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New York City will charge drivers going downtown

cnn.com

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Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#421

Post by tshaddox »

ericmay wrote: post #224
comte7092 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea it also ignores that if everybody stopped riding the $100 train then you’d never actually be able to drive into the city, let alone park anywhere for under $100. Also, this is a deliberate choice. They can improve train services and lower costs. Idk why people who ostensibly are market oriented are so fixated on current prices and assuming they can’t change or be improved upon. Germany is an example $49 for a tic…

> Another thing while I’m at it - how much does your car, insurance, gas, maintenance, tires, and other things cost? How much money per month are you paying to pay for the roads and highways?

Not to mention the driver’s costs are artificially reduced because they benefits from externalities that are distributed across everyone, particularly pollution and climate change. Driving would be a tad more expensive if you had to pay for carbon sequestration for every gallon of gas you burn.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#422

Post by steveBK123 »

QIYGT wrote: post #367
steveBK123 wrote: post #282

My main concern as NYer is the governments inability to build transit, and not for lack of money. NY will find it relatively easy to institute a new tax on drivers, but will the billions collected actually make transit better in any tangible way? NYC is also hamstrung by having its streets controlled locally by our DOT, but our transit & bridges controlled by a state agency. We just caved (again) entirely to the tran…

Even if the money is lit on fire, the reduction in cars entering the city will be a huge benefit.

I just don't think the pricing is going to meaningfully impact the cars entering the city, nor is it going to reduce the main congestion of ride hailing vehicles on every inch of Manhattan street.

The charge is $23 peak / $17 off-peak. Existing city tunnel tolls are already $17ish.

The fact that Uber publicly supports congestion pricing tells you everything you need to know about how it's going to impact ride hail congestion of our city streets. https://www.uber.com/blog/new-york/uber-supports-congestion-...

There's already a measly $2.75 per ride fee added on for congestion, which is trivial given choosing an Uber vs subway costs $20-50 more than taking the subway.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#423

Post by devb »

f33d5173 wrote: post #363
steveBK123 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet NYC having built only a handful of stations in the last 40 years, couldn't be bothered to include them even there.

I imagine the difficulty would be in ensuring that the train lines up exactly with the doors. In that cade, retrofitting would need to apply to the train and control system, not just the platform itself.

That's not the issue. Union Square on the Park Avenue line and the old South Ferry on the 7th Avenue line both had platform "gap fillers" installed decades ago that require the train to stop at an exact location each and every time:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/14th-street-union-square...

Every station has lining boards that the conductor must check before opening the doors to ensure that the entire train is stopped along the platform:

https://www.topic.com/conduct-yourself

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#424

Post by devb »

superseeplus wrote: post #172

A big proportion of the opposition is coming from New Jersey where former Governor Chris Christie systematically diverted public transit funding to constructing more roads leaving NJ Transit with a maintenance backlog, inadequate infrastructure and unhappy workers who were poached by the MTA. This resulted in a mismatch where the infrastructure is designed to favor driving on one side of the river and a fee designed…

Do you have a citation for the MTA poaching unhappy NJT workers? I've only seen people leaving the MTA for NJT, and not a single instance of the opposite.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#425

Post by winternett »

returningfory2 wrote: post #368
steveBK123 wrote: post #282

My main concern as NYer is the governments inability to build transit, and not for lack of money. NY will find it relatively easy to institute a new tax on drivers, but will the billions collected actually make transit better in any tangible way? NYC is also hamstrung by having its streets controlled locally by our DOT, but our transit & bridges controlled by a state agency. We just caved (again) entirely to the tran…

I agree with your points, but I don’t think they undermine congestion pricing. Even if you take all the congestion tolls and, like, toss them in the Hudson River, the program is still worthwhile. Just getting people to pay to drive into Manhattan is good in-and-of-itself.

The last time I drove into downtown Manhattan, just inches form the bridge, I was immediately pulled over by NYPD and given an excessive $150 ticket for the window tints on my car. I demonstrated to the officer that Range Rover made them that way from the factory *limo tint" and that it was legal in my home state, but they had shown that they apparently have always had the inclination to pull people over for bogus minor things in cities like it as an entry tax anyway as the "officer" said "He could drag me and my entire family in the car down to the precinct if he wanted to"... This way they probably don't need to pay police salaries and they just automate the unexpected tax probably. States are the new mafia... Phony "protection fees" and miscellaneous taxes are now more real than before, maybe because the old guard has now transitioned into NY GoV/council/desk jobs?

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#426

Post by [deleted] »

master_crab wrote: post #397
steveBK123 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city should abolish or extremely tax all on street parking. Then you could have sensible loading zones for deliveries and garbage containerizing. That said… given how many trucks bring goods into the city, I don’t see how abolishing the BQE is remotely tenable.

Asking for truck-only transit routes does not necessitate a 6-lane BQE. But that’s a good first step. Lot’s of other Moses era boondoggles also need to be re-imagined

[deleted]

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#427

Post by master_crab »

steveBK123 wrote: post #415
master_crab wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking for truck-only transit routes does not necessitate a 6-lane BQE. But that’s a good first step. Lot’s of other Moses era boondoggles also need to be re-imagined

The problem is no one is proposing tenable truck infrastructure when proposing "knock it down". We have dangerous enough roads all over the city, especially Brooklyn & Queens. Look at the tragedy recently in south Brooklyn. Keeping trucks/trade vans/people transiting the borough on a highway and off surface streets is beneficial. There's lot of infrastructure & services I don't directly use that I don't demand be tor…

No one is asking for bridges to be torn down. But asking to maintain a 60 year old (at its youngest) 6 lane elevated highway through a city is costly (both in dollars and quality of life). So you need to examine what the end goal is.

Elevating (both literally and figuratively) car culture ain’t it.

Also, you aren’t getting rid of truck traffic on surface streets. They still need that last mile. Better traffic control designs on streets will go a longer way then shuttling all trucks to another superhighway in Brooklyn.

(Admittedly though, the situation is different in North NYC. The cross Bronx expressway needs to be re-examined, and a new, possibly larger route, for interstate trucking to CT, RI, and points North is needed.)

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#428

Post by devb »

tacticalturtle wrote: post #96

Why did the federal government have to sign off on this? Assuming the tolls aren’t on federal highways, shouldn’t a state be free to decide where to enact tolls on its own roads?

In addition to other reasons given, the big one is interstate commerce.

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#429

Post by steveBK123 »

winternett wrote: post #425
returningfory2 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your points, but I don’t think they undermine congestion pricing. Even if you take all the congestion tolls and, like, toss them in the Hudson River, the program is still worthwhile. Just getting people to pay to drive into Manhattan is good in-and-of-itself.

The last time I drove into downtown Manhattan, just inches form the bridge, I was immediately pulled over by NYPD and given an excessive $150 ticket for the window tints on my car. I demonstrated to the officer that Range Rover made them that way from the factory *limo tint" and that it was legal in my home state, but they had shown that they apparently have always had the inclination to pull people over for bogus mi…

So that's pretty wild because within the city, they are epically indifferent to enforcement.

There's been a recent epidemic of defaced / quasi legal out of state registered / fake or illegally purchased paper temp tags so people could avoid tolls and tickets.. largely unenforced by cops as they are often the perpetrators..

https://www.streetsblogprojects.org/ghost-tags-part-1-the-de...

Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown

#430

Post by kortilla »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #405
steveBK123 wrote: post #282

My main concern as NYer is the governments inability to build transit, and not for lack of money. NY will find it relatively easy to institute a new tax on drivers, but will the billions collected actually make transit better in any tangible way? NYC is also hamstrung by having its streets controlled locally by our DOT, but our transit & bridges controlled by a state agency. We just caved (again) entirely to the tran…

> We just caved (again) entirely to the transit unions in the last contract negotiation. We have subway lines & trains wired up for 1 man operation but run them staffed with 2 due to union work rules. I don't think this is a good point to make when we've literally had several disastrous derailments thanks to poor regulations and rules around safety and train companies attacking unions. The transit unions are absolute…

The 2 are not redundant. One just does the extremely difficult job of closing the doors which can in no way be done by the driver due to the immense mental burden it would require.

Subways all over the world operate with just one employee and surprisingly don’t just derail and kill millions. Maybe take your FUD elsewhere.

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