Charging should be a function of either car book value as well
The point is to reduce traffic and raise revenue.
New York City will charge drivers going downtown
141–150 of 700 posts
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree! Let's get the poors off the roads. The peasant class belongs on public transport, not on taxpayer-funded roads.
> out of a region of 28 million people, just an estimated 16,100 low-income people commute to work via car in Lower Manhattan, according to the MTA
Exactly. If those 16K really concern somebody, they should just issue them a pass based on income. And if capitalism means anything, the employers of those 16K will have to raise pay to attract people.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#143So rich people (who really do not care about few dollars) will be able to drive to downtown just for fun. while poor people who truly need to come to downtown by car will struggle. This is an unfortunate reality of life: wealth equates to more available time.
Not sure how familiar you are with the realities of driving a car in Lower Manhattan, but as somebody who has visited the place a few times, I can assure you that poor people cannot afford parking there on a regular basis already.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#144So rich people (who really do not care about few dollars) will be able to drive to downtown just for fun. while poor people who truly need to come to downtown by car will struggle. This is an unfortunate reality of life: wealth equates to more available time.
NYC, and Manhattan specifically, is one of the rare places in the country where having a car is almost virtually unnecessary. In downtown, cars are already playthings of the rich: Just parking the car during peak hours can run you hundreds dollars of per month. The core of NYC has walkable infrastructure and an amazing public transportation infrastructure (at least compared to much of the rest of the country). For th…
It is now over a thousand per month for a dedicated space in Manhattan, and that seems to be about the right price.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Even assuming those folks are correct, it doesn't really matter, because these taxes are incredibly effective. It's eye-opening to see how a nearly insignificant tax (literal pennies per bag) changes the behavior of everyone. Yep. People have discovered that it's pretty easy to make it a habit to carry a small bag if you live in a city and just keep some bags in the car if you're driving to the store--and it's gener…
That nice bag also accounts for >300x more CO2 than the plastic bag it replaced.
Well, that's not the only metric. But, yes, cotton bags in particular are generally considered to have the most impact. (Somewhat ironically my nicest ones come from an environmental organization I belong to.)
It probably, in general, falls into the category of performative environmentalism even if it led me to change behavior in a way I personally prefer most of the time. (It doesn't apply immediately around where I live and mostly use recyclable bags out of preference.)
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#146So rich people (who really do not care about few dollars) will be able to drive to downtown just for fun. while poor people who truly need to come to downtown by car will struggle. This is an unfortunate reality of life: wealth equates to more available time.
Where are these poor people who truly need to come downtown by car parking?
I imagine there are literally thousands of them (/s)
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the city, especially downtown its basically not free anywhere. It's always metered. Only free at nights and weekends
Maybe I'm oblivious to them, but I don't think I've seen meters in Soho/Chinatown/LES and I definitely don't remember them in the East Village. Are they more in the Tribeca/Fidi area?
The classic meters at every spot are largely gone and have been replaced by block-based, app-enabled meters run by ParkNYC [https://www.parknycapp.com/].
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#148Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#149So rich people (who really do not care about few dollars) will be able to drive to downtown just for fun. while poor people who truly need to come to downtown by car will struggle. This is an unfortunate reality of life: wealth equates to more available time.
Yes, rich people do things for fun. Poor people struggle. It’s not a particularly deep or useful insight. What do you think should happen here instead since you’re so disappointed with the current plan? No charge for drivers going downtown? A dynamic charge based on social status/wealth?
> A dynamic charge based on social status/wealth?
That's one I like actually, maybe something like the blue book value of the car?
I recently moved out of NYC but I remember looking forward to the congestion charge because I loved taking my greyhound to the union square dog run, which was driving distance for me. 20$ wasn't enough to affect my plans to do that, and less traffic would actually make my life way easier when I took him there.
There were plenty of people like that: totally unaffected by whatever a reasonable toll is, and actually more likely to drive if they enact it.
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At the end of the day I don't buy that in a city like NYC we'll see the type of effect congestion pricing has had in other less connected cities. Here owning a car is already expensive, parking already cost more than people pay in rent in some places, etc. It's like stacking a regressive tax on a regressive tax, it doesn't really have the same effect.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure, let's charge methods of transportation based on negative externalities such as how much space they take, safety, and noise/particulate pollution.
I'm all for it! It would suck for transit, though: 1. It has a higher CO2 footprint than small/medium EVs. 2. Transit forces people into smaller and denser housing, resulting in suboptimal living conditions. 3. Buses in particular result in excessive road wear&tear. It's really amazing that people say things like "car owners should not get subsidized" (by whom?), while talking about transit that is literally infeasib…
> 1. It has a higher CO2 footprint than small/medium EVs.
This is too misleading to be unintentional. I don't know if you're comparing buses to small/medium EVs 1:1, but even if you aren't, the environmental footprint of replacing all bus services with EVs would be extraordinary.
> 2. Transit forces people into smaller and denser housing, resulting in suboptimal living conditions.
Transit doesn't force people into housing. It creates new housing options that previously were not tenable. Rivers don't create port congestion, rivers create ports. Not having enough ports, or enough rivers, creates port congestion.
> 3. Buses in particular result in excessive road wear&tear.
In proportion to human-miles, or is this a 1:1 comparison?