Forcing people to drive to an office just to type on a computer and take phone calls is the thing that should be disincentivized.
New York City will charge drivers going downtown
471–480 of 700 posts
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#472By the way, the congestion of the city makes life much easier for bikers and pedestrians than if the vehicles were moving faster, all things considered. Non-car NYers instinctively jaywalk and otherwise dominate the city because we don't have to deal with anything moving too fast. Other cities may have faster traffic and relatively fewer cars, but they are still way less walkable than NYC and scarier w/o a car.
As I mentioned in another post, this is mainly a way to extract more revenue from the 95% (their own projection) of people who will continue to drive in the city. The 5% that will be priced out... I am not totally sure how noticeable that will be. Busses aren't going to all of a sudden fly down the avenue just because a handful of poor shmuks now have to take 2 busses and 2 trains to get to their job.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#473We should just ban private vehicles in the city as well, bringing back more cyclists, walkers, and generally increasing metro usage.
You can't ban private vehicles because it's difficult to get to the rest of NY without transiting through Manhattan.
You would essentially be cutting most of NY off from the rest of the world.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#474By the way, the congestion of the city makes life much easier for bikers and pedestrians than if the vehicles were moving faster, all things considered. Non-car NYers instinctively jaywalk and otherwise dominate the city because we don't have to deal with anything moving too fast. Other cities may have faster traffic and relatively fewer cars, but they are still way less walkable than NYC and scarier w/o a car. As I…
Good — let drivers pay for their share of infrastructure and space required to support their existence. So much space in NYC is taken up by roads and parking, subsidized by people who don’t use it.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#475Wow. So much negativity. As far as I’m concerned, even if the city burns every dollar it collects, if this gets some cars off the island, it’s a win. It’s time to stop tolerating personal vehicles in our most dense urban centers.
It’s never that simple. There are loads of people for which a personal or work vehicle is a necessity. Public transport cannot, and is never designed to catch every edge case. I’m all for better public transportation but strong statements and mishandled public funds just sways the support of the average joe.
It really is. Have you been in New York? In the area that this is being implemented in, you can absolutely survive without ever setting foot in a car.
Other cities should have been planned around density. Instead we have suburban hellscapes where kids can’t be kids and there’s no real community. The car has been the single most destructive piece of mass-adopted tech for urban planning and lifestyle.
If we have to start new cities to replace the disasters we created, better to rip off the bandaid now. Sucks that we used some of the best land in the country.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
Describing the NYC subway as "working great" is an amazing twisting of the truth. The only thing good about it is that it isn't as bad as public transport in Long Island. Otherwise, good luck going anywhere on time without having to add 30 minutes - an hour of waste just standing around. The discomfort and cost of public transportation would be at least somewhat tolerable if there was anywhere near as much of an emph…
> Describing the NYC subway as "working great" is an amazing twisting of the truth. The only thing good about it is that it isn't as bad as public transport in Long Island. Otherwise, good luck going anywhere on time without having to add 30 minutes - an hour of waste just standing around. just to add some real numbers, we can look at the actual NYC subway data from MTA's march 2023 report[0] page 12: * ~3.7m subway…
This all might be true - but despite that, it takes half an hour to drive to the airport, and an hour and a half by subway + train.
And for family groups the public transport is more expensive, even when including parking (or paying an Uber).
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#477By the way, the congestion of the city makes life much easier for bikers and pedestrians than if the vehicles were moving faster, all things considered. Non-car NYers instinctively jaywalk and otherwise dominate the city because we don't have to deal with anything moving too fast. Other cities may have faster traffic and relatively fewer cars, but they are still way less walkable than NYC and scarier w/o a car. As I…
Good — let drivers pay for their share of infrastructure and space required to support their existence. So much space in NYC is taken up by roads and parking, subsidized by people who don’t use it.
I am curious whether you actually live in NYC.
In the parts of the city this article is talking about, there's no free parking during busy times. Those lanes are reserved for either special parking situations (teachers, police), business (loading/unloading trucks, taxi stands) or turn into driving lanes. It happens that on Sundays and evenings, that capacity isn't needed and is given over to parking.
30 years in NYC, I didn't ever feel this resentfulness that your post implies. I didn't have a car but I benefited from taxis, ubers, deliveries, ability for people to visit, etc etc etc. I assume that people who chose to drive into the city do so because it's their best option. For my lifestyle in NYC, I could always walk to work and taxi/train to get laid, but that's not everyone's situation.
The self-righteous hatred of cars and roads and parking is weird.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
You logic is completely backwards. Dense housing doesn't result in traffic congestion. If more people live closer together there is more population density, but as long as they can access commercial areas easily then they can do their shopping and work and recreational tasks without cars. When you remove cars then you suddenly have much more living space because a car takes up a large amount of room to store and ther…
> Dense housing doesn't result in traffic congestion. Yes, it does. And the relationship is causal. > If more people live closer together there is more population density, but as long as they can access commercial areas easily then they can do their shopping and work and recreational tasks without cars. What a bunch of bullshit. > Are you seriously arguing that adding more space for cars makes cities less congested?…
> Yes, it does. And the relationship is causal.
If the relationship is causal, why are spread out areas with less dense populations which rely heavily on cars, like the Dallas or Houston or LA areas, so congested?
If you think your opinion is backed by data, I would love to see it.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re vastly overestimating how many people commute into lower manhattan via car.
If nobody is driving, why is it congested? New York City is the hub of a region that represents like a quarter of the US population. Like many other regions, you start cutting off the hub and the central business district dies. Commuting is one aspect. Tourism. Business meetings. Medical care. I live in Queens. Getting a family member to MSK for treatment or getting a meeting in the city via public transit is a 4 hou…
I’m not saying “no one is driving.” Clearly they are or there wouldn’t be such horrible gridlock in lower Manhattan. I’m just very skeptical of the claim that congestion pricing in one of the densest urban environments in the world will “kill the city.”
I work in lower manhattan (in a high-income field). I don’t know of a single coworker that drives into work. Most of my friends also work in lower Manhattan. None of them drive to work.
Many other cities have implemented congestion pricing without killing their economies.
If businesses really do require employees to drive into lower Manhattan instead of taking transit, for most profitable businesses it will not be an issue to cover the additional cost.
I feel for you in Queens. I think we should absolutely expand public transit access. But that takes money. Congestion pricing provides (at least some of) that money.
Re: New York City will charge drivers going downtown
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a few of our transit problems today are actually because of the choices Robert Moses made. However, he certainly is responsible for the rapid growth of the transit system and did a great job consolidating power and getting stuff done. * He had the chance to buy the land and put transit along many highways in queens and Long Island but said that people would prefer to drive so he passed on the opportunity. Acqui…
I'm well aware of his history, and it's always interesting to me how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. when weighed against all the transit/bridges/tunnels/highways build under his watch. I mean the first thing is a crime of omission, made in basically every other city of the country - where have we seen land be purchased along highways to build transit done anywhere in this country? Even new…
> how few bad things people can point to that he actually did..
I'd encourage you to read The Power Broker, if you haven't. Some examples that aren't "policy decisions" we can disagree with given our knowledge of how it turned out (eg, building or not building public transit in a given place), but rather things that were clearly morally wrong at the time:
- repeated wholesale destruction of low-income neighborhoods through a variety of bridge, park, and highway construction projects
- evicting farmers and poor rural landowners through opaque legal methods to build highways and parks atop their land
- running a "slum clearance" program that primarily evicted people from slums and demolished them without providing any real place for the humans to go afterwards
- funneling vast sums of money into the pockets of collaborators, friends, and, in the end, himself
The Power Broker paints a nuanced picture, but he did some pretty terrible things in his time.