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Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

nytimes.com

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Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#651

Post by gottorf »

biorach wrote: post #647
gottorf wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ok so very uncommon. why are you even bringing it up?

I didn't bring it up, a commenter above did. I was adding color in response to another commenter saying that unpleasantries experienced (of various levels) in the NYC transit system is an outlier.

You and everyone else of course has their own barometer of what is an acceptable tradeoff. I'm not trying to convince you in particular that NYC transit is a good or bad experience overall; I'm explaining why it is reasonable for someone to come to the latter conclusion.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#652

Post by toss1 »

kazinator wrote: post #639
toss1 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operating as designed. If you have a car, you can already afford purchase/lease, insurance, registration, fuel, maintenance, etc., so affording a reasonable and variable toll is not an issue. If your need to take that vehicle into that zone at that specific time is so great, a $9 toll will not be a deterrent, and if it is just convenience, then rearrange your schedule or transport mode to a time/mode that balances th…

> If you have a car, ... Sounds vaguely like, why are you begging, and why should I give you anything, if you can afford cigarettes? A lot of low-income Americans drive cars, and would be way more fucked without them, because of the way things are. > that is much harder to tune and could present a far more serious impediment. What impediment, and how is it harder to tune? In principle, you can tune the system to such…

>>why are you begging, and why should I give you anything, if you can afford cigarettes?

The expense profile of a motor vehicle in the USA in 2025 is quite different than cigarettes. And yes, if you are buying two packs per day of cigarettes, at $11.96 NY State average [0] you can skip one to drive into the congestion zone in congestion time.

>> A lot of low-income Americans drive cars

Yup. It is near-absolutely critical to have a car in rural America. But that is a long drive from Manhattan. How many of them NEED to drive cars into Manhattan during congestion periods? When I lived in Manhattan long before congestion pricing, I sold my car because it was such a hassle to have while living there.

>>What impediment, and how is it harder to tune? In principle, you can tune the system to such a fine granularity that...

I already provided such an example. There are many types of appointments that are very difficult to get, and adding the hassle of being ILLEGAL to drive your car on that particular day will be a real hardship, not a mere inconvenience.

Sure, the city planners could tune any license plate scheme down to an individual vehicle, but only at the cost of a massive hassle to everyone involved. The general algo of "ya, it'll cost me to go during congestion times; oh woah, they just added $2 to the 11h-14h time slot" is waaay different from "I have a doctor appointment Tuesday, is the third character of my plate 4, 5, M, or N?...[runs out to look at plate]...damnit, I've got to change to... oh, no appointments for another seventeen weeks?... (real example from my own doctor)" The person who could have taken care of it for a $9 fee is now either seriously delayed or needs to pay $80 for an Uber.

Meanwhile, you want to add all that burden to everyone to accommodate a population of low income people, near Manhattan, who want to drive their cars into the city on a regular basis. But they will NOT be able to do this to get to their job daily, so will still need to make other arrangements initially every other day anyway.

This convinces me there is even less of a case for lottery allocation than even the first post.

edit: add LF for formatting

[0] https://boxprintify.com/how-much-do-cigarettes-cost/

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#653

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #498
steadicat wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, many of the cars we see in the city are bound to be from outside the city (like New Jersey). Just look at the traffic in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels at rush hour. A less abrasive approach than congestion pricing might just be pedestrian streets or narrower streets/wider sidewalks. If you make the city unattractive for cars, there will be fewer of them, and I am willing to bet that programs like these are le…

I don't know about elsewhere, but here in Ireland pedestrianised streets are usually open to deliveries in the early hours of the morning. I think they open to one-way traffic some time after the pubs and clubs close, and late-night foot traffic is reduced. Then the bollards go up at the entrance end at around 7am, and go up at the exit a little later.

Certainly I've seen delivery vehicles on Grafton Street in Dublin and Shop Street in Galway in the early hours.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#654

Post by soperj »

genewitch wrote: post #649
soperj wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they need it more than Italy. You can handle wayyy more traffic without cars on the road than you can with.

in context, i am specifically talking to “the US can't imagine itself without cars” point here and in my other reply upthread. I live ~36 hours from Los Angeles, driving at legal highway speeds, assuming no stops or delays. It's all about perspective. California is larger than germany. New York isn't a small state by any stretch of the imagination, unless you're comparing it to texas, alaska, or california. The car/p…

I live in Canada, a bigger country with less people and better public transport. A bunch of provinces are bigger than Texas, doesn't stop the public transport from being decent inside the cities.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#655

Post by harrall »

munificent wrote: post #599
ben7799 wrote: post #566

Car speed in the zone.. that graph is really telling, showing that in NYC cars never really travel faster than even the slowest bicyclist, and slower than a modest runner. That alone tells you this is the right path. All that infrastructure and work for cars to not actually allow anyone to travel fast. 9mph is very very slow even for the weakest/most timid cyclist.

I support this policy and was a bike commuter for several years, but just to play devil's advocate: Speed is not the only reason people prefer a car over walking and biking. * Some people have mobility issues and can't bike or walk but can drive. * Cars give you environment isolation when it's freezing, sweltering, or pouring rain. * Cars isolate you from other people, which can be important especially for groups tha…

In every transit-heavy city that I have been to, you have both an extensive highway system AND an extensive public transit network.

But on the Internet, people are either BAN CARS or BLOCK TRANSIT.

In reality, I want both.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#656

Post by ghaff »

genewitch wrote: post #646
ghaff wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without looking it up, I think it's also related to adjacency to a significant metro. But, yeah, the US census uses a binary classification that makes a lot of people assume "urban" means a big walkable city when, in reality, it often includes very dispersed exurbs (including places many would consider basically rural) that are never going to be serviced by public transit among other things. So a lot of people tend t…

> Consistent with previous decennial censuses, changes were made to criteria classifying urban areas following the 2020 Census. Key changes to the Census Bureau’s urban area concept and criteria include: > The use of housing unit density instead of solely population density. The minimum population threshold to qualify as urban increased from 2,500 to 5,000 or a minimum housing unit threshold of 2,000 housing units. >…

I hadn't looked in a while and, yeah, the definition seems to have switched a bit though the overall result seems to be fairly similar. The bottom line is that "urban" in the census has a lot broader definition than what a lot of folks think of as urban colloquially.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#657

Post by chrsw »

macNchz wrote: post #588
chrsw wrote: post #577

How are people on lower incomes who need their cars for a living dealing with this?

The great majority of lower-income people commuting into Manhattan are not doing so in cars, and those that do are eligible for a discount.

I didn't just mean for commuting. But that's good news at least.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#658

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

RhysU wrote: post #103
Vinnl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof, that sucks. Glad that delivery driver wasn't in a car though! Could've ended much worse.

Yeah, just imagine. I did. For hours yesterday evening I imagined. Had a car killed my wife or unborn child, there would have been a legal trail and insurance. Had the e-bike killed my wife or unborn child, there was neither. I doubt I could ever find the killer of the unborn child if the baby died later due to injuries-- there's neither license nor registration on an e-bike. Pushing powered transportation into the u…

>Had the e-bike killed my wife

That’s ridiculous. How many e-bikes do you think caused fatal accidents last year in the US?? Are you legitimately scared of this happening?

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#659

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

autoexec wrote: post #185
bunderbunder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending. I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyp…

I can understand why poor families might save enough money to make the trip across town to a nice restaurant or a high end shop in a wealthy neighborhood they could never afford to live in. I can't understand how making it prohibitively expensive for poor people to drive into those nice neighborhoods will result in them becoming rich enough to open fancy restaurants and shops in their own poor neighborhoods where no…

Poor families take public transit, they don’t drive. Reducing congestion makes public transit better. If you’re in a place where everyone drives, even the poor, then this thread is irrelevant.

Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

#660

Post by virtualritz »

genewitch wrote: post #626
soperj wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they can manage it, why can't New York?

New York City has more people in it than the 4 most populated metro areas in Italy. Italy has ~3x the population of the state of New York, half the population of the state lives in NYC area .

The obvious answer is more public transport infrastructure & bike lanes.

If you think population density is an excuse for public transport infrastructure not coping or need for more people owning cars I suggest taking a long hard look at e.g. Japan to have that hypothesis reality-checked.

I'm btw. not saying you did, just reading between the lines.

As I wrote in an earlier reply to parent, NYC hasn't managed to even build ring Metro lines around its city center – since a century!

And that is for one reason and one reason only: not nearly enough (political) pressure from the public to improve public transport infrastructure.

And that in term gets us to the root cause again: the US can't imagine itself without cars.

This is not a critique. It's just an observation that is very plain to see if you grew up in Europe (and possibly many other places, too).

When/if that changes, ever, the above things will just happen naturally.

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