Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
economist.com
economist.com
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
I would've had a hard time wrapping my head around being OK with ~$10/trip before this post
Goes to show time is the most valuable commodity anyone'll ever own
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)
I ask because the "only rich people" criticism of NYCs project has been beaten into the dirt and discussed at nearly every level of politics for more than a year now. If there's anything you want to know the information is readily available.
I don't believe that for a second. They could afford to drive a car, insure it, maintain it, buy fuel, and pay for very expensive parking in NYC, but $9 is too much now?
I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong if there's any data that suggest that this is actually true.
This kind of argument reminds me of a French politician who defended a tax on sweet drinks as a way to fight against the obesity crisis looming (France performs better than most country in that regard, but the situation is still bad). She wanted a tax to deter the consumption of sweet drinks, but at the same time they wanted the tax to stay at “a level where it would not affect the purchasing power of people”.
Funny because I was going to use that exact example as something that absolutely works. I can easily afford the sugar tax where I live, it's been around for a few years now. But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
I understand the same mechanism works with cigarettes and loads of other things - even if you can afford them the increasing price puts you off.
But maybe for a more relevant example - I can comfortably afford parking right in the city centre where I live. But the idea of paying what's being asked for parking puts me off so much I just park at the nearest park and ride and take the metro in.
Using market-style policies to try to nudge people around only works if there are alternatives they can choose from. In this case for many people there are not.
And like I said in my other comment - those people most likely still continue driving and pay the $9 fee. It's people who have other options or who simply don't really need to be there who have now stopped.
This exact same scheme has played out in many other cities already, this isn't new.
None of the blue collar workers in Manhattan (the janitors, the restaurant waiters and cook, etc. the massive working class that is needed for white collar work to be able to operate) can live in Manhattan.
So you're telling me that the very same people who refuse to buy non-brand Coke copies whose taste is indistinguishable from true Coke in blind tests would accept to buy Diet Coke despite it tasting like shit in a way that everyone can feel? And they would do so for a smaller gain than what it would save them to buy the cheap copy?
You're trying to make it seem like driving in NYC is simply a lifestyle decision that people could choose to do or not do. For some people it is, for many people it's simply the only viable option. Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
Which implies that the people who continue driving are indeed those who have no other option, and those who do have taken it instead of paying the $9. Would you disagree?
And no, of course I don't imply it's a lifestyle choice - merely that some people(not all!) were driving in NYC even though they indeed had other options available, because there was no extra cost associated with it - now that there is, those people use those other options where possible.
Again, it's really fun to speculate why who and where is doing what, but if you have more specific data then please share.
-- Fry (Futurama)
I know that legitimizes a bunch of activist talking points but come on.
This is HN
> Commutes on Hudson River and East River crossings for several express bus routes linking the boroughs with Manhattan have, on some lines, shaved more than 15 minutes off commuting times.
That’s a rather dramatic improvement.
Literally no one has stepped forward and said “I can’t afford $9 or $2.95 or the deep discount commuter tickets.”
The poor car owner who can't afford $9 stories are all made up nonsense. "Not everyone has $9 to spend to drive their tens of thousands of dollars car."
Providing additional impetus to make a change seems virtuous.
But it's not because “doing nothing” is bad that any decision is good.
This kind of decisions that reduces the freedom of movement of the majority but spare the rich is exactly how people like Trump reach power.
You want to solve the urban planning problem that is car congestion, then the solution is a urban planning one, not a new tax.
Or at least if you want to leverage economic incentives, you have to give everyone working in Manhattan and not living there $200 a month so that their overall purchasing power isn't impacted (the marginal price of taking the car stays the same, and so does the incentive).
Trump got power because we are a garbage people with neither merit nor intelligence.
It is making people who weren't willingly using public transit use it, so surely it is affecting their freedom somehow.
> Trump got power because we are a garbage people with neither merit nor intelligence.
I don't think this kind of essentialism helps in any way.
It's almost never needed to faregate sidewalks. Tourist districts can organize a special improvement district tax on stores to fund sidewalk upgrades, trash collection, shuttles, security, parking, and planting flowers. This makes the zone more even more attractive to tourists.
Auctioning off to the highest bidder the right to move around is cruel because you make it so that some people simply can't afford to exist in public spaces, and because you're telling people that their own city or neighborhood doesn't even belong to them.
The correct analogy here would be access to healthcare, water, or electricity.
Keep in mind that we're not talking about some suburb where you have to drive two miles to get to the store, but rather about the most walkable place of its size in the US.
Look at a school. Many make the front driveway bus only. Because parents dropping off kids one at a time was very low capacity and causing a line of cars to form every morning backing up into the road. There's just not enough space for everyone to drive single occupancy cars to the same destination within the same half hour time slot. Favoring school buses in the school driveway is not an attack on drivers. It's acknowledging the limits of geometry and time, and choosing to get the most out of our common space.
In what universe is this true?
There are 3 million parking spots in NYC. If each cost $3000/year to maintain (presumably that's "many thousands"), that would be $9 billion/year - considerably more than what's spend on the entire Department of Transportation.
I'd be shocked if a single spot cost even $100/year to maintain.
Manhattan is one of the few parts of the US where we don't indirectly mandate seven parking spots per car on average. A surface lot ends up costing about $7,000/spot to pave. But at >$1,000,000 per acre garages are used instead. But then that's tens of thousands per spot in construction cost. Underground parking is the most expensive type due to excavation cost. Meanwhile the most convenient parking curbside is offered by the government for free or <$1. Is there something wrong with this picture?
Are you going to build on something a couple feet wide on the wrong side of the sidewalk? Or tear down all the buildings then move the sidewalk first?
Treating curbside parking like it was exactly the same as large rectangular lots is nonsense.
Yeah because the parking is already built. But obviously before you build the parking you have a choice - and building "free" parking is a really stupid choice you should never make. You can give that space to building or the road, either will be more productive.
I prefer to value things based on what is rather than what could be if only we had a time machine.
The downside of this stuff that we don’t have data on is how it affects big employers who benefit from car transit and benefit the city as a whole? How many patients are going to avoid NYU, Cornell or MSK in favor of a satellite site not in the city proper, for example?
NYC chased most of the big industries away already in my lifetime, I wonder if this will impact commercial business in the city in the long run.
Insurance on that will be on the order of $60/month for an adult safe driver, not $200/month.
Driving from say, Jersey City to the East Village and back every day is going to use about 10 gallons of gas per month @ $3.20/gallon that's $32/month, not $200/month.
Parking is bad though it depends on how long you park for, but that's because that has also been jacked up to only allow the wealthy to drive.
So yeah, $180/month extra would in fact be a lot.
Seems that renting a square foot of downtown Manhattan land is about $60/year. A parking space being about 200 square foot, that's $1k a month if paying the actual rate, just for parking (let alone the road space)
Seems that $200 a month is small when compared to the actual cost.
Never mind that the land value for a curbside parking spot on the side of the road is substantially less simply because you can't build anything on it.
Why? Why can't I put a shed there?
These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time
I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!
My wife was a finance commissioner for a water utility. Guess what the most common clogger of storm drains was? Shopping bags. They did hundreds of service calls annually doing service that ranged from fishing them out to using a hydro-jet to clear a pipe.
Within 18 months of the bag fee, those calls dropped 60%. That’s easily $800k in wasted labor and dollars in this small city.
Strongly disagree.
New Delhi’s has gotten more polluted over the last decades, to the point that it’s almost comical. (400+ AQI being normalised.) Post pandemic, it’s done a decent job in some parts at reducing the amount of trash on the roads. On the balance, I find it more pleasant now than before.
I’d also guess that most people would prefer trading emissions for e.g. not living next to a carcinogenic or toxic-waste dump.
This is hyperbolic. It will make it more expensive. But not uninhabitable.
You know what would render sections of it literally uninhabitable? A Union Carbide incident [1].
If you think an analogy with the P/T extinction is invalid, note that CO2 levels are rising now much faster than they did over that event.
I kind of think it does, particularly when we’re talking about temperatures that humans choose to live in (almost precisely as you describe) today.
CO2 is not going to render our inland cities uninhabitable. It will make them more deadly, more expensive and less comfortable. It will cause a continuation of the current extinction event, which is already comparable with (if not equivalent to) P/T.
Where I live, the campaign against natural gas and an arbitrary timeline for decarbonization, combined with accelerating the shutdown of a major nuclear plant, just triggered a 30% increase in electrical delivery cost this year and is driving migration due to cost. (to places with dirtier electric and gas production, btw)
So it's just purely all downsides. Like security theater, but for the environment.
As a side effect, DC's water authority has also been able to cut maintenance budgets because clumps of bags were our main source of sewer clogs.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
But then the contracting process gets corrupted to prevent most companies from bidding and direct the contracts to specific cronies.
What you actually need is better ways to stop public officials from screwing the public for personal advantage.
The theory was “if we do this we can get more of the government money in our pocket” and the arguments were backwards construction from there.
At the time thins were privatized (50s through 80s) the misalignment of incentives was plain as day obvious fact. People looked at <shuffles cards> New York City, and said "do not want" and they attempted to break the feedback loop between public agencies and the parties they were making work for and tried to resolve it by putting more of the decisions of what work needed to be done under the umbrella of the agencies doing it. With proper competition, this can work. But people like you have spent the last 70yr erecting barriers to competition and so in an environment where things are only ever getting bid on by the same few players the costs rise and the values go down.
The government in turn sets the fares by amortizing the total cost of the system over the number of riders modulo any taxpayer subsidies it intends to provide.
The reality is we are now paying a lot of money for some of the worse public services we've ever had. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, our public services were considerably higher quality - AND this is with increased labor. We've managed to significantly lower labor cost through technology, and yet the quality has degraded.
We've tried the theory of privatization. In fact we keep trying it over and over. Look around you. Is it working? Yes or no? No, right? Then we should be on the same page.
The question is whether this is caused by privatization or by corruption. Obviously if you constrain who can bid on the contract so that it can only go to some well-connected paymasters who overcharge and underdeliver, things are going to go poorly.
> We've tried the theory of privatization. In fact we keep trying it over and over. Look around you. Is it working?
In which place are we incarcerating the politicians who deliver the contracts to their cronies?
The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth combined with pique at government departments that had the temerity to point out that "Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)".
The problem is that you switch from the government doing something possibly inefficiently to private industry who WILL take their cut no matter what which leads to even less efficiency. The contracting companies are the same but they love privatization because the government has far less recourse when they don't deliver properly.
If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.
For the modern strain: see DOGE. And how much money got saved? Yeah, exactly like that.
For that to be true it would have to be actually saving money in order to allow lower taxes at a given level of deficit spending.
> Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)
Quoting a satirist isn't a real argument.
> If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.
If you want real competition then you need real competition, i.e. multiple companies that can each supply the thing. And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.
But when the corruption is the outcome desired by the politicians, preventing competing bidders is the name of the game.
Quoting Republican propaganda isn't a real argument, but you did it anyway.
The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).
> And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.
This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that. So, contractors only have to worry about being sued after the fact, if that. In reality, the failures only manifest 10 years down the road and the companies have all rolled up and disappeared with the profits.
I think you're missing the dichotomy:
> The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).
One of two things has to be true. Either their purpose in doing privatization is to cut government spending in order to cut taxes, which would imply that it actually does save money. Or, their purpose is something else, like diverting the same number of tax dollars to their cronies, in which case "in order to cut taxes" is an erroneous attribution of their purpose.
And by the evidence it's the second one, because they don't actually cut spending and yet they still want to do privatization for some reason. Meanwhile if it was the first one as you claim then we should actually want to do it because then it's more efficient and would provide more government services per tax dollar regardless of whether or not you want to cut taxes.
> This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that.
This doesn't require a large number of personnel and in particular it doesn't require the likes of bus drivers or construction workers to be direct government employees, because they're not going to be tasked with making managerial decisions either way.
The real problem is that the people who are tasked with those decisions get paid off (revolving door etc.) to make sure the government gets locked in to some specific contractor or otherwise takes no effective recourse when they come in late and over budget.
So the solution is private corruption where nameless corporations and CEOs get to take public money with 0 oversight instead?
I'm not a yank myself, but in the Netherlands the national railway (NS) is "jointly" owned but run as a private business and is a complete clusterfuck, exactly because we for some insane reason believe that running public transport should be profitable. Prices get raised every year (and we already have some of the most expensive train costs in the world), there's less trains, conductors get paid like shit and treated like garbage (hence them striking often), the trains are late more and more often, they're filthy etc. I don't want to drive, but if me and my partner decide we want to go to a different city by train, it costs us easily double what the equivalent car journey would cost. Of course, if we didn't subsidize cars as heavily as we do that'd probably be a different story, but that's venturing off-topic.
Similarly in the UK, privatization led to nothing but chaos there, and now they're left with ludicrous prices compared to all other modes of transport, because again, things are being run as a private business and they're expecting profits to be made.
Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable. If it's possible, that's great, but we should aim for quality of service above anything else. How about we instead divert the gigantic chunk of money that goes to maintaining roads and making sure drivers have few inconveniences and instead start investing that in actual public transport instead?
Presumably the solution looks something like rounding up all of the public officials who officiated over anything that even hints a whiff of personal advantage and sticking their heads in a guillotine.
> Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable.
Whether something is profitable or not and whether it's provided by direct government employees or not are two independent things. You could very easily pay a private company to operate a transit system while subsidizing fares with tax dollars.
Meanwhile at some point the government is going to be buying something from the market. If they operate the trains, are they also going to design and manufacture the trains? Are they going to manufacture the steel that goes into the trains? What about the energy used to make the steel, or the trucks used to transport it?
But as soon as you have the government buying something from anyone, you need to start lopping off the heads of the public officials whenever there is anything fishy going on with the bidding process or you get what we've got.
Do voters really push for this? I would have suspected it is the consultants and the unions.
The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
A problem with this theory is that, I imagine, a lot of such companies basically only have contracts with the government. So it ends up with the same singleton problems, just outsourced.
As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public.
Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result.
Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living.
If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
Most people in a car in Manhattan don’t need to be in one, and most of those that do are exempted from this charge.
(I say this as someone who is commonly in a car in Manhattan.)
As is, it's a tax on people who drive.
It’s possible for an overall fee based structure to be regressive, but it’s also possible for it to not be.
For example a fee for landing private jets at public airports is not regressive.
Given the contours of who does and doesn’t drive in Manhattan it’s almost certain that this one has a similar dynamic and is actually progressive.
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
[0] in the case of NYC, for example, Transportation Alternatives https://transalt.org/
The people who blare loud music and rev their engines are the people with expensive cars? The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Yes, this has been my experience as well.
>The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Who says they could afford it? Getting an insane car loan for a vehicle you can't afford is an American tradition.
Are you adequately distinguishing between expensive cars and formerly expensive cars?
A brand new Rolls-Royce or Mercedes comes with an engine purposely designed to be audibly subdued and doesn't come with a sound system suitable for projecting a racket onto the opposite side of the city. A 10 year old Acura or BMW with a modified exhaust and a trunk full of aftermarket subwoofers, on the other hand... but that's available at a different price point.
> Who says they could afford it? Getting an insane car loan for a vehicle you can't afford is an American tradition.
The implication of the question was to point out that the purported advantage of congestion pricing is really in pricing out the riffraff, because "we've succeeded at keeping the poor people out of the borough" isn't a very sympathetic goal and is what "expensive cars" was presumably intended to deflect consideration away from. What other relevance does it have if the cars are expensive?
If you're admitting that the people being priced out are in fact poor regardless of the price of their cars, I guess that's kind of my point.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place.
One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places.
It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
As a pedestrian, cars take up space and block your vision when they're parked, they're dangerous, loud, and (can be) smelly when they're moving, and even when the cars themselves aren't around, the space between buildings is dominated by their required, exclusive infrastructure of asphalt.
Usually when parking is removed, it's replaced with planters, seating, and things for people instead of cars, which makes it more attractive to be a pedestrian.
People walking and biking are much more sensitive to changes in the urban environment because they're not in a climate controlled metal safety box. Lots of things can change that impact how much people are willing to walk or bike around. Having fewer/slower cars around, for example.
You’re hypothesizing that people are purposefully avoiding these streets because they have cars driving on them?
In Amsterdam there's been countless examples of this exact thing. Businesses booming after they rip out parking and make roads forbidden for cars, and I can anecdotally say I also love whenever they rip out parking near me in the Netherlands.
Anything by way of peer reviewed empirical evidence?
I'm struggling to imagine reasons why a significant number of people will now start walking to these businesses. What are some of these multiple reasons that have now been overcome to an extent as to cause shop traffic to increase ten-fold?
One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours.
I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
To your point trucks already double park so both changes would be a positive for deliveries.
Maybe, but wouldn’t they say deliveries if that’s what they meant? If I had a shop with no rear access, I’d be asking the city to create and enforce a dedicated short term delivery zone because unrestricted parking is going to full of private cars when the delivery driver arrives. It’d be totally reasonable to ask for that but it’s really rare compared to assertions that most customers drive which are obviously false because they need more than 1-2 customers per hour.
This keeps coming up in every area: discouraging private vehicle use in a dense area makes everything better for everyone. It’s safer, healthier with less pollution, more pleasant with less noise, easier for people who need accessibility accommodations, easier for delivery drivers and contractors who actually need trucks, and reduces congestion. Once you stop pretending there’s any way to make one car per person work in a city, there actually is enough space for everyone else.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
> Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds.
> “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses.
> Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior.
> “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-c...
Every time I see a study like this it is similar results where the reality doesn't match the guesses of local business.
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
According to you? Riding subway in NYC and you'd see plenty of rich people. Go to any station near the financial district, or Park Ave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City
> Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms.
> As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations.
There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.
"Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta."
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
"A decade ago, Utah set itself an ambitious goal: end chronic homelessness. As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
"Finland has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%,[1] though other reports indicate it could be up to 50%. The number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains."
Having a stable housing situation turns out to make a whole bunch of other related social changes more feasible.
> If by 'mental health' you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
I mean, I'd start with therapy, addiction services, social supports, and the like. But I do think the complete removal of long-term inpatient mental health in the 50s/60s was an overshoot. Some people need that much help.
(I also believe there's a lot more we can do to prevent people from becoming that "kind of people" in the first place.)
I think the explanation of "some people are bad people" is a lazy explanation. The proportion of bad people to everyone else should be about the same everywhere. We have to take a closer look at incentives and systems in place.
if you can reform the system fine but I don't have conidence. Human nature doesn't deal well with the needed power imbalance.
(I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other in my comment, but as someone who rides local US transit regularly and has for over 10 years, my patience for using transit as a "solution of last resort" is wearing thin but still remains.)
The system I'm referring to is San Diego's light rail. The 2nd (and last) time I rode it I saw someone get assaulted on the train (and what appeared to be homeless people riding it). The first (and last) time I rode the MARTA train in Atlanta last year, I saw a homeless man passed out sitting in a puddle of his own urine. I will never use public transit again unless there are exigent circumstances. Liberals have completely ruined yet another thing that used to be great.
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.
For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.
Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.
At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.
In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
They're wildly nice if only a few people have them. The more do, and the more parts of a city cater to cars, the worse they get, even as they also become totally necessary (so, not having them also gets far, far worse, even untenable).
I was introduced to this notion reading an analysis from some French social-philosopher and was initially like "that... can't be right, surely?" so ran conservative numbers on my own situation, with an average-or-better commute distance for my city, a cheap paid-off car, and nearly double median individual income for my city, and... yep, dude was right, living in a city designed around cars was costing me time, not saving it. It'd be a ton worse for people with worse commutes and lower-earning jobs. They were getting totally screwed on the deal.
was it Jacques Ellul? He made a real impact on me, his analysis that people adapt to the machine rather than the other way around, even will internalize its value system. In modern society, "efficiency" remains the sole aspiration, which is a technological value, not a human one. fwiw - don't recall if he wrote a lot about cars though.
I have friends who chose to move into cities and sold their cars in the process. The pros of the cities outweighed the pros of car ownership for them. They also don't have to spend money on car maintenance, insurance, or gas. They can move around the city fine with public transit and ride sharing. They rent cars to make long trips.
Absolute statements rarely are absolute, particularly when the motivations and preferences of individuals are in the mix.
I happily take the train and ferry in New York over a car. For some journeys, e.g. into Long Island with a group, renting a car would actually be cheaper.
If you haven’t spent any time not driving, it’s hard to imagine the luxury going car-free brings. Not the least of which is the ridiculous amount of privacy and law-enforcement interference we tolerate for drivers.
In a city, a carshare is much more practical in my opinion. No need to stress about street parking and getting tickets on days that they clean the street. Or wasting 10 minutes finding parking. Or worrying about car maintenance. Or spending a few grand annually on car insurance, maintenance, and gas.
All this worry for what? A weekend getaway twice a month? Buying in bulk once a month?
Here is the place for a good public transport, even in US it should be trivial to make it financially self-sufficient and attractive. People always choose whats best for them (cost or time wise). European city centers work like that and everybody normal accepts that.
And, I can agree it is the kind of thing that can save time for anyone, but will spend time for everyone.
People should not forget that Europe has tons of car friendly towns and suburbs and many people live there. You can choose your lifestyle.
It is a lot like people wanting city life to look a lot like college life. Without wanting to live in dormitories where people are also raising kids.
Granted, college dormitory is a hyperbolic. More realistic, will be your standard smaller apartment blocks.
Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. Just personally visiting cities and suburbs from (still car loving!) Germans v/s most US cities validates the fuckcars camp. The example my Chilean city should follow is certainly not Dallas, no matter how cringe NJB might be.
They are a particular variety of policy wonk that conflates positive claims with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are a matter of preference.
Consider urban sprawl; the desire to live in a larger home farther from the city center doesn’t go away with trains, the throughput is just more efficient. The question then becomes whether the denizens of a city would prefer to travel by car or by train. Given that car-centric urban sprawl is still ongoing, Americans appear to prefer the car.
Which is to say: his case studies examining the details of specific cities, evaluating transit system design etc. are great. But his analysis of why the bad things are bad (especially when he starts blaming people and ascribing motivations) is utterly insufferable.
Happy to say I missed that one.
But yes, I completely agree with all of that. I'd love more of the analyses of why some systems work and less of the vitriol against everyone who isn't already totally on board.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute.
The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there.
So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?”
A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?”
So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes?
Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours?
If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
Commute times: Faster.
Transit ridership: Up.
Visitors: Up.
- average commute time is up because transit is still much slower than driving used to be (this first point is definitely true), and many drivers were forced on to the slower mode of transportation (also true, but that doesn’t imply average times went up or down).
- Occasional visitors (that only pay once in a while) are up, but the number of people that can commute are down, hollowing out commercial office districts.
- polls showing it is popular under-represent people that can no longer afford to travel to the city.
The fact that the numbers being reported are so vague as to be compatible with my doomsday scenario is why I say the metrics seem cherry picked.
I’d love to see a study that reports enough of their methodology to disprove my three bullet points. I’m generally supportive of things like congestion pricing and public transit, but sloppy studies and sloppy reporting on their actual impact doesn’t help their cause.
There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...
Then why, out of the countless alternatives, did they choose to raise the funds this way?
Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes).
What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
The opposition to Manhattan’s congestion pricing has a curious tendency to be inversely correlated with how frequently that person is in Manhattan.
At this point I think it’s just another proxy for rural voters’ rage at liberal cities.
I probably too fully subscribe to this view. Seems a lot of "western" things that people love to complain about have been over indexed on. A lot are things that do need to get better, but when I hear people talk about how "actually, the US has been fascist for some time," I just... What?!
Just worth bearing mind when people talk about streets being emptier - just emptier of cars
/s
You can do the same things in a car and all you'll get is a traffic ticket.
... for 1 person in decent weather having to transport very little.
As it turns out, this is the majority of traffic, but let's set constraints.
I guess it is near a critical point where a relatively small change in traffic results in a large change in travel times, traffic jams, etc.?
Yes, same as school traffic (certainly where I live in the UK). It's not all the traffic on the road, but the difference it makes is enormous.
Reducing traffic to 90% of capacity makes a huge difference. A little bit of room here and there allows for much smoother flow and a lot better experience for those who didn't get priced out. And almost certainly better flow for busses, which is helpful for a lot of people.
Unless they really price it to deter people, they'll just drive. In London it's cheaper to pay the £15 charge than to get two adults return tickets on the tube from the outer suburbs. Once you factor in comfort, convenience, reliability and practicality of your private car Vs London's public transport it's obvious why more and more people just pay the fee to drive.
If they really wanted to stop congestion they'd increase the fee from £15 to something like £150-250 a day. But they won't do that because then hardly anyone would pay it and they'd lose the revenue.
This is actually a good point, because of the nature of what causes congestion.
It's that governments don't do the things that prevent it (e.g. allowing higher density housing construction to shorten commutes or adding capacity to both mass transit and road systems), until the congestion gets really bad.
So when you first introduce congestion pricing, congestion goes down, because of course it does -- increase the cost of something and you get less of it. But then, why do any of the other things that address congestion until it gets really bad again? So population grows over time or existing infrastructure decays and doesn't get replaced because it isn't "needed" yet. Until congestion is as bad as it ever was, but now people are living with a new mass surveillance apparatus and paying a regressive tax.
This is Manhattan. We tax the living shit out of parking, are actively converting driving space to bike lanes, and have multiple efforts to reduce or potentially even eliminate street-side parking in the congestion zone.
This is nobody-goes-there-it’s-too-crowded logic.
If there is congestion despite a charge, you can make more money by raising the price until there is less congestion.
If they really cared about stopping congestion they'd raise the price. This would very very very simple for them to do. But then they lose a major source of revenue. As a result it is clear that they don't care about reducing congestion. It's basically a toll now, because it has not reduced congestion in the long term. I deeply suspect NYC will be the same once the realisation creeps in that the fee isn't really that much to pay.
Not how a Laffer curve works [1].
Demand for almost everything is non-linear and usually somewhat logistic. Increasing the tariff by 20% doesn’t reduce demand by 17%. Being congested practically guarantees one can raise revenues by raising the charge.
The limit on raising charges isn’t revenue concerns. It’s the politics of raising a use fee.
The justification for the congestion charge in London was to reduce congestion, not raise revenue. The laffer curve says that as you increase the rate, the activity of the thing you are taxing decreases and so revenue decreases with it. So therefore if they increase the fee, congestion should decrease if you believe the laffer curve applies here. If they wanted to reduce congestion, just set the fee to the far right of the laffer curve and watch as congestion decreases (even if they raise no money as a result)
But actually they have not reduced congestion at all in the long term. Instead they've optimised the fee for the peak or the "sweet spot" (t* in your linked article) where they can get the most money out of it, not decrease congestion the most. They've raised the fee to the point where there has been no change in behaviour/congestion, and they make the most amount of money they can. If they raise the fee more they start to reduce their revenue as congestion drops due to shifting to the right of the curve.
They could very easily increase the fee and drive down congestion based on the laffer curve if that is what they really wanted, yet they don't. From this we can make the fairly strong assumption that this is not about reducing congestion , it's about extracting the optimum amount of money. Meanwhile congestion is basically the same as it was before the congestion charge was introduced, except now TfL get £15 per car per day as a nice bonus to fund the various vanity projects.
At that time. One can conclude the policy worked at it's time.
20 years later, today is a different day. One could say congestion is there today, but they can't say how much further congestion has been avoided.
Municipality can decide to reduce (not eliminate) it again today.
It is the laffer curve, in 3d (time).
Maybe we don’t need to burn the planet to “achieve AGI,” in order to “solve climate change,” and, “make cities livable.” It’s not like that tech, even is possible, is going to stop hurricanes or take cars off the streets.
Hope more cities in North America will follow suit. It’s sad how many have been doing the exact opposite of good ideas for so long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York...
But the tolls on the tunnels are super expensive.
That makes it seem like Trump was pro-congestion pricing... he was not. I remember reading there was a threat and attempt by him to reverse it. Lest it seem like I am a Trump hater, I am very much not impressed by Hochul's delaying which was certainly because of her special interests.
I'm not sure in the case of Manhattan that driverless cars are particularly valuable, and it's very much debatable whether they would be a predictable success for a few reasons.
Inevitably you arrive at a scenario where you have a limited number of them because of course otherwise would be to defeat the purpose of the congestion zone, and then you'll only have certain operators with the right permits able to extract money from moving people. Kind of like the taxi medallion scheme all over again.
One of the best things America could do is to be to reduce reliance and spend on cars. This applies to New York but even moreso to the rest of the country.
Those who want to drive, not pay, and not take mass transit are losing out and nobody cares.
Im not saying anyone has to care, but I dont think it is honest to call it a free lunch.
I also bet that people who live in the city are paying more to leave the city for recreation or visiting family, or whatever. Once you leave the city you NEED a car, and you need a car to carry luggage too. So their quality of life is reduced in this way too. I doubt that the cost of upkeep for a car is higher than renting a car for a few days a month.
Yet they stay true to economics principles even when they are more lefty and collectively enforced :)
Now imagine what else Pigovian Taxes can do to help solve collective action problems, if we had a UBI and local city currencies: https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...
To quote: Finally, as taxes and fees are introduced in the local economy, the community can start to issue a Universal Basic Income in its own currency, without causing inflation.
Various taxes can be organically introduced, including sales taxes, land taxes 1, and pigovian taxes 3 on things like pollution, fossil fuels, meat or cigarettes. By redistributing taxed money equally to everyone, this can align public incentives with taxing these negative externalities, and avoid them falling disproportionately on the working class, as happened with the yellow vest protests in France.
As demand for the local currency (and thus local real estate and services) grows, so does the town’s ability to tax various transactions. The town’s citizens could be given the ability to democratically vote on the level of taxes, and thus the level of UBI, they want to receive.
Thus the town can have both sound money and true democratic control of its fiscal and monetary policies, all the while becoming more self-sufficient and stronger. Any town will be able to introduce a local UBI to end food insecurity, improve health outcomes, reduce dependence on means-tested welfare programs, and so on.
PS: Why all the downvotes? Why always silent with no reason?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
so there is nothing "neo" about their "liberal".
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
whereas I see it what the center-right would be if we had a healthy media/political environment.
The term got its current usage when FDR came in because at that time it was a matter of "burn it all down" (real socialism) vs "fix the private property system around the margins".
I mean, like many things, the meaning of 'liberal' has shifted over the last few centuries, and always differed somewhat between regions anyway. Words in English mean what people use them to mean.
Neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes free markets, reduced government intervention, and individual liberty. It's often associated with policies like deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Proponents believe these measures foster economic growth, efficiency, and individual prosperity. However, critics argue that neoliberal policies can lead to increased inequality, social instability, and exploitation
And my point was here they were applauding policies involving clear government intervention.
Yes the Economist will do that, because they believe in classical liberal markets
The government has a clear role for internalizing externalities, which makes markets more efficient. Or, in this case, using price signals to allocate scarce resources when it was just a free-for-all before.
Update: wow you’re right: https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/net-zero-and-ene...
https://lomborg.com/news/how-avoid-political-pitfalls-carbon...
> The views expressed in the blog are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Economist Impact or the sponsor.
So not necessarily reflective of The Economist’s position.
Modern 'conservatives' abandoning them tells you a lot about how far their politics have shifted over the past decade.
Sure, you could crank the Friedman dial to 11 by say, privatizing the roads and letting the operators set the price based on competition.
But the policy is liberal at its core. A “lefty, collectively enforced” policy would be something like a quota or permit system.
A key difference being that anyone who wants to drive on the road can do so as long as they pay. It isn’t “everyone with odd license plate numbers can drive today, evens can drive tomorrow” but rather “you can drive today if it’s worth $9 to you”.
These policies are aimed at getting unwashed pleb off the roads so the rich can show off their cars in peace.
Got it.
1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding. The MTA rivals Tammany Hall in terms of waste and fraud, and the talks of budget cuts were political crocodile tears.
3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
---
Edit: I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
Ultimately, congestion was itself a cost, but it was a dynamic cost, increasing and decreasing with the amount of congestion to maximize utility of the roads. What the state has done here, effectively, is set the price of driving higher than the market at all times in order to guarantee a marginal reduction in demand.
Significantly? Aren't those delivery trucks spending a lot less time paying drivers to idle in traffic now?
We do have concrete evidence the buses, at least, are moving around faster.
Money spent on the MTA benefits everybody, especially the poor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
> An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.
> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
> Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.
> Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
This is literally what Tammany Hall did.
As someone in New York who supports congestion pricing and public transit, I will say this: yes, there is a ton of waste and mismanagement at the MTA, and the TWU is unfortunately frequently one of the impediments to progress here. They have a history of opposing things like industry-standard safety improvements, sometimes even things which create jobs for their members, for arcane political reasons that require a deep understanding of their internal politics to comprehend. It would be nice if the TWU were a more consistent force for efficiency and progress, but they are not. You can compare to unions elsewhere in the world, or even to other unions in the US, and the TWU still winds up as an outlier in many of these areas.
That said, OP is pointing the finger at the wrong party. The MTA is overseen by the state. The responsibility for these inefficiencies and cost overruns lie with the state legislature and the governor. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time that article was written, famously washed his hands off the MTA. He was so brazen as to even publicly claim that he had no authority over them, at the same time as he was making unilateral management decisions on their behalf, including ordering the MTA to write a check to an upstate ski resort, to bail the resort out after a low-business season.
Fortunately, the money from congestion pricing is legally earmarked by state law and under a settlement from a federal lawsuit (the lawsuit was unrelated to congestion pricing, but the funding was offered up as a settlement term), so there's a lot less wiggle room for things to go wrong.
Congestion pricing is a solid policy win. That doesn't mean the governor (Hochul) and the state legislature don't need to step up and do their jobs - which means real, material oversight - but criticizing congestion pricing on those grounds, when it's one of the few budget items which actually has been legally overseen and structured - is completely off-base.
That being said, there is definitely corruption in the NYC construction market that doesn’t exist in the market I operate in, and I’ve read articles specifically about sandhogs inflating contracts and so on. Their union contract could possibly specify certain positions being required that are extraneous to the work being performed that would inflate the cost of the project and line the union’s coffers.
Net margins on a 9 to 10 figure construction contract should be around 3-5% in a competitive market.
FWIW I am a construction management professional.
I think it is literally being used to buy hundreds of new subway cars as we speak.
Y'all can't just make things up and say whatever you want. I get it, I get it, public sector evil. Unfortunately that's not an argument. Yes, you're going to actually have to try instead of being intellectually dishonest.
Aruguable. It’s very possible that the time saved by not sitting in traffic will outweigh the congestion charge for delivery trucks (which is what I assume you’re referring to).
That's an empirical question, you're going to have to prove it. The time saved by delivery drivers or contractors, for example, has value. If they can make more deliveries, or fix more elevators in the same day those services get cheaper. If the only downside is that the assistant patrol supervisor deputy liaison that would have driven to 1 Police Plaza takes the train instead it's clearly a net savings and economic improvement and makes everything we buy and use in the city cheaper.
> 2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding.
The MTA is chronically starved for cash and unable to do large scale long term projects because of unstable funding. If this policy, which as we saw above might well have literally zero aggregate economic downside, also builds more efficient transit, it's a virtuous circle of winning.
> 3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
Rich people can already drive. Now those rich people give money to transit for everyone else. Working people or people who need to drive (like those with a van full of stuff that needs to be somewhere) are able to do so much more efficiently and most likely face net lower costs.
The "downside" is midly affluent people who do have cars and regularly drive in the central area take fewer trips or take the train a few more times instead. And the other downside is that the tens of thousands of assholes who've been abusing the city parking placard process for decades have to find another way to get to work like the rest of us.
Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC, it just came in the form of a deadweight loss (paying delivery workers / tradespeople / professionals to sit in traffic) instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
I agree!
> instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
Telling me that the money will be set on fire by a public organization with good intent doesn't convince me.
What has happened here -- and mathematically, this has to be true, or it wouldn't work -- is that the city has taken what used to be the market cost of congestion, and set an artificial floor higher than that market. They then captured the difference as revenue.
That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.
I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the value of driving and the cost of congestion are the same to every driver.
For some people, driving is an elastic decision. They mode shift, or time shift to off-peak, or carpool, or combine errands in the city into one trip instead of multiple.
For other people, driving is necessary. They'll benefit from fewer of the first type of person being on the roads during peak hours.
I'm just saying that if the marginal driver were still choosing to drive, then the system wouldn't work at all. That seems tautological?
The MTA has to set the price high enough above market that the reduction in demand is X%. Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.
It's a dynamic system though; as some drivers opt not to drive, the utility of driving for those other drivers increases. Yes, the market will find an equilibrium somewhere where some people will still drive, but that's kind of the point.
Yes, the market will find a new equilibrium, but if I'm right that the marginal driver is choosing to drive or not based mostly on a function of time saved, then eventually we'll see the market reaching an equilibrium where people are willing to pay up to the amount of money they save by getting somewhere faster via car (ignoring other costs for the sake of argument).
If that is true -- if the market is efficient for time -- then this plan can only ever work by making driving more expensive than the time lost to congestion.
(As an aside, thanks for having a serious, nuanced discussion about this. It's depressing how many people just want to fling insults and downvote/flag/censor stuff that they disagree with. I knew I was going to get ravaged for having a non-canonical opinion, but it's so hard to get people to just engage with the argument in good faith.)
One of the worst things about this congestion charge is that it applies even at off-peak times.
i dont think thats true. the cost can also be much cheaper, but people price differentiate better when they can actually see the number than when they cant.
you can look at 19.99 as an example, vs 20 as example of making people feel a certain way to get them to shop differently, or credit cards - which get people to pay much more for an item than they otherwise would with the interest payments, or with the klarna styled buy now pay later.
its not a tautology that a higher price drives down cost.
i think the government price is likely much less than the cost of congestion, especially once you price in the externalities of pollution, but drivers werent aware of how much cost they were incurring from the congestion, and now that there's a number, they can make decisions based off of it
> By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive.
That's not true. There's a tax credit for low-income residents and a full waiver for disabled people. The average person who drives in Manhattan makes $130,000, 40% more than the average income in the city as a whole [2], so letting them do it for free (while creating negative externalities that we all bear) is just a handout to people who don't need it.
[1]: https://selectliquidation.com/collections/grocery-liquidatio...
[2]: https://fiscalpolicy.org/impact-of-payroll-mobility-tax-on-n...
That's a fig-leaf argument. Yes, there's some theoretical tax credit that may or may not offset the costs for particular groups of people -- and it would be insane if they didn't exempt the disabled. But if the tax weren't causing the marginal driver to stop driving, it wouldn't work, by definition.
Congesting pricing has dual goals of reducing congestion and funding the MTA. Low-income drivers get a break on the charge, so they fund the MTA a little less than other drivers, but they're still less likely to drive than they were before, because it costs more now.
(...poor people being notorious for having lots of time for precise accounting and follow through on government bureaucracy.)
It is reasonable to say that it achieved its stated goals. Its not accurate to say nobody is experience higher costs or prevented from doing what they want.
After being the most vocal critics for years, they’ve learned that low traffic == more, faster deliveries == more business and more coverage, or same business with fewer drivers.
This is the real reason why I think it'll never get repealed. If anyone tries, the industry lobbies will be arguing to keep it instead.
You ok man? Like, respect for your passion on this issue but you’re also seething pretty hard about New York City having cleaner air and less traffic.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
> The New York City health department’s readings of PM2.5, one air quality measure, improved citywide the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2024. The improvement was more pronounced within the congestion zone, but it’s too early to attribute that to the program, or to know if that’s a lasting pattern, experts said.
"My apartment still gets dusty" seems like a pretty desperate anti-congestion charge argument.
A three-month change at the beginning of the year in PM2.5 is noise.
You've yet to provide any for your assertions. Just feels.
I personally don't think the PM2.5 thing would justify the implementation of the system even if it were true, but that's not a debate I want to get into.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schrodinger%...
The benefits of reducing PM2.5 pollution are... not in dispute. https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/health-and-environmental-ef...
I've been nothing but polite to you.
unless you disagree with the that definition of the utility of the road?
how do you explain phenomena like shockwave traffic jams, where otherwise high utility roads get sections of nearly stopped traffic. eg. https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M?feature=shared in a closed system (30s of video)
can you spend some time showing your work, and both propose and prove what the cost function of congestion is? then, it should be clear whether the government set cost is higher or lower, and under what conditions. id especially want to see the limiting behaviour - standstill traffic. my gur sense is that the cost of congestion should be going towards infinity, but im interested in how the constant value from the government is still higher.
See also: Singapore. When I first visited I was amazed at how little traffic there was. Turns out they had imposed so severe costs on car ownership that the vast majority can’t afford to own one.
Why Driving in Singapore Is Like 'Wearing a Rolex'
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/world/asia/car-certificat...
Occasionally? Tons of middle class people do it.
The majority of my social circle consists of middle and upper middle class Newjerseyans. Many commute daily into Manhattan via public transit. But if they’re going in for anything other than work, it’s always the car.
Which congestion price is perfectly fine for if you’re only going in occasionally.
I would not be surprised if occasionally driving into Manhattan is cheaper now. Surely the excessive prices on parking should be going down.
Edit: Happy to be downvoted by people who actually live in Manhattan and take 5 seconds out of their day to talk to anybody who works in a local store. Brooklyn transplants can move along.
But my in laws that drive in from the suburbs a few times a year? They can afford the $9.
I postulate it's because they don't actually live there, or just moved there, if they do actually live there, they'd have to be severely socially inept to never speak to a store or restaurant owner and ask what their commute is like.
To act as though it affects nobody of moderate or lower income is downright dishonest, when 22% of Manhattan households own one - it's no longer an upper class activity, just a basic tool to get to work.
The point isn’t that it won’t negatively affect anybody of moderate or lower income, it’s that overall it will positively affect most people of moderate or lower income, because most of those people do not drive regularly into Manhattan.
It wouldn't be unfair if nobody were subsidized. It's unfair that just cars aren't anymore, but buses, etc. still are.
But I am saying that not everyone that lives in the congestion zone are well off office workers, particularly those born and raised in lower Manhattan that have housing arrangements that go back a few decades. An extra $2-300 month in tolls is not nothing for many people. You can't easily bring hundreds of pounds of art and building supplies to your art warehouse in Newark every day on the path train.
I only brought this up to agree that there are definitely working class people that live in the congestion zone and happen to need a car, and the extra $200-300/month does have a real impact on their lives. It would be nice to have taken them into account a bit more.
It hasn't panned out that way at all however, it's just great for everyone.
OK, actually not everyone. There's one very specific group that this sucks for, which not-coincidentally was the group that was loudly opposing it using the excuse you tried.
That group is people who work for the city and/or are connected so they get free daily parking. That's a lot of cops and firefighters and various city functionaries at various levels and agencies that have been able to get their hands on parking placards. It's a core NYC subculture and they were the annoying loud voices that tried to stop this.
Almost anyone who was driving into central Manhattan and paying for parking already is thrilled by this, it's only a little more expensive and in exchange they shave hours of traffic out of their commutes.
It's the people that were gaming the system to get free parking that are suddenly screwed. Fuck them.
These aren't deep moral questions. You're trying to draw some sort of universal fairness doctrine around this that doesn't apply. It's just public policy. The people who live in the area are buying all the roads, through various taxes and fees.
Roads don't work the way you describe. Are you aware that there's literally no way to drive to Long Island without going through New York City? Or that driving from Princeton New Jersey to Providence Rhode Island requires going through New York City or driving about 40-50 miles out of the way? Why is all this solely the problem of people who live in Manhattan below Central Park again?
Oh, come now. Try a little bit harder to see the other side.
Live here, don't have a car -- haven't had one for 20 years. Ride the subway every day.
I freely acknowledge that the roads feel less crowded, but it makes no practical difference to me. As far as I am concerned, the entire thing is a small net loss, in that it's another tax, and on the rare occasions I do actually need a car or a service that requires a car (plumber, mover, etc.) it costs me more.
I look at congestion pricing purely as a question of "do I consent to another tax for the MTA?", and when framed in that way, the answer is emphatically "No."
That's the part you have to prove. I bet your statement is factually incorrect.
I encourage you to adopt this level of skepticism to claims on both sides of this debate, and not just things that violate your pre-conceptions of the world.
Edit: not that I use FreshDirect, but it took me about 30 seconds of searching to find this obvious example.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/09/business/freshdirect-quietly-s...
Your argument is that there are indirect costs. That’s the part that has to be proven.
Some company using it as an excuse to add a junk fee is anecdotal but hardly conclusive. It’s about as much evidence as a hotel saying they didn’t bring me new towels because they care about the environment.
Got it. I show you an example of exactly what you ask for, from one of the most common delivery services in NYC, and you dismiss it as a "junk fee".
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
You having to pay fifty cents more for FreshDirect is not a persuasive counter argument. Especially since that’s not actually an indirect cost at all.
Your order is quite literally causing more traffic congestion, directly, as the car pulls up in front of your apartment and double parks while some guy hand delivers your yogurt or whatever.
I told you that I don't use FreshDirect. You asked for an example of companies passing through the cost, and I provided one.
The people whom congestion pricing hurts the most are those who feel that public transit is beneath them but still rely on driving in Manhattan to a degree that the congestion charge is a significant tax. Which unfortunately seems to include most of the media class in NYC, hence the incessant whining about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/nyregion/mta-budget.html
"The M.T.A. expects to spend $10.9 billion to buy roughly 2,000 new rail cars, an order that will include 1,500 subway cars and more than 500 for the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road. Some of the train fleet has not been updated since at least 1980, the year of the M.T.A.’s first capital plan. Another $3.3 billion will buy and support 2,261 new buses."
"The plan includes $5.4 billion to modernize the subway signal system, which dates back to the Great Depression. Over the past 15 months, the antiquated system has led to an average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month, according to the M.T.A."
Why is that an issue?
Public transportation and taxis are readily available.