181–190 of 735 posts
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I'm generally sympathetic to arguments that are "we will fall down the slippery slope." But as someone who has spent too much time stuck in traffic, I WANT congestion pricing to spread. It's just basic economics that people end up paying for a "free" resource with time - grossly inefficient.
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Seems to be working fine, I know the large city about 60 miles from me looked at this, and I am all for it. But its mass transit is a awful mess, at times walking is faster that taking a subway. I wish they would start this, but its politics is such a mess nothing really gets done there. New Ideas there gets implemented far slower than then ideas in Roman Catholic Church.
Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
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I’m impressed. This is one of the strangest opinions I’ve ever seen. What is special about “at use”? Presumably because it lets you avoid the question of whether everyone should get a free car. Does a monthly car payment count as “at use”? Why not if a monthly transit pass does? The other replies point out that different forms of transit compete with each other, so the more cars we have, the fewer bikes and trains.
Because once an investment has been made in a car and roads or in a train line or whatever there should be no artificial distinctive for people to use it as they deem appropriate.
You're also, it seems assuming that investment is a one-time thing. Once an investment has been made in a train line or a car, you still need to afford maintenance over the thing over the lifetime of the thing. Including the opportunity costs of doing other things instead.
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> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up. If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users. IMO, people think driving…
It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending. I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyp…
Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.
Impressive how cars are harmful to society. This is just a small example. We should be more radical in preventing the use of individual automobiles. If it works in a country where the auto is so ingrained in the culture and lifestyle, it can work anywhere.
NYC is an extreme outlier. The city itself is older than America, older than the British colonies even. It was built by the Dutch . It's infrastructure is closer to Tokyo's[0] than any other American city. Congestion charge works in NYC because anyone driving solo into Manhattan is either an idiot or a cop[1]. In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so c…
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The dispute isn't between walking and cars, or between stone age and modernity. Just that individual cars have a terrible externalities. Impressive how public transport does not enter the mind of Americans.
If public transit even remotely resembled anything in China or Japan, Americans would ditch their cars in a heartbeat. But every train ride I've been on to Manhattan is like commuting through an open sewer while being harassed by strangers doing an obnoxious dance with a bluetooth speaker in my face, dodging puddles of urine, and wondering if today's the day I'll be thrown off the platform. Of course people would rat…
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> She delayed it by 6 months because she thought it would hurt some candidates in House elections Did she think that New Jersey residents vote for New York candidates? Do you have a link to the narrative?
Westchester County and Long Island residents vote for New York candidates.
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The trains and subway are right there...
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The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, i…