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NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

congestion-pricing-tracker.com

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Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#581

Post by cyberax »

Xylakant wrote: post #222
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed…

The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else. A single car line can transport about 2000 persons per hour. A single bus lane about 9000, a single bike lane 14000 - if you dedicate the space to pedestrians, we’re at 19000 and light rail goes beyond that at 22000 and more. (See page 3, https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002265/News/Pre... , German only) This…

> The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else

Bullshit. You are a victim of propaganda.

In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.

A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people. So with 10 buses per hour, you get just 180 people per lane per hour. Even at peak loads (200 people per bus) and a bus every 2 minutes, you get 6000 people per lane per hour.

Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math. Transit slowly consumes lives and increases misery. All it's good for is to move people to "misery centrals" (downtowns) where pretty much nobody really wants/can live in comfort.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#582

Post by delecti »

asdff wrote: post #482
Lanolderen wrote: post #444

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.

Agreed. I love public transit. To get to work I can either take ~45 minutes by bus (during which time I read), or 25 minutes by car (during which time I can only loathe that I'm stuck contributing to traffic). That 20 minutes "lost" to drastically improve the other 25 minutes is well worth it.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#583

Post by cyberax »

Xylakant wrote: post #309
thereisnospork wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is utilization: you can't get 9000 persons per hour via busing in most places, weighting by area. Fixed routing scales poorly compared to cars (or bikes which have their own drawbacks) trying to match many-to-many riders-to-destinations.

What's "most places?" This is a traffic flow that's achieved routinely in about every medium size european city. And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.

A medium US city has the commute time of 15 minutes. It's unachievable with transit in any scenario.

> And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.

Yeah. And it sucks. The distributed nature of the US cities gave people far more economic opportunities than in Europe. This resulted in faster economic growth (and still does).

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#584

Post by throw4847285 »

gcbirzan wrote: post #532
throw4847285 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't mean it in a way that absolves him of responsibility. I mean that he purposefully shut out any information that undermined his self-image as a "great man." That's a form of evil. It's worth differentiating that from other kinds of evil, as I believe it may be the most common.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#585

Post by recursive »

steveBK123 wrote: post #566
recursive wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are fewer cars in the system for each chauffeured ride vs private vehicle.

Fewer cars "in the system" but same (or possibly more) cars on the road actively moving. Take a look at some of the dwell times for ride hail vehicles in NYC. Can easily approach 20-35%. Plus the apps are kicking drivers out at various quiet periods of the day in order to avoid paying them minimum wage. So true empty time is higher. Again I'm not arguing for better treatment for personal vehicles. I'm arguing all the…

I don't know any of the science or research, but it still seems like it could possibly be a benefit. The increase in cars moving seems like it could be more than offset by the reduction in parking requirements. Those people taking private vehicles have to park them somewhere. More taxis means we can use some of that space for something useful instead.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#586

Post by cyberax »

Xylakant wrote: post #308
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just keep density lower and match the car lanes capacity.

2000 people per hour is really not that much. And reducing density will not buy you much - density itself doesn't mean anything. If you have a suburb with 50 000 people living there and an office park with 25 000 people working there (both not particularly high numbers), you get a traffic flow of 25 000 people moving both ways, during rush hour. That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the poi…

> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.

No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.

And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.

> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?

Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#587

Post by tolciho »

Lanolderen wrote: post #444
blehn wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one likes decent and cheap public transport? I find that hard to believe. It's basically the common denominator for the best modern cities. Motorcycles are definitely not the solution. Motorcycle usage in NYC has skyrocketed since 2020 and as a result the streets are far noisier, more chaotic, and more dangerous, especially for pedestrians and cyclists.

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…

Motorcyclists generally have some compassion for cyclists in that both share trouble with cars, and both have problems with staying upright. Multiple car drivers have tried to kill me in America; no such thing happened in 10 years in Pakistan, and I've had zero direct problems from motorcycles anywhere. Collision dangers aside—there's probably stats for that somewhere, probably poorly trained, drunk, or road raging folks sitting in cars are by far the main risk—the main problem of motorcycles would be the noise and air pollution from the engines, especially when there are too many of them in too small an area, versus having somewhere you can actually walk, think, and play (these differ not) without all that horrid noise and stench. In America, this is mostly limited to a few tourist island towns where there is only an ambulance and a service truck or two, and the cyclists on vacation are all like "wow, this is so nice! I don't get the Threat Of Death™ I usually do from the American stroad".

"Stroad" is a term invented, I believe, by those crazy folks over at "Strong Towns", who probably also have things to say about congestion pricing, and why it's taken so very bloody long to implement it in a supposedly modern and advanced nation.

I favor public transit, or ideally walking (problematic) or bicycling (even more problematic). Bicycling can be very problematic in America, to the point that a tourist from Florida in downtown Seattle once remarked "wow, the cars here aren't trying to kill me!" as we sat at some stinky car-strewn intersection. Basically you're a second class citizen if you walk or bicycle. Folks in cars will yell at you or throw things sometimes, and I have the correct skin color and sex, so it's strictly worse for others.

Buses? Sure, you can find the spicy runs with all the homeless (why are there so many homeless in America? Money out the ass and yet a nation so poor …), but I've had a lot more and a lot worse direct problems with folks who sit in cars, not counting indirect problems such as the noise, air, and real estate pollution (sometimes called "the high cost of free parking"). Usually the bus crazy will do something evil like offer you a joint, or wacky conversation, and will not do something upstanding like to change into the lane that you are bicycling in, forcing you off the road.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#588

Post by dleink »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #458
Spooky23 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the dogma gets in the way of reality. Uber and cabs are the glue that fills the gaps that public transit has left unfilled for decades. The policy goal is to reduce congestion by discouraging personal vehicles in the zone and generate revenue for transportation as a whole, not to turn the city into a pedestrian park. The state took an approach that does that without nuking the city. Based on the fact th…

The congestion relief zone is probably one of the single densest transit zones on the planet. Rideshares and cabs are definitely useful for filling in the gaps in the boroughs, but you basically never need one in downtown Manhattan.

One of the gaps is accessibility, rideshares are useful for people who have trouble getting around.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#589

Post by CPLX »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #511
CPLX wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah sure, but obviously people who fail at living in New York don't count.

I regret to say: I’ve lived here long enough to believe you genuinely mean it when you say that.

Is there a song called "Cleveland, Cleveland" that says if you can make it in Cleveland you can make it anywhere?

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#590

Post by selimthegrim »

CPLX wrote: post #460
nothrabannosir wrote: post #454

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.

I can just ask everyone I know in New Orleans around me who moved from New York.
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