Changes since congestion pricing started in New York • Hacker News Board

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#341

Post by listenallyall » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:17 AM UTC

lesuorac wrote: post #132

listenallyall wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the slippery slope concept surprise you? It actually happens often - banning smoking indoors, for example - started in just one city, once they tweaked the model and overcame the legal challenges, it spread rather quickly. Legalized casinos, same thing. Uber, drinking age, pot legalization, more. Why would toll roads or congestion pricing be different? (Idaho's Sun Valley probably already implements somethin…

I think the slippery slope has long happened and also gone away. There are a ton of roads with "turnpike" or "pike" in their name. Some cost money [1] others are free. What's the big difference between NYC's congestion pricing and the Florida Pike? I guess you can fight congestion pricing in order to slow the spread of toll roads but it's not the beginning of a slipper slope. Usage fees are a very old concept (price…

New York State already has a major toll road (NY Thruway) and tolls to enter New York City. So do New Jersey and Connecticut, the other states you must drive through to enter New York City. The congestion pricing is a new charge on top of longstanding toll roads and bridge/tunnel tolls, so it feels like a new category and the start of something new, rather than being equated to "usage fees" as you state, at least in the minds of many drivers.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#342

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:22 AM UTC

bitmasher9 wrote: post #303

bobthepanda wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle is weird in that drive til you qualify is not a thing unless you start getting really far out. Some inner ring neighborhoods and suburbs are comparable or more expensive than the core.

If you want to head straight south or straight north you won’t have to go further out than 1 hour before rents and property values fall significantly from city center Seattle. Tacoma is 30 minutes away without traffic and has a median home price 40% less than Seattle. Drive till you qualify is real. If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millio…

With traffic, Tacoma isn’t very viable. Also I have a relative who commuted to his job in Tacoma from…west Seattle (granted they bought in the late 80s). It was an easy reverse commute (so close to actually 30 minutes?), going the other way is hard and you can only win with the train (sounder) or maybe bus. Link is making its way down to federal way soon (or already?) but that assumes you work near a station or it quickly becomes not competitive with driving.

My mom commuted to Redmond from Bothell when I was in high school, horrible traffic…and that was early 90s. You don’t want to do anything on 405 during rush hour.

You can also head west if you dare. I have a coworker commuting in from Vashon Island. I don’t think prices are that great on the islands though, maybe 30-20% less than Seattle, but you live by the ferry schedule and if you want something near the ferry dock you’ll pay a lot more for that walk on convenience.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#343

Post by josephcsible » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:22 AM UTC

lesuorac wrote: post #132

listenallyall wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the slippery slope concept surprise you? It actually happens often - banning smoking indoors, for example - started in just one city, once they tweaked the model and overcame the legal challenges, it spread rather quickly. Legalized casinos, same thing. Uber, drinking age, pot legalization, more. Why would toll roads or congestion pricing be different? (Idaho's Sun Valley probably already implements somethin…

I think the slippery slope has long happened and also gone away. There are a ton of roads with "turnpike" or "pike" in their name. Some cost money [1] others are free. What's the big difference between NYC's congestion pricing and the Florida Pike? I guess you can fight congestion pricing in order to slow the spread of toll roads but it's not the beginning of a slipper slope. Usage fees are a very old concept (price…

With regular toll roads, if you don't want to pay the toll, you can drive on a different road instead and still get to the same place at the same time.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#344

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

lodovic wrote: post #335

lelandbatey wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the Eastside is a real estate hellscape. Everything east of Lake Washington till highway 203/18 is genuinely quite bad. I had cheaper rent on top of Queen Anne, 1 block from the Trader Joe's, than any place of comparable walk/transit on the east side ($2065/month for a 2 bedroom 1.75 bathroom apartment+1 parking place, ~950sq/ft).

Really curious what would amount to 1.75 bathroom, I'm unfamiliar with the concept. One full bathroom and a second with just a a toilet/sink combination?

That is 1.5. A 1.75 is usually a small bathroom with a shower. The space would have no room for a tub. These often get counted as full baths anyways.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#345

Post by choeger » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:26 AM UTC

I wonder if this will eventually lead to increased density and if that then leads to congested bike lanes. Will the cities of tomorrow regulate traffic between individual buildings?

Make no mistake, bikes are much, much, better for urban centers than cars. But the overall problem isn't cars, it's individual traffic in densely populated areas.

Certain policy here in Europe simply assumes that people stay in their surroundings ("15 minute city") and rarely, if ever, visit parts that are farther away individually.

Public transportation, however, is naturally biased. It can be much quicker to get 10km north-south than 5km east-west, or the other way around, depending on the city. And, of course, public transportation is often lacking quality compared to individual traffic. (Taking a bike across a bicycle road vs. getting into a crammed subway train in July, for instance.)

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#346

Post by rcpt » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:34 AM UTC

KingMob wrote: post #290

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just one more lane bro I swear that's it it's just one more lane then the traffic will go away

Road lanes are like CPU cores. And like CPUs, adding more cores does not linearly scale up traffic capacity. In the case of CPUs, there's sync and communication overhead; for highways, there's more turbulence and slowdown generated by lane-switching.

Adding more lanes encourages more driving. That's why it never reduces traffic

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#347

Post by egypturnash » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

choeger wrote: post #345

I wonder if this will eventually lead to increased density and if that then leads to congested bike lanes. Will the cities of tomorrow regulate traffic between individual buildings? Make no mistake, bikes are much, much, better for urban centers than cars. But the overall problem isn't cars, it's individual traffic in densely populated areas. Certain policy here in Europe simply assumes that people stay in their surr…

Less cars + overflowing bike lanes = hey what if we mark more of the street as being for bikes. (Possibly with an interim step of "the cyclists have already claimed pretty much the entire street for bikes".)

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#348

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #100

neves wrote: post #36

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…

    > To be clear, Tokyo as we know it today was basically rebuilt by America after we leveled it with firebombs. It was specifically built in the image of Manhattan.

I tried to research this topic. I cannot find anything about it. Can you share some sources? Tokyo was mostly low-rise until the 1990s, except some small areas in Otemachi (near Tokyo station) and Shinjuku.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#349

Post by rcpt » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:36 AM UTC

tetromino_ wrote: post #261

epistasis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with children, I can not imagine the bliss of living in Manhattan and being able to do things without needing a car. Car-centric urban planning is hell with kids. You have to load them up into the car for any small trip. You can't walk or bike anywhere because cars make it so dangerous. My only regret about living in the US is this car hellscape that is so hard to avoid. It's mandated by law, not chosen by…

> As someone with children, I can not imagine the bliss of living in Manhattan and being able to do things without needing a car. Lifting a 2 toddler stroller up and down narrow, crowded NYC subway stairs is the exact opposite of bliss. Perhaps you are unaware that many subway stations still don't have elevators (or escalators, for that matter) - only stairs. And where the elevators exist, it seems half the time they…

I did that it wasn't so bad. Definitely preferable to not finishing work because you need to drive one kid to gymnastics and the other one to jiu jitsu

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#350

Post by vladvasiliu » Thu, May 15, 2025, 6:40 AM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #325

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I'm curious, do other larger cities where commercial is concentrated into one area not have a private mini-bus(es)? It turns out, there are some private buses. Take for example, Santiago, Chile. It succeeded in terms of profits and customer satisfaction. The problem is they do not survive. There comes a time when they don't pay sufficient "political capital" and get taken over (nationalized) by local politicians.…

Lots of places in the world run public bus systems - it seems by far the most common to me. It's hardly a thing of 'socialism' (always a bad word on HN).

I don't know about Chile, but I think the issue isn't so much the system being public, as in run by some form of government. Rather, the issue is in how "socialists" tend to run systems: everything is great until they run out of other people's money.

Now, I'm not in the "free market will solve all our woes" camp, either, especially when it comes to what we call "public service" in France. Over here, transit systems are facing a push from the EU bureaucrats for "opening up to competition". I'm bracing for the shit to hit the proverbial fan.

Sure, our national rail company is world-famous for being on strike all day every day and twice on Sunday. But, when they do run, they work fairly well and serve most of the country, including random, middle-of-nowhere towns. New companies coming in for the competition only serve the most profitable routes. Of course, I don't know all the laws, but I haven't heard of any obligation for new companies to serve the less profitable routes. So, the SNCF will have less money from the profitable routes to subsidize these lines. This means that either service will degrade, or the State will have to increase funding [0]. Now, I'm generally fine with paying (reasonable) taxes and whatnot, but I'm less fine with having to pay more taxes just so that some random foreign company can make money.

So, what will become of these people? When, at the same time, there's a push to restrict private vehicle ownership, and, especially, to limit access to town centers for older cars? Think these people can afford brand spanking new electric cars? Think again.

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[0] I think the EU doesn't allow States to directly subsidize the rail company, it would be some form of unfair competition or similar. But the State is allowed to spend on social programs, so there could be some kind of program to help with transit, which, in the end, is the same thing: the people will have to subsidize service for less profitable routes because a chunk of the income from profitable ones has moved to a private company which doesn't care.