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This is the right thing to do - it makes drivers pay for the externalities they produce (including pollution, congestion, noise). When a city grows as big as Manhattan has, drivers need to begin shouldering at least some of the costs they introduce to the city, instead of leaving residents dealing with those costs.

For me at least, it will also make driving to Manhattan and parking actually more expensive than taking the train, which it should be. The fact that both options are currently about the same price for me has had me thinking that something somewhere is deeply wrong.

A better fix would be to just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive. Reduce the price of the train by $15 and, without this new toll, voila, your commute is cheaper by transit.

On top of that, make transit faster and more frequent so people look at driving & transit directions side-by-side and see that there's not much difference time-wise. This is already true for many trips inside NYC.

One problem is that cars take up the space that other transit options need, or alternately, cars themselves are the reason other transit options are unattractive.

For example:

- many people are afraid to ride bicycles because they are (justifiably) afraid of being run over by cars

- separated bike lanes cannot be created because the space is already used for parking spaces for cars

- street level trolleys or buses can move people very efficiently, but when cars block their path, they are slowed to the same pace as the traffic jam

I could go on and on and on. Unless you take back the space used for cars, it is very difficult to make space for anything else.

The amount of cars in Manhattan also makes walking (which is usually also involved in a transit journey) much worse than it needs to be. I saw this video posted yesterday: https://x.com/philwalkable/status/1773167820487962703?s=46

This is a daily occurrence in some parts of the city. Notice how unfazed everyone is by it, but also how untenable it would be to someone with a wheelchair, walker, stroller, or frankly anyone who isn’t young and thin and nimble.

I've done this walk 1000's of times on different crosswalks in NYC, I know exactly where this is.

Every single time I thought to myself I'm about 10lbs of foot pressure away from having my legs broken by a car.

I've never thought about that until now and I was better off for it... oh well I guess there's some static friction in my favor.

Isn't being stopped like that a violation? Why aren't people getting massive fines or their driving privileges taken away for driving like this?

Technically yes, but sadly in practice rarely enforced. Stand on a street corner in NYC for five minutes and you will see dozens of traffic violations that go unenforced. I don't agree with it, but there is a certain amount of accepted lawlessness here when it comes to driving.

Technically it is ticketable, but they don’t really have a choice. The traffic often moves at a crawl so they might enter the intersection at the beginning of a light cycle and not get further than the crosswalk. If they decide not to move until there is a car length of free space on the other side, cars behind them will honk up a storm. Ticketing them would effectively just be a stochastic congestion tax anyway.

> Technically it is ticketable, but they don’t really have a choice.

They absolutely have a choice where their car goes. They've got a gas pedal, a brake pedal, and a steering wheel don't they?

If they can't clear the intersection they have no business entering it.

> If they decide not to move until there is a car length of free space on the other side, cars behind them will honk up a storm.

That's a problem with the car behind them. You shouldn't break the law because someone is honking at you.

> Ticketing them would effectively just be a stochastic congestion tax anyway.

Good.

I agree we should ticket anyone who is blocking the box and I wish they still enforced those fines/points. But as drivers become increasingly lawless, especially in NYC, being the only person following the law can make you and the people around you less safe. Similar to driving in a developing country, driving safely in NYC requires learning the actual rules of the road which are not the same as the legal rules.

(Personally I avoid driving and biking in midtown these days because I am uncomfortable breaking the law, but when I do have to choose between following the law and operating safely I choose the latter.)

> If they can't clear the intersection they have no business entering it.

In heavy urban traffic, it is impossible to know if you can clear the intersection before entering it. You can often predict it with some degree of accuracy, but only if you are already familiar with this particular intersection; forget about out of towners being able to make that judgment.

Or not 5 ft tall

Look at the height of the hood of that car, the driver would not even see a teenager trying to cross

This is just putting them on a similar model (user pays). Currently, a train ticket has to cover the capital and operating costs of both the vehicle (train, driver) and tracks. For driving, the driver pays the operating and capital cost of the vehicle only - the road budget comes out of general revenue (of the city, state, etc).

Your suggestion of dropping the cost just means the transit agency would have to make up the cost elsewhere - any suggestions? General revenues backed by a tax hike? Shifting burden of track construction and maintenance fully to tax-funded?

I agree directionally, but fares only make up 23% of MTA's operating budget

https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics

It is common worldwide for governments to subsidize public transit. - in this case a ~300% subsidy on the fare.

However, in 'failed states', where the government presumably doesn't subsidize anything, you often find independent minibus operators zooming around town, carrying ~20 passengers each, offering in aggregate a very good public transit service, charging a few coins adding up to barely more than the fuel cost for the bus.

How come poor nations and failed states can manage to provide good public transit so so much cheaper than anyone else?

Because their labor costs nothing. I took these minibuses a lot in Ukraine, Georgia (the country), Armenia, Russian Far East and Kazakhstan. The cars work and aren't entirely unsafe, but I bet none of them would pass western technical and emission inspection. They fix it themselves using scrap and they keep it running for 1M+ km.

Yeah last time I rode in a minibus (guagua (sp?)) was in the dominican republic. It was a 4 door sedan carrying ~9 people. I had shift the car into drive from park because the driver didn't want to reach across the lap of the female passenger who was also sitting in the drivers seat with him.

My memory was that the car had many warning lights on and turned off while we were driving. Somehow he was able to restart it without it being in park while we were coasting.

It was extremely cheap.

> you often find independent minibus operators zooming around town, carrying ~20 passengers each, offering in aggregate a very good public transit service, charging a few coins adding up to barely more than the fuel cost for the bus.

NYC actually has an analogue to this! (Had? I’m not sure how many of these routes survived covid)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_...

> How come poor nations and failed states can manage to provide good public transit so so much cheaper than anyone else?

By using badly maintained, very old vehicles, with low to no enforced standards of operations for safety.

By operators exploiting themselves because of only coarsely tracked costs and low level of reserves.

By not having to conform to strict schedules and not providing service in off hours, only when good business is expected. This makes the infrastructure virtually nonexistent, hurting the general economy by limiting the possibilities of those having to take these forms of public transport.

By applying demand based pricing, for example when working off hours charging more to cover the running costs which are split among less users.

By not working for peanuts, it is your false perception because you have far more income (and disposable income) than those who have to live on incomes local to that area. If PPP adjusted it is often quite a sum.

Just to name a few factors. In general well run welfare states, or at least moderately well run authoritarian states (also having some welfare aspects many Americans would probably call communism) tend to have good public transport, for different reasons, and share taxis are generally not considered a good public transit.

>By operators exploiting themselves because of only coarsely tracked costs and low level of reserves.

Let's also not ignore outright gang/mob style affiliation of minibus transit organisations that will then also actively sabotage government public transport on their post profitable routes.

These private entities in the third world fill a role, but often are also rent-seeking and carve it out for themselves from a government without the willpower to A) build proper public transit infrastructure and B) defend it from bad actors.

Yeah, it was a huge simplification to be sure. The comment was talking about cutting his train ticket by $15, so I assumed it was more of a long distance thing - amtrack has farebox recovery of 95%

Does that mean that reducing fares will not impact them?

No? They said they agreed. They were just clarifying that tickets don't fully cover the costs as implied by the parent comment.

Drivers pick up some portion of the road budget through fuel tax, and NJ even recently invented a way to make EV owners pay for same in lieu of fuel tax.

Except that road maintenance is a bit more expensive than you'd think.

From memory, a politician claimed a few years ago that 40 km of highway was about as much as 1 JSF (~$110mln). Let's pretend that that is a rough proxy for what maintenance of NYC's streets & public parking would cost.

How often do you have to fillerup before you've spent about $100mln in fuel taxes?

> just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive

If ppl drive more than use transit, they won't support improvements to transit. This is the first step to improving transit. Make driving less attractive, more ppl use transit, complain about its shortcomings, and then fixes get implemented.

I also don't see why we shouldn't make driving less attractive. As the grandparent comment said, drivers should be the ones paying for the problems caused by drivers, not residents.

> A better fix would be to just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive

It’s a worse fix. Studies prove that you have to make driving harder. Sticks work better than carrots.

The Dutch model is the best example of this, using "autolow" methods to force cars onto certain routes while leaving the most direct ones to people, bikes and public transport.

It's surprising whenever these conversations come up that many seem to miss the extensive body of lessons that can be taken from the research and practice already done around the world. Is it a kind of "Not invented here" sort of thing?

What Dutch city looks anything remotely similar to NYC? There are very good reasons to drive into NYC for many people, due to density - much more people have much more diverse needs, and need much more workers moving around with their equipment and much more goods.

The Randstad does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad

Density is pretty similar as well.

I don't think it looks like NYC. Density might be similar, but not the size. You can count the skyscrapers on your hands.

Skyscrapers do not a city make. NYC has a population of 8.8M. The Randstad has a population of 8.4M.

Look at the area. 8261 km2 of land while NYC is 300.

We call both "city" but we might as well use 2 totally unrelated words given the differences.

As the other commenter said, NYC metropolitan area would be more comparable - 8936 km2, 19.5M people.

In that case, you should really compare it to the New York Metropolitan Area, which has over 20 million people.

I only meant that their methods should be part of the conversation, not implemented uncritically or without being adapted to local needs.

Many people in the Netherlands also need to drive and the system supports this while also offering alternatives. Many people means diverse needs indeed, so the reliance on and the defaulting of car travel runs counter to many of those needs.

The point I was trying to make is that much more people need to drive in NYC and can't use the alternatives. Sure, I'm all for it - but the problems and solutions are of much different magnitude from anywhere in the Netherlands.

People in the Netherlands made it hard to drive through their cities, which led to more people not driving. In NYC it's going to lead less people driving too, but still a massive clusterfuck on the roads that will be only worse if the solution of the Netherlands is implemented there.

I’m not sure why “it can’t work here”, even if it’s what every city says.

It did not work in the Netherlands either; in fact, after WW2, they imported “traffic planners”, i.e. people who want — and create! — traffic from the US, and set out to destroying their old city centers to create highways etc, until people said: enough!

To a greater or lesser degree, similar solutions work in Copenhagen, and in some German cities, and are starting to work in Paris, once one of the most car-crazed cities in Europe, and in other places.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying that it can be done. It sure takes a lot of work, but it can be done.

All these cities are very different from NYC.

To be clear, I'm not saying preserve the status quo. I just don't think the changes the cities you listed made have any chance to work in NYC. Most notably, all of these cities existed way before NYC and we're built with limitations of medieval technology. All the changes you mention are just rollbacks to last working state.

NYC is a new city built with comparatively godlike tech applied without restraint. The NYC-style solution "I guess I'll just commute by helicopter, no problem putting another skyscraper right here" was incomprehensible to the rich people who built the European cities - they had to go a little further away if they wanted their quiet comfortable life.

Don't you know America is, like, exceptional, man.

Which European country has a city with nearly 10M people on 300km2?

America is exceptional - in the literal sense, it's an exception compared to organically grown cities that existed for hundreds of years. It doesn't mean it's better, it's just very different and so naturally the solutions are going to be very different too.

> Which European country has a city with nearly 10M people on 300km2?

I have no idea, can you share specifically why you think autoluw only works for certain levels of population per square kilometer? To the point that the lessons couldn't be adapted and would have to be "very different?"

Much more people on that extremely small area actually need to drive - because they have reduced mobility, because they are carrying a lot of stuff, goods, materials or tools... Reducing NYC to one lane would stop all life in the city. You can drive through Amsterdam too in these cases - it works because incomparably less people need to.

There's also the problem of mass transit - you can't simply have enough bus/tram lines to cover people's needs if you have so many people who need to go everywhere around the city at one place. You'd have to build an incredibly number of subway lines like Chinese cities have, which is a huge investment.

Ah yeah that same Dutch policy that made public transport 12% more expensive this year while simultaneously reducing service and with outages up a literal 300% from pre-covid times.

Isn't the 12% in line with the inflation and the rise in their costs since the last time they updated prices?

No, that would be a different policy.

It's a regressive tax for poor and middle class people. People making $400K don't care about $15, so they get a pass. Typical.

I'm curious what fraction of people who drive a personal vehicle into lower Manhattan on a regular basis are poor or middle class. What would your guess be?

Mine would be a tenth or less. When I lived in NYC the only people I knew who commuted by personal car in Manhattan were people who made mid-six-figures and lived in some NJ/Westchester suburb. Everyone else took the train/subway.

>I'm curious what fraction of people who drive a personal vehicle into lower Manhattan on a regular basis are poor or middle class. What would your guess be?

Beats me, I haven't been there since the late 90s. If 90% of the people who drive personal cars are rich people who can afford it, it's just a tax that doesn't accomplish anything (except revenue generation and keeping the poor/middle 10% off the road) because they will most likely be annoyed but not deterred.

It will hurt the Uber drivers and delivery drivers and whatnot too. Probably tourists as well. I wonder if the city will keep metrics up to see how well it's working. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem well thought out.

Why just Manhattan you think? I guess it's where are the businesses are.

Right, I suspect that $15 will prove to be far too low to dissuade 90% of lower Manhattan drivers. Having said that, it's a reasonable (and politically palatable) starting guess, it provides funding to improve transit, makes drivers pay for at least a fraction of the negative externalities they impose on the neighborhoods they drive through, and it can always be increased over time until it has the intended effect.

> I wonder if the city will keep metrics up to see how well it's working.

Certainly they've talked about tracking travel times before and after, but I think the real test will be the long-term changes in land value. My guess is that eventually land value in car-dependent communities in the NYC metro area will decrease relative to those with transit access.

> It will hurt the Uber drivers and delivery drivers

That is a reasonable hypothesis, but I'm sure we'll find out. I would wager that the reduced travel time will allow drivers to make more deliveries which will make up for the daily $15 fee. In the end, the market will decide.

> Why just Manhattan you think?

That's where the supply/demand imbalance seems most acute. Well, there and many of the brides which we should be charging for as well. Any place that becomes gridlocked on a regular basis should probably have a price applied to ensure efficient utilization.

Finally, if we're worried that this fee is regressive, I think a better solution would be to use some of the funds to make the state income tax even more progressive. Subsiding driving for a small number of poor and middle class drivers seems less fair and efficient than letting people keep more of their money at tax time.

Most people commuting to manhattan are not wealthy or middle class, judging by the makes and models and visual conditions of the cars that you see on the bridges entering Manhattan.

400k in Manhattan with ~50% total tax, 2 kids in private school and a 2BR condo mortgage. I bet a lot of those families care about an extra 15/day. They can pay it yeah.

Sure but it's just an annoyance to them, not a deterrence. The objective is deterrence. This tax is targeting poor and middle class because it's a regressive tax. Pretty shitty.

Increasing the cost of driving is one of the best levers available for making transit more attractive!

The issue is that there are too many cars (including pollution, congestion, noise), not that there is not enough transit - or at least this is a separate issue.

If you could multiply by 10 the number of people using public transport without changing the number of cars on the road, would the car make less noise, or pollute less, or take up less space? I don't see how.

So the two policies we are discussing really are:

- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars directly more expensive

- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars indirectly more expensive, by lowering the cost of the alternatives and funding this extra cost _somehow_ (taxing everyone whether they use cars or not?)

It seems to me that solution 2 is potentially less effective, definitely way more complex and basically make everyone pay rather than just car users.

Of course if the goal is either to be ineffective (just subsidy transit but don't make me abandon my car) or shield car users from most of the cost (create an expensive solution to reduce car usage by making everyone pay, not just car users); then sure, it's better.

Would you be happy if they used the money by making driving less attractive to make taking the train more attractive?

Please do it!

> A better fix would be to just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive.

It is clearly not fiscally better, and its probably not better in terms of speed of induced behavior change. The best mix is probably some of both; make transit better and make driving more expensive so that people who have preconceptions about transit nevertheless feel that the absolute cost of driving (not the cost delta of driving vs. transit) is sufficient that it is not worth the trip without taking transit despite their prejudgement against it.

I agree transit is the solution but NYC transit is kind of crap and it will take decades and billions to get it up to the standards of more mondern systems. Just lowering the price is not enough. More lines and a cleaner safer system would attract more people

Why is that a better fix? Transit also has externalities (pollution, congestion, noise), just fewer than cars.

Making trains more attractive takes a few decades and a couple billion dollars.

> A better fix would be to just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive.

I agree, but at least this makes them relatively correct, if not absolutely.

Preferred way would be to make trains cheaper and more effective/safer than cars. But it's also the hard way.

Where are you parking? Public street parking is impossible to find, public parking lots are at least $20-40/hour. I'd assume apartment parking would be at least $200/month. That leaves corporate parking garages, which are probably free.

I think instead the train ride is too expensive.

Id rather have the train ride cost be lowered. Its too high now. Have you factored the price of riding late to work? Or maybe new clothes due to a car with a homeless stink that wont go ? What about the cost of a hospital bill after getting sucker punched in the face?

Sorry. Train is too expensive. Driving is irrelevant.

> What about the cost of a hospital bill after getting sucker punched in the face?

I'd be very surprised if the risk of an expensive injury wasn't significantly when higher driving vs. taking the train. Surely driving must be riskier? It's one of the riskiest things modern humans do. Maybe the NYC traffic is bad enough that you're never going a dangerous speed?

A brief search came up with trains being around 15-20x safer than driving. As with many things it matters a lot how you count but it’s a pretty huge gap.

Your brief search is meaningless unless you take a subway line through the Bronx daily.

Statistics will not capture 10% of the harrasment people put up with daily.

New yorkers have some massive Stockton Syndrome with what they are used to. Some will argue that if you complain about human feces on the train, maybe you should go back to Ohio, I see it daily.

What about subway lines in the Bronx?

As someone who lives & works in the Bronx, I haven't encountered any harassment in the Bronx lines. Pretty much every negative experience I've had on any subway line has been in Manhattan.

> Maybe the NYC traffic is bad enough that you're never going a dangerous speed?

Inside Manhattan this is almost certainly true. In a modern car you're going to walk away from almost all crashes under about 40 mph.

The pedestrian not so much, though.

A pedestrian just had they're legs ran over 2 weeks ago by a subway train because they go pushed on the tracks.

Maybe that is a 1/1000000 shot, but it is MUCH more horrifying than thinking about getting in a car crash at 40 mph.

You've heard about a pedestrian who you don't even know had an accident and determine its too unsafe.

Meanwhile I personally know multiple people who died, mangled in a car after an accident. I know multiple people who have survived but were in bad accidents where at least one person was injured. I know multiple people who were pedestrians and cyclists who were properly using the streets and were hit by cars requiring hospital visits, and indirectly know of several people who have died being legally in the right cycling on the streets.

You're way more likely to be seriously harmed or killed even just being around a car than you are riding a train or subway.

How will you take care of your personal safety ? Harassment/Assaults/Muggings/Slashings are becoming rather common in the subway there right ? There appear to be several incidents reported weekly - and these are only the ones that get views.

When you say "common," can you be more specific? I believe the actual rate, in the form of trips with an incident over trips without an incident, would be described as extremely uncommon. Perhaps there's been an uptick, and perhaps it's even more common in NY than other large cities, but probably less common than being a victim of similarly bad circumstances (plus collision risk) inside a car.

There are severe crimes reported weekly this year - you can simply just check the news for that along with regular assaults and hundreds of harassment cases. I am not sure I would quantify the rate as "extremely uncommon".

This got me double checking myself, but it does seem that a typical "common versus rare" threshold is a rate of 5%, though other values like 1% and 10% are sometimes used. Based on this, I'll concede that it might be common for an incident to make the daily news (if there's one a week, so 1/7 chance) but I stand by my claim that trips with such incidents are extremely uncommon relative to all trips.

There's 8 million+ people in NYC. So even if there are 8 severe crimes in a period of time that is still a one in a million chance. Seems extremely uncommon to me. Though I do agree, the uptick in crime is not great.

The last few years have shown that even if something is extremely uncommon you've still got to move heaven and earth to stop it happening. Costs be damned.

Metal detectors at every station entrance , mental health screening prior to boarding perhaps?

While the level of crime is appalling, it needs to be addressed, not ignored and isolating by putting yourself into a little metal box.

This is actually the perfect example of car-brain mentality, you can totally ignore huge social issues, ugly and dirty streets, etc. because you are insulated from them and are just driving past. If you had to walk through that area, that would not work.

If wealthy and influential people could not isolate themselves from the problem, maybe they would actually fix the problem

Sure, lets be the guinea pig and sacrifice one's life for the sake of some hypothetical improvement that will happen by one's death. Since other folks have died on the NY subway and nothing has changed, I doubt one's sacrifice will do anything.

Maybe the leadership of the city should daily take the NY subway - without their personal security. And then write a bond of guarantee for the public.

Far more people are injured or die on the highway outside my office in Texas than in the subways of NY, and there's fewer people riding on the highway.

Actually a bong guarantee is a good idea, if the city had to pay damages every time someone in a victim of crime a subway, things might be solved quickly.

You are describing tragedy of individual action. Similar story to protesting in Russia. Or using a bicycle instead of a car. Or perhaps climate change, and a few others

This is a horrible idea, the city does not care about paying damages. The taxpayers pay it, not the city agencies.

NYC pays out BILLIONS every year in real and garbage claims.

Better/cheaper train solutions would seem to be the desired fix though not just raising prices to random high numbers.

I agree that this will likely have a good outcome in the end but something about it just seems wrong to me.

It's hard to exactly tax externalities.

The high tolls are going to subsidize the trains.

So are train tickets going down in price or more seats being added?

> "So are train tickets going down in price or more seats being added?"

You can answer this question by looking at the existing service.

Are the trains crowded, unreliable, and/or running over capacity? In that case it would be better to spend the extra money on upgrading the service. Or is the service good but not enough people are using it? In that case it may be better to use the money to reduce ticket prices.

Whatever gets more people to ride the trains is going to be the best solution.

It's actually "neither of the above": the congestion funding is simply going to replace federal funding (mostly Covid relief stuff) that is due to roll off.

The article links to another article[0] (way down in the final paragraph) about how some transit upgrades were put on hold because they were 50% funded by the congestion pricing:

> The MTA said money from congestion pricing makes up more than 50% of funding for the agency’s capital program

Presumably, those specific things can now get back underway:

> Projects that rely on the funding include modern signaling on the A train to Far Rockaway, more ADA-accessible stations and phase two of the Second Avenue subway.

[0] https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/transit/2024/02/16/mta-halt...

I mean, sure, that's obviously the way the MTA wants you to look at this; and indeed the congestion pricing funds are restricted to be used on the capital budget.

But that's meaningless; since capital funding from the congestion pricing lockbox will just displace debt issuance, so it's effectively just taking pressure off the operating budget, which is where the current federal funding is going.

Nothing goes down in price. Ticket prices will remain the same, but salaries will increase because of inflation, so yes, they will become more affordable. At least that's the theory.

Capital projects on the subway:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/nyregion/mta-congestion-p...

They’ll be six workers standing around not doing anything while one works, up from five.

More bag searches obviously.

Nah. Those tolls go to new york. The people being taxed are predominantly from NJ. Our gov just raised the gas tax to help fund the transit system here, and he’s also suing NY over these tolls. Feel however you want about this, it’s a complicated issue because of our patchworks of states vs federal control.

If the people paying the tolls work everyday in New York, then I think it would be reasonable to consider them to effectively be New Yorkers as much as they are New Jersiers (New Jersites?).

Like you say though, it's complicated. Especially when you have New York and Jersey City that in a lot of ways are almost one city that happens to be in two states.

Income tax is often divided into where you live AND where you work (ie unemployment is typically work-state dependent).

However the where you live part is over-emphasized IMHO.

I mean this also hits anyone coming from an outer borough. It’s hardly only a tax on NJ residents

Subsidize which trains? Not the ones from NJ (NJTransit). These tolls will only be used for MTA (NY).

I’m for congestion pricing but NJ trains and buses are not going to benefit from this.

NJTransit will benefit by increased ridership

I will benefit personally as a NJTransit bus rider by, I hope, having a shorter bus ride (more time to do work and see family) since I sit in 1-2 hours of commuter car induced traffic several days a week

As an NJ resident, I very much look forward to this congestion pricing and wish it were $50 instead of $15...

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For obvious reasons, the vast majority of public transport systems long for increased patronage above all else.

Car congestion fees are touted but they are rarely effective, except at keeping poor people from moving around. It's just another dial the lazy can inflict on the population to pretend like they're solving the issue.

Reminds me of ye olde window tax.

The London and Singapore congestion schemes have been running for decades with clear, measured benefits.

https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-news/143883/l...

https://www.oecd.org/climate-action/ipac/practices/london-s-...

Killing people benefits against environmental disasters like global warming and pollution too. That doesn't make it effective.

> Car congestion fees are touted but they are rarely effective

Citation needed. All studies I have seen suggest that congestion pricing achieves its desired outcomes of reducing car traffic and is the most effective way of doing so.

Nope. Draining the pool and filling it with more water is not an effective way of cleaning the pool. The pool ends up clean though so you can lead any study you want.

It's not effective. It's just prohibitive. Prohibiting people stops things, who would have guessed.

I'm not sure I understand your point here. If the goal is less traffic then steps that lead to less traffic are effective.

Presumably to get less traffic you need to make the choice (to drive a car into the city) less attractive. Making it cost more would seem to do that.

Of course $15 is not enough, because while that will act on the "unattractive" side, there will then be less traffic, which will the increase the "attractive" side. The toll will need to increase to find the balance where it dwarfs the no-traffic convenience.

This is how I played out in London for example. Traffic has been reduced, but the connection charge is quite high.

Which is fine, those who want the convenience, and feel it offers good value for money can use it. And public transport (busses) is faster.

Yeah you don't understand the point. Effective means it works well at the problem. Would you say chopping off an arm that is broken is an effective way of fixing a broken arm? It definitely eliminates the problem. It doesn't solve the problem effectively.

To get less traffic you need to make sure the roads are good enough to hold the amount of cars that come, or are designed in such a way that those cars don't go far or don't stop (hard). Public transport is a great way at reducing cars which may reduce traffic.

Putting a price on travel does not effectively manage traffic. It just chops traffic off. If we put a price on a bunch of stuff and stopped people enjoying the benefits of things that way, we'd also see sharp declines in whatever we wanted.... never because it is effective though.

Claiming a chopped off arm is good healthcare is a great falsehood to run with since it's easy, but it's not right. Instead of pushing that propaganda, let's actually mend the broken arm.

> Putting a price on travel does not effectively manage traffic. It just chops traffic off.

There's already a price on travel-- the opportunity cost of waiting in traffic.

Putting a congestion charge in place may reduce the total price on travel for the people who need it the most.

Not to mention the externalities of vehicle traffic, which strengthen the case for a charge even more.

Non-toll roadways are a common-pool resource with significant externalities. They invite overuse and push most of the harms of overuse on others (locals, pedestrians, etc).

Congestion charges or tolls are a good way to put a price on the resource and make market mechanisms work.

Then the resources can be used for whatever produces the greatest benefit (and thus is willing to pay the most for use of the resource), and the tolls obtained can pay to address the externalities.

Tolls are there to pay for the new roadwork(s) (and in some cases, line private company profits). Nothing more. Anything else is not effective, it's just prohibitive.

It's good to have any scarce common resource be bid for, rather than giving it to whomever shows up first, is willing to wait longest, etc.

If 150k people want to go, it's usually better that the 100k people who value the road the most get through quickly, instead of having a random 110k get through after a large traffic jam.

150k people wanting to go and being able to go is better than a quarter being forced to stay home, a quarter being forced to not go and another half being allowed to go.

You seem to misunderstand the problem.

I understand basic economics just fine; but what you say seems to be orthogonal/not understanding what the common pool problem is.

Market mechanisms allocate resources better than "whomever is willing to endure the worst conditions" does.

This has nothing to do with market mechanisms. You can't look at and negotiate with the market to get to work cheaper.

In many places, congestion pricing is dynamic and tries to keep roads at the highest throughput capacity.

Here, it's a pseudo-static value chosen to try and push the roads to the highest throughput capacity. (There is some variation by time of day, but not by actual demand).

It has a lot to do with market mechanisms. This is stuff that's within the capability of a high school student to perform a reasonable analysis about after a semester-long class.

I've never seen a toll road decrease in price because no one was using it. Wouldn't that be the easiest place to test congestion if "market played a role"? Car number go up, price go up. Bing bong.

No, it might take a high schooler to read too much into it and pluck things out of thin air though.

It's okay if you genuinely think prohibiting something is effective at providing people with more effective usage of that thing. You'll be wrong though.

> I've never seen a toll road decrease in price because no one was using it.

Have you ever seen a city with congestion charge have all traffic vanish? :P

> Car number go up, price go up. Bing bong

As already mentioned by me, to you, above: there are lots of roads with dynamic pricing with this exact characteristic. But there's a tradeoff to be made between having a simple charge and by having fancy dynamic pricing.

> It's okay if you genuinely think prohibiting something is effective at providing people with more effective usage of that thing.

Charging for something != prohibiting.

There's already a lot of costs driving into the city (including the opportunity cost of being stuck in traffic). Adding a charge can make driving cheaper for people who have a high value on driving (because they value their time).

You seem to think the government charging for something is them understanding the market. It's not.

It's just another way to prohibit. That's the whole basis of fines in traffic violations. Not to discourage, but to prohibit most people.

Sorry if you can't understand that even after all this.

Do you understand what an opportunity cost is?

Does the opportunity cost of driving fall if traffic decreases?

Is there an optimum amount of traffic on a given roadway for society?

Does society reach that optimum value on its own?

Does the current system (first come, first serve, best-effort) appropriately prioritize traffic with vastly different economic values and priorities appropriately?

Yep. I don't know the situation around NYC, but in the bay area, lower-income folks have been getting pushed out of SF and most of the peninsula, and have moved farther out. Something like this (e.g. if they were to analogously increase the Bay Bridge toll) just hurts lower-income folks even more. They have no choice: they need to drive to where the jobs are, but can't afford to live where the jobs are.

And the transit options are laughable. It's great for the people served by BART or Caltrain, but there are a lot of people far enough from a station to make it less than useful for them. So even with the traffic, they make the entirely logical choice to spend 2 hours commuting rather than 4.

In NYC, the overwhelming majority of low-income workers commute by public transit.

It's easier to place the blame on something when you eliminate all casual or affordable use of that thing. You can stand back and say "see, it is this thing". Not mentioning the problems that eliminating and enforcing the ban of casual use brings about on required use.

Lazy weapons against problems are just barely better than sort-of-bad solutions. But if you look in the long term, the lazy weapons scorch the earth so that better solutions can't come along.

This is a NIMBY induced problem. If upward construction had been allowed, this wouldn’t be the case.

Who to blame probably does not matter one whit to those affected.

City planning produces traffic. Blaming drivers is a lazy evasion of responsibility. Large sections of Robert Caro's Power Broker pretty much explains exactly why there's traffic in the city and how it was baked in by the mid 20th century. If anyone is driving in or driving through Manhattan it's because they have to, not because they prefer it over pretty much any other alternative. It's a cash grab, pure and simple with absolutely no reasonable expectation for traffic reduction following this initiative. The residents "dealing with the costs" also need things delivered or a ride to the places mass transit doesn't support and you better believe that the extra $15 dollars will be something that will find its way in the already inflated costs of living in NYC.

If someone really needs to drive into Manhattan most days perhaps they should move to a place that's close to a PATH, LIRR, Metro-North, subway, ferry, or other transit system.

> The residents "dealing with the costs" also need things delivered

This generally works in favor of people within the congestion zone, because time is money and delivery drivers can do far more deliveries per hour.

> or a ride to the places mass transit doesn't support

Residents of Manhattan below 59th can easily take one of the above-mentioned transit options to get to Jersey City, Queens, Brooklyn, or Harlem, and get in an Uber or Zipcar from there. But if someone needs to do this most days, perhaps they shouldn't be living in Manhattan.

I live in Brooklyn and have a rarely used car. I'm 100% onboard with taking the train, walking, or biking. There should be so many more open streets as well.

The only issue I have with any of this is when I want to LEAVE the city. I pay tolls on the way out and on the way in currently that get me close to $30. Now it's closer to $45 if I enter the zone.

Ok but New Jersey charges people to leave, and leaving Jersey is a hot commodity!

I have to admit that's an expensive trip to leave and return to the city now. Might be nice if there were a discount for verified residents of Manhattan, but given existing issues with placard abuse throughout the NYPD I bet any exceptions would get abused to hell and back.

>If someone really needs to drive into Manhattan most days perhaps they should move to a place that's close to a PATH, LIRR, Metro-North, subway, ferry, or other transit system.

So "not in Queens", then? Jesus Christ.

It depends where in Queens. The buses are actually not bad these days, they get you to the subway or LIRR.

Some parts of Queens are better than others. But infrastructure changes (which is what this is) always results in people finding new jobs or new homes.

Shame to see you so downvoted. The spoiled rich fucks on this board have absolutely no idea just how inaccessible or poorly accessible most of the outer boroughs are and think that a 2-3hr commute (oh those perfectly-running subway lines!) is a perfectly reasonable alternative to paying $5000/mo for a studio.

They're also tripping over themselves to kick every rent stabilized (and statistically-insignificant rent controlled) renter to the invisible corners of the city where their less career-blessed asses belong.

I think the main response would be ‘then dont live there’. I live in a city cheaper than NYC, but I moved to a cheaper area further out due to cost.

Land is unfortunately limited. Someone else is willing to pay more for the space than I am.

I understand moving sucks and prices in areas change, but this is still an area where a functioning market is better on whole.

> ‘then dont live there’

I hear you but for most people that translates to "don't be born there". Most of the same people who would tell you if you can't afford it move out are the same people who think NYC should be a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants because they were born in unfortunate circumstances and desire a better life.

I've moved in and out of NYC several times and each of those moves ended up costing between 5k and 10k in expenses. Broke people can't afford that shit.

I don’t think “don’t be born there” applies to NYC anyway. Less than half of the residents were born in NY state. (So some percent less than that born in NYC itself.)

We need ‘some’ method to allocate residences, and price seems to be the best one we have.

Maybe give people $10k in loans to move out of NYC… they’ll more than save that money by committing from another state.

You know not everyone works in tech? Or has a job that is not as available anywhere else? Or has elderly parents to support? Or lives in subsidized housing that is difficult to secure elsewhere? Or doesn't actually have the disposable income required to relocate? The NYC area accounts for ~10% GDP for the richest country in the world. Why doesn't everyone just move? [GTFOH](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=GTFOH)

If you can't move, and cannot work remotely, there are still lots of other options including finding work literally anywhere in driving distance that isn't below 59th St in Manhattan.

Honestly NYC is a shit show and I don't know why people live there. SI to Manhattan takes like 2 hours at best. You don't even really get any benefit from living in NYC in the outer boroughs.

I love the “just move bro” responses to things like this.

Almost as good as the “let’s just do nothing” responses.

Guess which one is actually possible for the average person.

Both really. One is just easier than the other.

just liek stop being poor or sOmEThing....

A congestion tax isn’t “blaming drivers”, it’s just creating an incentive for them not to drive.

Most of the cost of delivery is labor. If a congestion tax successfully decreases congestion, overall delivery costs may actually go down. A lot of last-mile deliveries are done by bike (not subject to the charge) anyway because they’re more efficient.

Making something more expensive will actually lower costs? That only works sometimes if you make something prohibitively expensive that new methods have to be developed. For instance, if you banned horses in cities pre car, that may spur innovation of cars. Don't see how that applies here.

NYC is very mismanaged in terms of cars and parking. Double parking is the norm and the way the city deals with it is to use tickets as a form of rent. Every single delivery truck gets multiple tickets a day and I think they have some deal worked out that they prepay some amount of their tickets. So instead of solving the problem regarding delivery vehicles the city just lets them break the law and fines them.

None of this stuff is meant to be preventative . It's all about money.

> Making something more expensive will actually lower costs?

Yes, this isn't uncommon. Besides the example you gave of developing new methods, if costs are high due to supply shortages causing production delays, then increasing the price of those supplies can lower overall costs if it results in higher and more predictable supply.

In the case of the supply shortage of NYC roadway space I do not know if $15 is high enough to lower travel times, but if it is then I can absolutely see it lowering delivery costs.

As a thought experiment, if someone built private tunnels throughout lower Manhattan that allowed drivers to bypass most traffic and charged $15 per day for access, what fraction of delivery drivers would choose to pay that versus sit in traffic and make fewer deliveries?

> Making something more expensive will actually lower costs?

Yes. The key in this case is that you’re making a finite resource (road space) more expensive for everyone, forcing a more efficient use of that limited resource.

I've seen quadruple parking in the Bronx, near some green areas. I think it was during a local soccer game.

Of course a $15 charge is city planning. I'm not familiar with NYC, but a similar charge in London has worked wonders.

> Of course a $15 charge is city planning.

In the same way returning a 429 is handling high usage of your service.

But the closer analogy is right there: Charging more for API access to relieve congestion for higher value traffic is a completely valid solution.

Though analogy is going to obfuscate things here due to externalities that vehicle traffic has.

>>I'm not familiar with NYC…

All I needed to read

I think microeconomics is an under appreciated class / study. Thanks for that point. If more people understood those concepts we could skip some of these basic arguments which is why I think people love HN. You can get to the meat of tech discussions without wasting time on the basics. And I wish we could do that with economic discussions.

But to add on - congestion is not just a negative externality problem - it’s a policy problem to get a throughput of people to a location that the road infrastructure cannot support and therefore must incentivize people to a new transportation method which I’m not sure has a solution outside of economic incentives (New York’s solution) or strict regulation (Beijing with no drive days based on license plate number). No solution is perfectly equitable or efficient. But it’s a fun policy academic discussion with a lot of data! I am biased towards the economic incentives based on studies of the two.

These types of policy decisions are perfect for Freakonomic types. You really need to look at lots of data to make direct and indirect consequences of these policies.

Humans are not rational (As we know), behavior cannot always easily be predictable.

Time will tell but I feel like $15 max 1x/day is too low. Drivers are already likely paying other tolls, expensive monthly parking in Manhattan, gas. Another $15/day is not likely to change behavior.

It will definitely affect a lot of people around the margins. Right now, if you commute from North Jersey, you might pay $250 a month in bridge tolls, $600 a month for parking and another $100 for gas (I’m assuming you commute 20 days a month). This will add another 300 bringing your total from $750 a month to $1050. Many people will commute by car anyway, but that is not an insubstantial increase.

Like most things it will push poorer people out, middle income will be annoyed and slightly more poor, and people with money won’t even notice

Another way you can phrase that is that the lion share of the tax will be on wealthy people, so it's a progressive tax.

I've seen conflicting studies - but in general I don't think poor people living around Manhattan have cars or are parking in Manhattan. Less than half of all people in NYC have cars.

> Another way you can phrase that is that the lion share of the tax will be on wealthy people, so it's a progressive tax.

Thats not what a progressive tax means. I understand that you mean poor and middle income will drive less therefor pay less tax. But consider this: would it be a progressive tax if we had a 100% income tax rate on 0-$30,000? Same scenario - poor people would stop making anything therefore not pay taxes yet clearly this is a regressive, not progressive tax, right?

That is not plainly not a progressive tax. The average rich person and the average poor person each seeing their taxes go up the same dollar amount is the definition of a regressive tax.

That comparison doesn't apply here. The average rich person will pay more taxes due to congestion taxes than the average poor person.

I realize the concerns about poor people if they have a car and continue to drive but poor people with a car in southern Manhattan are the exception. Parking already costs $15+ an hour there so it's really just commercial vehicles, tourists, cabs, and wealthy people. Not to mention the policy already has exceptions (admittedly, maybe annoying to file for) for those making under 50k

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/nyregion/nyc-congestion-p...

I suppose in that sense consumption taxes are progressive. It’s not usually how we use that word…

Luxury goods taxes are a textbook example of a progressive tax.

I think this example isn't super clean, but it's closer to that than a tax on the poor or even middle class.

It’s definitely a toll on the middle class. They’re also the ones more likely to be driving in to Manhattan on a daily basis rather than living there compared to the über wealthy.

The vast majority of commuters in NYC use public transit to get around. This idea that only the poor are forced to drive has no basis in reality.

I didn’t mention poor at all. Only middle class vs wealthy.

Middle class folks that work in the city don't drive from NJ into NY, and for the few that do, they should get on a train because it will save them money today and after this goes into effect.

If you're a firefighter or most kinds of laborers that bring tools to work, you're usually dealing with equipment and/or chemicals that are not safe or even permitted on the NYC subway.

You do know that firefighters don't bring their kit home with them, right?

Not true at all. There's literally videos from FDNY chiefs circulating on the NYC news shows complaining about this problem and how it affects them because they're mad about not being exempted.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/07/off-duty-firefighter-saves-chi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Firefighting/comments/w008we/do_you...

Firefighter gear is covered in PFAS and is highly carcinogenic. I don't want them bringing that shit on the subway, no way.

If Firefighter gear is covered in PFAS, and highly carcinogenic, and you don't want them bringing it on the subway, why would you want them to bring it to their homes? The easy, obvious solution is to install safe storage at the fire departments so that the children of firefighters don't have to inhale carcinogens.

That's completely tangential to the discussion. I don't really want them having to bring it home either but that's what happens.

I'm sure they keep it in the trunk of their car or in their garage, etc.

So a progressive tax that disproportionally hurts poor people?

VAT/GST is by definition regressive due to being flat

"Another way" only if you're being disingenuous.

Pricing lower-income folks people out of an activity entirely doesn't make it a "tax on the rich".

I am skeptical there is a sizable amount of low-income people that were driving into lower Manhattan on a daily basis. You cannot find daily parking in this area of Manhattan for less than $30 either way.

There are also exemptions for people who make less than $50,000 a year

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/nyregion/nyc-congestion-p...

It's not as progressive of a tax as a progressive income tax, but it is definitely a tax which will help coordinate behavior and will disproportionately be levied on the wealthy. If any policy that wasn't perfectly progressive could not be implemented, we couldn't have car registration fees, subway tolls, or sales taxes either.

I live in Brooklyn and there are times I want or need to leave the city to Jersey or PA. I'm not trying to park or even be in Manhattan but adding an extra hour or two to a trip to avoid Manhattan is costly. It already costs me close to $30 to leave and come back if I head west.

Also, I live in a low-income neighborhood 1 mile from Manhattan. Many people have cars and use them for work and family. Transit can really suck the further out you are.

I'm pro-transit and am not a giant fan of cars. I use mine for transporting my work as well as some trips. Using Uber would maybe save me money if it was only me travelling short distances and the driver doesn't mind me loading paintings or sculptures in their car or SUV.

I don't even know if I disagree with the law but it's not going to stop the less wealthy from bearing the brunt of this. To act as if driving into Manhattan is purely an act of entertainment or easy choice is missing a million elements. What if your older disabled relative lives in Manhattan and can't take transit? Uber will cost more than the $15 even one way. What if you're unable to take transit and just want to visit someone in Manhattan? This is not a tax on the rich as the rich are maybe 1 in 10.

> I am skeptical there is a sizable amount of low-income people that were driving into lower Manhattan on a daily basis.

The low income were already hurt and now its middle income.

People pay attention to explicit costs. Sometimes irrationally so. e.g. Sales of Tesla Model S cars were predicted to decrease with gas prices. Even though a $500/year swing in fuel cost does not meaningfully change total cost of ownership on a $70,000 car.

Does it though? The congestion is a "tragedy of the commons" problem. Being stuck in traffic sucks for everybody regardless of income.

If rich people pay enough to keep driving on the roads frequently, funds (and maybe even space for buses/rail) can be reclaimed to make transit that much better. The rich people pay for the privilege of driving and transit riders get better service, a win/win.

NYC can't solve income inequality in the US. It's pretty much globally true that everything is better for rich people, everywhere.

Just take public transportation like everybody else

Poorer people are taking the PATH.

> Congestion pricing is expected to reduce the number of vehicles that enter Lower Manhattan by about 17 percent, according to a November study

$600 for parking is maybe if you work on the northern end of Midtown and higher.

I've seen rate quotes in Chelsea/West Village (which is where you'd be parking if you work at say Google or any Disney subsidiary) anywhere from $1200-2200/mo.

At least $300 for bridge or tunnel tolls.

[dead]

London's congestion charge is £15 (about $18) and has largely been a success. I suspect there's a difference in PPP though, so the Manhattan charge is potentially less impactful

People in NYC make much more. So if it's less in NYC than London then I'm even more convinced that it won't do that much for congestion.

It can be a successful way to raise money for the subway system even if it doesn't help much with congestion.

The nyc subways have a spending problem. if they could build and run it at normal world prices things would be much better.

Do you have a source for this? London is not known as a poor city. In addition, some people in both cities are wealthy but a lot more are not. I doubt someone living in the South Brox or Far Rockaway can afford a $15/day charge.

I'm talking about people who already have the means to drive into midtown manhattan as is, with all the tolls and gas and monthly parking bills they're already going to pay. For these people I'm saying I do not see an extra $15 1x/day being a difference maker.

Right, but it's exactly the same in London. The only people who are regularly driving into central London are either professional drivers (taxis, delivery vans, etc), for whom the charge is just an operating expense, or they're very wealthy. Just parking in central London is going to cost you a lot more than the £15/day congestion charge.

In addition to the central congestion charging zone, London also has an additional £12.50 low-emission zone (ULEZ) charge targeted at older, higher-polluting vehicles. The ULEZ has now expanded to cover all of Greater London.

You forget that America is a car culture outside of NYC so a typical tourist coming to NYC for the day will likely just eat the cost and drive anyway. The geography of NYC is also very challenging. A lot of the public transportation options don't even cover places like Staten Island properly so people drive instead. There won't be much of a difference in traffic imo. Taking the train is already pretty expensive.

Maybe those tourists can do what this tourist did (well, my parents). Park at some station and take the train in.

It was the obvious thing to do for Europeans visiting a metropolis.

When you have a large group it's cheaper to take a vehicle in.

I don't answer your question, but I had a quick look for statistics and found this beautiful map — zoom in all the way!

It broadly shows there are rich and poor areas of London, but I don't know if it's better to be in the bottom 10% in London or New York.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

I've lived in both rich(ish) and poor(ish) areas of London over the years. Clapham, Fulham/West Brompton, and Maida Vale in the "rich" west. Whitechapel, Poplar, and the Isle of Dogs in the "poor" east.

It is my general observation that the "rich" areas suffer more from traffic congestion and pollution, because more people own cars and more of those cars tend to be giant diesel Range Rovers and such. In the east it seems like while there are still a lot of parked cars everywhere, people don't actually drive them around as much, choosing the bus/train/bike/feet more often for everyday travel.

Also worth remembering that even the "poor" parts of London are still pretty rich by overall UK standards.

The bottom 10% in london can’t afford insurance for the car, let alone parking.

Median rent is also 2x London’s. Median pay is less than 3x. That’s not even counting the rest of cost of living changes

It’ll only affect working class people who commute by driving for whatever reason. As usual the actual rich won’t care. The majority of NYers don’t even own a car. So it’s mostly tourists and people from outside the city (plus ride share/taxis) who are driving.

Whenever I’ve parked in central london it’s been £50 for the day, the congestion charge is meaningless compared with the cost of petrol and parking.

How has it been a success? I'm not familiar.

London's congestion charge is just City of London. That's an incredibly tiny portion of London.

In terms of impact, this is closer to putting congestion pricing on everything inside of M25.

Not wanting to be too nitpicky, but the congestion charge includes the City of London and the West End. The City of London is 1 sq mi (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London) and the congestion charge zone is 8 sq mi total (https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tips-advice/108908/london-cong...).

I'm not sure how this compares to Manhattan's zone in terms of area.

Very, very small. Roughly similar to taxing driving below Wall Street or something.

There's no clean comparison of Manhattan to a portion of London, but just in terms of land area it's about 10% of NYC, and in terms of population it's around 20% (so maybe divide each by half to get the impact of this new rule). More importantly, almost every way to enter or exit the city by car is covered by this new toll. That's definitely not true in the case of the CoL congestion tax.

> The congestion zone covers about eight square miles of central London, close in size to the future congestion zone in Manhattan.

https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2019/05/19/congest...

(Many websites have similar comparisons.)

London is 600 square miles and has numerous routes into and out of the city. Manhattan is 23, and is an island with a handful of bridges and tunnels.

As a percentage of the whole, the City of London is trivial, whereas this "congestion district" is about half of Manhattan (even more if you account for central park).

Fair enough. I also think London doesn't really have a culture of driving into it. I could drive into London but with the sprawl; likely inability to find suitable parking; traffic and congestion charge, I never would. It's quicker for me to get the train (living about 50mi West of London). Though trains are becoming more expensive and less reliable by the day.

It’s Manhattan below 60th, not all of Manhattan, so maybe half the island, and it doesn’t include the FDR. Most of the ways to get to Queens, Brooklyn or Staten Island by car won’t be affected — same for the Bronx obviously.

> Most of the ways to get to Queens, Brooklyn or Staten Island by car won’t be affected — same for the Bronx obviously.

That's incorrect. All of the bridges and tunnels other than GW and Randall's Island (RFK) enter or exit from this new zone. With this new plan, literally all of the ways to get to Manhattan by vehicle will now have a toll. Some will have two.

I suppose if you're willing to take the tiny bridges from the Bronx into Harlem you can still get around tolls, but good luck with that.

Not sure why you’re fighting this so hard, but: GW, Triboro, Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Goethals, Outerbridge, Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel. Only the last two land in the toll zone. So yes, “most,” and it’s not especially close.

I’m not counting the Brooklyn Bridge, etc, because I was replying to your “ways to enter the city.” The topic as I understood it was “will you pay this toll if your final destination isn’t Manhattan,” and the answer is “Not unless you’re coming from certain parts of New Jersey, and even then you’ve got choices.”

> London's congestion charge is just City of London

This is only lower Manhattan.

No, it's everything south of 60th, and essentially every ingress/egress to the city, other than Randalls Island, the GW, and the Bronx.

> it's everything south of 60th

You’re right. It’s lower and midtown Manhattan. That said, it doesn’t include most of Manhattan let alone New York City.

The core question is what someone who won’t pay $15 and refuses to not drive into the city during its most congested hours is bringing to the table. That is harsh. But it is a trade-off a city must make with its limited resources.

The "rich person driving into the city" is a scapegoat. Get rid of those people (whom I absolutely do not care about taxing; it's fine, whatever), and the streets will still be crammed with the traffic supporting all the people who live here. And under this plan, those trucks, buses, taxis, etc. will be taxed to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

As someone who hasn't owned a car in well over a decade, but lives in NYC and pays for things here -- and yes, even takes the occasional taxi when the MTA sucks -- this is what I resent. Setting aside the corruption and incompetence of the MTA (which we should absolutely not set aside), this is little more than a regressive tax on the people who live here, dressed up like anti-car activism.

Apparently, everything below 61st St.

I'm unclear on how that's supposed to work, though. There are a lot of avenues crossing 61st. Are they going to put tolls on all of them?

I guess that could work, since it's all EZ-Pass anyway. But it does imply that there are going to be some people who take the Queensboro Bridge (paying the Central Business District Toll), but head to the Upper East Side. Then when they leave, they'll have to pay the toll to enter the CBD again to take the bridge home.

They already put up the toll tag scanners, they are just turned off.

You are correct. Most people haven't looked at a London map too closely, so there is a limited understanding of what the City of London is.

> The City of London, London's ancient core and financial centre − an area of just 1.12 square miles (2.9 km2) and colloquially known as the Square Mile − retains boundaries that closely follow its medieval limits.

Greater London, in total, is larger than Los Angeles.

https://mapfight.xyz/map/los.angeles/#london

https://www.londoninfoguide.com/how-big-is-london-uk.html

The congestion charge is not for Greater London and the Manhattan toll is not for all of Manhattan.

The city of London is irrelevant to this discussion. The London congestion charge covers a much larger area, roughly the same size as the one proposed in New York.

timr is not correct, he is confidently wrong even if he makes the same claim several times in the discussion.

> The London congestion charge covers a much larger area, roughly the same size as the one proposed in New York. timr is not correct, he is confidently wrong even if he makes the same claim several times in the discussion.

And you keep forgetting to say that London is 600 square miles, and Manhattan is about 20. They're also vastly different in terms of their connectivity to the outside world. The "London congestion area" is a tiny section of the middle of London. This covers almost every major ingress/egress into the island of Manhattan.

I'm not sure what's being debated here, but I just want to point out Manhattan is less than 20% of NYC's land area. And as you point out this is only about half of Manhattan. So 10% of the total city?

The issue was comparing the City of London to half of Manhattan, for purposes of comparison. I felt like some clarity on the sizing would be helpful. I think you're correct in the 10%. Also, I should have compared Half of Manhattan to the City of London, but I couldn't find a good illustration of that. Hopefully, the links are found to be useful.

Why not post greater Los Angeles then? Borders of Los Angeles are not less arbitrary than borders of City of London.

Again, the City of London (1 sq mile) is not London and the UK has a rather convoluted municipal system. The comparable region would be a borough, like Manhattan.

I used the term Greater London to try to make the distinction. I failed you.

Since the toll and comparative congestion pricing are municipal concepts, the arbitrary sizes matter for the purposes of figuring out consequence. The post was not very illustrative, since I compared LA to London, as opposed to NYC to London. The greater LA area just happens to share arbitrary terminology to my choice of description, rather than specific relevancy.

I think they want the revenues more than they want to change behavior. They want it to be low enough to keep the cars and the tolls flowing, but high enough to generate revenue.

Mta is in nearly $50 billion in debt last I read

they should privatize like Japan did. setup the correct insentives like Japan did and it seems to work. train companies own hotels, malls, grocery stores, office building, and apartments at and near their stations. This creates a virtuous cycle where the better the train service the more people patronize their other services and visa versa

is round-trip bus or train fare into the city higher or lower than $15/day? it seems like if they can just make the car a higher marginal cost per day than transit, that should do a lot.

Yes, round-trip bus and train fare work out to lower than $15 per day by a pretty large margin. If you were to only go into the city and out via subway/train i.e. two rides a day it would work out closer to around $6 per day which is already lower than the $15 cost which also doesn't include cost of gas and parking making it likely much higher of a cost for cars. Of course many people take the train many more times than that per week but thats where OMNY comes in with a per week maximum cost for using transit.

If you use OMNY there is a max you can be charged per week. Essentially all rides are free after your 12th ride per 7 day period. Since the cost of a ride on busses or subway is $2.90 that works out to a max of ~$35 per week for unlimited rides all over the city via train or bus.

I don't live in NYC anymore, but when I did I could never imagine owning a car given the financial burden not being justifiable, but obviously those that do have one are likely in a much higher tax bracket than I am, or are going there for business purposes.

It depends where you are taking the train from. I know of a lot of places in New Jersey where the train fare is a lot more than $6/person.

Thats true, there is a very large population of people who commute into the city from other areas where these same prices may not apply. But I still think the cost of parking alone would likely be larger than the cost of transit.

Where are you getting round trip tickets for $6/day from locations which would normally drive in?

Taking NJT one way is $6.75 for me. I also need to take a subway into the office (@$2.75/ride) to make it in on time so $19/day. One could buy a monthly pass at $184/mo or move to somewhere with PATH but for most people dropping $184/month is a lot of money for train tickets and most people who live in NJ need a car for life in NJ.

I don't think this is a good state of things. It would be great if we had plans to expand PATH or increase service times of NJT or build more housing next to NJT/PATH that normal people could afford but all of these seem very unlikely.

> and most people who live in NJ need a car for life in NJ

As someone who lives in NJ, I'd very much like to see this change. There's a ton of things within easy biking distance of my house, but no safe way to get there. Some decent bike infrastructure would go a long way.

You are correct, I was talking about people who live in the city whereas most who may consider a car don't. But I literally did know a few people who lived in the city and drove a car.

I do still think that for most others near public transit it would still net less costly to use that than to drive given cost of parking and gas on top of these new fees.

This is per car and bus/train/subway are per person.

a huge portion of car trips are made with only one person in the car, so it's still a fair comparison for all those trips.

Average amount of people in the car during rush hours is 1.3.

Driving is already likely a lot more expensive, so yeah I'm suggesting that if drivers have already made that decision as is I don't see another $15/day being a huge difference maker.

Monthly garage parking in midtown is like $800/month.

If you get a monthly pass, it is not.

However, this $15 charge is a floor. If you commute into the city by car, you're paying for parking and gas (if driving ICE) as well.

It’s like $5.80 (2.90 each way iirc) assuming you don’t have to leave one station to get to another. As long as you’re behind the turnstiles you don’t have to pay again (for trains)

So one of the big things this will do is encourage mass transit from the eastern new york / Manhattan river crossings. It has never been (and will continue to not be) a level playing field for commuters. Coming in from Brooklyn or Queens there are a lot of commuters that drive into lower Manhattan which until now was entirely un-tolled. This, combined with the rebate for people taking the existing tolled entrances will be a first step in equity.

Based on how much people complain about surge pricing on the Bay Area 101 toll lanes it counts for something.

People normally react with disgust, not rational calculation, to tolls. They'll drive in ways that not only discounts any value to their time, bu lt also in ways where the additional mileage costs more than the toll they're avoiding.

So, give it a chance and then ratchet up. $15 would certainly upset me.

Well, you probably wouldn't be paying $800/mo just to park in midtown as is then.

Guilty. I could make the math work for another mode of transportation very easily in that scenario..

Only thing is they should charge more for heavier and for less eco-friendly cars.

I don’t think it would be productive (or fair) to send a message of “your eco-friendly car is welcome”, when the real concern is traffic/space and any “green car bonus” might disappear on pretty short notice.

Incentivizing eco-friendly cars is great in general, but I think the two concerns in this case are best addressed separately.

In fact, for a geography like Manhattan, prioritizing public transport and small transport (bikes and scooters) would go a long way in improving congestion and conditions in general.

No car is, nor ever will be, as eco-friendly as a subway train. The point of congestion pricing is to better capture the actual costs of folks using cars instead of public transit.

Eco-friendly cars are a little better than traditional cars, but public transport is far far better. They're not in the same league.

Though it might be a good idea to also encourage carpooling with reduced tolls, because presumably one bigger car carrying 5-7 people is better than 5-7 smaller but still bigger-than-city-cars carrying 1 person each.

Presumably the toll is per vehicle, so carpooling already divides the fee among the carpoolers.

Wonder about the road damage aspect of this. If the relationship is a 4th power of weight, assuming a single vehicle with 2x the weight, it would need to replace 16 individual cars to break even.

"According to a 2022 study from the Environmental Protection Agency, the average weight of a car is 4,094 pounds."[1]

Going from 1 person of 200lb to 4 people totaling 800lb (in a 4,000lb car) increases the damage by less than an additional car (4,800 / 4,200) ^ 4 = 1.71

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-car-weight-140033718....

I imagine the average car commuter in NYC weighs about 150lbs

Good question. Maybe the amount of toll reduction should depend on the number of people carried and the weight of the vehicle, encouraging lightweight vehicles that can carry a lot of people. Probably should have a hard cutoff too so e.g. over a certain weight loses the reduction altogether.

How come Kei Cars are not a thing outside Japan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car

Seems like it would help a lot.

We can't convince NYC residents to not drive giant SUVs.

I think it's similar to how there's a lot of scooter drivers in SEA, but less elsewhere. Yes, climate is a factor, but I'd say so is culture. I think it's a lot more socially acceptable in Japan to drive a smaller vehicle than it is in the US. Kei car is also a policy, which makes these cars more attractive economically. And I think that for the same cultural reason, a similar policy in the US wouldn't work.

Reducing pollution is not the GOAL, to collect as much money as possible to give short term remedy to NYC's fiscal deep hole is the goal.

They should charge more as those are most likely to have transit options. some who drihe a truck are bringing tools or delivering things and so can't use transit. those shouldn't bay a fee . of course vehile type is the wrong thing to look at instead it is what you are doing.

Yes, especially all the delivery trucks that bring goods in from online retailers directly to the steps of buildings. I'd support a heavy tax on those, since they are the most dangerous of all the vehicles. Would also like to see a tax on scooters and mopeds that food delivery drivers use.

What's wrong with scooters and mopeds?

I don't see the problem with scooters if they're electric, but mopeds are nasty and spew tons of pollution, plus they're ridiculously noisy. I think they should just be banned.

e-bikes are fine though, and should in fact be encouraged somehow. They're a great form of personal transport in a dense city; they're very very common here in Tokyo these days.

The commenter doesn’t drive either.

But shouldn't pollution and noise be pretty much solved in the foreseeable future, I suppose, with EVs on the rise?

And congestion I find an interesting one. Where I live, the city planners are trying to make it as hard as possible for people driving into the city, the idea being that people will just give up if driving even to a parking lot close to the city center sucks too much. However, it has always made me wonder: doesn't this strategy add to the congestion? Like, what if you made it instead super easy and fast to get to a parking spot - then your car would be off the road much faster and you'd produce less congestion, less noise, and less pollution.

EVs don’t have tailpipe emission but they have tire and brake dust (worse, due to the average weight) and make tire and wind noise, not to mention having horns. From a climate change perspective, less CO2 is better but for things like heart disease, asthma, stress as well as water pollution they’re not much of an improvement.

> have tire and brake dust (worse, due to the average weight)

this isn't really true. EV brakes barely get any use because of regenerative breaking, and EV tires tend to be stiffer which mostly evens out the tires.

People who’ve studied it disagree:

> Assuming lightweight EVs (i.e. with battery packs enabling a driving range of about 100 miles), the report finds that EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less non-exhaust PM2.5 and 18-19% less PM10 than ICEVs. Assuming that EV models are heavier (with battery packs enabling a driving range of 300 miles or higher), however, the report finds that they reduce PM10 by only 4-7% and increase PM2.5 by 3-8% relative to conventional vehicles. Additional simulations indicate that the uptake of electric vehicles will lead to very marginal decreases in total PM emissions from road traffic in future years. In scenarios where electric vehicles comprise 4% and 8% of the vehicle stock in 2030, their penetration reduces PM emissions by 0.3%-0.8% relative to current levels.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/env-2020-311-en/index.ht...

And by studied you mean come up with synthetic / theoretical models that are not verified against reality?

Ignoring actual tailpipe emissions and focusing on large PM10 particles like dust kicked up from the road is not a serious evaluation of the benefits of EVs vs combustion engines

This sub-thread came from someone specifically questioning a comment acdha had made about non-tailpipe emissions. To bring tailpipe emissions back up here is a bit of a non-sequitur.

That’s just one of many studies - look at the fishery damage caused by tires in the PNW next - but I’m not arguing against EVs, only that they are not a solution to pollution and any better world should involve fewer and smaller cars.

I don't think you've received a good reply to the congestion part of your comment.

The most poorly understood urban planning concept by the general public is the idea of induced demand. Usually this is applied to freeway expansion, which inevitably ends up being just as congested as pre expansion.

However, induced demand can just as easily be applied to parking lots. Especially in NYC area, very few people who drive and park don't have an alternative. Those people only have so much tolerance for looking for parking, so limiting parking will push people on the margin to transit.

For the individual, driving will almost always be the best choice if you build endless parking and highways. But, it's not necessarily better for the collective to allocate our land and resources like that. Parking lots aren't free. In fact, they require a huge amount of space. You can fit more people in an apartment building with that space!

Parking takes up a lot of space, and space is obviously at a premium in downtown Manhattan.

> But shouldn't pollution and noise be pretty much solved in the foreseeable future, I suppose, with EVs on the rise?

The loudest noise is tire noise.

This is generally the case in most cities, but less so at lower Manhattan speeds.

Large diesel trucks produce a lot of pollution and noise. But those will take longer to electrify.

Tire wear also contributes the most to PM2.5 pollution, and EVs are heavier and produce more wear

Interesting. Do you have a source to back up the part about EVs?

https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/gaining-traction-los...

You need a source to tell you EVs are heavier? This is a basic fact.

> This is a basic fact.

Clearly they don't want a source, it's just malicious ignorance. After all, if they really wanted to know it'd be far easier to click the "plus" button on their browser and ask DuckDuckGo.

Funny that you should mention that, because the first hit I get when I type "EVs PM2.5 pollution" into my search engine is a Science Direct article that contains the following quote: "Findings demonstrate that EV adoption can significantly alleviate PM2.5 pollution." Not that I am one to blindly believe whatever happens to show up at the top of my search results, but it shows the ridiculousness of your argument about how easy it is to just do a web search.

So I'd recommend for next time, keep your clairvoyance to yourself (because I "clearly" did want a source) and while your add it, perhaps also your offences ("malicious ignorance").

The real loudest noise at city speeds is mostly jerks with modified exhaust or occasionally a large diesel truck.

Good news! Dodge are catering to that demographic with "the "Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust," which combines chambers and speakers under the car, plus some actual pipes" for all their anti-social needs.

If that is true then I doubt that this new fee will solve the noise problem.

In NYC, I'm pretty sure it is the horn (and the siren) ;-)

Noise will be about the same, it's the people honking their horns at traffic that are the real noise problem. But with a toll there will be less cars and then less horns honked.

Interesting. It's been so long that I visited Manhattan that I have no recollection of the soundscape, but the city where I live is much, much smaller. There is basically no honking here.

The horn honking is cultural in New York. If you visit the area, and cross from New Jersey into Manhattan, you'll notice that as soon as you cross the Hudson river, drivers are suddenly honking their horns for any reason at all, whereas they weren't in NJ.

It's not about city size; I live in Tokyo now, which is much larger than NYC, it's extremely rare to hear a horn honk here, even in the areas with heavier car and truck traffic. Horn honking is a cultural thing.

Honking is moderate. The biggest source of noise is ambulance / fire / occasionally police sirens.

Sometimes it's also the occasional car with a kilowatt music system blaring at full power.

This is regular streets; expressways are noisier but few.

In my experience the biggest source of noise is homeless people cosplaying as roosters, maybe I just got unlucky with my apartment location though. Police sirens only last a couple seconds because of the burst setup theyve got.

Must be an unfortunate location. From my many years of experience, this is really rare; NYC seems to have relatively few homeless folks, and most I ever met were quiet.

Regarding location, check the prices in hotels right on the Times Square; they used to be lower than in similar hotels a few blocks away. Times Squae can get really noisy, and stays bustling 24/7. Tourists value some quiet %)

Agree on the siren noise. Last time I stayed in NYC for a week, the sirens were constant. There was horn honking too, but the sirens were loud and frequent.

Drivers also supply positive externalities by engaging in commerce with associated consumer surplus. No one is driving into Manhattan for the thrill of it.

So goes the argument of every roadside downtown strip who complain about the removal of their curbside parking.

The reality in many cases is that walkers make up a substantial, if not majority of the business in these places (referring to denser town areas with parallel curbside parking rather than suburban strips with normal parking or actual parking lots)

Drivers are overwhelmingly funded by urban cores, nationwide, and the data is not ambiguous.

People do not cover the cost of their commuter lifestyle.

Your comment comes very close to implying that these people would not be there if they weren’t driving in.

> it makes drivers pay for the externalities they produce (including pollution, congestion, noise)

you can make a point that charging drivers will impact the poor a lot more then others.

and another point you can make is that if anyone was actually interested in pollution then wouldn’t it have been better to restrict usage directly?

I agree, but I think there should be an income cutoff, below a certain income level it's free.

Reason is there are lots of lower income folks who live top far out to use public transport or need to drive for other reasons (hotdogs or bagel cart) that this would really negatively impact.

The thing about a congestion tax is that if it’s effective at getting drivers to mode shift to transit, it also makes things better for drivers who do continue to drive, since they deal with less traffic. If a large group of people is excepted from the fee, they may start to mode shift in the reverse direction because they get the benefit without the cost.

In this case, I would say that would be good. It would be subsidizing our poorest folks, at the cost of those who can afford it.

Why not advocate for incentivizing use of public transportation by lowering costs trains and buses instead? It seems like prices only ever go up.

Because trains cost money? Everything can't be free or cost less just because you wish it so.

I'm a big proponent of no-fare subway's, but I don't think the MTA should just do that without a revenue source to replace rider fares. It would result in a completely broken subway system.

Huh? Free? A ton of tax money goes to both road maintenance and public transportation. This kind of price hiking comes off as a double-dip. Surely they have enough money in the budget already?

> Surely they have enough money in the budget already?

No, the MTA seems to be running with a substantial deficit right now: https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics

Removing fare revenue would only exacerbate that as a large portion of their revenue comes from fares.

nice find, it would be really cool to see the revenue v. budget year over year.

labor related costs seem sticky, and 58% is huge. I wonder how that compares to D.C. and other metros with automated systems.

a $3b cliff due to change of ridership is impressive, but doesn't common sense suggest fewer riders mean they don't need as much money?

> but doesn't common sense suggest fewer riders mean they don't need as much money?

Not necessarily. Consider: what would they cut? Run fewer trains? Reducing frequency has a huge negative effect on how convenient transfers are, which means you're likely pushing more riders away. (It can be the difference between hopping off one train and catching a new one 5 minutes later rather than 10 or 15 minutes later. Not a fun change in the middle of your trips!)

That can then lead to even less fare revenue... and you really don't want that, it's the infamous transit death spiral.

The cost is fine, but is it creating an incentive for drivers to stay longer because if they go in and out they are double charged?

We're talking about lower Manhattan, so in practice if they stay longer then they have to deal with alternate side parking or pay for garage parking.

Or, what the hell, I don't live there anymore, so I'll give away my secret awesome free parking spot: under the Williamsburg Bridge east of Clinton St.

Which works to the advantage of the city. They want to you stop to work your job (income tax), buy stuff (sales tax), participate on foot (low pollution). Not drive through (consumes tax dollars on roads, high pollution). In the long term if you move closer or change your commute mode they win too.

I am thinking more about Uber drivers I guess, who won’t be able to enter and exit all day. So they may be just sticking around the city, causing traffic.

You are only charged max once per day under the plan.

I assume this is aimed at commuters who drive into the city and almost always enter and exit the city exactly once a day.

> instead of leaving residents dealing with those costs.

Residents will be mostly the ones paying these costs. Residents are not exempted.

From Wikipedia 3.7 million people were employed in New York City; Manhattan is the main employment center with 56% of all jobs.[19] Of those working in Manhattan, 30% commute from within Manhattan.

And: The primary mode of transportation in New York City is rail. Only 6% of shopping trips in Manhattan involve the use of a car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_New_York_Cit...

NYC, and specifically Manhattan, is pretty much the only US city where you can get by pretty easily without owning a car but there's no cultural expectation with respect to friends and recreational options that you have one.

You don't need a car in San Francisco. It's a tiny city that's easily traversable by bike, metro and bus - or just walking. I haven't had a car in the city in over 10 years and it's really never impacted me - except for saving me boatloads of money, I guess, probably well over $100K.

SF is an awful place to own a car if you don't have a parking garage; however, you lose out on regional mobility. Marin, Sonoma, Tahoe - so many monumental vistas are an easy drive from SF, but nearly impossible without a motor. (Bicycling gets you some of the way there, but it's still life at a different scale.)

The ultimate SF cheat code is to get a Vespa - the regional mobility of a car, but the ease of travel and parking of a bicycle. Traffic doesn't exist on a Vespa.

> Marin, Sonoma, Tahoe - so many monumental vistas are an easy drive from SF, but nearly impossible without a motor.

you can rent a car over weekend..

But the point is that you DON'T have to do that in NYC.

My point was slightly different. If you want to go skiing for the weekend, you either have to carpool or rent a car of course. But in NYC (or at least Manhattan/parts of Brooklyn), there's just a general assumption among your local friends, organizations putting together activities, etc. that neither you nor a lot of other people have cars.

By contrast, with a group of paddling friends, some of which live in Cambridge, everyone has a car and while we'll carpool where appropriate the (correct) assumption is everyone has a car for gatherings and activities.

I wouldn't be so sure. A number of my friends tried living without a car and they quickly bought one when they could afford it. There are so many places that the car unlocks.

For instance, taking a bus to Golden Gate park from downtown isn't that fast. If you like to go to the park, it helps to have a car.

> For instance, taking a bus to Golden Gate park from downtown isn't that fast. If you like to go to the park, it helps to have a car.

From personal experience, yes, it's strictly "faster" to take a car to the park from downtown unless you include going to the parking lot, picking up your car, finding a parking spot and then walking to where you're actually trying to go. From Powell it's 16 minutes by the N train every 10 minutes, followed by a 3 minute walk. I guess driving is technically 16, but you know, parking on either side. Or 23 minutes by bike.

Honestly, the fastest way between any two points in the city is a bike (or an e-bike, or scooter) at least 2/3 of the day.

Then you have the spiky "oops all traffic" and your drive gets exponentially longer while your bike commute (or metro, or bus ride with protected lanes) remains exactly the same length.

The kind of places a car actually unlocks (going out of town on weekends) are like $100 for a car rental vs depreciation, financing, tolls, registration, insurance, parking, fines, gas/charging, etc. That gives you a huge car rental and Uber budget. And rental cars are usually available at the same parking lots you'd normally be putting your car.

> From personal experience, yes, it's strictly "faster" to take a car to the park from downtown unless you include going to the parking lot, picking up your car, finding a parking spot and then walking to where you're actually trying to go. From Powell it's 16 minutes by the N train every 10 minutes, followed by a 3 minute walk. I guess driving is technically 16, but you know, parking on either side. Or 23 minutes by bike.

Don't forget about the time to actually get to the station either.

> Then you have the spiky "oops all traffic" and your drive gets exponentially longer while your bike commute (or bus ride with protected lanes) remains exactly the same length.

A cramped bus or train ride gets pretty miserable too. There's nothing fundamentally preventing bike congestion either, aside from bikes being miserable enough that they have a fraction of the usage.

> The kind of places a car actually unlocks (going out of town on weekends) are like $100 for a car rental vs depreciation, financing, tolls, registration, insurance, parking, fines, gas/charging, etc. That gives you a huge car rental and Uber budget. And rental cars are usually available at the same parking lots you'd normally be putting your car.

This must be somewhere between regional and bullshit. Looking it up, it seems like you'd expect to pay around $65/day + gas here for a rental. But then you need to consider availability (hope you didn't plan on going during holiday/vacation season!) and the practicalities of the rental process itself (picking up and delivering the car becomes its own full trip on its own, not to mention all the paperwork involved).

> A cramped bus or train ride gets pretty miserable too.

It's unpleasant but the bus/train will get there at about the same time it would with fewer riders, which is not the case for car congestion.

> There's nothing fundamentally preventing bike congestion either, aside from bikes being miserable enough that they have a fraction of the usage.

Because bikes are smaller and more nimble, it takes substantially more of them to have congestion in the same amount of space as it does with cars. A single stopped car in an 11-foot-wide lane will back up that lane; given the same amount of space cyclists will just go around.

I've been traveling in the Netherlands/Belgium the last few weeks and it's made the space taken up by cars extremely clear. On the streets where cars are restricted, there's a ton of space for pedestrians and cyclists - until a single car shows up, at which point it dominates the available space.

> ... the practicalities of the rental process itself (picking up and delivering the car becomes its own full trip on its own, not to mention all the paperwork involved).

Check out Getaround or Turo. In major cities there's zero paperwork, the keys are in the car, and the car is parked in a parking lot a short walk from where you already are. They're very cheap and you can rent by the hour. There's a getaround parked in the white zone in front of my apartment building that's $53 per day.

> Check out Getaround or Turo.

Both seem to be very US-focused, and CA specifically.

> In major cities there's zero paperwork,

For a very narrow definition of major, perhaps.

> They're very cheap and you can rent by the hour. There's a getaround parked in the white zone in front of my apartment building that's $53 per day.

For a very broad definition of cheap, perhaps.

And is it going to be available when you actually need it? Even the most congested highways are practically empty a pretty large portion of the day, but that doesn't help you for shit during rush hour.

> and the car is parked in a parking lot a short walk from where you already are.

I assume "huge parking lots everywhere with lots of space" is another US-ism.

Everything I said pertained specifically to San Francisco. You were replying to a sub-thread about San Francisco. Top of thread I said "You don't need a car in San Francisco." Were you expecting me to provide international options? I'm honestly not sure what the availability of Turo or Getaround is even in the US outside of SF.

Further, I said a car rental was $100 for the weekend, and yeah, I guess it was $106. The average American spends $800-1000 per month on their car in excess of the base price according to the AAA, so yeah, $53 per day seems pretty cheap within the context of this conversation.

I don’t live in a city but a lot of my time a Saturday is waking up, having a coffee, and mulling what I’m in the mood for doing today.

No way, dude. We have a car parked in a garage, and we take the Lyft ebikes to go to GGP. It's faster from SOMA to take the bikes than the cars. Primarily because you can park at the other end really easily. Same with the Mission. If you add parking time, almost every SF location is better by Lyft ebike.

Have lived here over a decade, with car, motorcycle, bike, and ridden Muni+Bart. I'd never use the buses (way too slow) but ebikes are pure gold in the city.

I know a couple who live in Dogpatch without a car but my observation is they do a lot of Zipcar, regular rentals and Uber.

> they quickly bought one when they could afford it

Anybody can afford a car, and yet we’d be much better off if we didn’t spend 10 grand a year on something we don’t really need. With compounding interest, that 1k a month becomes 500k in 20 years

At 6.6%. After tax.

And $1k a month sounds insane to own a car to me - at least 5 times the cost

You think gas + the cost of purchase of a car + maintenance + insurance doesn’t add up to 1k?

Mine certainly doesn’t.

I ran these numbers at some point, on average.

Average monthly car payment for a new car in California is $738 ($532 used). A record share of Americans are payment $1000 or more on monthly car payments. [1]

Average monthly parking in SF is $340 according to SpotHero, if you have your own place and spot, that added $80-100,000 to the price of your home, so you can decide how you'd like to value that. Today 7.5% APR mortgage, that would add $7500 per year in interest, $625/month. Less if your mortgage is lower-interest.

Bankrate says the average annual insurance cost in SF is $2692 ($224 per month).

AAA says the average price of routine maintenance is 10c/mile. Average distance traveled is 14000mi/yr, so that's $1400/yr ($116 per month).

Add in gas, tolls, fines, registration, collision damage, etc.

Should be $800-1000 per month on top of your car payment.

Which is incidentally what AAA found. US average is $894 per month on top of the purchase price, or just shy of $11,000 per year. And one has to imagine it's a lot more than that in San Francisco. [2]

The GGP's $1K per month estimate is actually probably about half of what people pay all-in amortized over the ownership period of a car. 6.6% return is below the S&P average. I dunno man, the numbers check out, and may even be quite conservative.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/auto-loan-average-payments-2023...

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/cost-of-car-ownership...

Depends where you are in sf, the transit is an order of magnitude worse then manhattan

You can get by without a car in Boston as I do as well, if you work and live in the city.

That applies to a number of cities but that's the caveat. Especially if you're a bit older, it's common for friends to live outside the city, many jobs aren't in the city, there are activities you might like to do outside the city etc. Yes, there are rental cars but that's the type of thing I was getting at with my comment about cultural expectations.

Everyone in my circle who lives in Boston/Cambridge owns a car.

When I lived in Philly I still drove to do my shopping but I had coworkers that didn't even have cars.

> You can get by without a car in Boston as I do as well, if you work and live in the city.

FWIW, I lived in the city and worked in a suburb, and also was able to live car-free without issue. This was in the days before ride-hailing apps, so I imagine it'd be even easier now. (Not technically car-free, I know)

I’ve always worked out by 495 not adjacent to commuter rail. So living in town without a car would have been impossible. Indeed would have been too long a commute for me with a car.

I was working off 128 in Waltham and the time I worked overlapped perfectly with a city-sponsored local bus route that took people from the train station to the business areas. There were about 15-20 regulars doing the train-to-bus the morning Since the bus basically existed for commuters, the driver would always wait when the train was late.

The most amazing part of that commute was that most of the commuters actually did a cross-platform transfer at North Station from the Newburyport/Rockport line to the Fitchburg line. Again, one reason it worked is that the conductors on the outbound train would hold a few minutes of the Newburyport train was late.

I live in the area. You can get by, as long as you're willing to risk your life every few minutes. Some parts of Boston are walkable/bikeable, but most of it is not.

I don't really bike and certainly wouldn't in Boston. But most of the urban core (essentially Bay Bay plus the original pre-landfill Boston) plus Cambridge in general are absolutely walkable.

New Orleans used to be until they nuked the bus system recently.

This broke my heart because it was one of the reasons that New Orleans was one of my favorite travel destinations.

This move was so short-sighted.

The board of the transit system is currently falling apart and probably facing an impending FBI investigation so all the statements that were made about it being right as rain again within a year when they made the latest service cuts are now laughable.

Chicago is like this as well.

Chicago probably comes closest. Yes, it's not really binary.

Maybe Manhattanites should have to pay $15/day to park their cars on the street. That would quickly curb traffic issues in the city.

I would love if (_consistently available_) $15/day street parking was a thing in Manhattan, it'd be a good deal cheaper than garages and obviously a lot more convenient than keeping your car elsewhere. There isn't much benefit to having a car in Manhattan for day-to-day life, but it would be nice to have for things like day trips. Right now I park my car about 45 minutes away in another borough (at my family's house) so when I do need to drive I have a +90min fixed cost added to my commute time.

FWIW, Manhattan commercial real estate goes for about $80/ft²/yr. A parking space therefore costs about $40/day in real estate rent, so $15/day is well below costs.

Is that $80/ft^2/yr raw land value? Indoor space cannot be directly compared against a spot in a garage that’s not climate controlled and is more vulnerable to vandalism.

For more on this solution read The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup.

None of those numbers address the question at issue, which is,

"What percentage of vehicles used in Manattan on a given day are from outside Manhattan?"

>Of those working in Manhattan, 30% commute from within Manhattan.

Most commuters terminating in Manhattan are on mass transit so this stat doesn't really speak to the car question. Also a lot of vehicular traffic in Manhattan is not to do with commuting.

(I suspect the person you are replying to is incorrect, incidentally; I take no position in this argument. Your comment is a bit of a non sequitur is all.)

Some review from 2007: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/nyregion/12traffic.html

> Census data show that more city residents than suburbanites drive to work in Manhattan every day, according to Mr. Schaller. He estimated that 263,000 people in 19 counties in and around New York City drive regularly to jobs in Manhattan below 60th Street. Of those, 53 percent, or 141,000, live in the five boroughs, Mr. Schaller said. The greatest numbers are from Queens, with 51,300, and Brooklyn, with 33,400. About 23,900 auto commuters live in Manhattan, while 17,400 are from the Bronx and 15,200 from Staten Island. The suburban area with the most auto commuters to Manhattan is Nassau County, with 22,091 people driving to work in the borough, followed by Bergen County, with 19,975.

So 53% from NYC, 10% from Manhattan, 47% from outside the city. Only counting commuting as you note.

The primary mode of transportation is rail, but even ignoring taxis and Ubers (which we all use sometimes) we depend on things delivered by cars. They don't bring groceries or Amazon deliveries on the subway.

This stuff adds up, and is a big reason why it's expensive to live here.

I guess so, but a $15 toll vs whatever it is now isn't going to impact the price of goods materially unless all those trucks are mostly empty, in which case, good?

It's $24 for small trucks, and $36 for large trucks. Plus the $1.25/$2.50 for taxis and Ubers, of course.

I grant you that it's relatively small when amortized over a truck full of packages, but it's stupid to include trucks at all. They haven't thought it through beyond a superficial level (or worse: they have, and this was intentional).

Regardless, Manhattan is not City of London. City of London is one tiny little corner of London. This tax is closer to the equivalent of putting congestion pricing on all of London inside of M25.

Both zones cover around 8 square miles.

Yeah, you said that on the other thread. How big is London? How big is Manhattan?

(hint: one is about 30x bigger than the other.)

If you live in Manhattan south of 60th, your number one transit option should almost never be driving a car.

A good chunk of southeastern Manhattan is dramatically underserved by public transit, despite what the MTA's map would have you believe.

I'm talking about from the Seaport all the way up to Alphabet City. I hope you've got strong legs.

Tangentially, this is one of the reasons that nearly-invisible corners of Manhattan like the eastern end of Cherry St and Water St still have serious crime problems today.

Honestly that whole stretch between Smith Houses and Vladeck Houses is pretty fucked.

Residents living in the congestion pricing zone aren't the ones commuting into the zone.

22% of households in Manhattan own a car. There are about half a million households below 60th St. So there are about 100,000 cars in lower Manhattan that belong to residents. Of those, about 25,000 are used to get to work each day. The rest sit in garages.

So no, residents will not mostly be the ones paying the costs.

But suppose they were. So what? Sounds fair to me. We don't make the subway free for residents. Why should it be free to drive and store your vehicle just because you're a resident?

> We don't make subway free for residents...

I think you went the wrong way with that argument. Why don't we make the subway free for residents? All the infrastructure for cars is at least as expensive, but it's still free. (To be fair, there's a gas tax and tolls, but it's still massively subsidized.)

The MTA is also -heavily- subsidized. It doesn't cost the MTA merely $2.75 or whatever it is nowadays to provide you a ride.

I have no idea whether roads or MTA is more subsidized, but certainly there's a lot of upstate tax dollars going towards NYC transit...

It's fine for residents who inflict externalities on other residents to get billed for that privilege.

Residents aren't the ones driving into the city every day.

Isn't that what road tax is for?

Yes, this is a special kind of road tax for specific congested roads.

I guess "improving the roads" has been decided to be impossible. Whether it is or isn't, it sure would be a great way to increase congestion, if that was your desired outcome. You might then expect them to use the money to improve roads instead of giving to an unaccountable city controlled subway monopoly.

It's a baffling bureaucracy there in NYC.

They tried nothing else for the better part of a century, but the traffic just kept getting worse: the more you subsidize driving, the more people choose to do it.

The underlying problem is basic geometry: cars are the least spatially efficient form of transportation in common use - you need something like 140 square feet to transport on average just over one person, plus a similar amount of space for storage. That can work somewhere unpopular but the math just doesn’t work in a city core where you don’t have that much space unless you bulldozed all of the buildings. Even if they did something phenomenally expensive and unpleasant like creating multilevel streets those would fill up quickly because if traffic ever improved, more people would start driving all the way in.

This is so confusing. If you create bigger roads, it usually doesn't solve the issue, as:

1) More people start to use the road, which can actually increase total commute time (Braess's paradox).

2) It removes room for the actual city. The city becomes more spread out, and people have to travel farther to get to their destinations!

Think about this: do you want to be encouraging other people to create more traffic along your commute? No way! You want everyone else off your roads, somehow get them to start biking or take the subway. And the best way to do that is to replace a couple lanes with bus/bike/streetcar lanes.

Explain what "improve the roads" means in Manhattan.

Add more lanes and parking. Since there's no more vacant land, bulldoze some buildings. Due to real estate prices it'll be cheapest to raze a poor neighborhood after seizing it with eminent domain. We can make the GW Bridge a triple decker but hell no to any train tracks or HOV lane! /sarcasm

Remove traffic where needs could be solved by higher density?

The roads are maintained by the government just as much as the MTA is.

A major part of people who commute to Manhattan live in NJ. The taxes paid by the drivers don't end up in the coffers of the city.

NJ residents who work in Manhattan pay income tax to both NY State and NYC.

NJ residents who work in NYC do not pay the city income tax.

> NJ residents who work in Manhattan pay income tax to both NY State and NYC.

And NYC residents who work in NJ pay income tax to the state of NJ as well as to NY state and NYC.

and New Jersey!

it's one of the reasons why I left!

Why don’t they start by making all drivers pay the existing tolls and fines (including those that work for the city and those that cover their license plates)?

They we can talk about new ones. As it is this is only punishing honest people.

They already are:

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/ny-ghost-cars-dodging-...

Perhaps, but flat fees like this are regressive taxation

Yes, it’s great. Same shitty service, more cash for the TWU.

It would be the "right thing to do"™ if New York already didn't collect tax on the vehicles purchased. These include - registration fee, vehicle plate fee, county use tax, sales tax, title certificate fee of $50.00 and MCTD fee (see https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/how-estimate-registration-fe... and https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/sales-tax-information ). Collecting a toll for using a road in addition to all these taxes and fees paid to the state is just another kind of recurrent tax - but how fair is it to pay tax for the same thing, again and again (kind of like "double taxation")?

In India, we specifically pay a separate "road tax" to the State when purchasing a vehicle ( https://indianauto.com/stories/road-tax-india-different-stat... ), and the idea behind it is that the government needs money to build and maintain the road. Despite this, in the last 2 decades, the government has also introduced tolls on many state and national highways. In another decade or two, I expect even city corporations and municipalities to make road use a "subscription service" for all vehicle owners. /s

I pay taxes on every purchase which are used to fund public transit, but I still pay per use. I don't see why it isn't fair to also charge a usage fee on cars so that drivers feel the more immediate costs of a choice to drive somewhere.

They can tax as much as they want. The taxes on car ownership and fuel consumption are way way too low across the country to account for the costs they incur.

And that's how you tax the poor and the middle-class, and restrict their mobility by not investing in affordable public transportation. (Don't forget that in the US, you are forced to own a vehicle due to the lack of affordable and good public transportation). Taxes aren't meant just for building infrastructures but are also a mean to reduce income inequality and provide opportunities for those neglected or exploited by the society. Taxing the poor or the middle class too much works against this principle. But I guess that's too "socialist" for most Americans.

Really I kinda don't care. The problems of fossil fuel emissions are urgent and will also burden the working class more than wealthy. In this instance, we're talking about the 10 square miles of the US that is most densely packed with public transit. But everybody needs to start feeling this heat soon. EVs are much better but there's just an insane among or driving infrastructure that should not be necessary.

In NYC and even other cities you really aren't forced to have a car, that's a huge generalization borne out of much more suburban areas. I live in Seattle and myself and many friends don't have cars, yet we get on just fine. In NYC, especially Manhattan, a car is a liability.

The ones who drive nowadays on weekday regularly into Manhattan are mostly those who need to do a job in the city with a vehicle, which likely why you can get the goods you want in the city. This toll won't stop them from entering the city and will only make what people pay more expensive. It could be a fact you are not the group of people who care about that, but for most of the people, they do.

It is just another way to grab funds from private section into public ones, which usually operates at extremely low efficiency and high corruption level.

If you are operating a vehicle and operator in NYC you’re already paying $500 a day. This will add 3%.

If you are trying to say 3% is a small number, you are already suffering is not the reason why you should suffer more.

"...raise $1 billion annually for public transit improvements"

The money isn't going to residents.

It’s benefiting the residents who use the improved public transit.

The externality applies to residents who do not take public transit too. The two decisions should not be coupled.

If you want to do a Pigovian tax, do a Pigovian tax properly. If you want to do congestion pricing, make it budget neutral to users. If you want transfer payments, do that and call it that.

>The money isn't going to residents.

Does your state government send you a portion of tax receipts? No? They must be putting it in their mattresses instead, eh? Please.

So it's a tax. Fine, don't call it congestion pricing.

but it's purpose is to lower congestion, and the fee varies with time of day based on congestion, and the people who pay it are contributing to the congestion so ... it's a congestion priced fee. Not clear it's a tax at all, in the same way a fishing permit is not called a tax.

Does your state government send you a portion of toll receipts, DMV licensing fees, etc, etc, etc?

So that makes those taxes too?

And even if they are taxes, so what?

Congestion pricing in NYC is a tax on the selfish. And it's not nearly high enough. It should be at least ten times higher.

They do, by buying things in Manhattan and paying an 8.8% sales tax. Now many of them won't.

The issues with this argument is that pedestrians, transit-users, and cyclists also pay the same sales tax. So if the goal is to have drivers take ownership over the costs they produce, we could also consider only levying the sales tax on people who arrived by car - but that's silly since there's no good way to implement that (how do you know if someone arrived in the city by private vehicle?).

The straightforward answer is to add tolls. Another solution I could see working is adding special sales taxes on parking garages in the congestion pricing zone, but then this wouldn't capture tolls on trucks, and make it harder to implement exceptions for low-income drivers or drivers with disabilities.

It's not a straightforward answer to the issues you're presenting -- they're exempting the West Side Highway and JFK, and of course, the line at 60th is basically arbitrary. I predict that parking garages on the upper east and upper west are about to get a lot more expensive.

This is social engineering in tax form, intended to redirect traffic (or really...just to raise money for the MTA), without a great deal of thought about how it will impact the people actually living here (beyond "cars are bad", or, "New Jersey sucks", in any case). It is not "having drivers take ownership of the costs the produce" -- that would be, I dunno...raising the gas tax or tag fees or something. And don't forget that drivers already pay a toll to use the bridges or tunnels into Manhattan.

I'm generally in favor of making externalities real and specific, but this plan sucks. One nice thing about congestion is that it is inherently self-limiting, so the stated problem was already captured in existing economic incentives.

> It is not "having drivers take ownership of the costs the produce" -- that would be, I dunno...raising the gas tax or tag fees or something.

Gas taxes or registration fees don't reimburse Manhattan for the space and infrastructure costs of cars driving into and parking in Manhattan for cars that are registered and buy fuel outside of Manhattan.

You can toll drivers for driving on those specific roads, or add a significant parking tax.

Or reduce parking in general and let prices naturally rise, but then you'll also probably have more people driving in and then violating parking rules and need more parking enforcement. Parking fees/taxes also wouldn't capture the costs of traffic that doesn't necessarily park in Manhattan, such as ride share drivers.

> Gas tax or registration fees doesn't reimburse Manhattan for the space and infrastructure costs of cars driving into and parking in Manhattan for cars that are registered and buy fuel outside of Manhattan.

The tolls on every bridge and tunnel into Manhattan do. Raise those. But now you're tipping your hand: this isn't about "having drivers take ownership of the costs they produce", it's about punishing people who drive in Manhattan (below 60th, excepting FDR and West Side Highway, because those don't have externalities, I guess.)

> You can toll drivers for driving on those specific roads, or add a significant parking tax.

I don't have a problem with charging for parking. But the toll roads thing, again...that has little to do with "having drivers take ownership of the costs they produce". It's just social engineering via taxes, because people will avoid those roads, and drive on other ones instead.

Not sure what I'm 'tipping my hand' about.

This is just another tier of toll in another congested subsection.

If your argument is that all vehicles driving and parking in all places should appropriately pay for their externalities (infrastructure cost, driving and parking space, noise, and emissions) then we agree.

Gas taxes or registrations fees paid in another state as you suggested don't really accomplish that though.

> Not sure what I'm 'tipping my hand' about.

You don't want the general recapture of externalities. You want specific things to be punished.

> This is just another tier of toll in another congested subsection.

Yes, exactly. And unless you have some practical alternative for the thing you're taxing, this is just another tax. Those of us who live here don't have an alternative to buying groceries or getting deliveries, so this is just one more tax on life. I don't own a car, and I take the subway most of the time, but this will make my life more expensive. That's wrong.

> You don't want the general recapture of externalities. You want specific things to be punished.

I'm not the one levying this toll, I don't super care either way about it. I replied because your suggestions for capturing externalities did not seem to be equivalent or direct those costs to the correct place.

But I think this all depends on what you consider externalities worth charging for. I'm thinking of it as more than the simple dollar cost of building and maintaining roads and parking. There are other costs to dedicating space for those things that cities may want to avoid.

> But I think this all depends on what you consider externalities worth charging for.

I've already said that I do. So no, I'm making a more specific argument than the one you're trying to have.

Capturing externalities is fine, but this is dumb rule dressed up in the clothing of anti-car rhetoric. It's a little more than a politically acceptable cash grab by MTA.

> I've already said that I do. So no, I'm making a more specific argument than the one you're trying to have.

My point is which externalities you are considering, and which ones a city is trying to account for.

Cost of building and maintaining asphalt is one externality.

A city might consider other things like congestion, noise, and emissions. Pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Green space. Space allocated to parking vs additional homes and businesses.

You can call this considering the externalities of car traffic, or you can call it social engineering because the city wants fewer cars. I'm saying the distinction isn't super important, they are both the result of recognizing negative effects and trying to reduce them.

> My point is which externalities you are considering, and which ones a city is trying to account for. Cost of building and maintaining asphalt is one externality. A city might consider other things like congestion, noise, and emissions. Pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Green space. Space allocated to parking vs additional homes and businesses.

Yes, yes. I understand that you don't like cars. You keep ignoring the part where I say that I'm not opposed to capturing externalities. Those things are, in fact, externalities.

You have to do it fairly. When your rule ends up impacting everyone who lives in Manhattan, even if they don't own a car, then your rule is either not about capturing externalities, or it's badly designed.

In this particular case, the MTA is not concerned about what you're concerned about. The MTA is concerned about getting more money for the MTA, and this is a somewhat craven way for them to do it without huge political backlash. They know that left-wing Manhattanites will throw their lower-Manhattan neighbors under the bus in the guise of "reducing cars", and otherwise won't think very deeply about how this is a general purpose tax on everyday life.

Ok, let me restate some things.

- I drive a car. I like my car. I like driving my car places. You seem to be trying to find some personal sinister motivation on my part, or using me as a stand in for the MTA, and I don't think either are fair.

- You suggested that gas and registration taxes cover or could cover the externalities. I disagree because the externalities of specifically driving and parking in a city center are not covered fairly by taxes levied on vehicles buying gas or being registered outside of that city center. This is the point I originally responded to, and the one you seem to have moved on from to argue other things.

- You agree that cars should pay for their externalities if done so fairly. I agree.

- I don't think that cars used for personal transportation adequately or fairly pay for all of their externalities in any US cities. Especially compared to the relative costs per person transported by other means of urban transportation.

- I don't live in Manhattan and can't speak to the motivations and politics of this specific toll being levied by the MTA. The MTA may not be doing it for fair reasons of capturing externalities. That's perfectly valid and I won't (and haven't meant to) dispute it.

- Levying taxes, fees, or tolls on personal vehicles can have regressive costs for people living in the area, even if they don't own a personal vehicle. Absolutely, I agree with this. There are other ways to solve problems like getting groceries or deliveries, but if there aren't good alternatives in place then that is going to be an unfair cost added to those living there. Consideration and mitigation of these costs, and providing good alternatives, should be part of good policy.

There, I think that's a fairly accurate summary of my positions. Is there anything else you have questions on per my personal positions, or the arguments I have made in this thread?

> But the toll roads thing, again...that has little to do with "having drivers take ownership of the costs they produce". It's just social engineering via taxes, because people will avoid those roads, and drive on other ones instead.

Toll roads are direct use tax on using that infrastructure. 100% of roads being toll roads that cover their own costs is the libertarian ideal, isn't it?

Which roads will people take instead, if all roads into Manhattan have tolls?

And I agree it is social engineering. Those aren't mutually exclusive concepts. What reasons would a city have for wanting to encourage people not to drive or park in sections of that city? Perhaps there are negative externalities of that car traffic that they want to reduce. Why is social engineering via levying costs not a valid way to handle that?

> Which roads will people take instead, if all roads into Manhattan have tolls?

Yes, exactly.

Also: they already do. So consider that for a second.

Of course they don't. Multiple major crossings from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have no tolls into our out of Manhattan. Am I misreading you? Are you only talking about commuters from New Jersey?

No. Be specific, and think about it:

The Brooklyn Bridge, Queensboro, Manhattan, GW (heading to NJ only), and Williamsburg bridges are the only bridges that do not currently have tolls. All cross the East River. With this plan, you will have to enter the congestion area to use all of those but the GW -- but that's already tolled heading into Manhattan. They even defined the "zone" to be sure to catch the Queensboro onramps. It's intentional.

As for NJ (which is every New Yorker's favorite scapegoat when imagining car commuters): every crossing of the Hudson south of Albany has a toll.

I guess you can count the tiny bridges over the Harlem river if you really want to be pedantic about it, but this is essentially a new tax on NYC residents, whether you own a car or not. Literally every truck entering Manhattan by a major artery will be tolled in one form or another -- in many cases, twice.

The government isn't just offsetting "cost" to drivers and away from hipsters on skateboards. It's creating an economic disincentive to drive to Manhattan. This will create a net-reduction in the borough's economy.

Also, "the costs they produce" is way, way too flimsy of a definition. Are you talking about damage to roads? That's heavy trucks, not passenger vehicles.

If you are buying things you can fit more purchases in a car then taking public transit. You are also less likely to be robbed of your new purchase.

California wants to put in a per mile road charge. Why should I drive to go buy something and pay a mile tax when I can buy it cheaper online, get it delivered, and probably after factoring in higher pricing due to the road tax it will still be cheaper. These sort of things ruin businesses.

Congestion charges have been implemented in many global cities, including London, Milan, Singapore, and Stockholm.

Many more cities have started severely restricting access to vehicles, turning many downtown areas that had previously been roads into pedestrian malls. Indeed, NYC has done this to many roads (parts of Fulton Street, Delancey Street, and both Broadway and Times Square).

Do you have any evidence that those schemes have resulted in lower sale tax revenue for those locations?

I'm honestly kind of shocked to discover that Manhattan's only getting one now. Like, taken on its own it is one of the densest large urban areas on earth. I'd assume driving in it is a fairly miserable experience, anyway; where on earth do people park?

Yes, I was living in Manhattan in 2004 working on GPS navigation software, and had to perform some updates relating to the London congestion charge. I thought to myself "This is such a great idea, Manhattan will surely implement a similar system within a couple years". Here we are, 20 years later...

Parking is only really a problem below 59th st or so. You can usually get street parking by driving in circles for 20 minutes, or go to a parking garage and pay ~$8/hr to park.

Driving in Manhattan is pretty straightforward. There are parking garages everywhere you'd want to go (though most non-NYC people would probably consider them shockingly expensive) and at night and on weekends street parking is not too hard to find in most areas.

But outside of rush hours and especially a few places like the tunnel approaches it's not a big deal. People do it constantly, it's totally normal for people from NJ or Westchester or LI to drive in for dinner and park, that kind of thing.

I’ve owned a car in Brooklyn for more than 10 years and find it basically nonfunctional to drive in a lot of Manhattan and surroundings. The idea of driving in for dinner from NJ makes my skin crawl. I have family in NJ and Manhattan, and go through the Holland Tunnel frequently. Sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes it’s hell.

The random chance of winding up in standstill gridlock is just way too high. I can’t even count all of the times it has taken me over an hour to go like five blocks. Every time I’ve had the bad idea drive to the office to get a head start on an after-work trip, my mind is blown that some people actually do it every day, by choice.

Second that - for us it's a complete waste of time trying to go into manhattan from dumbo anytime during the work week, it's essentially a giant parkinglot from the bridges onwards.

I imagine all the congestion toll will do is swap the cost of congestion from time to something more palatable like money. And a windfall for people that own real estate just outside of the tolled boundary (yay brooklyn)

I wonder if the parking should be taxed instead of tolling the bridge.

It is heavily taxed.

> I'd assume driving in it is a fairly miserable experience

Driving in Manhattan is actually pretty pleasant, all things considered. Wouldn't even make a top 10 list for me of worst places to drive in the US. I think in part because there's a weird selection bias where people think it will be bad, so bad drivers don't even attempt, and you're left with a cohort that, on average, has above-average driving skills.

Seattle on the other hand? Worst driver's in the US by a country mile.

In specially-architected car elevators for a large amount relative to what you pay for parking in other urban areas. Daily parking varies from $20 to $125.

(I mean, there are also more traditional parking garages, both above- and below-ground, but the premium on real estate is high enough to justify more expensive solutions to maximize land value also).

We aren’t Europe though. Many Americans have no interest in paying even more taxes. Glad I avoided working and living in NY.

If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning. You're also compelled to own a car, which is enormously expensive, getting even more expensive, and is probably the thing you do on a regular basis which is most likely to kill you. Sprawl is expensive, and so is car ownership.

Upvote; People complain about a congestion tax -- or traffic -- or bad roads. But they don't think about policy when when a car costs ~30% of a median salary, when insurance is "required", expensive (and part is because some choose not to afford insurance while driving a car). Beyond that car / driving enforcement is a drain on police preventing more dangerous crime, a top entry point of harassment and escalation by police, a drain on District Attorneys and the courts from enforcing other crime.

> If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning.

It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars. OTOH, the roads also need to support fire engines, so there's that. Certainly stores devote more real estate to parking than they would if I didn't live in a car dependent infrastructure, but I'm paying for that in some way or another.

Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized? I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.

> Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized?

The city you drive into is subsidizing your ability to drive into the city, the space to park in the city (which could be used for more housing), paying the cost of your emissions and noise, so that you can live a cheaper life in an area that's generally more expensive to sustain per-capita.

> I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.

The power and telcos generally do not pass these costs onto you. The costs are spread across the entire user-base, and it's more expensive to support you because it's more infrastructure for less people. Streets/roads/highways are also generally subsidized.

Suburbs and extreme white-flight areas are heavily subsidized by cities, especially if you're commuting into them for work. If the costs of sustaining your living situation were truly passed onto you, you wouldn't be able to afford to live there.

> It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars.

This isn’t true and it’s also missing a bigger point: you need many more lanes for cars than buses. That space is not providing economic value and has to be subsidized using general fund revenue when it could be used by businesses or for housing.

Busses weigh a lot more than most cars, and require a better prepared road bed if you want the road to last. If it's just private light duty vehicles, you can build to a much lower standard; gravel roads are perfectly servicable for cars, but will suffer heavy wear from frequent busses. Road preparation is especially important where many busses are expected to stop and wait for long periods of time, bus stops are often built to an even higher standard.

In the city I live in, nearly all roads are one lane in each direction. Even if we had a lot more busses, I don't see how we would have fewer lanes. If we had a lot less traffic, one lane roads could work.

The minimum infrastructure for busses is more than the minimum infrastructure for cars. Although, if you're getting municipal roads, it makes sense to build them to standards so you can use busses.

This thread is about one of the largest cities in North America and that’s the context of my comment: if gravel roads are an alternative you’re not looking at congestion tolls, and you already need to build the roads to handle things like trucks.

Re: lanes, yes, rural areas are different but if you look around suburban or urban environments there are a ton of 4-8 lane roads, complex interchange ramps, etc. which exist only because people drive solo and the resulting congestion leads to a massive amount of dedicated space. If you count the number of people on a given block, it’s usually an amount which will fit on a single bus. This is really eye-opening if you’ve ever driven in New Jersey where there are these huge congested roads full of cars and a single train goes by with more people than every car in eyesight.

You started with

> If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation,

Which I felt moved the topic out of NYC. Lots of people live in NYC without car ownership.

That was someone else, but I think the point of comparison was the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs whose drivers are affected by this change rather than rural drivers. Those kind of places are where you see such a large amount of the local budget going to road construction and maintenance because they have the combination of high population and limited transit options.

What are you talking about? The roads in my city are paid for my taxes remitted to the city. I guess you could call that a subsidy but that's also just known as being paid for by taxes. And if you're in an area where everyone needs a car to get around then there's no argument that drivers are mooching off the tax revenue of non-drivers. I swear people are so salty about roads when they don't drive but nobody complains about public schools when they went to private.

Owning a car isn't enormously expensive except in online discussions where people quote the MSRP of $year+1 models and act like folks making minimum wage are actually paying that. My primary car is a 2012 Honda Fit that was $6000 when I bought it at 30k miles and is now pushing 120k. I bought it in cash, but the monthly payment with insurance would have been 15% of my rent.

I'd recommend watching this video by "Not Just Bikes": [Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI).

The city also has to pay for utility lines, which are much more expensive in suburban sprawl than the urban center. Also, zoning laws make it more expensive to build apartments, so you really only get single-family houses in the suburbs and apartments in the inner city. If you use property taxes to pay for infrastructure, the inner-city residents (living in apartments, and likely poorer) are paying most of the money for infrastructure they never use.

This isn't even moving the goalposts, this is switching to water polo. You don't get to tally every cost of suburbia and then say that's the cost of people driving cars. The argument doesn't apply to someone who lives in a city and drives a car nor someone who lives in a rural town who drives a car.

You're really just arguing that suburbia is a drain on city budgets and I can agree with that, it's a drain on a lot of things. I think the reason it persists and gets special treatment is because a significant number of people consider it the goal and see themselves moving out of the city eventually.

But more generally people get so stuck in the idea that tax dollars will be spent on things that aren't for you. Am I the weird one that's unbothered by this? If your vegan you're paying for meat and dairy subsidies you don't use, if you don't have kids you're paying for schools you don't use, if your house is all electric you're paying for gas subsidies you don't use, if you're not outdoorsy you're paying for parks you don't use, if you're acab you're paying for police you don't want, if you believe that caging people is immoral you're paying for whole prison systems you don't want.

Most Americans do not drive solely on city/town roads, we rather frequently take highways and interstates which are federally subsidized - not mostly paid for by city taxes.

You or your city may be exceptions, you might drive only on city roads, but the parent comment's point about subsidies is broadly correct.

Federal taxes come from ... citizens.

Even the fuel taxes come from ... citizens.

There's not some magical source of funding that doesn't eventually come from taxes.

I don't think anyone here is under the impression that government subsidies don't come from taxes. The criticism above is that subsidies skew the observed relative prices of transport at the point of use.

If I am reading https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-03/F... correctly (and I'm almost certainly not) the budget in 2023 was $60 billion (which to be fair includes more than just highways) and if this is correct (which it may be biased) https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t... then federal fuel taxes raised $43 billion of that.

It's within 2/3rds (and frankly lower than I thought, $60 billion doesn't get you @#@^ these days).

Yes, but I think the poster's point was that their locality maintained the roads using tax dollars collected from the locality - i.e. their local roads are sustainable system.

All US dollars are created by the US government, the ability of the US government to create valuable dollars comes from the tax base, so of course everything eventually goes back to taxes.

But it's not really relevant to the point.

Adopting or rejecting a policy based on it being "European" or "American" rather than by its actual projected effects and merits seems like weird decisionmaking to me. American exceptionalism, as well as its inverse, are usually pretty poor guidance for anything.

> Glad I avoided working and living in NY.

Seems like an unequivocal win-win :)

Do you have any evidence that those schemes have resulted in lower sale tax revenue for those locations?

If car infrastructure was replaced by more transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure, then more people would be able to go into Manhattan and shop and dine.

One or two people per car each taking up 320 sqft of road space and parking space imposes a lower human density limit than most other ways of getting around. And the infrastructure to support it is more expensive on a per-human basis.

I've got the strong suspicion that this was never a thing:

Why on Earth would people living in New Jersey drive into (paying bridge/tunnel toll) and park in Manhattan to do their shopping when there are so many malls with free parking available in NJ?

As someone who currently lives in NYC, I can think of ten brands I love to shop at here and not a single one could be found in a mall in New Jersey.

My ex's family lived in NJ and we'd always commute in for a fun day in the city. There's way better food, better shopping, better energy. I'm not surprised people come to the city.

I haven't bought anything retail in a store since 2004. Online shopping was totally transformative.

Even while living in midtown manhattan. This is still true for me living out in the rural south.

Free parking and no sales tax on clothing.

There's a reason the big NYC area malls are in Paramus and Elizabeth.

> There's a reason the big NYC area malls are in Paramus and Elizabeth.

I think the reason is that malls are just out-of-fashion.

If we consider the SoHo area to be the equivalent of a mall, or the North Williamsburg/Greenpoint area to be a mall, I'd bet they dwarf the Paramus & Elizabeth malls in GMV sold and foot traffic.

SoHo retail has been collapsing for more than a decade. Storefront availability was nearly 25% in 2017.

At least according to this article in 2017 [1], it looks like that was because of SoHo's soaring rents (because there's tons of great shopping which brings a lot of people there). It was also common across the country at the time.

It's apparently back and better than ever though [2].

And anecdotally, everyone I know shops much more in SoHo than they did a decade ago, even if the center has shifted to Williamsburg/Greenpoint and more thrifting / vintage stores.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/nyregion/soho-empty-store... [2] https://equicapmag.com/real-estate/soho-retail-rebounds/#:~:....

So they're not paying sales tax?

Sorry if that wasn't clear: NJ doesn't have a sales tax on clothing. NY does. Paramus and Elizabeth are where the 4-ish (the ones in Paramus blend together) giant malls outside of NYC are.

NY/NYC only charges sales tax on clothing over $110 per item.

In addition to the giant malls you mentioned, there's American Dream in East Rutherford. Parking isn't free there though. And all its clothing stores are closed on Sundays. (Ditto for the Paramus malls re: Sunday.)

High land costs pushed these kinds of land uses further and further from Manhattan. There are the same huge malls in Westchester and Nassau county.

It's more reasonable to drive to Staten Island from most of New Jersey.

Unfair. Those who don't come by car also pay the sales tax.

Drivers are using a limited resource, why not pay for it. Be happy it's a fixed fee and not a proper market.

> Now many of them won't.

That's the point of congestion pricing.

Who would drive into Manhattan to buy anything? Seriously, if you are already in the Suburbs, why not just go to a store there. If you are in any other burrough, you will find easier parking there. If you are anywhere else, it'll also probably be cheaper. No one drives into Manhattan to buy anything. If you don't live in Manhattan, you go into Manhattan for work, an event, etc.

> Who would drive into Manhattan to buy anything?

Because the selection and quality are unlike almost any place in the world.

oh the tragedy

I would be willing to wager that the increased sales / foot traffic from one fewer car trying to make its loud and carcinogenic way through manhattan is well worth the decreased foot traffic from that car's passenger(s)

> Now many of them won't

It’s $15 creditable against other tolls. If whatever you’re doing in downtown Manhattan during peak hours isn’t worth $15, its replacement by other activity happening faster is likely a net positive.

$15 covers about one minute of parking in Manhattan

Taxing vehicle use does not reduce the necessity of vehicle use. It just makes it harder to live with the broken infrastructure. If you want less cars then create the infrastructure. Don't advocate against yourself or your peers.

> congestion, noise

These aren't problems, these are features. Manhatten is not a place to go for quiet, empty spaces, except maybe Central Park. You're there for energy, movement, lots of action. Who wants a peaceful, empty Manhatten??

You’re not there for any of those things from cars. The energy and movement people visit Manhattan for are from other people – if they wanted car noise, they’d be out at a racetrack.

> You’re not there for any of those things from cars.

I don't know how you can say that (other than your personal preference). The cars have been there, doing those things, for generations. They are quieter and pollute less now.

Are they trying to turn NY into Long Island? Keep the things that make NY unique and special - people obviously love it.

> I don't know how you can say that (other than your personal preference)

Pretty sure if I went to everyone I know who lives in NYC and asked them if they'd prefer less car noise throughout the day and night, they would answer with an emphatic yes.

I agree with you that car noise has been a part of NYC's backdrop for generations, but that doesn't make it a good thing, even for people who are accustomed to it.

Cars still pollute plenty, especially in a dense place like Manhattan, and that pollution is a health hazard.

It sounds like you'd complain if eventually everyone in NYC started driving EVs, because it'd be too quiet for your taste. Weird.

> Pretty sure if I went to everyone I know who lives in NYC and asked them if they'd prefer less car noise throughout the day and night, they would answer with an emphatic yes.

Unless the people you know are much different than the ones I know, the great majority would say they don't care, many would embrace the energy of the city, and no doubt some would agree. (Of course, it depends on how you frame the question - 'do you want less car noise?', and 'do you want NY to be quiet like the suburbs?' would get different responses.)

I don't know how you can say that (other than your personal preference).

Decades of evidence, as I said.

Cars do pollute less but are still a major hazard and quality of life reduction. If you ask people why they come to NYC, nobody says it’s to listen to people honk at each other or almost get run over in the crosswalk by an Uber driver. People may say that they accept the background car noise as a cost of living in the city but nobody sees it as a positive.

Pretty definitive statements, but what are they based on?

Let’s start with your survey results showing that people like Manhattan for the car noise. Please link to your data and methodology.

My support is based on both the real health costs and direct injuries/fatalities - see e.g. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abf60b – and the fact that if people loved the pollution so much there wouldn’t be an entire political movement to reduce it. Beyond the topic of this thread, they’ve also had a variety of laws to punish noisy vehicles and reduce traffic: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/07/06/opinion-loud-driving-...

Whoever took a look at your average day in Manhattan and proclaimed: "Thank god there are so many cars and so much traffic noise here!"?

The answer is no one. No one ever wanted any of these features.

Millions of people are willing to spend a lot of money to be there.

Because of, or in spite of?

Consider the following: if everything else stayed the same, but all traffic was removed from Manhattan, would there be a net increase or decrease in population from migration?

It's very speculative, but I'd say a decrease because people couldn't get things done that require driving or are easier to do that way.

Maybe we can finally inch closer to having a city in the US that doesn't bow down to car owners and actually cares about the health of the people that live there?

Maybe even carless unless absolutely necessary (disability related) and emergency services.

Even in Urban areas there seems to be a vocal minority that don't want to give up their cars and any inconvenience to them is attacked. In Boston we are shutting down some streets in the summer and car drivers love to complain about how much worse driving is. Which it being worse to drive is a positive to me, as someone who actually lives here and does not own a car.

Why are two wheelers not popular in denser cities in the US ? Is it due to inclemental weather ? Is it cultural ?

In most of Asia where dense cities are the norm, 2 wheelers are the preferred way of daily transportation, and it works very well.

Even in dense US cities, being on two wheels is dangerous.

Many people buy a car for safety, which ends up making the road even more dangerous!

(To clarify, I’m not taking a jab at people looking out for their personal safety.)

> Even in dense US cities, being on two wheels is dangerous

I think it's made particularly true because of the very low requirements for driving license in the US, which end up letting dangerously unskilled people on the road.

In 2014 I went from Paris (which at that time hasn't done its cycling transition yet and I was one of the very few cycle commuter in the city by then) to Boston, and it was a terrifying experience despite the city being actually pretty gifted in terms of infrastructures (with the Charles river banks being kind of a bicycle highway).

American drivers (or as least Massachusetts's) have very little spatial awareness, they watch the car in front of them and that's it (well, when they are looking at it and not their mobile phone), most of them don't even check before turning and changing lane. As a result I had 3 really close calls over the course of 4 months, when I never had a single situation as dangerous in 2 years in Paris. I also witnessed roughly as many small accidents between cars in that period than in my whole life.

I discussed with other Europeans there and the ones who had to get their US driving license told me how lenient the process was compared to the European equivalents.

Sometimes I wonder that if every single one/two person car in America switch to motorbikes, it'd already relieve congestion by a good measure.

Put simply: because of the danger posed by all the cars, and the fact that there's typically no place to ride them that doesn't put you into frequent conflict with car drivers.

Not dense enough

Please talk to a bicycle rider in any major city. The problem isn't density; it's the danger imposed by cars combined with poorly implemented (if at all) bike infrastructure.

NYC is one of the densest cities in the world... much denser than many places that use scooters. I guess because the transit is so good?

They’re noisy, dangerous, and lack climate controls.

(It does seem like they’d improve traffic throughput though)

Electrics take care of the noise and climate. Traffic in dense cities flows slow making two wheelers not very dangerous within urban areas over short distances.

By climate control I think they mean that motorbikes are near unusable in rain or in sun heat. Valid point, though the benefits outweigh it for bikers in Asia.

Modern four-stroke low-rev motorcycles/scooters are no noisier than cars. And lorries easily beat them in the noise contest.

NYC shuts down streets too. https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/openstreets.sh...

Not enough of them and nowhere near often enough. And they’re rolling back many of the programs that do exist.

I think it says a lot about how our society is so hugely car centric that the idea of charging people to drive on a road is hugely controversial, but the idea of making people pay to travel on a train is accepted without a thought.

Well let’s see…we paid for the road already, we pay tax on the gas and we pay tax on the vehicle every year just for owning it.

Now onto the train…we didn’t pay for the track in most cases and we don’t pay property tax as we don’t own the vehicle.

It’s not that we’re overly car-centric. It’s that we’ve already been charged at least three ways to drive on that road and now they want to add another.

The last federal gas tax increase was 31 years ago (1993). Most states have similarly stalled gas taxation. Both are also facing the issue of electric cars entirely dodging this tax revenue. It's such a large problem that the Highway Trust Fund is projected to bankrupt in 2028.

In other words, we haven't paid for that road.

You're confusing tax collection and tax increases.

According to your logic we should be at a tax rate on gas close to 99%.

You are incorrect: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/texas-news/what-do-texans-....

> There is also a federal tax of $18.4 cents per gallon.

Federal gas tax is not a percentage

They have not increased the tax but still collect it.

We’ve definitely paid for the road. We pay every time we fill our tank.

A big difference is that many taxes for using roads are paid regardless of road use, whereas a train ticket is obviously priced for the usage. (Yes, gas tax can indirectly be this, but different vehicles have vastly different fuel economies, and people also buy some amount of gas for non-road use; of course toll roads are by-usage, but most roads are not toll roads.)

> we didn’t pay for the track in most cases

Could you elaborate?

> now they want to add another

There are plenty of existing toll roads, bridges, and tunnels. It’s not really a new idea.

>> we didn’t pay for the track in most cases

> Could you elaborate?

I presume this is a reference to the fact that over 70% of the track used by Amtrak is owned by freight companies.

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Yes that's correct.

Maybe consider that a car is just an expensive thing to own? Why should costs stop at cost-of-ownership when cars affect the lives of more than just their owners?

Did you read the comment you replied to? There are already a bunch of taxes in place on it, and this is adding another tax. They aren't saying there should be no taxes at all. As far as cost-of-ownership, the trains are actually the thing being subsidized here, not cars.

I hate cars in the city, and I think the argument that cars are a negative externality and that for car owners to pay the true cost requires some taxation, but let's be honest about what we're arguing for.

but strawman arguments don't help anybody.

Gas tax doesn't even begin to cover the externalities of burning that gas. Vehicle taxes go entirely towards the administrative costs of vehicles (i.e. DMV) and also don't cover externalities. Sure the road is already built but it was funded by all tax payers, not all of which drive cars. And roads require maintenance, also tax payer funded. Society at large subsidizes cars and drivers, giving them huge chunks of land while making most cities inhospitable to pedestrians, causing almost as many deaths as guns in the US. A giant, heavy, extremely dangerous machine is just about the worst way to transport people. Maybe we should stop subsidizing it entirely and taxing it to lower use like we did with cigarettes?

> As far as cost-of-ownership, the trains are actually the thing being subsidized here, not cars.

Exactly. In fact, if you try to find a single example of passenger rail that is financially sustainable you will likely fail. The only reason passenger rail exists is because it is massively subsidised. It is inherently flawed as a mode of transport.

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You should pay more because you aren't covering the actual costs.

Yes this exactly. If I'm not allowed to talk about the health effects of car infrastructure (because apparently that's "feelings") then let's just talk about money.

Cars are horrendously over-subsidized and are FAR more expensive to maintain infrastructure for in exchange for moving way fewer people. Trains might not cover their costs with fare but they move a hell of a lot more people while simultaneously being underinvested in, in the US.

I believe taxes paid by drivers do not in fact tend to fund roads in their entirety.

Applying any level of systems thinking or lifecycle analysis to the problem will reveal that nearly none of the costs to the environment or society are paid by whatever cursory fee you pay at the pump. Most of those taxes are paid by everyone regardless of car ownership anyway.

I would encourage you to consider the entire system when applying the “systems thinking” that you are so clearly adept at. I’m curious - do you believe that cars have greater costs than benefits to the economy and society?

Hang on - preparing a great post where I explain the totality of the economy, society, and ecology to you. watch this space.

I’m assuming you completely avoided the question because you lack an informed opinion, which is likely why you feel insecure enough about your intelligence that you attempted to insult mine with your first reply to me. Makes sense.

And the collected tax on gas and a vehicle do not pay for the externalities of that gas and that vehicle in NYC. So we levy and additional tax/fee for that. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand.

I don't think this has as much to do with "paying for externalities" as it does with simply reducing demand by increasing price and netting some extra money for infrastructure as a side effect. Indeed, a large amount of the money is going to subway improvements.

Excess demand that degrades service (traffic) is an externality.

Maintenance costs more than the initial buildout

The ability to travel down roads and paths has been a major part of life for centuries whether by foot, horse, car or whatever. The land you travel over was there before humans evolved. Blocking that is always going to be a bit controversial. Trains on the other hand don't exist unless someone pays to build them.

As opposed to roads, which exist in nature when there is no one paid to build them.

This is much more expensive than the equivalent trip on a train.

Which makes sense, because a train is much more efficient per-person than a car.

That rather depends how you define expensive doesn't it?

The toll is per vehicle and not per person. The price paid per vehicle is massively higher for the train.

This is not really a fair comparison - even without a congestion toll, people have to pay to drive on a road. They need to buy the car, pay for its maintenance, fill it with gas, pay for insurance, pay annual registration fees to help maintain the roads. Presumably some of the money from buying a train ticket goes into doing the equivalent things: purchasing and maintaining the trains, etc.

Not saying the implicit subsidies/taxes on each mode of transport is equal, but it doesn't seem to be as simple as 'one is paid and the other is free'.

Most of the things you mentioned only benefit the car owner, and they can choose to adjust them based on their need and budget.

This is about the cost to other people for your choices: if you buy an SUV, you get the positive effect of feeling more macho but the people whose health is at greater risk as a direct consequence of that decision aren’t consulted. This kind of thing allows those communities to provide the negative feedback required to keep a system stable.

You're clearly not arguing in good faith when you suggest the only reason people buy an SUV is to feel macho. You know women own them too?

Yes, for the same reasons – the desire to feel strong and powerful isn’t exclusive to men! That product class has a higher profit margin so car companies have been running a marketing campaign for decades promoting them as powerful, safe, etc. to get buyers to pay extra.

Pay per usage seams fair, but its usually a regressive tax.

Joe Schmoe who needs to drive for his work or small business shelling out 15 bucks per day hits different than Joe Apple not even noticing this expense while driving from the jewelry too the theater.

I own the car and pay taxes that are partially used to build/maintain highway infrastructure.

I do not own the train. I guess it's true that my taxes were partially used to subsidize the tracks without my consent, though.

The taxes go to the administrative costs of driving.

The multiple billions of dollars per year that each state spends maintaining road infrastructure comes from everyone, regardless of participation.

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> I thought this site was for intelligent comments?

Comments like this add nothing of value toHN discourse, somewhat ironically.

Except, you own your car and have to pay to maintain it already. A better comparison would be taxis, which we do pay for per-use, like with a train.

That’s far from universally true and for the median household it’s a significant expense forced on them by past generations’ planning decisions.

That also doesn’t address the reasoning behind this decision: cars are a major health risk and entail significant quality of life reduction. Taxing negative externalities is a textbook way to shrink them, and your sunk cost in car ownership doesn’t have any effect of the costs to the communities you drive through.

You pay for the wine, but you don't pay for something more important for you, air. I guess we have to really think a little bit before pushing agenda like this. BTW, there are only 1/5 of people in Manhattan has a car, which not really can be called "car centric".

> BTW, there are only 1/5 of people in

The argument isn't that Manhattan is car-centric qua its people, the argument is that Manhattan is car-centric qua its infrastructure.

It's $15 a day: $300 if you commute 20 days a month. That's not a small price change.

I find that tolls are a good idea, but suspect that we'd have significant complaints situation if the MTA decided to raise the prices of the 30 day pass by, say $300 a month in one sitting. People made decisions based on existing prices, and a change this big. Going around the price changes by moving or parking further out and then paying for a train is a significant lifestyle change. People get really mad when rent goes up by this much too. So all in all, we don't need any car dependence exceptionalism to expect a lot of push back.

You can't afford 300 bucks a month you can't afford to own a car in NYC. Take the bus, it's cheaper

Many people who are unhappy with this tax are people who live in NJ where cost of living is significantly lower and it is much more affordable to own a car. Many people who live in NJ work in the city.

There are commuter rails that go from NJ to NYC

I haven’t lived in NYC for a few years now but wasn’t the toll to cross the bridge already between $12-15? How is this a significant change?

$15 for bridge/tunnel + $15 for congestion. doubling the cost sounds significant to me.

Oh interesting. This isn’t just a bridge toll, this is a surcharge on top of that. This is going to kill traffic in Manhattan. The PATH is about to get really crowded (more than it is already).

21 years of London's congestion charge and its effect will give New Yorkers a good idea on the effects to expected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Effec...

A bit embarrassing that Germany, the USA, Japan and Russia embassies are among those refusing to pay the toll... I'm very very curious how NYC will treat the British ambassador.

NYC already has plenty of unpaid parking tickets from the UN diplomats. It won't be anything new.

London’s congestion charge is particularly annoying as (at least when I lived there in 2012-2013) it was very easy to take the wrong turn and be in the zone, not realize you were ever in it (even for a single block) and consequently not pay the fee in advance. If you don’t pay the fee the same day, they send you a bill for like 10x the amount. I found TfL to be a totally corrupt organization that was trying to obfuscate its rules to extract larger fees.

Choosing a street at random, there are red "Congestion Charging © Central ZONE" signs on both sides of the road, as well as a huge painted © on the road lane for turning into the road.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5168161,-0.1655445,3a,49.9y,...

I am not sure what the case is today and in all areas but for what it’s worth, in 2013ish when I got hit with two tickets back to back when I drove to a conference that was on the edge of the congestion zone two days in a row, I went back to the location on foot and walked all around and there was zero signage indicating that the street I turned onto was the congestion zone, and the opposite end of the street I turned immediately out of it.

If there really are no signs you can appeal the fine — but lots of old forum posts of people trying this seem to end with them accepting that there was a sign.

You can look at old captures in Google Street View.

I'm a huge fan of bollards that retract for motorist with access, but that's be impractical in such a case. Bollards are simply more visible for the average motorist who doesn't bother to read signs. The Netherlands are far more advanced when it comes to designing roads so the road user visually understands "you enter a village and 80 km/h is not acceptable any more".

I live in Linz in Austria, three years ago they turned a small passage into pedestrian only street and I still stop motorist and explain then that things have changed. Most just didn't see or understand the sign (which comes with an extra sign with a lot of exception obviously, for a 100m passage with no parking spaces or private garages). The city won't draw the "pedestrian zone" sign on the ground, I'm sure that would help a lot.

Good. We Londoners absolutely support that.

I'm a Londoner and I don't see why things should be draconian if someone makes an error. Just send them a bill for the normal charge if they go in without paying once. Maybe for repeat offenders charge 10x.

Which part? Congestion charges or Byzantine rules designed to obfuscate? If the former, so do I. If the latter, why not simply charge the fees you want to charge rather than be shifty about it?

As someone who lives in the NYC metropolitan area, the problem here isn't with the idea of congestion pricing, it's with the public transit system. Public transit options to travel between Midtown and Brooklyn, or Staten Island and downtown, etc. are sorely lacking, as are options to get into the city from places not well served by the MTA trains. The subways and buses are unreliable at best. Once those are fixed, I'd embrace congestion pricing. Until then, the toll only hurts people who can't easily afford to pay: it's no coincidence that those people live in the places where it's less convenient to get into Manhattan. They're stuck either paying the extra few grand each year or spending an extra hour every day on the mediocre transit system.

Once NYC (*including* the other four boroughs, not just Manhattan itself) gets its public transit on par with London, Copenhagen, etc., I'll embrace the congestion pricing.

> The subways and buses are unreliable at best.

Everyone complains about the subway, but as someone who lives in Brooklyn it's been generally good enough to get to work without too many headaches.

I live in the Brownsville/Canarsie area, and I generally take the 3 into the city, and that generally just works, but I will admit that it kind of sucks that the 3 is the only train that's easily near me. It's not usually a problem on weekdays, but it's a very annoying problem on weekends when they have to do maintenance, meaning my only easy mode of transportation is either severely limited or non-existent. [1]

Still, I really don't think it's as bad as people complain about. I've lived in NYC for nine years, and deep in Brooklyn for about 5.5, without a car, and it's been "generally ok".

[1] It's not completely horrible, if I'm willing to walk a bit further (about a mile) I can get to an L train and if I am willing to walk a bit further than that I can get to an A.

When I was reverse commuting from Manhattan to Sunset Park the train would regularly shut down on the bridge and just sit there with the power off for 45 minutes or more. I regularly had 2-3hr commutes, usually 3-4 days in a row when it was bad. This was one of my main reasons for swearing off the subway before I left the city.

When was this? And what do you define as regularly?

I've experienced 3 line shutdowns in the past 24 hours. F Q and 6. All while I was trying to ride them.

Lol I bet I was downvoted by people who don't even live in NYC. Pretend that public transport is a utopia. Ignore the places it exists and has issues.

> Staten Island and downtown

What a ridiculous statement? Forgot about the free ferry? Once you get to South Ferry you have a wealth of connections, the 123 (7th ave line), 456 (Lex ave line) and NQR (Broadway line).

The ferry is definitely a lot less convenient when you don't live North Shore or mid-island. That said I don't have any personal experience, I'm only speaking secondhand for Staten Island.

The other suburban portions of the NYC metro have direct rail links to Manhattan not a stupid boat.

Is there more context behind S.I’s lack of subway connections?

It very well could be similar to Marin County, North of SF in the Bay Area - the community aggressively pushed back against a BART line going north on the Golden Gate Bridge to keep their community insular and disconnected from the urban riffraff.

They’ve planned a connection before, but it’s now basically considered dead. The New York Times had a great article on it a few years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/nyregion/staten-island-su....

> between Midtown and Brooklyn

I don't follow. There are relatively few neighborhoods in Brooklyn without train access to Midtown (though those do tend to be the most car centric).

I take the trains all the time in Brooklyn, and live here, but the person you're responding to isn't completely wrong; there's a fairly large patch of north Brooklyn/lower Queens that has pretty bad train coverage.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Of...

Also, in Brooklyn, there's a lot of places that do have train coverage in the most technical sense, but that means they have exactly one line near them. This is fine, but it can be annoying if that line is your main mode of transport and it gets shut down for whatever reason.

When I lived in Manhattan, even in the less-covered Washington Heights, it was comparatively easy to find another train nearby if the train I was planning to take was down. In Brooklyn, unless you're near the more metro-ey hubs, you might just be out of luck (or just take the bus).

But I don't know what the comparison is. It's definitely not London and Copenhagen.

It's pretty amazing that you can take a 30+ mile ride from one end of NYC to the other for less than $3.

But who exactly are these people living in transit starved outer boroughs that drive into Manhattan for work every day? Bearing in mind that these people will also need to pay for parking in the city.

I don’t doubt that some exist but they have something of a mythical quality to them. Frequently invoked, rarely seen.

The buses will be more reliable when they aren't stuck in traffic caused by congestion.

Many roads buses have their own lanes...

Except in lower Manhattan those bus lanes are taken over by clueless tourists or entitled folks driving around. Pretty much an everyday occasion near Union square.

You're not even allowed to drive in bus lanes during the day and the ticket printers are AGGRESSIVE.

Outside of daylight hours whether the bus even shows up or not when scheduled is practically a coin flip. Especially in Manhattan where practically every second or third scheduled bus seems to run (other than the bus lines on either side up and down Central Park).

> Once those are fixed, I'd embrace congestion pricing.

Isn't congestion pricing being used to finance the MTA? I don't understand your complaint here, it seems like they're doing exactly what you want.

I mean there will be a delay of many years before the fixes actually happen, if that's even what the financing would go towards.

Someone who shows up frequently in my Twitter feed takes pictures of cars where they've put mud or leaves on the license plate to obscure the characters. Also they scrape paint off, put a Back the Blue sticker on one or two characters, use a reflective license plate cover, etc. Almost always there's something that identifies the driver as a city employee, often a police officer.

It would be interesting to know if they'll crack down on that behavior while fighting congestion.

NYC has _always_ needed this. Staten Island and upper Queens/Bronx aside, the city is just not designed for driving and it never will be (at least not without completely altering the city's core). Having lived there forever, my gut tells me that the _vast majority_ of people who commute into work by car can be served by the (comparatively excellent, but still lacking) MTA and NJ Transit.

Driving into NYC is already a massively expensive pain in the ass and nobody does it for shits and giggles. The only people deterred from driving by this will be the working poor (think doorman who needs to be at work 5 am and lives in outer queens. Might be a 20 minute drive or an hour bus+train ride - that's the kind of people that might hesitate at $15 a day extra)

Everybody else either HAS to drive for whatever reason and will suck up the extra $15 or is too rich to care. It's a pretty naked money grab by the city precisely because demand is kind of inelastic.

You can imagine anything else being taxed in the same way. If the government decided to raise money by making your cell plan cost 3X, you'd grumble but pay (it's not like you're gonna give up your phone) It's not a great reason to tax.

> Driving into NYC is already a massively expensive pain in the ass and nobody does it for shits and giggles.

Plenty of rich people drive into the city because they don’t want to take public transit. I know some!

> think doorman who needs to be at work 5 am and lives in outer queens

I don’t doubt there will be people like this but the data shows that car owners are notably richer than the average NYC resident. The working poor of NYC by and large do not own cars. And among those that do own cars the number that drive into Manhattan daily for work is already small (because how could they afford to park? How does this doorman?)

And to take your example specifically, I have to imagine there are alternatives. Like driving to parking near Manhattan then jumping on the subway for the last part. If they aren’t doing it already parking garages will be even more incentivised by congestion charging.

You are making the same point I am without realizing.

For the rich, it's a negligible expense. For the poor, it's a major inconvenience (scenario you described) or cost.

So mainly the city expects it'll get free money out of the people who will still drive in. The only folks who will contribute to decreased congestion are the ones for whom $15/d is meaningful.

I think there’s much more of a sliding scale than that. Yes, there are very rich people who will drive no matter what. And there are a very small number of poor people who won’t drive no matter what. But in the middle sit a large number of people who are much more likely to use park and ride schemes and the like.

Good news is the city wins either way: if people still drive, city gets money. If people don’t drive, city has reduced congestion.

I live less than 40 miles from the city, my commute via public transit is 20 minutes in a car, a 15 minute ferry across the river, an hour train ride to grand central, 15 minute subway downtown. It is 2 hours on good day door to door to go 40 miles. Thank god for work from home but it is not surprising that people choose to drive when a lot of peoples commutes look like this. And yeah like you say driving sucks too, bumper to bumper traffic most days people would happily avoid given a better option.

The $15 charge will push people in your position to optimize their lifestyle for less driving in Manhattan, either by finding a new job, or moving closer to work, or more likely driving to a park and ride and using transit for the last bit.

How about the radical idea of train service on both sides of the river if we don’t want people to drive. There are a massive amount of commuters, rent is outrageously expensive and park and rides are far away and have all the fun unpredictability of regular old driving. And as the parent poster says it is already expensive to go into the city, $18 to cross the GWB, if anyone wants to do the quick math on how many people cross that a day and then come back and tell me why we can’t have better infrastructure.

You might not have to sit in bumper to bumper traffic now

Before I read this comment, I thought the tax was a good idea, but honestly this changed my mind. NYC is a rich man's city; $15 isn't going to dissuade anyone but the poorest folks. Rip out parking spaces instead

Lol have you ever been into the city? What parking spaces?

Free street side parking, I imagine? I would like to see that.

That literally doesn’t exist in Manhattan during busy times.

-1. Speaking as a local, friends from Long Island and New Jersey and other boroughs do drive in casually. They didn't live near subway stops and way too far for busses.

LGA and JFK are an hour+ by train with transfers, much now reasonable to ta ke a car. Fortunately, congestion pricing is just a small surcharge for taxis.

Where on long Island is it better to drive then to take the railroad in? Especially now that you can get off at grand central or Penn.

Please see Google maps: there's lots of places in Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and of course NJ, Westchester, Connecticut, Staten Island

This is particularly true off-hours. One friend from Nassau reports 20-30 mins drive off peak but mass transit would be crazy: long walk to a bus to LIRR to subway. 3 transfers and hours of BS. Perhaps with an electric scooter? But then what about crappy weather or hauling stuff?

Something isn't right. First your comment makes no sense, since I was talking about long Island, why bring up Connecticut and Staten island. 2nd no one calls queens and Brooklyn long Island.

The western most towns of Nassau are barely under a half hour drive into the city and they all have LIRR stops.

East meadow, Levittown, North Merrick, Brookville, Manhasset Hills, ...

Just look at Google maps, turn on transit to see the stations, then count all the towns that ain't walking distance...

I do actually know what I'm talking about, having spent way too many hours in the freezing wind/rain/snow on LIRR platforms, chiseling ice off the car in the parking lot, and questioning my life choices. Try an expensive 2+ hour with multiple transfers for a month.

If you can drive, you can drive to LIRR station and park.

And those particular towns hit close to home, they are no where near 30min drives ever to the city, it's not possible lol. And they take the train in.

The only people that drive in some of those places are people who go to the city once every 10 years and think it's still like the 90s.

Amazing to watch some here try and justify another tax that hurts poor people and deprives them of access to opportunity, that doesn't impact rich people.

There are always exceptions to any rule, but the vast majority of Manhattan drivers aren't poor and the vast majority of poor people passing through Manhattan don't drive.

You're thinking of some other kind of place like the middle of america, where that would make sense.

Ever needed more stuff than you could fit in a backpack at work? Ever bought something too big to carry on a bus?

> There are always exceptions to any rule

This is not an everyday occurrence except for some occupations. If it happens once a month, it amortizes out to not much. When I lived there, this is when you got a cab, and the surcharge there will be $2.50, for something you do once in a while. Wow, what a scandal /s

In an occupation where you have to drive in lower Manhattan daily, everyone else in your industry also has the extra $15 now too, so you're not really at any competitive disadvantage. And for some of those occupations, the time savings from lower traffic due to the surcharge might actually really be helpful.

> everyone else in your industry also has the extra $15 now too, so you're not really at any competitive disadvantage

So you're all worse off is a good solution?

How do you think the goods and services – upon which the poor depend – get into Manhattan?

Via bulk transport which allows for amortization across the prices of many items.

This will not significantly increase the cost of goods.

In fact, by reducing congestion, it might actually decrease shipping and other bulk transportation costs.

One of the more confidently incorrect replies I've read on HN in a while, thank you.

Most people driving in are not poor - if you’re truly poor, you can’t afford the cost of car ownership at all, and if you’re in the lower income brackets you’re likely to take transit because it’s still a big chunk of your income – and the article notes that there are discounts for low-income drivers:

> As for discounts, low-income drivers who make less than $50,000 annually can apply to receive half off the daytime toll after their first 10 trips in a calendar month. In addition, low-income residents of the congestion zone who make less than $60,000 a year can apply for a state tax credit.

And I learned today that NYC has a 50%-off program for low-income transit users ("Fair Fares"). That makes taking a bus or the subway incredibly cheap.

"It's not that bad". It is.

Almost every public health tax hurts poor people. I'm sure you would agree that even taxing tobacco hurts poor people because poor people are the largest user base of tobacco and since they are addicted, taxing tobacco is tantamount to taxing the poor directly (and has little effect on the non-smoking rich). That doesn't mean the tax is a bad thing.

Subsidize what you want more of, tax what you want less of, and all.

Driving a car is like smoking?

In most cities I would agree, but NYC has the best transit in the country by a huge margin. Genuine question: are there lots of people in NYC and surrounding area who must drive into the city for work and don't have convenient alternatives available? This would be true in most places in the US but I'm not sure about NY.

Of course, your underlying point is still valid that the effects of such a tax will not be felt equally across class lines, and that is not ideal in my opinion either.

Genuine answer as a former New Yorker: No. You can get in and out more easily by transit than by car already. It's a luxury. Driving in Manhattan is already expensive many ways anyhow

- bridge/tunnel tolls to enter any way other than from the Bronx along slow inconvenient local streets

- parking costs a lot of money, or a lot of time and hassle (and in fact is prohibitive, like as in you won't find free parking even after circling for an hour, in much of manhattan for much of the day)

- if you're an average american driver from the suburbs or further afield, who is not used to big city driving, you will probably find it very stressful until you practice a lot

- opportunity cost: transit is already great, so there's no compelling reason usually

Agree with everything you said except "transit is already great". Subway could be greatly improved, and taxing congestion is one way to address that.

Yeah, true, great is too strong a word.

But, it is great _compared_ to driving, in terms of point A to point B on time performance, other than very late at night, which is the only time you can get around faster in a car (but will likely still struggle with parking)

> are there lots of people in NYC and surrounding area who must drive into the city for work and don't have convenient alternatives available?

Yes. Many poor people (think teachers, healthcare workers, services workers) have been priced out of living in areas that are commutable by MTA. You're looking at driving in or a 2-3 hour commute. People who think NYC's mass trans is 'the best in the U.S.' already live in Manhattan/close-in Brooklyn.

Don't get me wrong, it's great – if you're already paying $40k/year in rent anyway.

I suspect this summary is fundamentally mistaken. I'm sure at least one poor person will have to pay this tax, but my understanding is that the revenue from it will be used to improve systems used by the general public and the wealthy are overrepresented in the expected tax base. By definition, that's the opposite of a tax on "the poor."

Driving is an important form of freedom. The argument that driving is for rich people and the poor should do something else is absurd.

That's not the argument at all? We're talking about "the tax" and who it falls on. It's not good that some poor people will have to pay it. That's obviously a downside. It's also only one of many unfair costs pushed down to poor individuals and pretending this is the most important cost of driving a car seems silly. do you disagree with my summary that this is a net transfer to poor folks?

I don't agree that you can decide for someone what a net transfer to them is.

It's an HN classic! "Fuck the poor" is probably the most consistent sentiment expressed on this board. And any opposition to this is met with "they aren't really poor!"

Like they would know.

So you think the congestion fee should be means-tested (or, more accurately, affluence-tested)?

How might such a system work? Have the DMVs from the metro area (NY, NJ, CT) link registered vehicle owners with their taxable income last year and share this info with MTA to adjudicate fees? I think that makes it too complex. You could achieve a similar equitable outcome by making the fee universal and using the revenue to improve alternative transit services (and/or lower fares) that are used more by lower income households.

I believe that's roughly how countries that do progressive fines do it. I'm very supportive of progressive fines generally, they preserve the desired deterrent effect of a fine and make sure we all have skin in the game.

It should be easy to make it income related these days. Just have the transit authority submit a list of tolls passed to the tax authorities once a year and have the tax system work it out.

No, there shouldn't be a congestion fee

This.

Don't forget the disabled. Can't use 75% of subway stations because you're in a wheelchair? Pay the fee because it's now your problem that MTA doesn't prioritize accessibility.

The article specifically notes that they’re exempted, so this will help disabled people experience less congestion.

That's only for the "Access-A-Ride" shuttles and hasn't been codified for individual vehicles of people with disabilities. It's planned but not in writing.

I'm sympathetic to this argument, but as an example someone from NJ could easily drive up to Secaucus Junction and hop on the NJ transit into Penn Station in about the same time as it would take to make it through tunnel + Manhattan traffic. If there are not good connections inside Manhattan or other parts of the city then that is a good argument for better public transit.

Sometimes you've got to carry more stuff than you can fit in a backpack.

I think you overestimate how many poor people use cars in NYC and underestimate how much HN hates car owners.

<3

Sometimes you've got to carry some stuff with you and cars a great at that. Less affluent people getting penalised for needing some stuff to do a job is pretty brutal. No amount of public transport fixes this.

"The congestion charge initially contributed to reducing the level of car traffic in inner London. However, the regained space was quickly filled by taxis and other service vehicles, which benefit from exemptions. Cars and taxis represent about three-quarters of London’s road traffic. The number of miles driven by cars and taxis has progressively decreased by about 6% or 1 billion vehicle miles since 2000; in turn, the traffic of light commercial vehicles increased by 1 billion vehicle miles. Overall, the level of London’s road transport has thus remained fairly stable over the past two decades, ranging around 20 billion vehicle miles per year.

The road pricing schemes are an important instrument for raising additional income for greening London’s transport system. According to the Annual Report and Statement of Accounts 2021/22 of Transport for London, congestion charge net revenues reached £307 million in 2021/22. The ULEZ and LEZ generated a net income of £111 million and £34 million in 2021/22, respectively."

https://www.oecd.org/climate-action/ipac/practices/london-s-...

Take from that what you will

Finally!

It's still not enough (and don't get me started on the incredibly cheap double-parking fines!)

Ride the bus, take the train. Don't make my city more smog filled, noisy and nasty.

NY isn't really smog filled. It is pretty windy and the straight broad streets ensure the wind flows. It's something that actually surprised me when I lived there. Trains, taxis and busses are also major contributors to the noise, along emergency services.

Compared with other places, NYC air could be a LOT better.

Taxis are getting the conversion tax. Take and busses are by definition a tiny fraction of the impact.

London had the first full assessment in 1964 that something ought to be done about cars on the basis of congestion, but sadly those building roads had the upper hand for a few more decades.

> Ride the bus

Have you not seen the busses? They're old and spewing tons of fumes

Supposedly they will all be electric by 2040, which is much later than I was expecting [1]. So far just 60-75 buses in NYC are electric out of 5,800.

That does not compare well with e.g. London, which currently has 950 electric buses out of 8,600. London plans to have all zero-emission buses by 2034 or 2030, depending on funding.

Here in Copenhagen the aim is to have entirely electric buses in 2025, although that seems to be apply only to the inner city. Some routes in the suburbs will not change until 2030.

[1] https://new.mta.info/project/zero-emission-bus-fleet

1 ton of fumes / 50 people is better than 0.1 ton of fumes for 1 person.

The buses are being replaced over the next few years in the MTA capital plan anyway.

[flagged]

the poors are already off the road!

they use the train or bus, which is cheaper, faster, and more environmentally friendly

if you are wealthy enough to afford a car in NYC then you are wealthy enough to pay this toll

If that was strictly true then the toll wouldn't make any difference. I don't have a better solution for Manhattan, but I can recognize that fixed-fee tolls select for traffic with the "most disposable income" rather than the "most economically beneficial" traffic.

Arguments can be made in places like Denver that high tolls means that those who have control over politics (who tend to be rich) won't feel much need to invest in additional road infrastructure, because their experience is that "the travel times are fine!". But they're using an up-to-$15-each-way toll road (E-470).

Similar to how the TSA procedures would get reformed if everyone flying had to go through the same process (most importantly, including anyone taking private planes). But almost no one who has power to force changes actually goes through the TSA lines because they mostly take private chartered planes which don't have any TSA process.

You have to align incentives with these things, and that can be tricky.

For TSA something like "if you're in line an hour before your flight and you miss your flight, the TSA pays for your ticket unless they can prove you got through in less than 15 minutes" might do the trick. You'd have to work out the details.

If you're wealthy enough to not notice this toll, then how would the toll even accomplish its goal of reducing traffic?

By definition it's going to make people that notice +-$15 stop driving.

Who do you think does all of the jobs that require driving in Manhattan? Do you really believe it's wealthy people doing that by choice?

if you're referring to rideshare and taxi drivers

yes, these rates might rise. but it's the wealthy who are consuming these services. costs will obviously pass through to the rider (not be borne by driver)

If you're referring to the number of folks who work in the central business district of Manhattan but have no choice but to drive (given the enormous catchment area of MTA services), that number is vanishingly small, and congestion pricing does have low income discounts.

If you're referring to those who drive taxis or cars-for-hire in Manhattan, yes, the idea is the cost should be borne by riders who choose those services instead of transit.