Congestion pricing is great. I routinely end up in Manhattan on Friday and Canal Street at 5pm is running smoothly (not packed end to end with idling cars as before), the city looks like a regular city instead of the packed cars honking and spewing tire dust and exhaust. Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. It’s a different environment and everyone is loving it that I’ve talked to.
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. I
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
Yes I imagine a handful of crime was caused by the sheer number of people on the street. Fewer people idling about looking to cause a ruckus has made a huge difference. Passive benefits are what will keep cp in place.
> ”Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.”
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
London is a pretty good city for walking around and public transport.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
Congestion pricing is only a half of the solution. The second half should be the MTA reform. MTA has been a dysfunctional mess and a bottomless money pit for as long as I remember. MTA of today will squander any amount of money you throw on it wasting all the potential gains from congestion pricing.
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax. It doesn’t actually ‘work.’
As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public.
Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result.
Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living.
If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
Great to hear the positives about congestion pricing. It would be great to see how it can ease the congestion in Toronto. Unfortunately, I suggested congestion pricing as a possible solution as part of an academic project and was laughed off.
Car culture is strong, I’d seek local transport advocacy group interest[0] before academic interest. Your academic colleagues all probably drive to work.
[0] in the case of NYC, for example, Transportation Alternatives https://transalt.org/
It remains amazing to me, time and time again, how relatively small fees can encourage large changes in behavior. At the aggregate level, people overvalue their time and undervalue their money.
I certainly refuse to pay $0.10 / plastic grocery bag since those fees were put in place. I have been exclusively shopping with a canvas bag for years now. Likely having saved thousands of bags in that time. In fact, I am angry at the half-dozen times where circumstances have forced me to pay for one.
Eg when plastic bags are free Grandma wants 5 things in 2 doubled bags but at 8 cents each she'll just stick them in the cart with no bag at all and transfer them to the back seat even if 8c for single bag to carry them in would add negligible costs to her $120 basket.
People are not perfectly rational. When there's no explicit price tag people tend to overlook costs. For example when Tesla Model S sold at $70,000 a decrease in gasoline prices was predicted to hurt sales even though a few hundred dollar swing in fuel cost for one year is not going to materially change total cost of ownership of a luxury vehicle.
I'm not sure why what is functionally a $180/month fee is considered "small". I think what we're seeing here is that public services (like roads) are more enjoyable, for those who can still use it, if the lower half of the income ladder is banned from using it.
If you make it so only rich people can do a certain thing, you'll have way fewer people doing that thing. I'm curious what kind of inconveniences this has caused for people who can't afford to pay the fee though.
Surely the reduction in vehicle count is more than enough to cancel this out, but a moving vehicle does emit more exhaust and tire dust per unit of time than does a vehicle idling. For the environmental improvements it's more about the reduction in the number of cars than about the better traffic flow.
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.
The people who blare loud music and rev their engines are the people with expensive cars? The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Really? I must admit I have not noticed it. I've had nightmare trips trying to get into the city still during traditional heavy traffic times. Frankly I've thought more "the pandemic is finally over" than I did "congestion pricing is working" over the past few months.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
Are there any measures that show any downside to this? I confess a bit of bewilderment at how many people will assert there must be something bad every time this comes up. I don't think a single measured outcome has gone poorly from this.
It reminds me of what happens nearly every time car parking on a busy retail street is removed for bike lanes/bus lanes/better walking.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
I think the businesses do kind of know their customers.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
Yeah, I imagine they are often projecting their own frustration over parking onto their customers. Every time a customer comes in and grumbles about parking, it triggers their confirmation bias. Conversely, new customers who only popped in because they were on foot are probably less likely to express that fact.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
Some changes, like having a highway bypass a small city, can be catastrophic to local businesses. A restaurant that might have hundreds of out-of-town cars go by, now has only local residents.
There were some negative effects at a construction shutdown of a street recently where it temporarily did hurt some business, mostly retail shops but not the restaurants/bars which had a big boost in business. These boutique style shops were more patronized by people from suburbs or far flung parts of the city than actual locals, and their location was based on the owners wanting to live in the city vs their actual customers.
It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pity because public transit done well is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw [NotJustBikes]
I'm torn on this. It is a very appealing way to blame people in discussing why it goes this way.
It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)
Not Just Bikes is such a terminal pessimist. I enjoy his videos but I think he really has trouble acknowledging the counterpoints to his doom-and-gloom rhetoric. What he says in that video just barely applies to NYC at all.
I created an account because of how terrible this comment is.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
In my lived experience, public transit is not actively avoided by so-called upper castes (I am not convinced you know what a caste is). Rather, it is so straightforward to take ones own automobile that you don't even consider public transit options.
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
First off, comparing classes in the US to a caste system is genuinely delusional. The US doesn't have a caste system (except where it has been imported by immigration) and if you think it does either you don't know what a caste system is or you are completely out of touch with American culture.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
I fully subscribe to this view. The obsession with people hating all things California is borderline insane, at this point.
I probably too fully subscribe to this view. Seems a lot of "western" things that people love to complain about have been over indexed on. A lot are things that do need to get better, but when I hear people talk about how "actually, the US has been fascist for some time," I just... What?!
The project was studied for 10 years so the nay-sayers really don’t have a platform because they’re up against a decade of research. Most of the anti-cp has a romanticized view of driving into the city as some sort of right or NYer benefit.
Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.
>how many people will assert there must be something bad
Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes).
What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
A downside could be that 2 years from now the effect has rippled away (the shock and awe of paying for it is gone), and everyone sits in the same traffic but pays more money for it.
Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute.
The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there.
So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?”
A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?”
So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes?
Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours?
If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
Other than Trump's seemingly knee-jerk opposition because it was implemented by, in his own oft-repeated words, radical left lunatics, I haven't really heard anything negative at all as a Manhattanite.
In London from 2020 till about 2023 congestion charging ran till 10pm and then that was moved back to 6pm. The reason was it was hurting nightlife especially west end theatre.
I find it surprising that theatre would be harmed by a congestion charge. It seems like the cost of paying or planning around a congestion charge would be small relative to the cost and planning required to go to a live show.
I wonder whether pedestrian collisions will be slightly more deadly, since one effect is that traffic flows faster than before. Great for drivers but probably more dangerous for the jaywalking new yorker.
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
What matters in a pedestrian collision is the speed of impact. Traffic flow is about the average speed over time. Cars that spend less time stopped don't become significantly more dangerous when their maximum speed is still limited to, say, 30 km/h (20 mph). Certainly not for those who are aware of a constant traffic flow.
The biggest downside is that the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect. It was to fill budget holes in the MTA, which is a notorious money pit that delivers far less value than the billions if gobbles up.
There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.
Cycling is so much more effective than cars.. actually approx 5x more in terms of street usage. So when people move to bikes, the streets look way less busy.
You'd need a 5x more bike traffic than car traffic for the two lanes to be equivalent.
Just worth bearing mind when people talk about streets being emptier - just emptier of cars
Slight hyperbole but every single food delivery on door dash happens with cyclists in NYC. Rain or shine. Multiple orders at a time. So not for everyone and everything but cyclists are still 5x more efficient in bad weather.
It's interesting that everyone is saying it is a drastic change, when it says "Traffic is down by about 10%" (which doesn't sound like a drastic change to me).
I guess it is near a critical point where a relatively small change in traffic results in a large change in travel times, traffic jams, etc.?
Manhattan traffic was pretty much at capacity. Bumper to bumper most of the time, certainly during peak times.
Reducing traffic to 90% of capacity makes a huge difference. A little bit of room here and there allows for much smoother flow and a lot better experience for those who didn't get priced out. And almost certainly better flow for busses, which is helpful for a lot of people.
Yeah it's like fluid flow where once you reach choked flow or hit the sound speed, there's a discontinuous jump in resistance that fucks up everything.
Congestion will creep back up, just like it has in London.
Unless they really price it to deter people, they'll just drive. In London it's cheaper to pay the £15 charge than to get two adults return tickets on the tube from the outer suburbs. Once you factor in comfort, convenience, reliability and practicality of your private car Vs London's public transport it's obvious why more and more people just pay the fee to drive.
If they really wanted to stop congestion they'd increase the fee from £15 to something like £150-250 a day. But they won't do that because then hardly anyone would pay it and they'd lose the revenue.
> If they really wanted to stop congestion they'd increase the fee from £15 to something like £150-250 a day. But they won't do that because then hardly anyone would pay it and they'd lose the revenue
This is nobody-goes-there-it’s-too-crowded logic.
If there is congestion despite a charge, you can make more money by raising the price until there is less congestion.
They don't raise the price to deter people. Because the reality is it is a money-making scheme so they price it just right so that most people will pay it.
If they really cared about stopping congestion they'd raise the price. This would very very very simple for them to do. But then they lose a major source of revenue. As a result it is clear that they don't care about reducing congestion. It's basically a toll now, because it has not reduced congestion in the long term. I deeply suspect NYC will be the same once the realisation creeps in that the fee isn't really that much to pay.
> Congestion will creep back up, just like it has in London.
This is actually a good point, because of the nature of what causes congestion.
It's that governments don't do the things that prevent it (e.g. allowing higher density housing construction to shorten commutes or adding capacity to both mass transit and road systems), until the congestion gets really bad.
So when you first introduce congestion pricing, congestion goes down, because of course it does -- increase the cost of something and you get less of it. But then, why do any of the other things that address congestion until it gets really bad again? So population grows over time or existing infrastructure decays and doesn't get replaced because it isn't "needed" yet. Until congestion is as bad as it ever was, but now people are living with a new mass surveillance apparatus and paying a regressive tax.
> governments don't do the things that prevent it (e.g. allowing higher density housing construction to shorten commutes or adding capacity to both mass transit and road systems), until the congestion gets really bad
This is Manhattan. We tax the living shit out of parking, are actively converting driving space to bike lanes, and have multiple efforts to reduce or potentially even eliminate street-side parking in the congestion zone.
Thinking the same thing. Sydney has a lot of tolls but not for congestion. More as an additional tax really. Doesn't stop people using cars. What probably does is pedestrian streets and less parking making it a PITA to drive vs get a bus.
There are so many more initiatives from climate adaptation and environmental advocates and urban planning folks that will have similar, “well duh,” effects. It’s surprising how many easy, simple ideas there are that society and politicians dismiss.
Maybe we don’t need to burn the planet to “achieve AGI,” in order to “solve climate change,” and, “make cities livable.” It’s not like that tech, even is possible, is going to stop hurricanes or take cars off the streets.
Hope more cities in North America will follow suit. It’s sad how many have been doing the exact opposite of good ideas for so long.
Readit News
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
I would've had a hard time wrapping my head around being OK with ~$10/trip before this post
Goes to show time is the most valuable commodity anyone'll ever own
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public.
Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result.
Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living.
If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
[0] in the case of NYC, for example, Transportation Alternatives https://transalt.org/
The people who blare loud music and rev their engines are the people with expensive cars? The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Yes, this has been my experience as well.
>The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Who says they could afford it? Getting an insane car loan for a vehicle you can't afford is an American tradition.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-c...
Every time I see a study like this it is similar results where the reality doesn't match the guesses of local business.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYyQ8ev5yE
It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
The opposition to Manhattan’s congestion pricing has a curious tendency to be inversely correlated with how frequently that person is in Manhattan.
At this point I think it’s just another proxy for rural voters’ rage at liberal cities.
I probably too fully subscribe to this view. Seems a lot of "western" things that people love to complain about have been over indexed on. A lot are things that do need to get better, but when I hear people talk about how "actually, the US has been fascist for some time," I just... What?!
Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes).
What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute.
The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there.
So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?”
A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?”
So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes?
Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours?
If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
Commute times: Faster.
Transit ridership: Up.
Visitors: Up.
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...
Then why, out of the countless alternatives, did they choose to raise the funds this way?
Just worth bearing mind when people talk about streets being emptier - just emptier of cars
... for 1 person in decent weather having to transport very little.
As it turns out, this is the majority of traffic, but let's set constraints.
/s
You can do the same things in a car and all you'll get is a traffic ticket.
I guess it is near a critical point where a relatively small change in traffic results in a large change in travel times, traffic jams, etc.?
Reducing traffic to 90% of capacity makes a huge difference. A little bit of room here and there allows for much smoother flow and a lot better experience for those who didn't get priced out. And almost certainly better flow for busses, which is helpful for a lot of people.
Yes, same as school traffic (certainly where I live in the UK). It's not all the traffic on the road, but the difference it makes is enormous.
Unless they really price it to deter people, they'll just drive. In London it's cheaper to pay the £15 charge than to get two adults return tickets on the tube from the outer suburbs. Once you factor in comfort, convenience, reliability and practicality of your private car Vs London's public transport it's obvious why more and more people just pay the fee to drive.
If they really wanted to stop congestion they'd increase the fee from £15 to something like £150-250 a day. But they won't do that because then hardly anyone would pay it and they'd lose the revenue.
This is nobody-goes-there-it’s-too-crowded logic.
If there is congestion despite a charge, you can make more money by raising the price until there is less congestion.
If they really cared about stopping congestion they'd raise the price. This would very very very simple for them to do. But then they lose a major source of revenue. As a result it is clear that they don't care about reducing congestion. It's basically a toll now, because it has not reduced congestion in the long term. I deeply suspect NYC will be the same once the realisation creeps in that the fee isn't really that much to pay.
This is actually a good point, because of the nature of what causes congestion.
It's that governments don't do the things that prevent it (e.g. allowing higher density housing construction to shorten commutes or adding capacity to both mass transit and road systems), until the congestion gets really bad.
So when you first introduce congestion pricing, congestion goes down, because of course it does -- increase the cost of something and you get less of it. But then, why do any of the other things that address congestion until it gets really bad again? So population grows over time or existing infrastructure decays and doesn't get replaced because it isn't "needed" yet. Until congestion is as bad as it ever was, but now people are living with a new mass surveillance apparatus and paying a regressive tax.
This is Manhattan. We tax the living shit out of parking, are actively converting driving space to bike lanes, and have multiple efforts to reduce or potentially even eliminate street-side parking in the congestion zone.
Maybe we don’t need to burn the planet to “achieve AGI,” in order to “solve climate change,” and, “make cities livable.” It’s not like that tech, even is possible, is going to stop hurricanes or take cars off the streets.
Hope more cities in North America will follow suit. It’s sad how many have been doing the exact opposite of good ideas for so long.