Live data from Hacker News

NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

congestion-pricing-tracker.com

241–250 of 653 posts

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very hopeful that Boston commuter rail gets electrified with the associated speed and frequency improvements soonish. the inner half of the commuter rail network is absolutely dense enough to be worth running service every 15 minutes on peak and every 30 off peak

Why ask for 15/30? My schedule right next door for the Berlin subway is 3/10. During peak hours, you don’t even check when the next train runs. And they’re all full. I do believe Boston has more inhabitants than this small city.

The Boston commuter rail network would be equivalent to Berlin's S-Bahn network, which is 10/20 minutes, and 30 on Friday and Saturday nights.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#242

There's a lot of interest in forcing people to use public transit but relatively little interest in making transit something people want to use. If people think they're going to be stabbed or assaulted they're not going to want to use it. Other countries don't have this problem and until the transit types realize this normal people are going to reject transit alltogether.

The USA needs to work on: -- making the cost of employing a good staffing level of police more affordable (so that we can have more, everyday police doing a job as a neighborhood force and seen as a reliable presence against crime) -- more certain prosecution and penalties for quality of life crimes that we all pay for in seeing petty but significantly confidence-decreasing incidents that reduce our willingness to ta…

Subways in nyc have 2 crew by union decree and I don’t think it’s helped public safety

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#243
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been highly successful in London. Less congestion, better air quality, incentivises the most disruptive things like heavy good vehicles to deliver out of rush hour reducing impact on other traffic etc.

My ancedotal experience of driving around London once or twice a year for the last ten years is there hasn't been a huge change. I don't trust TFL data on this as the authorities are incentivised to report figures to support the gathering of the additional revenue stream. At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions). In my opinio…

Why would there be a change in London within the last 10 years? Congestion charging was introduced in 2003.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed…

The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else. A single car line can transport about 2000 persons per hour. A single bus lane about 9000, a single bike lane 14000 - if you dedicate the space to pedestrians, we’re at 19000 and light rail goes beyond that at 22000 and more. (See page 3, https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002265/News/Pre... , German only) This…

The problem is utilization: you can't get 9000 persons per hour via busing in most places, weighting by area. Fixed routing scales poorly compared to cars (or bikes which have their own drawbacks) trying to match many-to-many riders-to-destinations.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#245
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ancedotal experience of driving around London once or twice a year for the last ten years is there hasn't been a huge change. I don't trust TFL data on this as the authorities are incentivised to report figures to support the gathering of the additional revenue stream. At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions). In my opinio…

Why would there be a change in London within the last 10 years? Congestion charging was introduced in 2003.

ULEZ was introduced for a start.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seek agency and don't consider traffic deaths to be the same as random assaults. It's for the same reason most people think they'd do well in a fight. They value their agency and assume they would be able to prevent it.

Pedestrians outside of cars don't have agency to prevent injury to themselves from cars.

Situational awareness shouldn't be discounted.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#247
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congestion pricing makes driving better, not worse.

Of course it does, if you remove price from the equation!

Wouldn't the price of the car, fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc. dwarf the congestion tax? So the car itself is the worst part about the driving experience?

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 con…

Several million people disagree with you.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#250
post #113

The harsh law of hacker news: For any topic outside of strict software development, the strength, viciousness and certitude of opinions expressed is inversely proportional to the level of knowledge about the subject. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/3/3/the-fundamental...

Whiplash, every time.

HN's takes on cars are shockingly bad. For a community as thoughtful as HN, their responses are (to use an insult provocatively) car brained.

It's as if cities don't exist outside the US. The US is decades behind on urban infrastructure and governance. This means their policy debates in 2025 have been globally settled issues for decades with outcomes to back it up. Conjecture can't be an effective rebuttal to evidence.

Post reply on HN