Parking garages: the OG congestion fee.

I suspect that this is due to the elimination of toll shopping/avoidance. Per [0] and [1], the only way to avoid a toll entirely is to drive from the West Side Highway or FDR Drive to the Brooklyn Bridge, but commercial vehicles are prohibited on FDR Drive and the Brooklyn Bridge has weight restrictions [2], so heavy trucks don't have a legal way to dodge the tolls anymore.

If you need to reach Long Island, the incentive to avoid the (tolled) Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Verrazzano, and RFK bridges are gone; now you're paying for the privilege of sitting in Manhattan traffic.

[0]: https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info/faqs

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-congestion-pricing-...

[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/parkway-restricti...

Do we know that those heavy duty trucks were formerly used to do things you need heavy duty trucks for? It seems more likely that 18% (or more!) of the usage was by people who think heavy duty trucks look cool and wanted to show off theirs.

What business or shopping trip into Manhattan is small enough that 9 dollars is a significant hurdle or increase in cost? It's there to disincentivize taking a car for no reason when you can use transit while being small enough to absorb if you have a reason to actually use a car.

If you're engaging in commerce, those few bucks are negligible..

By the time you could build such a system, autonomous cars will have completely taken over, so the rules could be as complicated as you wish.

Yes, but also it's just annoying to have a car in NYC. For many routes the subway is going to be faster than driving and sitting in traffic, unless you're traveling between outer borough neighborhoods that only have a connection in Manhattan. If you're making that commute often (say, Bushwick to East Flatbush, or Flushing to Canarsie), a car might make sense, but then this whole congestion pricing thing doesn't apply to you.

Transit is $3/ride (in a few weeks), 24 hours, and all over the city. It's not perfect, but for the vast majority of cases owning a car in NYC is just not really worth it. If you need one because you have a weekend home out in Long Island or up in the Hudson Valley, you can afford the $9 toll.

It's economically infeasible for a large percentage of people to drive in a dense urban area, period.

That's true even without congestion pricing. A city would go broke and bulldoze itself trying to add enough stacked lane, highways, and parking to handle everyone who would prefer to drive in or through if the capacity existed.

It would be before the congestion fee anyway - parking costs alone are absurd and cumbersome right?

Well yeah — cars are expensive.

That was the case before congestion pricing too.

No; it was already economically infeasible, and thus the drop was not marked.

is it? i dont see the relevant other studies, and my initial assumptions would be that the median subway user is lower income than the median car driver in NYC, so transfering funds from car drivers to subway improvements would be progressive.

However NYC's transit is notoriously bad at spending, so not sure it would achive that. Which studies linked in this thread are you refering to? I cant see them.

Regressive taxes aren't bad inherently bad. Regressive spending is bad.

In this case, you have a regressive tax with a huge positive side effect due to taxing an externality. If the funds are also spread into progressive services it can be a net positive for all income brackets.

TIL that word.

I wish as a society we'd use this form of taxation more, and widely applied taxes less. In theory insurance is supposed to have the actuarial people who figure it out and properly price the choices in, but it's also surprising how crude they can be-- lumping very distinct situations as "the same". eg aggressive drivers are only penalized after they hurt someone, like the phrase "no harm no foul" (until there is harm). It'd be better if telemetry was collected and penalized in realtime.