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NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

congestion-pricing-tracker.com

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Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#191

Post by lolinder »

vinay427 wrote: post #177
Ferret7446 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The externality is already "priced in" to the traffic. People who can wait in traffic or can't afford not to wait in traffic do so, and people who want to skip out can as well. Congestion pricing, like many fees and regulations, is a regressive tax, because the overhead seeps into all goods and services and it impacts the poor most of all and the rich not at all.

The median income of a household with a car in the city is more than double that of households without cars [1]. In a city where public transport is a viable and relatively cheap alternative, it doesn’t seem obvious that it disproportionately impacts the poor, unlike for instance a flat sales tax on essential goods. [1] https://blog.tstc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/how-car-fre...

If they only taxed passenger vehicles you'd have a point, but the cost for trucks is actually higher (up to more than double), which means that in the end it is a tax on essential goods, because those goods have to make it into the city somehow and businesses have to pass that cost on to customers. It's reasonable to be afraid that poor customers will see the largest change as a percent of their budget as prices go up to pay for the tax (though obviously we haven't had time to measure whether that to see for sure).

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#192

Post by boroboro4 »

RhysU wrote: post #135
paxys wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying everyone who gets in a traffic accident has full agency over the situation? Because that is laughably far from reality. It is infinitely easier to consciously avoid danger on the subway than in a car.

I have some agency. I can drive faster or slower, more or less aggressively, choose a vehicle based on safety, not drive in bad weather or when the bars let out, drive more or less frequently. I can't control if some batshit crazy tries to set me on fire, aside from riding the subway less. I do ride the subway, BTW. But I definitely do not habitually walk as close to the platform edge as I used to given how public sa…

You have way more control over batshit crazies than riding the subway less. You can change the subway car, fight, ask for help, engage the police. And let’s face it - you never gonna be this person who got burnt.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#193

Post by what »

taatof wrote: post #69
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. Same happening here in my smallish (~300k peeople) capital of a small eu country... Too many cars? More expensive parking! Less parking! More expensive parking! Less parking! More pedestrian-only streets, and even more cars around that... And the buses? They suck. The city is roughly star-shaped.. want to go from one leg to anoth…

Sounds right. Here in SF, instead of police pulling over people who speed and run stop signs, we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections so people speeding and running stop signs can see if they're about to kill a pedestrian. Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.

You must not be a pedestrian if you don’t like the red zones at intersections. You can’t see the oncoming traffic without stepping into the intersection.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#194

Post by neilv »

nayuki wrote: post #147
neilv wrote: post #131

This seems to be selling use of the public roads to rich people (who can more easily afford the tolls). Isn't this a step backwards for social justice?

Do you know what it means to be rich? Serious question. It's not "having a lot of money". It's actually "having a lot of options". By definition, rich people will have more ways to get around than poor people. The rich can hire a limo, hop in a helicopter, and even take a trip to space. Is it a social injustice that not everyone can afford a limo, helicopter, or spaceship? I do not think it's bad to take steps to mak…

> Do you know what it means to be rich? Serious question.

A serious question that you immediately proceed to answer, with rhetoric that it's preferable for there to be only the relative few rich elite, who implicitly should enjoy all the luxuries possible in the world, but there should not be these luxuries for the lesser people, since our experiments in permitting the peasants to enjoy small amounts of society's wealth has been a disaster, encroaching upon the enjoyment of the rich, and making the poors uppity?

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#195

Post by lolinder »

djrobstep wrote: post #158
Ferret7446 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's highly unlikely to result in positive effects. I would be hoping that it only harms NYC economic condition "a little", as the best case outcome. This falls solidly in the "it sounds good but causes significant negative unintended consequences" bucket of regulation, like the rest of NYC's many regulations that led up to this point.

What are you talking about? It will have overwhelmingly strongly positive effects, while also raising revenue to fund stuff like more transit. Congestion charging is great and every city should do it!

You're both just asserting your positions as facts without even providing an argument, much less evidence.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#196

Post by fuzzylightbulb »

dralley wrote: post #167

Fantastic. That's step one, now fix the public transit, and make it safer and cleaner, so that people actually enjoy using it consistently rather than just needing to do so. Do that and NYC will be a much, much nicer city to live in.

That is literally what the money is for

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#197

Post by what »

fragmede wrote: post #142
Niksko wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you look to places like Meixco City and Bogota, their bus rapid transit is very fast and efficient. But good luck taking away a single lane of traffic for dedicated bus services anywhere in the US.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrLLq1V4acKnG3RVA This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.

Yet there’s now 6 lanes? So they didn’t take out two lanes for bus traffic?

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#198

Post by Lammy »

tlogan wrote: post #96
taatof wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we get around? To get downtown I have to take two busses and then bart (or two busses but it takes longer because there are a lot more stops). The kicker: I'm not even in a suburb, I live in SF! All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. At least NYC has a plenty good enough train system. I end up WFH anyway, largely because it's annoying to get to an office downtown…

The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people. Rich Democrats will claim it’s beneficial for the environment, while rich Republicans will call it capitalism at work. In the end, improving public transit isn’t really on their radar. And they rule the world.

> The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people.

And spy on everyone, all the time, because now it “““has to””” track every vehicle's every move — Total Information Awareness

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#199

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

cyberax wrote: post #186
DrBrock wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities". Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives. This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move…

> We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities". No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me. > This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).

Manhattan is such a strange place to live. People are locked into something far off the normal ways of living, and they forget those other ways of life and look down on them (smaller less dense cities, suburbs, rural areas). Living in closets in high rises and moving around underground isn’t life. Having room for living, being able to get around quickly with private owned vehicles, and walking on grass instead of concrete is a better way of life. Somehow masses of people, especially younger people, have convinced themselves that an unhealthy way of life is healthy.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#200

Post by vinay427 »

paxys wrote: post #81
maxwellg wrote: post #11

I'm incredibly hopeful that NYC congestion pricing pays off in a big way - and that we start to see it in other cities across America. I really, really want congestion pricing in downtown SF. During rush hour, cars block the box and slow down busses, with cascading effects.

SF is already half way there with its bridge tolls (which, funny enough, are higher than NYC's congestion charge, yet there is zero fuss about them). The rest of the city is too spread out and has no natural choke points, so I don't see how this kind of congestion charging will be possible.

> which, funny enough, are higher than NYC's congestion charge, yet there is zero fuss about them

That may be because NY/NJ have bridge tolls into the city that are often much higher than those in SF.

https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/tolls.html

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