.
Well, in a hundred years they should be able to afford a couple of new subway stations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
The article highlights that was $45 million in the month of March alone:
"In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year."
Of course, practically that will not happen, but it could be that they are overestimating the long term revenue stream. As more and more people get used to not driving into downtown, that will become the habit, and then their kids won't be used to it and they won't do it either.
Do you think people in medieval times also preferred commuting by car but had to suffer through using horses? There's no such thing as "preference" that's somehow not influenced by the environment you exist in.