Six months into congestion pricing, more cars are off the road

That seems about right!

I think this is just an issue of text not conveying intent. If you wrapped the word in quotes - "liberated" - people wouldn't be as confused. There wasn't a great indication that wasn't your perspective.

So, do you notice how the first quote doesn’t actually answer the question? Of course pedestrian activity was up. Because cars were taxed. But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.

And businesses saying it had a negative impact were more than twice as prevalent (10 to 4) than businesses saying it had a positive impact, with 25 saying no impact.

So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.

There’s more to business than retail. People with service and delivery vehicles are screwed under this.

> The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.

In addition to making for a more pleasant environment, it's also worth pointing out that in a dense urban area, cars are pretty terrible in terms of people throughput compared to alternatives. People traveling in cars take up way more space than the same number of people riding buses, subways, bikes, or even walking, and the cars don't have enough extra speed to make up for it (in fact they're probably slower than everything except the pedestrians). This doesn't matter as much in less urban areas where there's plenty of room to spread out and the higher speeds that enables, but in downtown areas cars are realistically a pretty slow way for a bunch of people to get around.

People outside the zone benefit too -- from the tax revenue, the reduced pollution, and every time they visit.

Public transport in London is world class. Most people don’t even drive into London, let alone inside the congestion zone. And this was true even long before the congestion zone was created.

Not only does it not break down, but situations with scarce resources are actually when the free market is most useful. It creates an efficient way to allocate those resources while avoiding shortages and creating incentives to develop alternatives. It's not perfect, as it can result in scarce resources going to those with the most money rather than those with the most need, but the track record compared to alternatives is pretty good.

I don't see the similarity.

It's routine for transit systems to run at a loss in the sense that the ticket prices don't pay 100% of the costs.

The idea is that transit has benefits beyond what it gives to the riders. If a bus takes 20 cars off the street that's a huge boon to the other cars.

In Ithaca, for instance, Cornell doesn't have a lot of space for parking, if you do get a parking space it is probably far enough away that you'll ride the bus in anyway. Employees get a free bus pass and even though it means I have to fit my schedule to the bus, it drops me off right by the door of a building that's connected to my building so it's as convenient as can be.

Oh, I totally agree with this, but I think the largest cause is unfortunately simpler (especially in the US) than people think: Middlemen. Subcontracting has made every project a boondoggle since now you don't need to coordinate internal teams, you need to coordinate a ton of external teams, which is way more difficult, and it costs more. Building more in-house talent where possible would save a lot of money, especially in the NYC area. (NJTransit and the MTA both overuse contractors and spend money like crazy, SEPTA uses significantly more in-house talent and they spend their money much more effectively)

Obviously, there are more causes than just this, including sabotage because the US dislikes public transit in general, but contracting is a massive cost that kills in-house talent and wastes money on every project. And of course I don't expect them to do zero contracting either - I don't expect them to start manufacturing their own trains, for example. Right now, however, the balance leans far too much on the side of "too much contracting".

>The issue is that they consistently lose money and people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.

It's doubtful that congestion pricing is going to lose money given that the roads already exist.

>A great example is Pennsylvania where they privatized the turnpike but as part of that deal, the turnpike had to pay half a billion a year for 20 years to fund public transit in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. So tolls I paid that should have gone to improve the turnpike were instead used as a form of price controls to keep people happy in the cities.

A mandatory payment enforced by the government is a "tax", not "price control".

>people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.

That is the cost of living in world class cities with services.

I don't use every single suburban street of the state or every single interstate freeway. I still must pay taxes for it so that society functions.

If you are really so opposed to a functional society, you should really consider moving to rural villages with no services, and no taxes for them.

People without cars subsidize street parking and parking minimum mandates by forcing all other uses for land to be more expensive.

People without children subsidize public schools. Healthy people subsidize sick people's insurance. Part of living in communities involve subsidizing services you don't use, that it occurs is not a problem, you need to argue that it should not be subsidized in the first place, and moving people by bus is better than moving people by car in a variety of ways.

The part you're missing: All the people whose public transit you funded aren't driving! It reduced traffic! You benefitted from it, whether you realize it or not. People in the cities pay lots of car and gas-related taxes, despite not owning a car - same thing. That street goes both ways. They fund streets and highways and infrastructure in your area just like you fund public transit in theirs. It's mutually beneficial, even though both parties are funding stuff they may not use.

You see all of those roads in Pennsylvania that you have never driven on? You're paying for them in your taxes. Those people who never drive the roads you use are also helping pay for them. Thats how the system works (as designed).

I don't have kids and I'm paying for other kids public education, that's the point of public services

You have to pick one and stick to it. The mess of hybrid public private gets you the worst of both.

>It's made from ~100 private and mostly private companies

how much state intervention/subsidies are those companies getting?

Japan’s system didn’t start that way, though. They built the initial infrastructure via “tax and spend”.

Not really. The Japanese public transportation system is analogous to employer sponsored healthcare in the US. The employers and employees get significant tax incentives to get employee commuter passes.

Ths US tax system makes capital intensive business difficult to operate in the private market. It’s one of the larger distorting influences in our economy. Most public transit is operated by authorities, which are public corporations with their own books and tax exempt bonding authority.

Based on your saying “tax and spend”, I assume you identify as a modern conservative. The tax and spend aspect is really the road system - one of the ways that Nixon tried to prop up the flailing economy was to invest billions into highway aid and projects. Roads = lots of oneshot construction jobs and local patronage.

Rural, exurban and suburban towns didn’t have broad paved highways until those programs took off, as states didn’t have the will or the dollars to fund them. Drive around upstate New York and you’ll see lots of “old state route XX” — all of those roads were built in the last 50 years, all paid for by external federal dollars. (And narrower than the ridiculous wide streets in subdivisions today)

> I mean, you could demolish half of it and build highways and parking lots

Right, and sadly this describes the downtowns of many U.S. cities since Robert Moses.