Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New York City will charge drivers going downtown

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 700 posts

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#371

Post by seadan83 »

cyberax wrote: post #311
kelnos wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car owners are already hugely subsidized. Toll roads cover only a tiny fraction of road maintenance. The rest is paid by taxpayers, even those who do not drive.

> Car owners are already hugely subsidized Around 80% of all commutes in the US are by car. You can't subsidize 80% of the population. Drivers simply pay for their road use through various taxes, and not directly.

Only a fraction of the US population work and thus commute. Of those that commute, that 80% do not have equal road usage. Even within that community, there is a subsidy going on. So, yes, there is a ton of subsidization going on (and this is not always bad)

> Drivers simply pay for their road use through various taxes, and not directly.

I think this is the point, notably because those 'indirect' payments are also payed by non-drivers as well. Hence, the subsidy.

Even within drivers, some are subsidized by others (let alone non-drivers). To illustrate, first: most road wear is from weather [1]. This means any two lengths of similar roads will have about the same upkeep cost regardless of usage (not quite true, but if taking 30 people vs 300, it's about true).

Let's consider 10 miles of road to suburb A with 30 drives, and 10 miles of different but similar road to suburb B with 300 drivers. The city will pay for upkeep of 20 miles, collecting various taxes from 330 people, and those taxes are then spent evenly across those 20 miles. To do this proportionately, without any subsidies, the group of 300 could arguably have those various taxes reduced for them only by 90% and increase the taxes of the 30 people 9 fold. That would be an equitable upkeep system.

The fact the road upkeep payment per person is not equitable, means there is a subsidy (and this situation is not always a bad thing)

[1] https://lacrossetribune.com/what-causes-roads-to-wear-out/ar...

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#372

Post by samstave »

cj wrote: post #12

See also: London congestion charge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge Singapore Electronic Road Pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Road_Pricing Stockholm congestion tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_congestion_tax

Re: Singapore - Have you ever been to Singapore -- _ALL_ their public transport/flow control systems are #1 in the world IMO ;

* The roads are pristine

* The take city planning to the next level (anecdote at end)

* Vehicles cost a boatload - but thats because all other transport is amazing

--

Singapore is a hot a humid climate - a small city-state with lateral constraints.

But they new that they were going to double their population in the next few decades, so they built up and down.

There are massive walkways under the city that are basically large mall-tunnels, that have shops along the way.

The city was really smart in setting large setbacks between road and building such that greenery, plants and general aesthetics are wonderful.

Their freeway / road over-passes generall have planter boxes along the sides - so instead of prison-fencing style over-passes, such as the US', even the freeway and most roads are beautiful to drive on.

The trains, ferries etc - put the entirety of the US public transit system in the toilet.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#373

Post by cyberax »

nimbleplum40 wrote: post #335
cyberax wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is too misleading to be unintentional. It's not misleading. On average, buses in the US carry around 15 people. A car carries around 1.5, so the raw multiplier is just 10. But wait, there's more! ALL buses have an incredibly polluting component that is fundamental to their functionality: the driver. You need around 3 drivers to cover the useful service time (from 5am to midnight). And drivers are POLLUTING AS…

Do you have citations for those numbers? They don’t match what I’ve heard in the past so I’m curious to learn more. Also, everything about density in relation to quality of life is pretty subjective. Luckily, we have cities for both! You’re free to live in Houston while those of us that prefer dense urban environments can live in New York and take transit.

> Do you have citations for those numbers?

Road wear scales as 4-th power of axle weight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

The average loads: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/perso...

The CO2 impact by transport mode: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

Nothing I'm saying is controversial. Heck, even urbanists admit that, they just try to avoid talking about it.

> Also, everything about density in relation to quality of life is pretty subjective. Luckily, we have cities for both!

My problem is with people that try to remake wonderful cities like Seattle into Manhattan-style hellscapes. And this is a result of market forces, that need to be counteracted via political regulation.

I'd love to live in Houston, but I just can't tolerate its weather. I tried.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#374

Post by comte7092 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #364
comte7092 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point. Why does New York have to accommodate New Jersey and not the other way around?

Yes, but it’s complicated by the fact that a lot of infrastructure funding is done at the federal level, which should in principle care about people in NY and NJ equally.

We aren’t talking about infrastructure in general though, we are talking about a relatively small area in Manhattan.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#375

Post by [deleted] »

cyberax wrote: post #107
zip1234 wrote: post #98

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#376

Post by nemo44x »

bradleyjg wrote: post #358
Hikikomori wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We basically need a modern era Robert Moses to consolidate NYC DOT/MTA/Port Authority and whatever other agencies and bring us into the modern era. Idk about that, maybe a less racist one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#377

Post by nemo44x »

comte7092 wrote: post #209
bilalq wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more reason for NJ residents to take issue with this. In central jersey, it costs at least $20/person for a round trip ticket. If you go with your family or a group of friends filling a 5 seat car, the train costs $100 just to get into the city and then get hit with whatever additional costs you have for the next few subway rides. Gas, parking, and carpool bridge/tunnel toll prices don't add up to anywhere ne…

Regressive if you ignore all of the other costs associated with driving. Drivers always love to make this argument, but it presupposes that everyone already owns and insures a car. At the end of the day it’s car dependence that is regressive.

Everyone in NJ already has a car though so it’s not material to the discussion.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#378

Post by robben1234 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #278
RobinL wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning is equivalent to an infinite price. Better off setting a very high price, such that the revenue is far higher than the negative externality

Banning means you don't need to maintain the infrastructure. You can let people walk all down the street. The pavement doesn't need to withstand thousands of pounds of vehicles. And so on.

>The pavement doesn't need to withstand thousands of pounds of vehicles.

It has. It'd be illegal and extremely dangerous to design a city without properly functioning infrastructure for emergency services, garbage disposal, physically impaired accessibility. Also very inconvenient to not include commercial deliveries and public transit into that list of essential road use scenarios. Most of the vehicles performing these services are heavy.

For the most part only private ICE cars are light enough to be a drop in a bucket on the road maintenance. Private EVs, and especially EV SUVs, are likely making an impact on the maintenance schedule though.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#379

Post by cyberax »

acdha wrote: post #333
cyberax wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is too misleading to be unintentional. It's not misleading. On average, buses in the US carry around 15 people. A car carries around 1.5, so the raw multiplier is just 10. But wait, there's more! ALL buses have an incredibly polluting component that is fundamental to their functionality: the driver. You need around 3 drivers to cover the useful service time (from 5am to midnight). And drivers are POLLUTING AS…

> On average, buses in the US carry around 15 people. A car carries around 1.5, so the raw multiplier is just 10. Buses in the US are largely avoided due to the last century spent prioritizing suburban car commuting over everything else. What you should be looking at are the averages on bus routes where the buses run regularly and aren’t blocked by solo drivers. That means that the floor for a bus is 10:1 but it can…

> What you should be looking at are the averages on bus routes where the buses run regularly and aren’t blocked by solo drivers

Le sigh. If you want more bus passengers in each bus, you either need to run buses with longer intervals (making them completely useless) or you need to pack people together. Packing people together densely enough to make buses work inevitably requires living in small apartments.

The US in the last century decided to focus on comfortable human-oriented housing, and not on building Soviet-style human anthills.

> In contrast, the large EVs people are actually buying will never become more efficient over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Large EVs have lifecycle CO2 footprint of about 70g/km. Buses are ~100g/km, and EV buses (trolleys) are 60 g/km.

Moving to mid-sized EVs, such as Tesla Model 3/Y, cuts that to about 35 g/km (it depends on the US state). This is definitely something that we should encourage. The US addiction to huge barn-sized SUVs is unhealthy.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#380

Post by nemo44x »

comte7092 wrote: post #290
speakfreely wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Drivers always love to make this argument, but it presupposes that everyone already owns and insures a car. Have you ever been to New Jersey? The entire state is set up to make it as difficult as possible to live without a car.

That’s the point. Why does New York have to accommodate New Jersey and not the other way around?

Because people from NJ put billions into the NY every year via income tax (no reciprocity with NY, hell they’re even coming after new work from home people) and tons of tourism etc. Its in NY’s best interest to accommodate NJ.
Post reply on HN