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It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

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Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#121

Post by geofft »

speedplane wrote: post #48

Banning cars, congestion pricing, Uber and taxi surchages, taxing parking spots and rental cars ... under the current NYC political consensus, personal motor vehicles are in the cross-hairs. I actually would support this if it was part of an honest effort to improve transportation and livability in the city, but most of these proposals make it harder to live here, not easier. I suspect the real motivation is a mix of…

> * I actually would support this if it was part of an honest effort to improve transportation and livability in the city, but most of these proposals make it harder to live here, not easier.*

My experience as a resident is that the fewer cars on the street, the easier it is to live here. (Sometimes in a strictly literal sense of fewer things that could run you over, less clogged road for emergency vehicles - I wouldn't want to have a heart attack in Manhattan at 5 PM - and so forth, but more generally in a quality-of-life sense.)

Can you expand on how it makes it harder?

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#122

Post by elif »

capableweb wrote: post #76
nightfly wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but they still need roads. Lots of these plans seem to include re-purposing the roadways, without considering the remaining vehicles that still need roads.

No, not at least what I have seen. Even in the thread you are now answering in, there is examples ( https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life... ) where a mostly-car street turned into a mostly-pedestrian street, with still the option for vehicle to travel if they must. Same if you take a look at the Superilles (Superblocks) in Barcelona ( http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/es/ ), they stil…

Many streets in Japanese cities fit this. There is only one loosely defined car lane and no sidewalks. So it's a pain to drive because if someone is driving the opposite way, someone has to pull over and yield.

The lack of sidewalks makes it so that the road's primary users are pedestrians, so cars are forced to drive carefully (slow) at all times, making these roads even less desirable for drivers.

The "soft pressure" leads to cars mostly using car-friendly roads unless they absolutely have to use the pedestrian ones.

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#123

Post by 4ad »

ekianjo wrote: post #111
4ad wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing they do in Europe, where cars are banned from almost every city center. We manage just fine.

> cars are banned from almost every city center. In which utopia is this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#125

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

imgabe wrote: post #112
speedplane wrote: post #48

Banning cars, congestion pricing, Uber and taxi surchages, taxing parking spots and rental cars ... under the current NYC political consensus, personal motor vehicles are in the cross-hairs. I actually would support this if it was part of an honest effort to improve transportation and livability in the city, but most of these proposals make it harder to live here, not easier. I suspect the real motivation is a mix of…

> NYC politicians should be focused on how to move the most amount of people, the safest and quickest way, for the cheapest cost. And the way to do this is with trains and buses, not cars.

And bikes. The reason London built its two major Cycle Superhighways (East-West and North-South) is because their modelling showed more people were going to need to cross the city, but a new tube line was unaffordable in comparison.

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#126

Post by geofft »

speedplane wrote: post #51
_delirium wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to see numbers on that (e.g. what percentage of cars are coming from which locations). There are people poorly served by transit, but Manhattan also has a lot of fairly wealthy people driving, or even being chauffeured, on routes that have perfectly usable transit that they'd just rather not use. Car ownership in NYC (45% overall) is much higher among wealthier than poorer people, and especially so…

> Manhattan also has a lot of fairly wealthy people driving, or even being chauffeured, on routes that have perfectly usable transit that they'd just rather not use. The classicist subtext you allude to above has no place in NYC transportation policy, and will likely make inequality worse. If you want to make the rich pay their fair share, then raise income or wealth taxes. A multi-millionaire won't be fazed by a $10…

1. The word is "classist," not "classicist," someone who studies the classics. (I wouldn't comment except you've used it twice in this thread.)

2. The proposal has neither classist subtext nor text. It isn't "The rich need to stop driving because the rich suck," it's "The rich need to stop driving because they have perfectly reasonable alternatives, people who live and work in less affluent areas underserved by transit often don't have a perfectly reasonable alternative." Nobody would care if the rich want to drive their cars in Staten Island all day, as long they're not causing congestion. Nobody is trying to hurt the rich. They're trying to solve congestion without hurting people, and those who drive private vehicles in Manhattan are, it is believed, least hurt by this proposal.

And your own argument demonstrates this: obviously congestion pricing is more affordable to the rich, but people still think it's a good idea. If three billionaires want to drive Hummers around midtown all day but in exchange there are protected bike and bus lanes, I am all for that.

If you think the rich are actually being hurt by this proposal, it would be worth arguing that claim. But it is not an injury in my opinion that the rich could previously do something from their richness and now have to do what everyone else does.

Meanwhile, taxing the rich simply because we don't like them (as opposed to because we think that they disproportionately benefit from government resources, or that setting this tax policy has particular benefits to the economy, or whatever) would in fact be a gratuitous injury to them, so I'm not sure why you think that's a kinder alternative.

(Disclosure: I work for a hedge fund, I take the subway, and I think taxes at my bracket and above are too low.)

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#127

Post by kijin »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #55
andybp85 wrote: post #38

This sounds like it would suck big time for musicians and the like who have to transport gear to bars and whatnot, which I've done plenty of times since high school (I live just outside the city in NJ). Having to carry all my gear like 10 NYC blocks (or more) after having to pay tens of dollars to park in a garage (what would availability even be?) would definitely make me think twice about trying to get gigs there.…

“No street would need to be completely cut off from vehicular traffic; emergency services could get through and transport for the disabled, just as they do in places like Ghent, Belgium, where the city center has been car-free since 2017.” Every street is still accessible by car. You simply wouldn’t want to go on the pedestrian streets until you absolutely have to because like in car free European cities today, you’d…

If that's what you're proposing, there's no need to use clickbait words like "ban cars from Manhattan". You're just shifting the incentive structure so that people will be less inclined to use a car.

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#128

Post by lukas099 »

speedplane wrote: post #62
Pfhreak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has building more roads for cars ever resulted in fixing traffic. The solution isn't to try and make the city more car friendly, it's to remove the cars entirely. Move to streetcars, subways, trains, busses, anything that moves crowds of people rather than 1-5 people. Cars are such an incredibly inefficient model for moving people around in dense areas -- every person gets their own engine, several chairs, stora…

> why would I need to own a car if public transit served my every need and I could take a zipcar/car2go/taxi for those rare, rare cases when I needed my own vehicle? Many kids growing up in NYC rarely get to leave the city. They don't get to go upstate, see real nature and open spaces, go camping, hike a big mountain, swim in a natural lake, or experience the things that a large city cannot offer. Many never get a dr…

Isn't the other alternative for those families to own a car? That's surely more expensive than renting one to go camping.

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#129

Post by ChrisLomont »

4ad wrote: post #123
ekianjo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cars are banned from almost every city center. In which utopia is this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places

Almost every one of those is a tiny part of a city on order if a few streets or part of a tiny city.

Do you have anything substantial, say affecting on order of a million people? Or even an area of 100k people?

Re: It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

#130

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

baron816 wrote: post #20

I was once riding in a cab, ranting about how private cars should be banned in NYC, and the driver spoke up and said that no one who drives in the city wants to drive there—they do it because they have to. They do it because many neighbors within the greater metro area aren’t severed by any form of public transportation.

Unfortunately you get to a point where no-one _does_ have to drive in a city, yet still people do. Oxford (UK) is a case in point. There are park-and-rides at every entrance to the city, good bus and train services, and conversely, awful congestion and exorbitant car parking costs. Yet I still know people from my town (15 miles outside) who choose to drive into Oxford even though there's an express train that takes under half the time.

Eventually you can't offer any more carrots and you have to start using a stick.

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