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

Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 735 posts

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#41

Post by notTooFarGone »

taeric wrote: post #26
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people's preferred method You have some evidence of this?

To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference? Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want…

This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum. If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#42

Post by bradain »

ramesh31 wrote: post #28
philipallstar wrote: post #9

The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.

>The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people. Anecdotally that seems to be the case. The largest burden of this tax is falling on low income commuters who live off the train lines and have to drive into Manhattan, yet all of the money is going to... the train lines (MTA). Understandably they're not too happy.

[dead]

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#43

Post by jasonlotito »

taeric wrote: post #26
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people's preferred method You have some evidence of this?

To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference? Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want…

> To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?

Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ).

Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that.

All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety.

I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#45

Post by vidarh »

w0m wrote: post #31
shermantanktop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How high would the tax have to be to get you to stop eating so much meat?

Think about it more; if the vegan and steak options were ~equivalently priced - more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive. The idea isn't to make it prohibitive; insofaras don't make the most environmentally-expensive choice also the cheapest. To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.

As a committed meat-eater: I have no idea what vegan food costs, as the label almost immediate makes me skip over them. To make me look at them, you'd have to make the non-vegan options prohibitively expensive.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#46

Post by bunderbunder »

sc68cal wrote: post #21
explodes wrote: post #4

Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so. I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.

We already had A/B testing of congestion pricing. The A test was without congestion pricing in NYC, and has been tested for decades.

That's not an A/B test because it has no way of controlling for broader economic trends over time. How do you figure out if what you're seeing is because of that one thing that changed, or the enormous list of other things that also changed around the same time?

A more valid design would be randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it. Obviously not feasible in practice, but that's at least the kind of thing to strive toward when designing these kinds of studies.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#47

Post by lubujackson »

jwagenet wrote: post #27
maerF0x0 wrote: post #7

Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious. The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like high…

> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up. If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users. IMO, people think driving…

Driving into NYC is one of those things that is most convenient at the beginning (driving in, stay in my car) but has a high cost at the end (looking/paying for parking, traffic, on a parking time limit, etc.) I do think if people grow ACCUSTOMED to taking the subway in, they will prefer that in most cases.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#48

Post by tayo42 »

shermantanktop wrote: post #22
zzzeek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there should be a meat tax, btw. I eat a ton of steak but it's costing the ecosystem dearly

How high would the tax have to be to get you to stop eating so much meat?

For me 20 dollars a pound to push it into a treat territory.

I don't know know what would replace it though.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#50

Post by aredox »

explodes wrote: post #4

Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so. I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.

Yeah, let's do that for everything: safety belts, safety on gun triggers, melamine in milk, etc...

Do you A/B test your comments too?

Post reply on HN