In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
For example, I have Michelin's CrossClimate tires, which are all-weather tires that do better in snow but don't break down as fast as dedicated winter tires do in warm weather.
Modern tires are works of material science miracle, working with dirt cheap inputs.
Even iron dust from steel on steel friction like with trains is bad for your health.
The human lungs just have bad filtration.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/automotiv...
> Euro 7 will also regulate emissions from tyres and brakes for the first time worldwide.
Same trick with solar farms: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
And wind: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-oil-and-gas-ind...
If you're claiming that the oil and gas lobby is facilitating their criticism of any automobile, I hope you're right because that would be hilarious.
That's not shocking to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)
> Friends of the Earth U.S. was founded in California in 1969 by environmentalist David Brower after he left the Sierra Club. The organization was launched with the help of Donald Aitken, Jerry Mander and a $200,000 donation from the personal funds of Robert O. Anderson. One of its first major campaigns was the protest of nuclear power, particularly in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
> Robert Orville Anderson (April 12, 1917 – December 2, 2007) was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist who founded [the United States' sixth-largest oil company] Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).
Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
I have a much better time in my EV than my ICE car but to each their own.
You likely don't need to replace the panel, as load management options exist. Wallbox, in particular, has an option where you can add a modbus doo-dad (carlo gavazzi energy management module) to your panel and it will monitor the overall usage and drop the EVSE current to keep it at a safe level.
It's more expensive than if you had a modern panel, but less expensive than replacing the panel itself.
And when you say that your panel is old, just how old are we talking?
80% of 15A x 120V = 1.4 kW
80% of 20A x 240V = 3.8 kW
Just going from a standard 15A outlet to a 20A/240V nearly triples the amount of power, and many homes that would need a new panel for a 50A charger have room for one more 20A circuit. Cars typically spend 8-16 hrs per day stationary in their own driveway, so 3.8 kW translates into tons of range.
While 40A or 50A is nice to have, it's far from necessary.
Says the person who has never owned an EV. Fifteen years of EV ownership, I’m never going back. Environmental factors aside, an EV is the overall better vehicle. You can keep your rattling ICE vehicles that need special fluid from specific vendors.
I plug it in when I get home, and when I get in it again the "tank" is always full. I think about the EV a lot less than I do our ICE car, which seems to need gas at the most inconvenient times. You might have an argument for road trips, but even that's almost a no-brainer these days. Sure, I can't just get off at some random exit in the Utah desert and expect to find a charger, but my experience says this whole "charging on a road trip" is way overblown, as if even the slightest bit of look-ahead planning is just too much for people to handle.
But to your question: I don’t know, does it still? Seems BMS has gotten a lot better from the early Nissan Leaf days, so I don’t if it yet time to retire that along with “discharge batteries all the way so they don’t get ‘memory’”.
Depending on your commute length, you may be able to just use your regular plug to top up over night. Infra upgrades to support the future are unfortunate, but it should be a one and done kind of thing. It was probably time to update the panel and get 200 Amp service- you will recoup a portion of that if you ever sell the house.
The best part is batteries get signficantly (for some values of signficant) cheaper and better each year. Gen 1 Nissan Leaf owners can now actually replace their batteries for about 1/5th the initial pack cost and increase their range.
Inconvenience when taking long trips.
When operating beyond your comfortable range you have to strategically plan charging the way shitbox owners have to stop and top up fluids. If it's your only car it's absolutely a degradation in the ~monthly ownership experience though you (in my opinion) make it back not doing oil changes and the like.
Even without the tax credit I still think that EVs are a great buy for most though. Charging shenanigans is simple and a "known known" whereas ICE maintenance is far more unclear at the time of purchase
I was surprised though that ranges, at least on the top end and very expensive EVs, are now comparable to ICE cars. This will continue to improve and hopefully alleviate any form of range anxiety in the future, especially as chargers just become more ubiquitous. I feel people really fail to realize they can just essentially top up each night and start out with a full "tank." I don't know, it all just feels very overblown with today's EVs.
IMO what you save by not going to the gas station is a wash if you have to habitually charge more than just at home. You're replacing one habit with another.
I still think they're worth it since you basically never get hit with an exorbitant repair bill for the engine/trans.
The auto industry has positioned EVs as that solution, even though it's mostly not.
Even https://www.tesla.com/modely uses the term "Electric Midsize SUV"
Look in the mirror, that's who's responsible for this.
You people levied regulations. You levied them in half baked ways that resulted in the demise of sedans and station wagons. And now you complain that SUVs are "subsidized". Get out of here with that nonsense and take your stupid regulations with you so the rest of us can have diversity of vehicle choice back.
None of this stuff is a subsidy, construing "exempt from the screwing some other product category gets" is just a lie.
I had a Ford Focus wagon for quite some time, loved it. Cheap to buy, cheap to own, nothing exciting but very dependable and useful. With a small 4-cylinder engine it could not tow (at least not much) and rust eventually claimed it. Still ran like new with over 200K miles.
EVs do also have higher torque, so that may increase tire-based particles, but you're right that it avoids the brake pads for the most part.
Fewer cars in general is the win from congestion pricing, though.
And lower VMTs (vehicle miles traveled) is also a win for the planet, it's probably the best weapon the average person has access to in the fight against climate change. Transit usage begets transit usage; more fares paid to the agency enables better frequencies and more routes, leading to more people opting to take transit instead of driving... In a well-run system, it's a positive feedback loop (and the inverse, where people stop taking transit, can also lead to a death spiral, as happened across America in the mid-20th century).
If you substitute with “don’t travel far [or at all]”, it’s a big savings. If you substitute flying 1000 miles on an airliner with “drive 1000 miles instead”, or flying US to Europe with a cruise ship trip to Europe, you’ve probably made it worse; in that regards, it’s less the mode of travel and more the total distance in these trades.
The distribution of air-travel emissions, to me, seem pretty gross when juxtaposed with the number of people who are doing this travel. The incentives for business travel, in particular, seem misaligned.
The reason you get asked whether your USPS parcel contains hazardous substances X, Y, and Z and why the fines for violations are so stiff is partly because of passenger airline safety concerns.
The high torque of EVs results in frequent wheel slippage for those eager to pull away from traffic lights quickly. Just like with high BHP ICE vehincles, smooth and gentle acceleration/deceleration will result in long tire life.
Brake dust is mostly some iron, carbon, silica. Not great to ingest but very much recyclable by the environment, unlike rubber.
And possibly much easier to greatly reduce (just build some shielding around the brake to catch most of the dust) than the tyre
But tire dust is definitely now the worst of the two, by far. 6-PPD alone.
On one hand you've got the people who insisted on regulating all of our manufacturing out of the country on environmental and safety grounds. On the other hand you've got the people who want to band asbestos and lead and all manner of other dangerous chemicals in consumer products. Both these people are dressed like Spiderman and they're pointing at each other. <facepalm>
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
non-exhaust emissions on an ICE vehicle are roughly 1/3 brake dust, 1/3 tire dust and 1/3 road dust. EV's have almost no impact on road dust, 83% lest brake dust and 20% more tire dust.
I guess those narratives aren’t going to support themselves.
Which, as an EV owner, feels like an "oh no, my steak is too buttery" kind of problem to have.
Not relevant for normal driving. The tires aren’t spinning appreciably due to acceleration except in brief moments with aggressive driving.
EVs can actually have higher acceleration related tire wear because they weigh more and have more instant torque on demand.
A lot of consumer EVs have filtered throttle pedal inputs to reduce the torque spikes though.
There's also the regular deformation of wheel just in the course of regular rotation, which is where the majority of highway wear dust comes from.
I would not doubt I use my breaks 1/20th of the amount that our X5 or Silverado use theirs.
They are active in reverse, to ensure that they are used and so that any rust gets cleared from the rotors. They also activate if you slam on the brakes or if the battery is at 100% charge and the kinetic energy can not be used.
I have about 12,000 miles on the car over the last year and the rotors and pads look the same as when I got them. The first annual inspection showed no measurable wear.
TLDR regenerative braking reduces this significantly, nut getting the raw numbers is always fraught with today's horrific AI-addled search engines.
Also seems like a wonderful opportunity for the materials science people to print money coming up with better brake materials here. And if anyone here who can say "clean coal" with a straight face disagrees, point and laugh at them.
Edit: Uh Oh! Facts...
https://www.truecar.com/compare/tesla-model-3_standard-vs-to...
Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.
See for instance https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...
Also for what it's worth you have no idea if it's good or bad faith.
https://railroads.dot.gov/railroad-safety/divisions/crossing...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Level_crossings_...
State/local governments can also declare a quiet zone. https://railroads.dot.gov/railroad-safety/divisions/crossing...
Premature mortality related to United States cross-state air pollution - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1983-8 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1983-8
While that is true, PM2.5 is still a major cause of lung cancer in non smokers, see e.g.
Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions.
Two-stroke engines are terrible, classic automobiles are terrible, cars with no emission regulations will tend to be terrible. Cars in NYC will have catalytic converters and other technologies to reduce tailpipe emissions.
The good news is that I believe Ho Chi Minh City is about to start, so hopefully they'll have much cleaner air in a couple years.
And oh also the small engines powering street food carts.
Are Yale's media releases typically done by the people who do the study?
Also, I thought tire particles tend to be larger.
Nothing i would breath in a garage. Nothing i like to breath in while i'm driving.
Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles.
The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
PM2.5 is also a broad category of particulates that come from many sources. The PM2.5 levels in the air depend on many sources, with wind being a major factor in changing PM2.5 levels. It’s hard to draw conclusions when a number depends on the weather and a lot of other inputs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
When you remove the cheating and give adequate weight to those emissions, diesel for passenger vehicles makes a lot less sense.
The focus has more recently shifted to reducing overall emissions of CO2 and other harmful gases and particulates, which makes diesel much less appealing.
I suspect that modern (last five years) turbocharged gasoline engines are probably approaching diesel thermal efficiency, but I don't think that it's correct to say that they generally surpass it. The gasoline Ford EcoBoost is 33% thermally efficient while a BMW N47 turbo-diesel is 42% thermally efficient, as an example [2].
[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio...
People that buy cars almost exclusively care about cost of fuel to move between A and B.
That's why before EVs started to show up on the market en masse if you walked into a dealership they would always recommend that you pick the diesel engine if you wanted to save money of fuel costs.
That was actually the reason why the Yellow vest protests started in 2018 when the French government announced that the taxation gap between diesel and regular gasoline was going to disappear gradually.
Small edit to add to the context:
By that point, when the protests started in 2018, the governments(right and left) of France and the many French automakers had been pushing diesel engines as THE solution to alleviate rising fuel costs and so justifiably, the protesters thought that someone had just pulled the rug from underneath them.
Also this measure was in direct contradiction to Macron's campaign promise which was that he was going to reduce the tax burden or at least not increase it on the middle class, especially the rural middle-class that basically cannot get a job without having a car as public transport is almost non-existent in rural France.
That and many other things which I won't get into since it is not relevant for this discussion really riled people up.
Based on this, I've always thought of diesel as "more expensive", like you better get 15% more power/miles out of it if it's going to cost more! However, I suspect that most people purchasing diesel vehicles have as their other choice a car that would slurp premium, so for those buyers perhaps diesel is still a discount, even in Canada.
Europe began embracing diesels 40yr ago when they were noisy and stinky and they did it because they taxed the crap out of fuel so people rightfully prioritized buying vehicles that got better fuel economy.
Giving a crap about CO2 is a recent thing.
In the US, Federal lawmakers would be voted out of office (even now after the science of climate change has settled) if they imposed taxes on fuels anywhere near as high as European lawmakers do.
Energy security. They didn't have north sea oil back then. Buying from Russia or the ME was fraught with political peril. And of course the .gov is never gonna pass up a chance to increase revenue.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-re...
And turns out the whole thing was a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
It's unfortunate that so much rhetoric around environmentalism is based on faulty claims. It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.
The latest one is AI data center water use- the extreme numbers like 5 liters of water per ChatGPT image just makes me feel sad that we can't have a civil discussion based on the facts. Everything is so polarized.
You link an article that talks about how manufacturers lied on their emission figures.
But later you seem to imply that the actual lie was about how bad emissions are for humans/environment?
Best effort is not enough to guarantee a good outcome- for example, this car is diesel and has lower emissions, therefore I will buy it and I will be reducing my own emissions turns out to not be true all the time.
Just like congestion pricing might or might not actually affect pollution in the way that it's claimed. The obvious point being that the city loves the new revenue, no matter what the level of impact it actually has.
I'm actually in favor of congestion pricing in principle (whether or not pm2.5 is reduced or not). I'm just sad that often times it's impossible to figure out what's true.
What does that even mean?
Honestly whatever it means it sounds like you would be the kind of person that would fall for the firehose of falsehood rather than look for the truth behind the actual claims.
Someone incorrectly conveys a simple science concept, and people blame the scientist, not the communicator.
Like, News says "New revolutionary battery" and people roll their eyes and say "Oh but this will never make it to prod" and decide that scientists are liars and conveniently ignore that lithium battery density has like doubled over the past 20 years or so.
The person who was wrong was the unaware journalist taking a PR person's claims at face value, and having no context to smell test such a claim, and having no time or interest to treat the claim with skepticism anyway because "Batteries slightly improve" never sold newspapers.
But they blame science!
Why? There are massive incentives for people to lie in a great many cases, especially where profits exist. Car manufactures, as we know, gladly lie and fake evidence. Even when there are massive fines involved, the fines are generally less than what they make in profit from the lies.
What's even better is you can play both sides to confuse the issue. Create 3rd party groups on the other side of your claims and have them make up the stupidest claims "Just looking at a car will give you cancer". Flood the zone with false information, bullshit asymmetry. Lobby the shit out of politicians so they don't care about the issues, only the money it brings in.
The confused regulars in the middle are so propagandized to they no longer know up from down and billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.
The idea is that diesel is the "work" fuel, for shipping, construction, etc... While gasoline is the "consumer" fuel, for personal use, motorsports, etc... Make the former expensive and it will affect the entire economy, everything will become more expensive and less competitive. Making gasoline more expensive will not have the same impact.
So, put high taxes on gasoline. The result was an increase in popularity of diesel cars, that cost less to run because of taxes.
Now, the situation is changing. Diesel, at least the one that is legal to use on the road is taxed at a level closer to gasoline. Diesel cars are also becoming less and less welcome with regards to low emission zones and green taxes, so many people are going back to gasoline.
That's a thing of the past as as early as in 2023 diesels were already a smaller percentage of new cars than non-hybrid EVs:
https://www.acea.auto/figure/fuel-types-of-new-passenger-car...
To add to what others said: diesels always had a reputation of reliability. The cast-iron TDI 1.9 is legendary but even Italian cars fitted with the JTD line would just work and not require maintenance. I recall making light of a friend who was driving an Alfa Romeo until he mentioned that actually it's been more reliable than anything else he's driven - at least in terms of powertrain issues.
It's expressly incentivized by their tax system.
Imagine the year is 1988 and you're some snooty jerk in Europe about to buy a Mercedes. Why on earth would you go with the noisy, smelly diesel option if not to save A TON of money over the life of the vehicle?
It is different in Africa, where catalytic converters are harvested for precious metals and cars are driven without them.
It also assumes they're using the same tires. EV owners put on EV tires, which are formulated to have a lower rolling resistance, quieter and last longer. All 3 of those correlate with lower dust.
Also, cars designed as pure EV's are a lot lighter than EV's built on an ICE chassis.
A Telsa 3 is about 2% heavier than a BMW 3 whereas a Ford Lightning is 20% heavier than the comparable F-150.
Table 2 in the paper lists which cars where compared, and that 24% numbers is an average from comparing models where manufacturers offer EV and ICE variants.
It's the same problem as giant phones. They make them this way in order to fit a bigger battery in.
The order is:
1. brake dust 2. road dust 3. engine emissions 4. tire dust
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
That's why your choice of tires on online sites gets so smaller as soon as you tuck the "electric/hybrid vehicle" case!
But they do care about tire wear a lot, they know the acceptable wear life for the class. A couple years ago I bought a set of Pirelli tires that were ~50% off because they were an older version; hoping I’d get some benefit. Unfortunately they had half the life and were a bit worse in every way than the newer tires I had before and after.
If you have something like really high performance tires, I recommend just using them. The grip is always there and you are always paying for it. As long as you aren't losing traction constantly, the difference is negligible in my experience.
If an equivalent car wore down its tires 20% slower, and those tire particles contributed 2x the intensity of pollution than other types of wear-based pollution, than the increase in produced pollution from that source seems like it would be ~16%, not 40%.
If one car drives 100 km and produces 2 units of pollution per km, that would be 200 units. Another car wearing 20% more would produce 240 units, or roughly ~16% more.
This is some Fermat’s Last Theorem shit
There was a "study" going around claiming otherwise, which sampled air captured by passing vehicles with a trash bag on a busy road, claiming EVs did not reduce brake dust, but even my brief summary here makes it extremely obvious how flawed this "measurement" is.
EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, as well. Fairly significantly. It's not obvious to me that the decrease in brake dust isn't made up by the increase in tire dust.
The removal of the tailpipe emissions is really where EVs shine from a pollution standpoint. If you turn on your car in your garage, you don't die anymore.
> EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, Fairly significantly
In the USA, mass of EV is not significantly different than the alternative choice. EVs do not have increased tire particulate. If in Europe extremely lightweight tiny cars are actually a likely substitution for nicer, heavier EVs, then it seems reasonable that tire wear will increase proportionally. There's a lot riding on that "if" though.
This does not seem correct...
- Air resistance slows the car without putting anything extra through the tyres (the friction is between car and air rather than between tyre and road)
- Regenerative braking channels energy into the battery, and also heat, that would otherwise be dissipated by heating and ablating the brake pads and discs, but regardless or whether it's brakes or the the motor acting as a dynamo that puts resistance on the rolling of the wheels, for a given amount of braking you will have the same forces between the tyres and the road and the same tyre wear.
So I'd expect it's only any additional weight that contributes to increase tyre particulates from electric care. Perhaps a tiny contribution from lower air resistance (on average at least) for electric cars, as there's often quite an effort to reduce the drag coefficient for range reasons, but I wouldn't expect this to be substantial as air resistance is not huge part of braking.
EVs tend to use regenerative braking, thus applying road-tire friction, much more often than an ICE vehicle uses brakes. In an EV if you are going tobfast and let off the accelerator, the regen braking slows you. With tires. In an ICE car, you will coast along and slowly slow down, mainly due to air resistance, unless you actively press the brake.
If regen braking only happened when then EV driver pushes the brake pedal with their foot, your expectations would be correct and weight would be the only differentiator. But the single pedal driving design decision means the tires wear more.
I haven't noticed EVs oscillating between full acceleration and hard braking when out and about. They seem to be driven pretty much the same as any other car.
If I'm not mistaken, this means that tyre wear should be roughly equivalent (for an equivalent vehichle weight). So EVs still have the benefit of reducing brake pad wear.
If you have any friends with motion sickness, ask them if it feels different to be a passenger in an EV.
Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.
All this isn't to say EVs aren't better than ICE vehicles. They are, in many ways. It's just that tire wear isn't one of them.
I'm convinced they do, many people noted this. But I always thought it was mainly because the cars are heavier than what most people are used to, and they also have much better acceleration.
Tires apply the braking force to the ground in exactly the same manner on both EVs and ICE vehicles.
Secondly, if you've ridden in an EV, you would know that the drivers/cruise control often apply regent braking in situations where an ICE vehicle would have simply coasted to a stop. Hence more wear.
With the ICE car, if you want to go 55, you might accelerate to 57 and then coast down to 55 without using brakes.
With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
Tire wear is a function of how often you use your tires to slow down the car. With an ICE car that's every time you hit your brakes. With an EV that's both brakes and regen. An EV's time spent braking or regenning is more than the time an ICE car spends braking.
Someone could design an EV that behaves the way you describe, but aggressive regen sells better, so no one does.
If you lack the middle-school-level understanding of physics to understand why, I'm not going to be able to give it to you in an internet comment.
Think hard about why braking and coasting would wear the tires differently. Here's a hint. Where does the energy go? What is doing the work to stop the car in each scenario?
No one with more than a few miles of one-pedal driving would do this; it’d be highly unpleasant.
What actually happens is you remap your pedal inputs: all the way off is braking, somewhere in the middle is coasting. Your brain will do it automatically and OPD is far more pleasant than two-pedal driving after a trivial learning curve.
What actually happens is you wind up decelerating for curves, accelerating on straights more, and otherwise having better control of the car. Holding the pedal in a location where power is neither going to or coming from the motor is very difficult; usually you want power going to the motor anyway to overcome air resistance.
Also, consider that most EVs will automatically regeneratively brake when going downhill with cruise control on. The last ICE car I owned just coasted and would speed up on large downhills with cruise on.
No you don't; in fact you can't. Letting off the accelerator enough to apply regen is going to take far more than 2 mph off your speed.
If you want to drop from 57 to 55 in an EV its done the exact same way you do it in an ICE vehicle: you coast.
And yes, you are right, if you do that you can coast and then your tire wear will be no worse than an ICE vehicle.
Most EV drivers don't do those things.
Certainly not enough to make up the EV tire wear from regen.
An electric car can use its engines to bring a vehicle to a complete stop. It can also use the motor to hold the car in place, even on a fairly steep incline. You can't do either with a standard transmission ICE vehicle.
There are people with electric cars that have their brakes rust out because they're never used. A standard piece of advice to EV owners is "make sure to use your brakes at least once a month".
A better solution would probably be radar-based speed signs with printed threats of fines, though.
I don't think people respond to those as much as they do to "traffic calming" like speed bumps, roundabouts, and narrow choke points.
To be clear, I'm all in favor of reworking neighborhood roads to be more friendly to pedestrians, but I think things like signs have a significantly better chance of actually being implemented in most circumstances.
At the expense of basically training people to roll them.
The EVs passing by are nice, though!
There were a number of accidents which prompted the 4 way stop.
I've been wondering whether, theoretically, if self driving cars become widely usable and deployed in cities, will they be able to safely operate with harder tyre compounds and harder road surfaces that shed less but don't grip as well?
If nothing else, less aggressive driving should lead to less shedding.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
Had most people outside the tri-state area not heard and formed an opinion about congestion pricig before Trump brought it up?
The VAST majority of people I would see have conversations about this seem to want others to take transit so that traffic is better for them in their car.
I lived in the UK for 2 years without a car and it ultimately did not negatively impact me (other than needing to memorize local bus routes). I lived in towns as small as 10000 people (Newtown, Wales) and they had both a connected rail system and a couple of bus routes serving the town and connecting it to other towns.
Buses absolutely can work in even quiet rural locations, they just need to be properly funded and prioritized. They also need to be subsidized. The American notion that public transit needs to either run net zero or turn a profit is backwards and fundamentally stopping it from working well.
The underlying issue remains that it is seen as a poor person option. As soon as people can afford a car, they get one.
Back when I didn't have a car, my future wife and I saw a comedian that literally had a joke about being above the poverty line of "do you take the bus?"
And the reason it seen as 'for poor' people is because you only use it when you can't get a car.
So the underlying issue is the overall quality of the service (frequency, reliability, comfort and so on).
Again, I lived for over a decade with a tech job and no car. In Atlanta. It is easily doable. Especially for younger people that don't have a family. When I got married and we started having kids, I never had "my" car. Stayed on transit and cycling to get to work.
It is frustrating, because I would be surrounded by progressive people at work that would go on about why transit doesn't work. But... it did. Just fine. You just can't also have a 4k square foot house at the same time. (I feel like I'm exaggerating, but that is literally the size of average home in some areas just around Seattle. My shared living in Atlanta was almost 1000 square feet. I remember dreaming of a 650 square foot "luxury apartment" someday.)
Look it might be easily doable for you, but the data shows pretty clearly that if one thing is easier and faster then another, most people, not all people will pick what is easier and faster. There are always 10-20% of people who will just prefer one thing, no matter what. See people who ride bikes in horrible dangerous conditions threw traffic. You might be willing to, but most people are not.
But what you need is a system with enough quality that enough people use it so they can demand continued increases in quality.
Even in places like Tokyo, you will find that the wealthy neighborhoods have cars. The catch is in Tokyo, this is enforced by law. If you can't show that you have a legal parking spot, you aren't allowed to register a car. That is a very steep hurdle that makes the vehicle far more than just 10x. And is a large part of why even the largely confusing mess of major transit offerings that will require different tickets works, there.
In spite of that, commute times in Tokyo are, on average, still HIGHER than SF and NYC commute times. My commute time even on public transit in Atlanta was better than the average commute in Tokyo. I don't know how you want to start quantifying "worse" or "better." Are they "workable?" Yes. Absolutely. Will people use if they can afford to get and operate a car? No.
1) I wish we had better rail transit in the bay area and to the areas surrounding the bay
2) I have to own a car to get to places in Northern California
These don't seem like remotely contradictory positions.
Which, to be fair, people online have a habit of just arguing past each other.
And in most countries we wouldn't call multiple cities of 100k+ population 'nothing'.
HSR is the spine of the transportation network, that local and regional traffic docks to making a greater whole. It increases the reach and power of public transport as a whole.
For HSR to be successful, you need people using the in-between station for regional trips, not just end to end airplane like trips.
I guess there are some very passionate rail fan liberals in the Eastern united states that hope for true HSR on the East coast that really root for HSR.
But then again I have heard plenty of Californians passionately denounce/advocate for the project.
So I don't think your observation holds.
I've lived all over the world and in NYC for decades so it seems silly to me. Bust most Americans have never seen or ridden an effective form of public transport. So they view congestion pricing as an infringement on their rights and quality of life.
i hear this a lot and i also feel like this population is declining very significantly for a lot of reasons (cars that people care about are unaffordable, most cars on the road tend to fit into one of a very small number of categories, people find other ways to navigate depending on where they live, people don't do as many activities out of the home that require a vehicle, etc). at what point does the real population of car enthusiasts become small enough to be irrelevant in public policy and infrastructure decisions?
Especially considering that
* Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers, as they spend the most amount of time actually driving in congested roads
* Congestion pricing forces trips to self-select on cost/benefits in actual dollars, instead of time, so you optimize for wealthier trip takers, short stays or high value trips, where before you would favor long stays (which make looking for parking forever not so bad), and people who don't value their time very much
* Car use remains heavily subsidized, as motorists do not come close to paying the full costs associated with their road usage
Not sure how I managed that
Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York.”
But that's a real argument. They're not a $1.3tn economy ($1tn of which is Manhattan alone) [1] with fewer than one car per household (0.26 in Manhattan) [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City
[2] https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L...
There will be a stop and balance struck everywhere, but this sort of thing really does make people that deal in the car industry nervous.
I'd gladly ditch my car tomorrow if I could catch a bus within walking distance.
I'm unfortunately 5 miles from the nearest bus stop.
The answer to which in many American cities being because there isn’t enough density.
Outside America’s 4 to six largest cities, ditching cars probably doesn’t work.
One problem that faces my city, as an example, is that we have a community that is being built out in a mountain area. There is a 2 lane highway going up there and, as you can imagine, it gets absolutely jam packed. On a clear day you can do the trip in 10 minutes, during rush-hour it can take over and hour.
This is the perfect place for something like a toll and a park and ride location within the community.
But instead we are maybe going to spend 10s (or maybe hundreds) of millions of dollars expanding the road.
This concept works great for airport's economy lots. It's a bit crazy that it doesn't seem to work for anywhere but the top 6 largest cities in the US.
I've heard that from San Jose to San Francisco, the major towns (San Mateo, Palo Alto) are spaced about a day's laden carriage ride apart.
"We should toll roads". This will reliably produce "we should all contribute through tax to the maintenance of roads and they should be considered a public good".
"We should have land value taxes". This will reliably produce "we should not have to pay rent to the government for something that we own".
A simple self-interest model will capture all participants in this discussion. This is why economically optimal policies have such opposition. People don't want to pay the price for their actions. They're ideally hoping to have someone else pay it. It is just as common for a position like funding for SF's Muni.
Propositions J and K made it clear. One said "let's raise Muni spending". The other said "if we raise sales tax, that will go to Muni spending. If we don't, the Muni spending proposition dies". People voted for the first and against the second. Pretty straightforward position: "We should spend more money but from a place that is not me".
The way welfare is organized in the US also shows this. Welfare is the largest sector of the US federal budget, and the ideal is to tax all productive capacity to pay for the aged. This aligns with the increased vote share from the aged. The classic two wolves and a sheep at dinner.
That's a very hard sell when people all around the country are feeling continuous downward pressure on their lifestyle and financial security while billionaires are seen getting massive tax breaks and pillaging everything they want while escaping accountability for the harms they cause everyone else. Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work, and punishing them for it while once again giving the wealthy a pass was certain to upset people. in fact, by forcing more of the peasant class off the roads it makes driving into the city much more pleasant for the people with enough money to not care about the extra expense. Taking from the poor to improve things for the wealthy resonates with a lot of people.
It also doesn't help that in other contexts, congestion pricing has already hit people's wallets and is seen as an exploitative business model designed to extract as much money from the public as possible. The last thing most people want is seeing congestion pricing and other price-fuckery infesting another aspect of their daily lives, which is why the pushback against wendy's implementing it was so swift and severe that the company had to backpedal even after spending a small fortune on the digital menu boards they needed to enable it.
> Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work
That is simply not the case in NYC. Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work. It was already unaffordable to do so anyway because parking is incredibly expensive. People take the subway. Car ownership is already disproportionately preserved for the rich.
NYC is different from much of the country. I'm not going to make an argument that it's any better or any worse, but it is different. NYC congestion pricing as a national debate is missing the forest for the trees.
The original seems to have disappeared.
I assure you that Manhattan is filled with many employees and service workers.
> It was already unaffordable to do so anyway
Yes, it was a massive strain on the budgets of many people, and it's the people who managed to sacrifice enough to show up for work or get where they needed to go anyway even though it was difficult for them who were most impacted by congestion pricing.
> People take the subway.
Many do. When it's an option for them and at the expense of time/convenience. If this were an acceptable excuse we might as well just shut the roads into Manhattan down entirely.
This article proves that people have been being priced out of driving into the city and I promise you that isn't the millionaires who are suddenly navigating the subway system and waiting for the trains in filthy stations.
It's also important to note that nationally, nobody knows or cares about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities. The vast majority of the people outside of NYC complaining about it have never even been to the state. They just know that once again, it's the small guy who is getting screwed over and that they don't want the success of congestion pricing in New York (however that is measured) to cause it to appear where they drive, and who can blame them for that?
That is not a meaningful response to "Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work.", the two statements do not contradict each other. Those employees and service workers take the subway.
> When it's an option for them and at the expense of time/convince
The subway is both faster and cheaper than driving in NYC at peak hours. Traffic has historically been awful, hence the congestion charge! Trading money to gain time/convenience is what the rich do. The "small guy" didn't have the money for the bridges, tunnels and parking before the congestion charge even arrived.
> It's also important to note that nationally, nobody knows or cares about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities.
Yes, that is literally my point about why conversations like this one are fruitless.
> They just know that the small guy is getting screwed over
Right but that isn't true. They are mistaken in what they "know" because, as you said, they don't know or care about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities.
Not the ones who need to bring service vehicles with them. Not anyone who has to enter or return with heavy items or any number of the other many many reasons people choose to drive and not take the subway. The fact of the matter is that the subway has always been an option for many people, but not all people and it comes with costs of its own. The people driving into the city, as obnoxious as that trip is, were making the decision to put up with the traffic and parking for a reason. Now many of those people, enough to make measurable differences in pollution levels, have been priced out of that choice. "It's only a few poors, why are people bitching about it?" isn't going to make people across the country worry any less about it spreading to them.
> The subway is both faster and cheaper than driving in NYC at peak hours.
And also not an option at all for many and a less attractive option for many, as noted by the number of people who were driving. It's not as if the subway is a well kept secret.
> Right but that isn't true.
Just because you say it isn't doesn't make it true. Show me that millionaires are taking the subway because of the increased fines at the same rate as the hourly workers and I'll concede that the impact is being equally felt.
The question was "How has congestion pricing become a national issue" and the answer isn't "the nation hasn't read this one study". For what it's worth though the study linked in the article does show a reduction in cars entering the zone. (ctrl-F "car" to find that)
Only 2% of lower income outer borough residents (around 5,000 people) drive a car into the city:
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/congestion-pricing-outer-bo...
When the congestion pricing rollout was paused, only 32% of lower income voters supported the move, compared to 55% of those earning more than $100,000:
https://www.amny.com/nyc-transit/congestion-pricing-pause-ho...
(AFAIK there isn't direct polling on a yes/no support question by income, this was as close as I could find)
The overwhelming majority of poor people in New York City take transit and stand to benefit from the funding congestion pricing brings. Highlighting that 2% of the population and ignoring the 98% is a fundamentally dishonest position to take, especially when you're not even in the group yourself.
Someone on the other side of the country is only going to see the way this will impact the lives of people like them. They aren't going to say "Clearly this policy has impacted the household budget of NYC plumber Mitchell Tnenski" They don't know Mitchell. They know that congestion pricing coming to their city would hurt them in very real ways. They also know that rich people don't give a shit about a couple extra bucks in fines for getting where they want to go by car. That's why this issue has resonated nationally.
But why should they even care to begin with? Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing? This is the whole problem, that local issues are made mainstream news media specifically to cultivate fear and anger in people that literally have no skin in the game and a completely different lifestyle.
Why should they care about something that they feel will hurt them financially when they're already struggling and restrict their freedom on top of that? Why wouldn't they care?
> Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing?
Uber's "surge" pricing was what first introduced many of them to a world where the price of something they depend on changes from moment to moment. Dynamic/discriminatory pricing schemes have been worrying people for a long time now. People don't like it, they consider it scammy, and they don't want it to spread.
I think that if NYC had just jacked up the toll price all the time it wouldn't have set off as many alarms, but ultimately people in other places aren't really worried about congestion pricing in New York, their worry is that it will come to where they drive and they can't afford people taking more money from them. They're struggling to keep food on the table and are drowning in record high levels of household debt. Of course they're scared of congestion pricing catching on.
Mind you, while some of their fears are reasonable, not all of them are. I've seen some of the more conspiratorial people talking about it as a way to control and restrict the movement of poor people (something shared with criticisms of 15-minute cities). The core of the problem though is that their standard of living is declining, their trust/confidence in government is bottoming out, they know that they're getting screwed over by the wealthy and they're on edge. They see NYC using some scammy pricing scheme to take more money from people like them while the wealthy are unaffected and it hits a nerve.
They'll have plenty of skin in the game if congestion pricing spreads (and its success makes that increasingly likely) and that skin is already stretched thin which is making them feel highly skeptical of government, suspicious of people's motives, and angry over being asked to make their lives worse for the convenience of the wealthy. They worry about driving where they need to go becoming a luxury they can be priced out of, and as bad as NYC's public transportation is (compared to what's seen in other countries) most of them don't have anything even close to it in their own cities. That's what I'm seeing in discussions surrounding this issue both online and offline anyway.
Everything you're saying has zero impact on 93-97% of the US population (New York State is 6% of the US population, NYC is 3%). None of these people have real skin in the game, because this literally has no effect on them. New Yorkers don't vote in other states.
Why is a single student's grade in OSU national news? Why is congestion pricing national news? Why is a library in the middle of nowhere California news?
None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system. In fact they're exactly unrelated which is why we're blasted with this stuff on the news 24/7. You're worried about a slippery slope argument when most of us are already being fleeced by current, real policies from government and corporations.
Congestion pricing is not the thing screwing over American families, it's the thing they're pointing at so you don't look at the actual thing.
Because in all likelihood this isn't going to be limited to Manhattan, and I'd argue (like many others) that it probably shouldn't be. The fact that it's been so successful makes it all but inevitable that the practice will spread. Why would people wait until they're forced to choose between driving to work and affording groceries before they speak out against it?
> None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system
I think a lot of people would argue that dynamic pricing schemes and governments taking increasing amounts of money from their pockets is, at least in part, why they are stretched thin. In any case, regardless of the cause of their struggles they are struggling. If they were feeling financially secure they might grumble at the increasing likelihood of paying fines to drive where they want to, but they wouldn't be panicking over it like they have been.
Congestion pricing isn't seen as something that's screwing them over right now, but it is seen as the latest scheme cooked up by government that will be screwing them over if they can't put a stop to it.
I think we'd agree that congestion pricing isn't the biggest issue impacting the struggling American family right now, but I can understand why it's being seen as a concern and as something they want to keep out of their own cities. For some that means putting a stop to the practice before it spreads.
I also wish they put less emphasis on punishing people for driving and put more effort into giving people alternatives that are genuinely better. When people are given an option to use something better than what they have, they tend to gravitate to it naturally and with gratitude. It's a lot easier than punishing people and trying to convince them that it's for their own good.
People say they hate socialism, but drivers love car-socialism.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
That and right-wing politics where anything that harms the car as a religious symbol is seen as a 'values' based attack.
Take a look at their figure, especially in May 2020—the average appears lower, but, more significantly, there is much less variability in May 2020 compared to earlier years.
The authors' model quite strongly includes their preferred confound (secular decrease in PM2.5) but doesn't explore what other covariates could explain the differences between years.
It's fine to say that one should be skeptical, but one contrary report doesn't invalidate an antecedent report, and the structure of a linear model strongly influences an outcome.
Given the physical mechanisms involved it is implausible that pollution did not decline. And if you look at their data you see a marked drop in 2020 at day 70
This is March 10 or thereabouts, I think. And there are ZERO high pm 2.5 days for a 20 day stretch or so. This isn't seen in other years. The vast bulk of days are below the trend.
And then for the rest of the year there are some days above the trend line but no high pm 2.5 days.
This fits with people being extra cautious in the early days and then relaxing a bit as things went on.
Now, I'm eyeballing this so I could be incorrect. But:
1. The effect was found in other cities
2. The physical mechanism makes it highly expected that there would be a drop
The study was about the slope of the regression modal, but if you had scrambled the years I'm fairly confident I could have picked 2020 out of the set.
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/4/19/15358234/times-square-snohet...
> “Bowtie” bounded by Broadway and Seventh Avenue between 42nd and 47th Streets.
Frankly, if they let me citizen report - I could likely cover my entire tax burden in 2-3 days. At $490/ticket, the ROI for enforcement seems obviously there.
It could also be the case that making it viable to drive personal vehicles at all inside a dense city comes with opportunity costs (parking, roads that cut through infrastructure, pollution, noise) that aren't worth it.
And I'd wager that it is the case.
We did this in Times Square and on Broadway, and it's honestly been great. I say this as someone who takes cars far more frequently than most New Yorkers and has a place I lived at full time for over a decade off one of those closed-off sections of Broadway.
[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.
Popular truck route from Queens->Bronx was 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd then immediate left onto 59th, and another left onto 1st and take 1st all the way to Willis Ave bridge to beat the RFK bridge (formerly the Triborough) tolls.
https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/the-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York... says "By July 2025, there were 67,000 fewer daily vehicles in the congestion zone compared to before implementation. The same month, one study found that travel times within the congestion zone had decreased, and that delivery companies were opting to use smaller vehicles (which were charged lower tolls) in the toll zone".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65127-x
Now we can get back to our regularly scheduled global warming, without all those pesky clouds in the way.
Yet it’s good if the city does it but bad if a Corp does it?
> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.
> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.
The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.
FWIW, I like that there is a carveout for economically disadvantaged folks. Either way doesn't affect me since I'm not a NYer.
This "Distinctly American idea" you cite does not at all exist.
Tens of millions watch a news channel that openly stated we should euthanize homeless people. Millions more moved to a crazier channel because that one wasn't lying enough
They vote against free school lunch programs that cost very little.
They hate "welfare queens" with a passion, despite that being a lie, and still being a lie decades later.
Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
>This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy
No, the reason we get so many special interest carve outs in the US is that special interest groups fund election campaigns. Fix campaign funding (IE, make it publicly funded and extremely time limited) and you make it significantly easier for people who eschew bribery to be and stay politicians.
Sure, HN has a strong "Not perfect should never be done" bias, because HN is full of turbonerds that crave validation for how smart they are and always need to pipe up with a nitpick to be heard. 95% of the time, the exact "complaint" someone on HN makes up was already noted and covered in the very article. We aren't allowed to sass people for not reading the article.
This is not the case off of HN and in reality. Conservatives are perfectly happy doing "Obvious and common sense" measures that actually have insane second order effects. They insist tariffs are a good policy the way they are being implemented. Democrats want all sorts of things that are not at all perfect and would be happy to have slightly fewer new problems than the same problems our grandparents had to fight about.
this seems awfully coy. Why not just say who cheerled the bill and who went on the TV circuit to explain how great it was because of "super predators" - nice euphemism.
[*] https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/biden-on-the-1994-crime-bi...
[*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlGM4TClIjA (Hillary apologizes for 1994 crime bill)
"Democrats" isn't some amorphous thing we can't tag to individual people. The last president of the USA and his sponsor (Bill Clinton) were adamant to get that bill passed. Biden spearheaded the legislation. This isn't just some "he voted yea on it!" sort of thing.
Allowing employees to work remote.
EWR is in New Jersey, so... not technically the NYC Subway. But taking the subway to Penn Station, then hopping on NJ Transit is pretty easy
LGA is the only one that straight up has no subway/train option.
Why? Fewer cars into Manhattan means fewer cars through the boroughs. And even if they all diverted, you’re still looking at less idling and less stop and start braking.
In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights, which are predictable, rather than the traffic itself.
Is that because of gridlock or because of the higher energies?
> In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights
Source? In my experience it's unexpected incursions, whether that be cars changing lanes, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk or food-delivery bikers yeeting themselves into an intersection.
So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.
I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
There are no highway arteries running through the congestion zone. Building one would require hundreds of billions of dollars of eminent domain.
Manhattan has a $1tn GDP [1], on par with Switzerlad [2]. Its economy is larger than all but 6 states (between Pennsylvaia and Ohio) [3]. More than all of New Jersey. If it crossed the pond it would be the fifth-largest member of the EU, between the Netherlands and Poland [4].
It's a tremendously productive jewel that towers–literally–over the economies of its neighbors. Sacrificing Manhattan to save a few bucks on a trucker who doesn't want to take a highway through the Bronx is absolutely mental from a social, economic and environmental perspective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City $939bn in 2023
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
You can see some of these same dynamics playing out in SF with the decommissioning of the 'Great Highway' on the west side, which led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM?
A pair of thought experiments. The tri-state area is depopulated and turned into a nature reserve. Everywhere except for New York City. How does it do?
Now, New York City is leveled and turned into a nature preserve. How does this affect those states’ non-urban populations? (Hint: economic collapse. Budget cuts. Unemployment.)
Cities suck resources from outside. But by and large, they also distribute largesse to their proximities and subsidize life for everyone around them.
> led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM?
New York City has a population of 8.5mm [1]. That’s almost half of the metropolitan area’s population [2]. Include New York State and the non-voting population effect is a minority. Congestion charging isn’t a tyranny of the minority.
As for why, self determination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
Is this happening in/around NYC?
> Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
The are the same, you just have to pay the fee.
Also, for like 90% of NJ you'd be going the southern route into Brooklyn anyway, no congestion pricing involved.
This is a fixable problem. I'm still waiting on someone to do it though. NY is mostly interested in corruption from their preferred interests. (which is why they are working on a law to require a conductor on all subways instead of working to eliminate all that extra labor, instead of fixing their system so it is fast and reliable and then covers more area)
Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.