Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same time? Why does anyone use the toll road?
With regular toll roads, you can choose to leave sooner and take a slower way to avoid the toll. With this, the toll is mandatory no matter which way you go.
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Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
701–710 of 735 posts
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
My view of vegan food has been shaped by occasionally suffering it (ok, so I' exaggerating with the "suffering") Heck, my breakfeast at the moment is vegan, because I'm on a diet and cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute. But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals. I…
> cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute. Way off topic now, but: emphasis on few . Surely you don't use more than a couple ounces on a bowl of cereal? You might lose about 20 calories this way - but if you find it that unpleasant, you'll surely find them somewhere else. > But cutting a few more calories makes i…
A few here and there adds up. Once I've reached my target weight, I'll ease up gently, and that's certainly one of the things I'll ease up on. For now, it's finding savings everywhere that doesn't affect my sateity.
(Also, I realised I was wrong - I forgot my breakfast has plenty of whey produced from milk in it, so vegetarian but certainly not vegan)
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You would likely be unhappy if you saw the outcomes of almost all vehicle manslaughter cases. It’s the easiest way to kill someone and get away with it consequence free
In March 2024 in Berlin, an elderly man sped down a bike lane, murdering a woman from Belgium and her 4-year-old child: https://apnews.com/article/germany-road-accident-belgium-1d3...
The punishment: His driving license was revoked: https://www.berlin.de/generalstaatsanwaltschaft/presse/press...
Germany has a reputation as strict and bureaucratic, and yet, it's apparently still legal to murder people with your car.
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I live in a NYC like this how do I visit my friends in Philadelphia? What if they live in Towson MD? Now what if they live in the suburbs? How would I visit anybody in the country side anywhere? What if I want to buy in bulk at Costco? What if I just want to buy anything I can't carry on the subway? I have spent over a decade without owning a car in multiple cities. It's definitely possible but I've been fortunate…
This is crazy. Costco just exists because America is an auto addicted society. In sane places you can make multiple small errands. Maybe you could even get to know some neighbors
Costco has many locations internationally. They're kind of nice in that the pizza is the same if you ever feel home sick in a country with terrible pizza.
Small errands also completely defeats the point of Costco. Running to a corner store to buy 4 rolls of toilet paper ends up being way more expensive than going to Costco and picking up 30+ at a time.
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one. Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square. Its a slow process but its getting there.
> There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one. One street in a city the size of NY? I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;) On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.
GP's premise was there "Are none" -- I shared the progress I'm aware of.
NYC needs more, but I think the tide is turning the right way.
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rust…
This is my experience travelling as well--Latin America has public transit that is an order of magnitude better than anything I've used in Canada or USA.
The success in s.a. highlights how much of a problem cars are causing in n.a. cities. Even if a well financed public or private bus service wanted to run frequent lines at rush hour, those buses would be stuck in slow car traffic. In nordic countries, the bus and trams have dedicated lanes, and mass transit is generally faster than cars.
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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 crit…
You're not trying to argue that random selection for a benefit is unfair, compared to selecting for people who are willing to pay? About appointments, there could be a very simple website where you punch in your license plate, hit Enter, and see a calendar with all your days highlighted, for the next 6 to 12 months. There could be some flexibility in the system. Everyone gets a small number of tokens (which expire: m…
I agree adding exemption tokens or 'ding count' is a good idea. But YES, I am arguing:
1) random selection creates both substantial unfairness and cost on people who through no fault of their own have schedule issues, when compared to a modest congestion toll,
2) random selection creates widespread inconvenience for everyone especially when changes are made to 'tune' the amount of traffic; everyone needs to check if the new lottery numbers match their plates, vs just increasing prices at specific which will at most cost someone a few dollars extra if they don't check in advance, instead of a costly ticket
3) The lottery system would not help anyone who wants to commute in everyday, since they would be banned on whatever days they are banned. In contrast, the cost system is trivial for one-off trips, but a significant cumulative cost to people who want to use cars in the congested zone every day. The one-off trips are not the problem, the GOAL is to reduce habitual trips. The toll system addresses that most specifically and gives no advantage to two-car households, whereas a lottery is basically a free pass to two-car households to continue congesting.
Having a lottery system with ~4 free passes per month may solve some of these, but at the cost of a lot of additional tracking and overhead. Still thinking basic economics is a good solution here. More ideal in some ways would be a sliding per-visit scale (e.g., scaling by some exponent per visit per month...), but again likely not worth the overhead.
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not an A/B test because it has no way of controlling for broader economic trends over time. How do you figure out if what you're seeing is because of that one thing that changed, or the enormous list of other things that also changed around the same time? A more valid design would be randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it. Obviously not feasible in pract…
> randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it Cities are stupidly heterogenous. These data wouldn't be more meaningful than comparing cities with congestion pricing to those without. (And comparing them from their congestion eras.)
What you're telling me here is that you aren't aware of what the randomization is for in randomized controlled trials.
"Our treatment units are stupidly heterogeneous" is exactly the problem it solves. A century's worth of developing increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques for making do without random assignment has thus far failed to accomplish anything than provisional mitigations that are notoriously easy to use incorrectly in practice.
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the UK did this in the 1980s and it’s turned into such a disaster, most mayors and local authorities are trying to move to the London model: companies can bid a flat rate to deliver a bus service (effectively, they commit to providing drivers to deliver the timetable). TfL collects all fares. They also - I think - supply most of the buses to ensure they are of a certain standard, but the companies need to le…
I don't know about London, but many places systems like this results in terrible working conditions for drivers. Pay is lousy, shift arrangements are in some cases insane, like work from 5:30-10:00 and then 14:00-17:00. Minimal time in between routes to go to the toilet and so on.
Yep, it does! However the net benefit to society at large - and being public transit, to the less privileged in particular - is still gigantic compared to any of the alternatives, and this is blatantly obvious if you've been in multiple countries/locations that use this system, as well as ones that don't use it. The job is generally still better than driving for e.g. Amazon, as well as honestly a whole load of 3D jobs[1] that we rather forget exist and people carry out every day, including in "wealthy" countries.
Perfect is the enemy of good. This is the #1 thing other progressives need to learn. Everything is a tradeoff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty,_dangerous_and_demeaning
Re: Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts. When I lived in Atlanta, there were people, mostly YIMBYs and other urbanists, who wanted to charge a significant congestion fee to anyone living in surrounding towns like Alpharetta, Roswell, Duluth, etc., who commuted into the city to work. It would effectively be a car vice tax paid by the working class, as most of the people I knew out there liv…
People said the same thing about New York City, but it is absolutely not true at all about NYC. Rich people drive into NYC, others take transit. It may be true in Atlanta, but it wasn't passed in Atlanta. I'd want to see a ton of data before I believed your claims though. Typically suburbs are where the wealthier people live.
It's not hard. Just go on Zillow and look at the relative costs of a 3 bedroom place in Atlanta's central neighborhoods (Midtown, O4W, Virginia Highlands, Edgewood, etc.) and compare it to the cost of a 3 bedroom in Alpharetta or Tucker. Last time I was there, I saw shitty little 1200 sqft condos in areas that were barely walkable going for upper $500k prices.