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NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

congestion-pricing-tracker.com

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Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#621

Post by Mawr »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #46
jmyeet wrote: post #25

I happened to be living in London when congestion pricing was brought in and the difference on day 1 in the West End was like night and day. I believe it's never gone back to the pre-congestion pricing levels. I fully expect similar in Manhattan. The social media response has been particularly interesting. Predictably, there are a lot of non-NYCers who simply object to the slightest inconvenience to driving in any fo…

>Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere. I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, but this it needs to be noted that most road damage is done by weather and heavyweight vehicles like semis/trash/buses/delivery vehicles etc., not regular passenger vehicles. Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionat…

Repairing road damage is only a part of road cost. We do not build expensive 2-16 lane roads and massive parking lots to support trucks and buses. We build them because everyone needs to drive their personal vehicle to work each day at 8am.

Then the space taken up by unnecessarily big roads and parking lots further stretches distances between destinations out, leading to... more roads required.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#622

Post by Mawr »

taatof wrote: post #69
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. Same happening here in my smallish (~300k peeople) capital of a small eu country... Too many cars? More expensive parking! Less parking! More expensive parking! Less parking! More pedestrian-only streets, and even more cars around that... And the buses? They suck. The city is roughly star-shaped.. want to go from one leg to anoth…

Sounds right. Here in SF, instead of police pulling over people who speed and run stop signs, we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections so people speeding and running stop signs can see if they're about to kill a pedestrian. Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.

First off, false equivalence - there is no "instead of", what the police do or do not is unrelated to the reduction of parking spaces.

Second, implementing safety by modifying the physical environment is vastly superior to anything else because it scales. There's no longer a need to educate every single person who will use every intersection in the city every day on how to do it safely, nor a need to ensure x police officers are present. The physical design creates an environment that is safe by default.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#623

Post by eru »

freejazz wrote: post #413
occz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already extrapolate from the results from other cities who have implemented the policy, where it has been wildly successful at reducing congestion.

I thought London's traffic returned to the same levels as prior to their congestion pricing?

Singapore is probably the better model to look at? We had congestion pricing before London.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#624

Post by eru »

taatof wrote: post #53
maxwellg wrote: post #11

I'm incredibly hopeful that NYC congestion pricing pays off in a big way - and that we start to see it in other cities across America. I really, really want congestion pricing in downtown SF. During rush hour, cars block the box and slow down busses, with cascading effects.

How do we get around? To get downtown I have to take two busses and then bart (or two busses but it takes longer because there are a lot more stops). The kicker: I'm not even in a suburb, I live in SF! All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. At least NYC has a plenty good enough train system. I end up WFH anyway, largely because it's annoying to get to an office downtown…

> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.

Well, congestion pricing would make driving better. (And perhaps make busses better, too, since they use the same roads.)

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#625

Post by Mawr »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #137
cyberax wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Most agencies have a problem of people realizing that wasting life in buses is not worth it. Transit can never compete with cars on speed in well-designed cities.

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…

> absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures)

I think they're intended to be anti-"getting killed by a car" measures. Traffic fatality statistics speak for themselves.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#626

Post by eru »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #453
blehn wrote: post #424

1. The data is obviously flawed, but if there's anything to speculate from it, it's that the actual congestion in lower Manhattan isn't affected that much. 2. So the success of this policy really depends on how much additional revenue it's bringing in for the city and the MTA. The $9 increase needs to significantly offset the loss in toll revenue from the decrease in drivers. 3. There are so many other simple policie…

Advocates did worry that reducing it from $15 to $9 would create a sort of "no-mans land" — not quite high enough to deter traffic but high enough to annoy people. I'm not sure how to reconcile the significant drop in the bridge and tunnel commute times with the apparent non-effect on commute times within the congestion relief zone.

It's a bit silly to set a fixed rate.

Here in Singapore, the congestion charging pioneer, we adjust the fee dynamically to keep traffic flowing.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#627

Post by Mawr »

cyberax wrote: post #607
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> Which it can, if you make it zero. But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners. Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?" "bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring…

Oh hey, I actually agree! By all means, let's compare fairly and price in all costs and externalities of car ownership vs public transport. You may not like the result, but that's life.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#628

Post by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql »

rendang wrote: post #575
dml2135 wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly feels safe on the NYC subway. You know what's more dangerous than riding the subway? Driving in a car.

Driving in a car is pretty dangerous when you're in some Texas suburb with 50mph arterial streets. Going 20mph through lower Manhattan with an intersection every few hundred feet, not so much

https://youtu.be/xloWKKVxZqI?si=IHNFOcGhiQHX3opN

Dangerous to who? Cause you seem to forget about the people outside of the car.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#629

Post by Spooky23 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #601
jakelazaroff wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I live in Manhattan and I am decidedly anti-car. If I had my way private vehicles would be banned (with exceptions for e.g. people with relevant disabilities). But cabs are important! This past august, I bought a new desktop PC (I did not want to build it myself for various reasons). I took it home in an Uber. Trying to walk to the subway with that giant box would have been virtually impossible.

A transit nut would have suggested a simple solution that does not destroy the planet - just use a simple cargo bike.

Re: NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

#630

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

You don’t. Yet they are popular.

It’s only the densest transit zone in the US. Many international locales are denser and measurably better.

This issue highlights that people take for granted that things are permanent and people will accept anything. This is great for me — I’ll happily pay the toll to move faster when I’m in the city. But my guess is my customers will start melting away faster and I’ll be spending quality time in Jersey. That was happening even before COVID and I think will accelerate.

They would have been smarter to hold out for a few years and add a surcharge to the road mileage tax that’s coming.

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