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
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.
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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
[0] in the case of NYC, for example, Transportation Alternatives https://transalt.org/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!