Changes since congestion pricing started in New York • Hacker News Board

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#501

Post by FreebasingLLMs » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #461

virtualritz wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is the working answer one can find in many places around the world. When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is. The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center…

It's not the only reason, but in general in American history, "why is this weird thing this weird way?" is usually answered in part by "racism". Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations. Again, not the only explana…

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Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#502

Post by ghaff » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

doctoboggan wrote: post #320

epistasis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with children, I can not imagine the bliss of living in Manhattan and being able to do things without needing a car. Car-centric urban planning is hell with kids. You have to load them up into the car for any small trip. You can't walk or bike anywhere because cars make it so dangerous. My only regret about living in the US is this car hellscape that is so hard to avoid. It's mandated by law, not chosen by…

I live in Chicago and use a cargo ebike with a child seat for probably 90% of my trips. I can take my kid to school, go shopping, and go to my office on my bike, often quicker than if I were to take a car. Chicago has (recently?) put a lot of focus on their bike infrastructure (protected bike lanes, bike signals, bike only paths, etc) and it seems pretty widely used.

>protected bike lanes

I'm certainly not opposed. But my observation in the relatively nearby city when I go in and sit on the sidewalk at a restaurant is that the fairly new protected bike lanes have a fairly terrifying combination of transportation modes (bikes, ebikes, things that I guess are ebikes but look almost like small motorbikes, escooters, and pedestrians crossing). And then, because they're in a bike lane, many seem to assume the signal at the next street doesn't apply to them.

Not sure of the best answer.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#503

Post by gottorf » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

biorach wrote: post #421

gottorf wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points. 1. A 1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly or wrongly, people feel more in control when they're driving compared to when they're using public transit (or similarly, taking a commercial flight), which makes them feel better about it. And there is some element of sense here: accidents do not occur evenly among the population, because some drivers are better and more ale…

> A how common is it for people to be thrown off the platform into an oncoming train in NY?

Not common. From what I've read, each year, 50-80 people are killed on the tracks (either by hitting trains or touching the third rail), with only a handful being caused by somebody else pushing them onto the tracks.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#504

Post by ghaff » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

bitmasher9 wrote: post #303

bobthepanda wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle is weird in that drive til you qualify is not a thing unless you start getting really far out. Some inner ring neighborhoods and suburbs are comparable or more expensive than the core.

If you want to head straight south or straight north you won’t have to go further out than 1 hour before rents and property values fall significantly from city center Seattle. Tacoma is 30 minutes away without traffic and has a median home price 40% less than Seattle. Drive till you qualify is real. If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millio…

Yeah, it varies in a lot of cities. I live about an hour (given not a lot of traffic--hah!) west of Boston and the real estate prices aren't cheap but not crazy. A lot of the tech industry was out that way anyway historically until pharma and outposts of west coast companies took over Kendall Square. But certainly a lot of the coastal towns north and south of the city are pretty pricey.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#505

Post by darkwizard42 » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

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.

I don't think they were trying to disprove the point. They admit that the US is largely car centric EXCEPT NYC, which is why congestion pricing has worked well. Also, car ownership rates are probably extremely correlated with density/efficiency of public transportation.

There is probably no other city in the US where you can truly eschew car ownership (this includes metro "dense" regions like San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston). Maybe you could include Chicago where there is a heavy amount of density/walkability in most of central Chicago neighborhoods.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#506

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

tacker2000 wrote: post #483

virtualritz wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is the working answer one can find in many places around the world. When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is. The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center…

Not every city needs a ring line, or has a geographical shape where it would be practical. Manhattan is a long rectangle, whilst Berlin has a more rounded shape. Its faster to cross the small width of the rectangle than to go all the way around.

It's perceived as a problem around NYC that a lot of people might want to go from Brooklyn to Queens or to Harlem and the Bronx but public transit funnels everyone through downtown or midtown Manhattan. NYC doesn't need a ring but it could use a supplementary arc.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#507

Post by ghaff » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #344

lodovic wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really curious what would amount to 1.75 bathroom, I'm unfamiliar with the concept. One full bathroom and a second with just a a toilet/sink combination?

That is 1.5. A 1.75 is usually a small bathroom with a shower. The space would have no room for a tub. These often get counted as full baths anyways.

Yeah. A lot of us prefer a shower to a bathtub with shower anyway. But it's probably an important distinction for people with kids especially.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#508

Post by genewitch » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

virtualritz wrote: post #399

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…

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is the working answer one can find in many places around the world. When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is. The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center…

I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store. No trains, no uber, no bus. The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.

I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.

Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.

And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.

That's why we "love our cars"

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#509

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #495

dfxm12 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the brands/types of busses you're talking about? In my city, Greyhound, Chinatown busses, etc., handle city-to-city connections, but they don't connect the residential areas to the city center. It's not lucrative enough (one reason being car use is so heavily subsidized). This is one of the reasons the concept of public transit exists. Like delivering mail to Americans who live in remote areas, we spread out…

These minibusses or dollar vans don't have strong brands that you would recognize. They often operate in a legal grey area, so they're deliberately anonymous looking if you aren't in the know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_me...

I volunteered to do some work in a rural village in the Dominican Republic years ago and got instructions to take several forms of public transportation from the airport to downtown Santo Domingo and then the town of Ocoa and finally either walk up the hill to El Limon or ride on a motorcycle with somebody.

I saw motorcycle taxis and minibuses that run between cities and have the cobrador hanging out the side to rustle up passengers and where you might sit next to somebody holding a chicken. I rode in a "public car" which was painted red and drove in a circle and got out at a place that I thought was a bus station until I realized the tickets on the wall had the names of US college football teams and it was really a sportsbook.

In the developing world it is common to see many forms of less formal transit. Maybe standards aren't that high and maybe I'd feel different if I'd missed the last bus to Ocoa, but it struck me as an economical, fast and efficient system.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#510

Post by lo_zamoyski » Thu, May 15, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #461

virtualritz wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is the working answer one can find in many places around the world. When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is. The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center…

It's not the only reason, but in general in American history, "why is this weird thing this weird way?" is usually answered in part by "racism". Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations. Again, not the only explana…

In northern cities, the black population is quite recent, and urban renewal programs predate much of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was itself weaponized by WASP elites against the European and very often Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities (who were out-procreating the WASPs given their stance on contraception, for example, which differed from the Protestants who had began to accept its use in the 1930s).

To disguise the project, terms like "white flight" were invented in order to frame the disintegration of these European neighborhoods as a racist reaction. This worked especially well during the Civil Rights movement, because it played on black/white categories in the forefront of everybody's minds. But were these European ethnic groups "white"? We already know that the Irish and the Italians weren't considered "white" until recently.

Perhaps you've seen videos of "white people" in Chicago throwing rocks at black marches led by MLK into these ethnic neighborhoods? These were people, like Lithuanians, who were defending the integrity of their neighborhoods from an invasion. That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant: any mass migration of another cultural group into a host population harms and destroys the integrity of the host population. And that was the point. White flight destroyed the ethnic neighborhood through mass migration and the subsequent dispersal of them across the newly created suburbs. This process hastened their assimilation into an amorphous mass shaped by the mass media. These assimilated groups formed a buffer between WASP neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the new black arrivals from the South. The construction of highways played a similar role by erecting psychological or physical barriers between these neighborhoods. They were also used as excuses to demolish "undesirable" neighborhoods.