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Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

nytimes.com

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Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#441

Post by mattlondon »

Good luck New York.

In London it is now just a toll. It started off at just the busiest times but now you need to pay it 24/5, and even on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when there is no rush hour. Not only have the hours expanded, but so has the size of the zone. So now even right out in the suburbs you need to pay if you drive a diesel but I fully expect them to include petrol cars, then eventually all EVs too.

The prices are quite cheap too - the price is like 2 adults return tickets on the tube so you may as well just drive it since the price is the same but public transport is so utterly utterly awful and unreliable and slow and dirty and just terrible in London.

If they were serious about changing people's behaviour and serious about trying to prevent congestion and/or pollution they'd price it so that it is a real deterrent to usage (so instead of £15, it would be like £250/day or something). But if they did that then no one would pay so they'd not get the revenue. So they price it just right so that people pay.

They say all the proceeds are ring-fenced for reinvestment etc etc. This is disingenuous - it's not like transport suddenly gets 125% extra funding, they just set the budgets so the "extra" they get from congestion charging and cameras etc tops-off the budgets so things balance out at ~100% of what they'd get anyway and the difference just used for other vanity projects by TfL.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#442

Post by lazide »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #318
mplanchard wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transit always seems to be kind of a chicken and egg problem. You can’t have good transit unless you have good ridership, and you can’t have good ridership if you don’t have good transit. Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that m…

> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact? Central Tokyo (inside Yamanote line) has almost no national railway lines (just one/two called Chuo between Shinjuku and Tokyo station). Most of its subways are inside central Tokyo. The second subway line didn't open until 1954. Tokyo is much later to build than London, Paris, or New York. I also think that Seoul started bui…

Tokyo was burned to the ground though just before that started. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo]

It also wasn’t really a major city historically over the types of timeframes as London, Paris, or even New York.

Modern Tokyo is more of a ‘new’ city, and the subways were constructed along with a lot of the new construction - that central Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in the war certainly removed the friction that would otherwise have made that hard, eh?

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#443

Post by vidarh »

aziaziazi wrote: post #322
vidarh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the point, which was that you're not going to convince people like me who ignore the vegan options just by having them be cheaper than meat, because I won't look. The only thing that would make me look at the vegan options would be if I felt I couldn't afford the meat options.

1. I’m not trying to convince you or anyone. In fact people always convince themselves , you only can share facts and opinion with them and they do their own arbitrage. Eat what you want to eat. 2. Speak for yourself. "People like me" doesn’t mean much, you may share some thought but everyone have a whole life of different experiences. Your argument on price and affordability makes sense may be shared by others but i…

> I’m not trying to convince you or anyone.

Good for you. For those who are trying to convince, the cost increase on meat needs to be substantial, is my point. When I was a child, we didn't have much money. That didn't mean we chose to eat vegan. It meant there were smaller amounts of meat, or cheaper types of meat (such as whale; back then whale meat was a cheap beef substitute in Norway - you'd buy meat if you could afford because whale meat is a lot of effort and tough).

To your argument I should speak for myself: We have clear evidence on the basis of seeing that people rarely end up on a vegan, or even vegetarian diet even when meat is expensive - such as it was during my childhood - to suggest that this is the case for far more people than myself.

> Not many admit it, but people do changes opinion sometime

Yes, but my point is that if you want people to change opinion, it isn't going to cut it if the other options are cheap, as long as people so strongly prefer the more expensive option that they will buy it anyway.

> why do you eat meat ?

Because I enjoy it. I don't need any other reason. I love the taste. I love the texture.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#444

Post by isaacremuant »

Everything tends to optimize to benefit the rich. Just like tax incentives on expensive electric vehicles.

Of course every other metric section is beaming but the one about affecting lower income is "it's too early to tell".

It's not fair economics or policy making if it always skews one way. It's like "carbon tax to force people not to fly or move, while elite private planes are essential".

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#445

Post by Vinnl »

SoftTalker wrote: post #88
Vinnl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof, that sucks. Glad that delivery driver wasn't in a car though! Could've ended much worse.

Anything could be worse. Doesn't mean it's an excuse for bad behavior.

Was absolutely not intended as an excuse for bad behaviour. I just care about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater: just because someone on an e-bike displays bad behaviour, it's still preferable to have people switch from cars to e-bikes.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#446

Post by Tade0 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #108
HonestOp001 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.

Expanding the commute availability circle does not increase the supply of housing, because people build sparser neighborhoods with larger lawns. If you want to increase the supply of housing, you need higher density, not longer distance. What longer distance does is make the closer areas more valuable, because people will pay $$$ for a shorter commute. And for those who can't afford the closer housing, they get to pa…

In my region of the world they enable having any sort of housing at all. Plenty of people don't have the credit score to buy anything livable within city limits, so they resort to buying apartments in the suburbs and small, adjacent cities.

Public transport hasn't caught up because these places developed too fast and even though their inhabitants live and pay taxes there, the businesses they work for don't, so the tax base is all the lower due to that.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#447

Post by h2zizzle »

mattlondon wrote: post #441

Good luck New York. In London it is now just a toll. It started off at just the busiest times but now you need to pay it 24/5, and even on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when there is no rush hour. Not only have the hours expanded, but so has the size of the zone. So now even right out in the suburbs you need to pay if you drive a diesel but I fully expect them to include petrol cars, then eventually all EVs too. The…

I've never understood what people mean when they say public transportation is "dirty". I've never had to sit or stand in or near muck or sick or anything like that. If there's a bit of grime in the corner or animals or something... Okay? I don't have to touch any of that. I care about as much as getting onto a slightly groady amusement park ride, or seeing bugs or squirrels in the park; it's not going to so traumatize me that I won't ride. Is it the people? I've had to sit next to one or two people who smelled in my hundreds of train and bus trips. Or is it an ethnic/class dogwhistle sort of thing?

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#448

Post by lbotos »

steadicat wrote: post #438
Thorrez wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars. All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th... https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268

You’re kind of proving the point here. NYC has fewer car owners and yet NYC doesn’t have a single pedestrian street or street closed to through traffic. Sounds like a city that can’t imagine itself without cars even though it’s completely realistic.

There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one.

Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square.

Its a slow process but its getting there.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#449

Post by Hnrobert42 »

Saigonautica wrote: post #296
aynyc wrote: post #271

As a long time NYC resident who moved out during Covid but commute to work in the city. I definitely noticed less traffic on the streets and less noise. I see a lot of talk of other cities that don't have good public transportation. For example, between Flushing in Queens to 8th Ave in Brooklyn, there are privately run buses at affordable rate and get you there at half the time of trains. There are buses from a lot o…

In Ho Chi Minh City (and probably Vietnam in general but not 100% sure). Our commercial district is very concentrated. The busses in general are some form of public-private partnership. Several private bus companies operate the city busses. There are some annoying edge cases. For example, pre-purchased tickets are a mess -- better pay cash. If another operator takes over your route, even temporarily, your tickets can…

How has the new metro line worked out? I was there all the time it was getting built, but I left before it finished.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#450

Post by idid »

mattlondon wrote: post #441

Good luck New York. In London it is now just a toll. It started off at just the busiest times but now you need to pay it 24/5, and even on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when there is no rush hour. Not only have the hours expanded, but so has the size of the zone. So now even right out in the suburbs you need to pay if you drive a diesel but I fully expect them to include petrol cars, then eventually all EVs too. The…

Having lived in several European cities so far (Brussels, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, Berlin, Bucharest), London's (where I have lived since 10 years) public transportation is one of the best I've seen so far. It's not without its zonal imbalances, but calling it terrible, unreliable, etc. is something I do not subscribe to, and, I suspect, neither do many of its residents.

You might be right though: what is your commute/experience that made you describe it so? Am genuinely curious to understand in how much of a privileged bubble I might be in.

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