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NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

airqualitynews.com

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Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#191

Post by anonymars »

orwin wrote: post #158
hammock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They better be. No one’s rooting for the smog, but a congestion tax is pretty regressive (hurts poorer people more)

It hurts homeless more, that's a fact (although most,big cold city homeless couchsurf rather than sleep in their car in my experience, but it might be different in the US). But if you take 'poor people' as in the bottom 20% of earners, they probably don't drive, because car are expensive.

Do I understand correctly -- you are saying this NYC congestion price hurts the homeless more? As in, people who are homeless in NYC are regularly driving cars into and back out of lower Manhattan?

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#192

Post by kmeisthax »

jpalawaga wrote: post #80
csomar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not. NYC transit is already one of the most expensive in the world and quality is suspect. Pushing money into a dysfunctional structure doesn’t make it functional and might make it worse. A money grab from the public that goes through a maze of expenses. The solution was to re-structure the MTA. But that’s hard work. Politicians would rather blame the other side and just raise taxes. The people like it becaus…

The quality is not suspect. It is one of the world’s few 24/7 systems, and there are many capital improvements happening constantly. For example, making more stations accessible and improving switching equipment to improve reliability and volume. This comment is typical HN “government bad can do no right” fodder. The MTA is truly a marvel in the service it provides. The only advantage it has is age, which is why it i…

If you're a car-owning Long Island or upstate suburbanite who occasionally commutes into Manhattan, the MTA is a god damned marvel compared to what would be available to you in other cities.

If you live anywhere in Brooklyn or Queens, the MTA is an inconvenience that constantly reminds you that the spirit of Robert Moses haunts your city to the present day, and that he really, really would like you to ride a private vehicle. Those boroughs are littered with coverage and frequency gaps that can turn a 40 minute car ride into a 2 hour subway ride. And god help you if you ever need to take a bus.

The capital improvements you mention are improvements on the margins. The MTA needs to engage in a radical rethink of NYC metro area transit. There needs to be radial lines - plural - crossing through Brooklyn and Queens at regular intervals to move as much traffic as possible out of Manhattan. The IBX is a good start, but it should also cross through Staten Island and the Bronx. Queenslink should absolutely be built[0], the N/W should extend to LaGuardia Airport, Utica Ave needs a subway line, and the subway in general should extend through Nassau County and Yonkers. Nassau and Suffolk counties need way more north-south rail[1] than they currently have (which is zero) and the same probably could be said for the service areas of MNR.

The bad part of government is not that it can't run a successful transit service. Actually, government is very good at taking a politically popular service and preserving it[2]. But this comes with a cost: extreme conservatism. You see, our government also happens to have a military that is obsessed with roads; and they pay a 900% subsidy to highway projects. So even states that like transit are hard-pressed to actually fund coverage improvements because it's capital inefficient to build anything that isn't a road. And private institutions building their own rail or transit services will just get absolutely crushed by the road subsidy making driving the only good option. So, government bad, actually, but not for the reason you think.

Also, you're replying to someone talking about NYC in particular. Politics in this area are notoriously corrupt; NJ had a mayor who literally closed a bridge to punish people who didn't vote for him. LIRR in particular has a labor scandal every decade or so. And don't forget, Trump was a NY real estate guy before he decided to tear apart America's political fabric.

[0] In fact, it's kind of absurd they didn't do this when they initially switched the Far Rockaway line over from LIRR to subway service!

[1] This would actually be a good opportunity for light rail, unlike the MTA's initial idea of making the IBX a light rail line

[2] See also: Amtrak.

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#193

Post by tim333 »

lomase wrote: post #183
tim333 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure GDP is a good guide there since whether you drop dead at 60 or 80 doesn't effect the GDP much. Though obviously there's a value to the individual there.

In most of the civilized world the goverment takes a big chunk of the GDP for health care so their citizens dont die. Does your goverment just let people die?

No but the treatment doesn't vary so much depending on age. You only die once. It's probably cheaper for them if you die young.

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#194

Post by kmeisthax »

frankest wrote: post #58
Pooge wrote: post #24

I live in Europe so it's still very much considered pedestrian-friendly, but cars and roads scale so bad. Especially with population density going through the roof in bigger cities. I wonder how it's going to look like in 50 years.

EV self-driving shuttles you can take on demand so nobody needs to keep a car

This is a bad way to provide functioning public transit and a good way to enshittify car ownership. All the externalities of private vehicles with all the downsides of not owning your own mode of transportation.

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#195

Post by rangestransform »

Mawr wrote: post #152
rayiner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, individualized point to point travel is better. I just got back from Tokyo and Taipei, which have transit systems better than any European country. And it was still faster to Uber everywhere.

If speed is your only concern, why not hire a helicopter? Oh, because cost is also a concern so we can't just look at what's "faster"? Rats.

this is the west, we can afford to spend more marginally on transportation to:

- have a financial and physical barrier between the riffraff and paying customers

- spend less total money (for real, the cost of second ave subway alone is about 1/3 the market cap of waymo)

- sit down in comfort with door-to-door air conditioning

- go faster

wheverever the density justifies, autonomy will make "dollar van"-style minibuses financially viable too, since unionized drivers have made full-sized buses a money pit

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#196

Post by rangestransform »

maximilianthe1 wrote: post #189
dzhiurgis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> put them on rails to reduce friction Good luck climbing hills. A lot of systems like these moved away from rails onto rubber tires. Rapid bus is probably best combination. Yes it will never match the throughput of rail, but it's vastly cheaper.

Have you seen hills in NYC or (most of) other major cities? Also, the solition is deeper stations under hills & escalators.

deep stations have a significant impact on travel times, it takes well over 5 minutes to surface from the deepest stations in Barcelona

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#197

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

orwin wrote: post #162
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A difference between 8 and 12 PM 2.5 levels won't change that Yes, it will, and that's the point I was making. There are some things that have no harmful affects below certain concentrations, in that they are not toxic at low levels. PM 2.5 particles are not one of those - they are toxic at all levels. It's quite similar, in this context, to ionizing radiation. There is no safe level of ionizing radiation - every X…

So about ionising radiation: UNSCEAR recommendation is to act as if no threshold effect exist at low doses for indeterministic effects (even though effectively we act as if a 100mSv threshold exists), but the medical literature isn't as clear cut. Precautionary principle should be respected in any cases. The most recent epidemiology studies (studies on _very_ large cohort) do seems to favour a linear model without th…

Thanks for investigating and adding detail, very helpful info.

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#198

Post by dangus »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #157
dangus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, how about this, connect them together and put them on rails to reduce friction. You could even run them separate from the street with raised platforms for accessibility and sometimes even run them underground. We could call this something like “underway” or “steel beam connect-o-cars”

> put them on rails to reduce friction Good luck climbing hills. A lot of systems like these moved away from rails onto rubber tires. Rapid bus is probably best combination. Yes it will never match the throughput of rail, but it's vastly cheaper.

Trains can have rubber tires (Paris metro)

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#199

Post by milesskorpen »

Aloisius wrote: post #96
milesskorpen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"

I thought the tire wear particulates being a huge source of particulate air emissions was an overestimate due to misunderstanding and misquotation of primary literature by secondary literature used by regulatory agencies. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792

1/6 is a lot lower (good!) but is that sufficient to say they're not a large source of particulate air emissions?

Re: NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

#200

Post by milesskorpen »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #100
milesskorpen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"

How do EVs help with congestion? They take up the same amount of space as an ICE car.

I was thinking autonomy, but you're right for EV alone.
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