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NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

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531–540 of 653 posts

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wonder why they choose not to enforce this aspect of it when it can be a significant population (in a statistical sense) of the car traffic as well as revenue. Manhattan inside the highways is a big place. Maybe it's the cost of the cameras to be installed.

> I just wonder why they choose not to enforce this aspect of it when it can be a significant population (in a statistical sense) of the car traffic as well as revenue. It's not. 85% of Manhattan households don't own a car at all. The number is even higher inside the Congestion and Relief Zone. Almost all car traffic within the zone is from people who do not live within the zone.

Plus of that 15% that do own a car how many actually only use the car within the Congestion Zone a significant portion of the time? My guess is the number is well below 1% of car traffic could possibly dodge a significant portion of the toll.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robert Moses knew it, but that didn't stop him.

I'm not sure Robert Moses knew that. He wasn't an urban planner. He was an urban doer. He made it his life's mission to not learn the actual impact of his work on people's lives. I suspect he took that willful ignorance to his grave.

Oh, no, he knew.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#533
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean… yeah; I think we agree there. That’s kinda my point: people here whom I know to claim New York City is the greatest city in the world don’t actually know a lot about the world.

I've literally been to 80+ countries and have spent time in every U.S. city of significant size. If you can't look at the world and figure out the obvious fact that New York is the greatest and most significant city that has existed since we climbed down out of the trees I'm not sure what's going to convince you.

how do you reconcile this theory with the existence of the Mets?

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other) The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop…

Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive. One good example to study is Germanys 50 EUR Ticket - now 58 EUR. It's a flat rate for all of Germanys public transport, including regional trains. You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car. Yet, while it has increased ridership, the majority of people d…

> Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive.

This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math.

> You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car.

When most people have a car you have to compare it not to the amortized cost of owning a car but the marginal cost of driving one you already have.

The majority of trips might be suitable for public transport but then people have a car because it's such an inconvenience to go to Costco and carry back everything you buy there on a bus, or they occasionally go somewhere the bus doesn't. So they get a car and then the insurance, tax, depreciation, etc. are all sunk costs and to get them to take the bus instead of driving themselves it has to beat the cost of gas.

Which it can, if you make it zero. Which in turn increases ridership, allowing you to justify more routes, which reduces latency, which causes even more people to take mass transit. By making mass transit more attractive instead of making driving less attractive.

> It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable.

Or you can just handle 85% of the cases that would have a justifiable amount of ridership and then let people drive a car or get an Uber in the 15% that would be mostly disused, instead of leaving it how it is now where people drive the majority of the time.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#535
post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it in the sense that I've literally never met a person who prefers travelling by public transport to a personal motorized vehicle outside of long trips. The usage I've seen of it is from people who are too much of a mess financially to afford a car/license or people who are terrified of driving. Incentives just don't fix the issue of having no control and being in a pod with a hundred people you don't know and…

Chiming in to say I also prefer public transit. Why focus on the ride at all when I can just read a book and teleport? And the real danger of motorcycles is to yourself. You could end up living with a feeding tube slipping in a shower let alone a minor scuff at 25mph.

You don't have to be the one driving...

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#536
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean… yeah; I think we agree there. That’s kinda my point: people here whom I know to claim New York City is the greatest city in the world don’t actually know a lot about the world.

I've literally been to 80+ countries and have spent time in every U.S. city of significant size. If you can't look at the world and figure out the obvious fact that New York is the greatest and most significant city that has existed since we climbed down out of the trees I'm not sure what's going to convince you.

The odds of you calling yourself "native new yorker" and having never actually lived anywhere else are virtually 100%

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. There may be a other materials that bridges can go over, however.

Your solution to road congestion on a densely-populated peninsula is more roads. Got it.

It's not just more roads, although more roads are one of the things it is possible to create.

You can also create more housing, so people are closer to their jobs and have to travel fewer miles. Manhattan has higher density than most places, but it also has more people, and would you be surprised to learn that the zoning in most of NYC no longer allows the buildings that are currently in Manhattan to be built almost anywhere? So as a result you can't create more of them and people who might like to live in Manhattan instead live in the suburbs around the city and drive into the city in a car.

You can also create things that aren't roads, like subways, which then allow you to remove cars and buses (and bus lanes) from the roads when it becomes viable for more people to take the subway, which reduces road congestion.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the passenger car pays once a day, it's only generating one unit of congestion.

The car takes up space in the city the entire time it's there, even if the congestion impact is less while it's parked.

The lengths this city goes to keep free parking...

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top speed, sure, but for typical commuter heavy-rail, a non-express train isn't running at top speed for all that long. Diesel-electric trains take a LOT longer to accelerate compared to a modern EMU, so much so that Caltrain's electrification project shaved 23 minutes off the SF to San Jose local trip, from 100 to 77 minutes. Videos [0] [1] make the acceleration improvement pretty clear. [0] https://x.com/Caltrain/s…

The MBTA already runs top speed on most of its lines once you get outside of roughly I95 depending on the line. Getting there faster would help but I don't think it would shave as much time off the end to end trip as you think. And for the urban stops they already accelerate and brake at the limit of what is reasonable for standing passengers. They can't push it too much or an old lady is gonna bounce off a wall and…

if there aren't enough seats and they're still running 30 minute headways, that's incredibly stupid.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#540
post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During rush hour, cars block the box There's an easy solution to this: have ticket writers waiting at intersections to paper all the cars who do it. It's not like they can drive away. NYC used to be really good about enforcement, and it worked extremely well. It doesn't solve traffic, but it does help stave off gridlock and keep intersections free for bus lanes to operate normally.

Thats the thing with socal traffic especially. Absolutely zero enforcement by the police. What do they do with their resources instead? There was a man with a knife caught in a burglary last week and the police sent like 40 suvs some unmarked with the blue and red lights through the windscreen, a swat team, and a helicopter. Probably in the millions spent for that operation alone for this guy with a kitchen knife. I…

That's hardly a SoCal phenomenon, sadly. In all the places I've lived, "protect and serve" seems to be abbreviated - "protect and serve our desk jobs and pensions" would be more accurate. If the TSA is security theater, the police are a circus, and the occasional show of force is them coming to town.

It's like those pictures of Luigi Mangione being perp walked in Manhattan with 20 cops and FBI agents behind him. Imagine if those officers were on the beat or enforcing traffic laws instead. That would make more of a difference in our communities than a photo op ever will.

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