Congestion pricing is great. I routinely end up in Manhattan on Friday and Canal Street at 5pm is running smoothly (not packed end to end with idling cars as before), the city looks like a regular city instead of the packed cars honking and spewing tire dust and exhaust. Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. It’s a different environment and everyone is loving it that I’ve talked to.
Reason077 · 1h ago
> ”Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.”
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
graemep · 28m ago
London is a pretty good city for walking around and public transport.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
No comments yet
tim333 · 46m ago
Also a lot of the flash car revving is around Harrods which is outside the zone.
ericmay · 4h ago
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. I
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
fitsumbelay · 16m ago
Same
I would've had a hard time wrapping my head around being OK with ~$10/trip before this post
Goes to show time is the most valuable commodity anyone'll ever own
righthand · 4h ago
Yes I imagine a handful of crime was caused by the sheer number of people on the street. Fewer people idling about looking to cause a ruckus has made a huge difference. Passive benefits are what will keep cp in place.
lr1970 · 2h ago
Congestion pricing is only a half of the solution. The second half should be the MTA reform. MTA has been a dysfunctional mess and a bottomless money pit for as long as I remember. MTA of today will squander any amount of money you throw on it wasting all the potential gains from congestion pricing.
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
const_cast · 1h ago
This is the story of the American public sector. Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector because clearly public organization X sucks. The private sector is greedy and a black box, so they're basically going to bleed the tax payers dry because they have no accountability to anyone. And the added complexity of hops between communication just burns money. And now the military is paying 150 dollars for a shovel.
The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
dhosek · 6m ago
The other thing is that privatization is old-school patronage on steroids: if you structure it right, you get to channel government money to the recipients in a way that continues even after you lose power.
krferriter · 1h ago
Americans have a weird thing with government agencies (or government-owned companies, e.g. Amtrak) simply hiring people to do a thing the government is tasked with doing, or buying things the government needs in order to do that thing. So instead our governments at all levels rely heavily on contracting it out to private companies to do the exact same thing but with higher cost and turnover and no long term expertise built in-house in the government agency which is now tasked with managing and overseeing all this contracting.
The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
pfannkuchen · 1m ago
I suspect the theory is that private companies with many clients besides the government are less susceptible to bloat and waste than a government agency is because they are not a singleton entity and will be outcompeted if they are sufficiently inefficient.
A problem with this theory is that, I imagine, a lot of such companies basically only have contracts with the government. So it ends up with the same singleton problems, just outsourced.
nobodyandproud · 52m ago
Largely because a hostile state government is given control over what’s largely a NYC issue.
tixocloud · 42m ago
Great to hear the positives about congestion pricing. It would be great to see how it can ease the congestion in Toronto. Unfortunately, I suggested congestion pricing as a possible solution as part of an academic project and was laughed off.
xvedejas · 4h ago
Surely the reduction in vehicle count is more than enough to cancel this out, but a moving vehicle does emit more exhaust and tire dust per unit of time than does a vehicle idling. For the environmental improvements it's more about the reduction in the number of cars than about the better traffic flow.
eddd-ddde · 1m ago
A moving car from point a to point b will always emit such "moving vehicle" pollution. The idle pollution is just extra.
mumbisChungo · 4h ago
The better traffic flow reduces the amount of time they’re operating for as well (assuming start/end of planned route is independent of travel speed)
astine · 2h ago
Right. Presumably a car idling for ten minutes produces less pollution than a car being driven for ten minutes, but a car that is driven for ten minutes and idled for an additional ten produces more pollution than either of them. Any pollution produced by cars idling in bad traffic is superadded to the pollution produced in transit so improving the flow of traffic should reduce pollution even if the total number of cars remains steady.
marcosdumay · 1h ago
It's worse than that.
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
wat10000 · 3h ago
Pollution per time doesn’t make any sense as a metric. A trip that includes a lot of idling will pollute more than a trip that doesn’t.
sokoloff · 2h ago
I think that depends on the motivations of the driver. You (and I) are probably thinking of a trip that is motivated solely by getting from A to B (or A to B to C to A). In that case, any pollution from idling is strictly additive.
But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)
toomuchtuna · 2h ago
Won't those idling vehicles also end up moving?
mystified5016 · 3h ago
The stop and start conditions of highly congested traffic produce more brake and tire dust
SoftTalker · 3h ago
And more emissions. Idling is pretty efficent, as is driving at a constant speed. Repeatedly stopping or slowing, then accelerating is not. This is also an unintended consequence of "traffic calming" devices e.g. speed bumps or chicanes. People slow down, then hit the gas again which is awful for emissions.
jgalt212 · 4h ago
It remains amazing to me, time and time again, how relatively small fees can encourage large changes in behavior. At the aggregate level, people overvalue their time and undervalue their money.
3eb7988a1663 · 1h ago
I certainly refuse to pay $0.10 / plastic grocery bag since those fees were put in place. I have been exclusively shopping with a canvas bag for years now. Likely having saved thousands of bags in that time. In fact, I am angry at the half-dozen times where circumstances have forced me to pay for one.
kulahan · 1h ago
I think I’m up to like 8 canvas bags, significantly thicker yet still significantly plastic, which I continue to forget at home.
These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time
I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!
Spooky23 · 1h ago
HN likes to equate all environmental issues with carbon. It’s one dimension but not the sole dimension. Bags were a huge litter, wildlife and quality of life issue.
My wife was a finance commissioner for a water utility. Guess what the most common clogger of storm drains was? Shopping bags. They did hundreds of service calls annually doing service that ranged from fishing them out to using a hydro-jet to clear a pipe.
Within 18 months of the bag fee, those calls dropped 60%. That’s easily $800k in wasted labor and dollars in this small city.
Karrot_Kream · 31m ago
Great example. FWIW I don't think this is just an HN issue. It's hard for most people to have a systemic view of policy. I'm pretty dialed in on these issues and I never even thought of the drainage impacts of the bags.
pfdietz · 35m ago
It's just the most important dimension, by far.
mh- · 59m ago
Back when this was new, there were studies showing that the typical canvas bags sold at grocers are also breeding grounds for all sorts of nasty things that you don't want to be transporting your food in.
So it's just purely all downsides. Like security theater, but for the environment.
showerst · 46m ago
Tell that to the Anacostia river in DC! They great at reducing watershed pollution. It's really noticeable how much better things have gotten since the bag fee.
As a side effect, DC's water authority has also been able to cut maintenance budgets because clumps of bags were our main source of sewer clogs.
michaelmrose · 58m ago
Likewise with the canvas bags they are so much nicer but if I do end up needing an 8 or 10c bag I hardly care. If I spend 50 its 1/5 of 1% of the cost.
somsak2 · 3h ago
i think it's the opposite right? people that didn't mind spending an hour in traffic are now unwilling to pay $9.
righthand · 3h ago
I think you’re agreeing with each other. GP was talking about at the aggregate level where your observation is about the individual specifically. At the aggregate level with traffic reduction you’d think individuals would weigh their money as a shortcut to regain time but they don’t. My personal guess is because Manhattan is not the actual destination, work and home are the destinations, Manhattan is just the environment. Before it was the cost of car maintenance to drive into Manhattan (in the individuals eyes “free”), now it’s car maintenance + $9/day.
supertrope · 2h ago
People are not perfectly rational. When there's no explicit price tag people tend to overlook costs. For example when Tesla Model S sold at $70,000 a decrease in gasoline prices was predicted to hurt sales even though a few hundred dollar swing in fuel cost for one year is not going to materially change total cost of ownership of a luxury vehicle.
michaelmrose · 1h ago
Eg when plastic bags are free Grandma wants 5 things in 2 doubled bags but at 8 cents each she'll just stick them in the cart with no bag at all and transfer them to the back seat even if 8c for single bag to carry them in would add negligible costs to her $120 basket.
GoatInGrey · 2h ago
I'm not sure why what is functionally a $180/month fee is considered "small". I think what we're seeing here is that public services (like roads) are more enjoyable, for those who can still use it, if the lower half of the income ladder is banned from using it.
hnav · 2h ago
That doesn't make much sense, driving a gas car from Jersey is gonna eat up a couple of gallons of fuel ($10x20=$200/mo), insuring it will be $200/mo, if it's not paid off it'll cost at least $500-600, parking will run easily $500 but likely more. Why is that $180 the straw that broke the camel's back?
Spooky23 · 1h ago
The Jersey thing isn’t the issue. Car commuters still commute. Most of the traffic volume are whiny Long Islanders who’d rather cut through Manhattan than navigate the belt parkway and bridges to New Jersey. Also poorly served Queens and Brooklyn residents — I grew up in Queens… my dads public transit time to Lower Manhattan or my mom’s time to Manhattan hospitals was about 2 hours — similar to taking Metro North from Dutchess county or LIRR.
The downside of this stuff that we don’t have data on is how it affects big employers who benefit from car transit and benefit the city as a whole? How many patients are going to avoid NYU, Cornell or MSK in favor of a satellite site not in the city proper, for example?
NYC chased most of the big industries away already in my lifetime, I wonder if this will impact commercial business in the city in the long run.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
When I lived in the area, I used to regularly drive in to lower Manhattan after 6PM for free parking because it was cheaper, faster, and more convenient than taking the train from right in front of my NJ apartment. The congestion charge would change that equation.
const_cast · 1h ago
The parking should've never been free in the first place, that's always a mistake. Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain and own.
ta1243 · 1h ago
So your land use is no longer subsidised?
ta1243 · 1h ago
Manhattan is at least as dense as London, and land values must be about the same. The market cost of parking in London far outweighs the cost of the congestion charge, so presumably that's the same in New York.
Seems that renting a square foot of downtown Manhattan land is about $60/year. A parking space being about 200 square foot, that's $1k a month if paying the actual rate, just for parking (let alone the road space)
Seems that $200 a month is small when compared to the actual cost.
yupitsme123 · 3h ago
If you make it so only rich people can do a certain thing, you'll have way fewer people doing that thing. I'm curious what kind of inconveniences this has caused for people who can't afford to pay the fee though.
rcpt · 3h ago
Are you actually curious or were you just trying to make a gotcha against congestion pricing?
I ask because the "only rich people" criticism of NYCs project has been beaten into the dirt and discussed at nearly every level of politics for more than a year now. If there's anything you want to know the information is readily available.
yupitsme123 · 3h ago
I'm not curious because I already know the answer. The inconvenience is that driving through the city is $9 more expensive without any improvement in other transportation alternatives. For some people that's no big deal but obviously for a lot of people it is, hence why there's fewer people on the road. The "missing" people are the ones who simply can't afford to be there.
amluto · 1h ago
The OP, as well as plenty of other articles, pointed out a rather immediate improvement in alternatives: the busses are faster as a result of traffic being reduced.
yupitsme123 · 30m ago
If you're going to massively inconvenience millions of people then you have to do better than a couple buses running faster. Better as in, using the new funds to completely revamp the whole system. If those faster bus lines don't provide an alternative to my previous route then they don't provide me an alternative to paying $9, losing my job, or picking a different city to live in.
gambiting · 2h ago
>>The "missing" people are the ones who simply can't afford to be there.
I don't believe that for a second. They could afford to drive a car, insure it, maintain it, buy fuel, and pay for very expensive parking in NYC, but $9 is too much now?
I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong if there's any data that suggest that this is actually true.
yupitsme123 · 27m ago
People pay what they have to pay do get to work or get around. In that sense they could "afford" it, because the alternative is to move or get a different job.
You're trying to make it seem like driving in NYC is simply a lifestyle decision that people could choose to do or not do. For some people it is, for many people it's simply the only viable option. Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
gambiting · 17m ago
>>Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
Which implies that the people who continue driving are indeed those who have no other option, and those who do have taken it instead of paying the $9. Would you disagree?
And no, of course I don't imply it's a lifestyle choice - merely that some people(not all!) were driving in NYC even though they indeed had other options available, because there was no extra cost associated with it - now that there is, those people use those other options where possible.
Again, it's really fun to speculate why who and where is doing what, but if you have more specific data then please share.
littlestymaar · 2h ago
Why would they not be there then? How is that supposed to even work if it doesn't affect consumers' behavior?!
This kind of argument reminds me of a French politician who defended a tax on sweet drinks as a way to fight against the obesity crisis looming (France performs better than most country in that regard, but the situation is still bad). She wanted a tax to deter the consumption of sweet drinks, but at the same time they wanted the tax to stay at “a level where it would not affect the purchasing power of people”.
gambiting · 1h ago
>>Why would they not be there then?
Funny because I was going to use that exact example as something that absolutely works. I can easily afford the sugar tax where I live, it's been around for a few years now. But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
I understand the same mechanism works with cigarettes and loads of other things - even if you can afford them the increasing price puts you off.
But maybe for a more relevant example - I can comfortably afford parking right in the city centre where I live. But the idea of paying what's being asked for parking puts me off so much I just park at the nearest park and ride and take the metro in.
yupitsme123 · 24m ago
These are all lifestyle choices. You don't need to do any of those things. Getting to work or getting around one's own city are not lifestyle options. They're necessities.
Using market-style policies to try to nudge people around only works if there are alternatives they can choose from. In this case for many people there are not.
sokoloff · 1h ago
I can also afford the parking in the city center, but mostly choose to patronize businesses in the suburbs where the parking is free (and usually plentiful). That I think is what city business owners are worried about.
cortesoft · 2h ago
Poor people were taking public transit already
beowulfey · 3h ago
$9 is basically an hour of parking or whatever so really it's likely to be saving people a lot of money since transit costs a lot less
yupitsme123 · 2h ago
If transit is an option for those peiple and if all other things (transit time, safety, etc) are equal, then yes.
const_cast · 1h ago
It is, the subway is a few orders of magnitude safer and cheaper. Sometimes it can take more time... now. Because of congestion pricing. Before, it was often faster to just walk next to the cars than be in one of the cars.
righthand · 3h ago
$2.95 + planning time or you can walk for free
Literally no one has stepped forward and said “I can’t afford $9 or $2.95 or the deep discount commuter tickets.”
yupitsme123 · 3h ago
I assume you're referring to just taking the metro instead. Not everyone who drives lives near a metro. Not every destination is accessible via the metro. Many people commute from more affordable areas far from the city where public transportation isn't always a viable option. Driving gets $9 more expensive but public transit doesn't suddenly get better for the people who can't pay $9.
overflow897 · 2h ago
There are very very few places in nyc not accessible via some combo of bus, metro and ferry. It's not as reliable as say Japan but the public transit network is pretty extensive.
yupitsme123 · 20m ago
Not everyone who drives through NYC lives in NYC. Even if it were, those transit hops add time. Now you're forcing people to choose between paying money they don't have or spending time they don't have.
wat10000 · 3h ago
If you want the government to help poor people, there are much better ways to do it than giving away access to one specific kind of public resource to everyone.
yupitsme123 · 2h ago
Would you be in favor if they also wanted stop "giving away" access to the sidewalk and fresh air?
supertrope · 2h ago
Sidewalks can fit an order of magnitude more people than roads can fit cars. Especially if one car lane was re-allocated to make sidewalks wider. Less traffic means less air pollution.
It's almost never needed to faregate sidewalks. Tourist districts can organize a special improvement district tax on stores to fund sidewalk upgrades, trash collection, shuttles, security, parking, and planting flowers. This makes the zone more even more attractive to tourists.
yupitsme123 · 14m ago
This analogy pretty much gets at the heart of what makes these policies distasteful. Me walking or driving through my own city or neighborhood, where I live, pay taxes, and vote, is not the same as me taking a trip to Disney. I don't do it just for fun. I do it because living requires me to occasionally move from place to place.
Auctioning off to the highest bidder the right to move around is cruel because you make it so that some people simply can't afford to exist in public spaces, and because you're telling people that their own city or neighborhood doesn't even belong to them.
The correct analogy here would be access to healthcare, water, or electricity.
littlestymaar · 3h ago
The theory is that the price signal helps people make their own arbitrage between time and money and it would maximize society utility, but the reality is since people have a very different amount of money, it just do what you say: the rich pay without second thoughts and enjoy the higher quality of life when the less rich see a degradation of their own: they will either pay with money they don't have in excess and have to stop other consumption, or take public transports which is less convenient for them (since it's cheaper than car commute, they would be doing it if they didn't like it better).
yupitsme123 · 2h ago
Yeah, and I'm guessing the opinions of those people don't get taken into account by folks who are studying or manufacturing consent for these policies.
michaelmrose · 44m ago
We have finite space for roads and an expanding population. Doing nothing means people spend as much time on congested roads as they would taking public transportation. Objectively the worst of both worlds and people having invested in a car and being used to it will continue living in it as it gets worse and worse.
Providing additional impetus to make a change seems virtuous.
yupitsme123 · 12m ago
If there's an overall plan to revamp transit and public spaces to accommodate all people then I'm in favor of it. That's how functioning cities do it. This is clearly just a money grab by a corrupt city.
michaelmrose · 5m ago
If slack capacity exists in public transportation and roads are way over what's needed immediately is for people to switch over. Making it more expensive to drive instead of subsidizing it is a way to achieve this.
dcchuck · 3h ago
Really? I must admit I have not noticed it. I've had nightmare trips trying to get into the city still during traditional heavy traffic times. Frankly I've thought more "the pandemic is finally over" than I did "congestion pricing is working" over the past few months.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
mattlondon · 11m ago
Congestion will creep back up, just like it has in London.
Unless they really price it to deter people, they'll just drive. In London it's cheaper to pay the £15 charge than to get two adults return tickets on the tube from the outer suburbs. Once you factor in comfort, convenience, reliability and practicality of your private car Vs London's public transport it's obvious why more and more people just pay the fee to drive.
If they really wanted to stop congestion they'd increase the fee from £15 to something like £150-250 a day. But they won't do that because then hardly anyone would pay it and they'd lose the revenue.
AnthonyMouse · 5m ago
> Congestion will creep back up, just like it has in London.
This is actually a good point, because of the nature of what causes congestion.
It's that governments don't do the things that prevent it (e.g. allowing higher density housing construction to shorten commutes or adding capacity to both mass transit and road systems), until the congestion gets really bad.
So when you first introduce congestion pricing, congestion goes down, because of course it does -- increase the cost of something and you get less of it. But then, why do any of the other things that address congestion until it gets really bad again? So population grows over time or existing infrastructure decays and doesn't get replaced because it isn't "needed" yet. Until congestion is as bad as it ever was, but now people are paying a regressive tax.
bravesoul2 · 7m ago
Thinking the same thing. Sydney has a lot of tolls but not for congestion. More as an additional tax really. Doesn't stop people using cars. What probably does is pedestrian streets and less parking making it a PITA to drive vs get a bus.
taeric · 4h ago
Are there any measures that show any downside to this? I confess a bit of bewilderment at how many people will assert there must be something bad every time this comes up. I don't think a single measured outcome has gone poorly from this.
TulliusCicero · 4h ago
It reminds me of what happens nearly every time car parking on a busy retail street is removed for bike lanes/bus lanes/better walking.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
acdha · 3h ago
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
timr · 2h ago
> In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent.
I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours.
I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
cco · 21m ago
Then the owner should prioritize things like congestion charges and removal of parking.
To your point trucks already double park so both changes would be a positive for deliveries.
timeinput · 3h ago
I think the businesses do kind of know their customers.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
I think this is basically hitting the nail on the head. My town has closed a lot of street parking in the downtown, and as a result I rarely do shopping or dining there now because I don't want to park in a garage 3-4 blocks away when I used to be able to park on the same block if not right in front of the business. In other words, I had no other reason to be downtown, so making it inconvenient is going to make me less likely to go there.
But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
tzs · 1h ago
> But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place.
One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places.
It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
kulahan · 1h ago
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. My wife is disabled, so I’m probably one of those customers he would lose along with his parking, but there are probably 1.5x as many homes in my neighborhood (of condos) than there are vehicles actively parking here. It would likely be a huge boon for the places I frequent now. It might even have an effect of slightly countering market downturns as people in trouble sell/lose cars and move to public transit temporarily
One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!
sokoloff · 1h ago
> Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there.
I'm struggling to imagine reasons why a significant number of people will now start walking to these businesses. What are some of these multiple reasons that have now been overcome to an extent as to cause shop traffic to increase ten-fold?
lurk2 · 2h ago
> Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do.
You’re hypothesizing that people are purposefully avoiding these streets because they have cars driving on them?
sensanaty · 1h ago
Yes? Cars are loud, they smell, take up a tremendous amount of space & are gigantic metal boxes that can cause serious injuries even at low speeds.
In Amsterdam there's been countless examples of this exact thing. Businesses booming after they rip out parking and make roads forbidden for cars, and I can anecdotally say I also love whenever they rip out parking near me in the Netherlands.
norir · 3h ago
Yeah, I imagine they are often projecting their own frustration over parking onto their customers. Every time a customer comes in and grumbles about parking, it triggers their confirmation bias. Conversely, new customers who only popped in because they were on foot are probably less likely to express that fact.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
Tiktaalik · 57m ago
The business owners are clueless.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
> Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds.
> “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses.
> Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior.
> “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
ctkhn · 2h ago
There were some negative effects at a construction shutdown of a street recently where it temporarily did hurt some business, mostly retail shops but not the restaurants/bars which had a big boost in business. These boutique style shops were more patronized by people from suburbs or far flung parts of the city than actual locals, and their location was based on the owners wanting to live in the city vs their actual customers.
proee · 4h ago
Some changes, like having a highway bypass a small city, can be catastrophic to local businesses. A restaurant that might have hundreds of out-of-town cars go by, now has only local residents.
TulliusCicero · 4h ago
That's a completely different sort of scenario than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about changes to streets that accommodate greater population density.
mcphage · 4h ago
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited
Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
Herring · 4h ago
It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pity because public transit done well is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw [NotJustBikes]
taeric · 3h ago
I'm torn on this. It is a very appealing way to blame people in discussing why it goes this way.
It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
enaaem · 1h ago
It is not that cars are not useful. It's that people want to live in nice cities and too much car infrastructure ruin cities. You can't have both. You can't enjoy a nice terras next to a busy road. Or kids cannot safely cycle with their friends if there are many cars driving around.
People should not forget that Europe has tons of car friendly towns and suburbs and many people live there. You can choose your lifestyle.
trgn · 2h ago
They're only convenient in cities built for cars.
some_random · 2h ago
That's just not true, cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use. If you have a pros vs cons list, it's not a lack of pros that causes people to stop using cars it's an overabundance of cons in every single case I know of.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
> people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use
I have friends who chose to move into cities and sold their cars in the process. The pros of the cities outweighed the pros of car ownership for them. They also don't have to spend money on car maintenance, insurance, or gas. They can move around the city fine with public transit and ride sharing. They rent cars to make long trips.
Absolute statements rarely are absolute, particularly when the motivations and preferences of individuals are in the mix.
const_cast · 1h ago
I don't think this is true, cars truly only make sense in places where every single detail is built to accommodate cars. In an absolute sense, public transit is wildly more efficient.
The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.
For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.
Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.
At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.
In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
sokoloff · 1h ago
And in towns, suburbs, rural areas, and pretty much everywhere except the densest city centers.
trgn · 1h ago
So you mean built for cars
badpun · 59m ago
In Europe, most of those places were built before cars existed (and certainly before they were popularized). Still, people overwhelmingly prefer to drive cars there.
trgn · 28m ago
Yeah, and if you have a car in any of those city centers dating from before the car, it's inconvenient and you'll walk for little errands, it'd be insane to drive. In suburbia, car is convenient, and sure, europe has a lot of suburbia too
jajko · 2h ago
They are, and should be, huge time saver outside cities. But city centers? Those should be on purpose as annoying, time consuming and costly to regular traffic as possible. It should be only necessary services, taxis, public buses and so on.
Here is the place for a good public transport, even in US it should be trivial to make it financially self-sufficient and attractive. People always choose whats best for them (cost or time wise). European city centers work like that and everybody normal accepts that.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
MTA is a corrupt money pit. It will never be self-sufficient.
taeric · 1h ago
Right, but if you already have a car, you are likely to reach for it quite often.
And, I can agree it is the kind of thing that can save time for anyone, but will spend time for everyone.
rafram · 2h ago
Not Just Bikes is such a terminal pessimist. I enjoy his videos but I think he really has trouble acknowledging the counterpoints to his doom-and-gloom rhetoric. What he says in that video just barely applies to NYC at all.
zahlman · 2h ago
Not just that, his approach to the politics of it is incredibly obnoxious. He comes across as everyone who disagrees with him with the same brush, railing against some sort of ideological complex that includes everything his "team" hates and insinuates that it's all somehow interrelated. Of course he doesn't say those things, but it surfaced really prominently for example in his April Fools' video where he played the role of a suburbanite obsessed with his new truck. Satire is one thing, but if you see enough of it (also content from Twitter and other social media) you get the sense that he really does take his perception of other people way too seriously.
Which is to say: his case studies examining the details of specific cities, evaluating transit system design etc. are great. But his analysis of why the bad things are bad (especially when he starts blaming people and ascribing motivations) is utterly insufferable.
rafram · 1h ago
> his April Fools' video where he played the role of a suburbanite obsessed with his new truck
Happy to say I missed that one.
But yes, I completely agree with all of that. I'd love more of the analyses of why some systems work and less of the vitriol against everyone who isn't already totally on board.
lurk2 · 2h ago
Mid-40s amateur urban planner YouTube is the worst social media trend to have come out of this decade bar none. They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed.
Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
conductr · 4h ago
We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)
siliconwrath · 3h ago
NYC generally doesn’t have this stigma as bad as the rest of the USA. Wealthy people and celebrities ride the MTA.
NYC is an outlier of US cities though. The long narrow island of Manhattan makes everything more efficient in terms of the subway, etc. Most other large US cities sprawl endlessly in all directions.
culi · 1h ago
Most of these photos are taken for their social medias. Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people
cguess · 2h ago
NYC really doesn't have this stigma at all. The narrative is more or less pushed by groups with anti-liberal agendas who want to convince people whom have never even visited NYC that it's just as bad as where they're from, when in fact the violent crime rate per capita in NYC is much lower than most medium sized midwestern and southern cities.
Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
ch4s3 · 3h ago
Wealthy people use the subway in NYC, it's often the fastest way to get somewhere.
p_dubz · 54m ago
I created an account because of how terrible this comment is.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
bdangubic · 49m ago
EVERYTHING you wrote was going GREAT until In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it - this cannot be further from the truth. some take it, not enough to make a dent in traffic congestion madness in any City (especially those you specifically listed, I live in one of them…)
anthomtb · 3h ago
In my lived experience, public transit is not actively avoided by so-called upper castes (I am not convinced you know what a caste is). Rather, it is so straightforward to take ones own automobile that you don't even consider public transit options.
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
some_random · 1h ago
First off, comparing classes in the US to a caste system is genuinely delusional. The US doesn't have a caste system (except where it has been imported by immigration) and if you think it does either you don't know what a caste system is or you are completely out of touch with American culture.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
gosub100 · 3h ago
Refusing direct contact with homeless people's excrement is not based on class/self-respect.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
A society that causes and/or permits homeless people pooping in the subway is, though.
> Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms.
> As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations.
There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
lurk2 · 2h ago
The bathrooms become too expensive to maintain because they are being used by people who need to be institutionalized. When this is suggested the Civil Liberties people get into an uproar. You could build one wall and keep people who suffer from psychosis inside of it, or you can put them on the street and watch as everyone else finds ways to build walls of their own.
bluGill · 1h ago
The institutions of the past were so bad that it is more human to let those people fend for themselves than put them in one. Yes some people freeze to death now but that is better than before.
if you can reform the system fine but I don't have conidence. Human nature doesn't deal well with the needed power imbalance.
aerostable_slug · 3h ago
'Society' doesn't make people shoot up, turn tricks, or attempt to set up permanent shop in public toilets inside train stations. Also, they're great places to put bombs (in theory at least).
I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
Society absolutely does do that.
Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.
rendang · 2h ago
The kind of people who destroy public spaces and public toilets will also destroy any free housing you give them. If by "mental health" you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
"Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta."
"A decade ago, Utah set itself an ambitious goal: end chronic homelessness. As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent."
"Finland has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%,[1] though other reports indicate it could be up to 50%. The number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains."
Having a stable housing situation turns out to make a whole bunch of other related social changes more feasible.
> If by 'mental health' you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
I mean, I'd start with therapy, addiction services, social supports, and the like. But I do think the complete removal of long-term inpatient mental health in the 50s/60s was an overshoot. Some people need that much help.
(I also believe there's a lot more we can do to prevent people from becoming that "kind of people" in the first place.)
const_cast · 1h ago
I think it does, which is why this is a problem in some societies but not others.
I think the explanation of "some people are bad people" is a lazy explanation. The proportion of bad people to everyone else should be about the same everywhere. We have to take a closer look at incentives and systems in place.
echoangle · 3h ago
What makes a toilet a better place to put a bomb than a full train car?
sokoloff · 1h ago
IANAB, but I'd imagine the privacy inherent in a toilet makes it easier to assemble a dangerous bomb from transported-safe components than doing so in a full train car would, and to leave it long enough that the bomber can get away without getting caught.
Karrot_Kream · 3h ago
For better or for worse a lot of US progressives view transit as a "solution of last resort" which is why so many progressives are okay with transit also acting as a homeless shelter and being tolerant of some drug use. One way to think of this is that progressives view government's role as a champion of the disenfranchised. Another is to think that the US is a class based society where transit is considered the domain of the disenfranchised, the lowest class. Which framing you choose is probably based on your experience and frustrations with your local US transit system.
(I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other in my comment, but as someone who rides local US transit regularly and has for over 10 years, my patience for using transit as a "solution of last resort" is wearing thin but still remains.)
epicureanideal · 2h ago
Exactly. It’s the cleanliness and safety issues in US public transit that makes people avoid it. Fix that and more people will use it.
erehweb · 2h ago
Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.
righthand · 3h ago
The project was studied for 10 years so the nay-sayers really don’t have a platform because they’re up against a decade of research. Most of the anti-cp has a romanticized view of driving into the city as some sort of right or NYer benefit.
zahlman · 2h ago
>how many people will assert there must be something bad
Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes).
What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
tim333 · 43m ago
In London from 2020 till about 2023 congestion charging ran till 10pm and then that was moved back to 6pm. The reason was it was hurting nightlife especially west end theatre.
hedora · 3h ago
The metrics I have seen all look cherry picked.
Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute.
The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there.
So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?”
A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?”
So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes?
Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours?
If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
Counterpoints (could be true or false, but do not contradict the data from any article I have found):
- average commute time is up because transit is still much slower than driving used to be (this first point is definitely true), and many drivers were forced on to the slower mode of transportation (also true, but that doesn’t imply average times went up or down).
- Occasional visitors (that only pay once in a while) are up, but the number of people that can commute are down, hollowing out commercial office districts.
- polls showing it is popular under-represent people that can no longer afford to travel to the city.
The fact that the numbers being reported are so vague as to be compatible with my doomsday scenario is why I say the metrics seem cherry picked.
I’d love to see a study that reports enough of their methodology to disprove my three bullet points. I’m generally supportive of things like congestion pricing and public transit, but sloppy studies and sloppy reporting on their actual impact doesn’t help their cause.
standardUser · 3h ago
Other than Trump's seemingly knee-jerk opposition because it was implemented by, in his own oft-repeated words, radical left lunatics, I haven't really heard anything negative at all as a Manhattanite.
xvedejas · 4h ago
I wonder whether pedestrian collisions will be slightly more deadly, since one effect is that traffic flows faster than before. Great for drivers but probably more dangerous for the jaywalking new yorker.
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
zahlman · 1h ago
What matters in a pedestrian collision is the speed of impact. Traffic flow is about the average speed over time. Cars that spend less time stopped don't become significantly more dangerous when their maximum speed is still limited to, say, 30 km/h (20 mph). Certainly not for those who are aware of a constant traffic flow.
prasadjoglekar · 3h ago
The biggest downside is that the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect. It was to fill budget holes in the MTA, which is a notorious money pit that delivers far less value than the billions if gobbles up.
There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.
Cycling is so much more effective than cars.. actually approx 5x more in terms of street usage. So when people move to bikes, the streets look way less busy.
You'd need a 5x more bike traffic than car traffic for the two lanes to be equivalent.
Just worth bearing mind when people talk about streets being emptier - just emptier of cars
ks2048 · 2h ago
It's interesting that everyone is saying it is a drastic change, when it says "Traffic is down by about 10%" (which doesn't sound like a drastic change to me).
I guess it is near a critical point where a relatively small change in traffic results in a large change in travel times, traffic jams, etc.?
toast0 · 33m ago
Manhattan traffic was pretty much at capacity. Bumper to bumper most of the time, certainly during peak times.
Reducing traffic to 90% of capacity makes a huge difference. A little bit of room here and there allows for much smoother flow and a lot better experience for those who didn't get priced out. And almost certainly better flow for busses, which is helpful for a lot of people.
bravesoul2 · 6m ago
Like CPU %. Or maybe memory is a better analogy.
djaychela · 2h ago
>I guess it is near a critical point where a relatively small change in traffic results in a large change in travel times, traffic jams, etc.?
Yes, same as school traffic (certainly where I live in the UK). It's not all the traffic on the road, but the difference it makes is enormous.
carabiner · 2h ago
Yeah it's like fluid flow where once you reach choked flow or hit the sound speed, there's a discontinuous jump in resistance that fucks up everything.
There are so many more initiatives from climate adaptation and environmental advocates and urban planning folks that will have similar, “well duh,” effects. It’s surprising how many easy, simple ideas there are that society and politicians dismiss.
Maybe we don’t need to burn the planet to “achieve AGI,” in order to “solve climate change,” and, “make cities livable.” It’s not like that tech, even is possible, is going to stop hurricanes or take cars off the streets.
Hope more cities in North America will follow suit. It’s sad how many have been doing the exact opposite of good ideas for so long.
throw7 · 5h ago
"Only after Donald Trump won re-election did it start."
That makes it seem like Trump was pro-congestion pricing... he was not. I remember reading there was a threat and attempt by him to reverse it. Lest it seem like I am a Trump hater, I am very much not impressed by Hochul's delaying which was certainly because of her special interests.
They conveniently timed it until after the election.
enragedcacti · 39m ago
There was no "They". The state legislature passed it, NY/NYC/MTA designed it, and the Biden admin approved it to go into effect before the election. Kathy Hochul delayed it until after the election on extremely spurious grounds, despite the law being on the books and NYCers supporting it.
EGreg · 5h ago
And keep in mind that The Economist is traditionally neoliberal.
Yet they stay true to economics principles even when they are more lefty and collectively enforced :)
To quote: Finally, as taxes and fees are introduced in the local economy, the community can start to issue a Universal Basic Income in its own currency, without causing inflation.
Various taxes can be organically introduced, including sales taxes, land taxes 1, and pigovian taxes 3 on things like pollution, fossil fuels, meat or cigarettes. By redistributing taxed money equally to everyone, this can align public incentives with taxing these negative externalities, and avoid them falling disproportionately on the working class, as happened with the yellow vest protests in France.
As demand for the local currency (and thus local real estate and services) grows, so does the town’s ability to tax various transactions. The town’s citizens could be given the ability to democratically vote on the level of taxes, and thus the level of UBI, they want to receive.
Thus the town can have both sound money and true democratic control of its fiscal and monetary policies, all the while becoming more self-sufficient and stronger. Any town will be able to introduce a local UBI to end food insecurity, improve health outcomes, reduce dependence on means-tested welfare programs, and so on.
PS: Why all the downvotes? Why always silent with no reason?
PaulHoule · 5h ago
The Economist was founded in 1843 to oppose the Corn Laws
whereas I see it what the center-right would be if we had a healthy media/political environment.
billfor · 42m ago
Count how many times they use hard-left vs hard-right, or how many times they use hard-right vs any other kind of right.
kristjansson · 4h ago
Impugns the source(s) trying to place them on the left-right axis more than anything.
tekla · 4h ago
They are classical liberal, which is impossible to place in the current US Left-Right spectrum because politics have become even dumber than previously thought possible
PaulHoule · 4h ago
… politics aren’t just dumb in the US. The Economist is politically homeless these days and has little faith in Labor, Tories or Lib Dems.
rsynnott · 4h ago
They're not _that_ far off being antonyms, really; neoliberalism certainly shares distant origins with the left, but that's about as far as it goes.
turnsout · 5h ago
It's confusing, but "liberal" and "neoliberal" are in fact antonyms.
recursive · 4h ago
Based on this comment tree, I'm tempted to believe neither of them mean anything. Or at least very few people are aware of whatever real definition they have. But many people have opinions about it.
tekla · 4h ago
They do mean things, but most who toss the words around only use it to mean "thing that I don't like"
rsynnott · 4h ago
> Or at least very few people are aware of whatever real definition they have
I mean, like many things, the meaning of 'liberal' has shifted over the last few centuries, and always differed somewhat between regions anyway. Words in English mean what people use them to mean.
PaulHoule · 5h ago
Not really. Ever seen a "liberal" liberate or a "conservative" conserve?
The term got its current usage when FDR came in because at that time it was a matter of "burn it all down" (real socialism) vs "fix the private property system around the margins".
Fair enough from a pedantic point of view, but I was using the term in this sense, as it is the most recognizable modern term to describe serious economic positions of this kind:
Neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes free markets, reduced government intervention, and individual liberty. It's often associated with policies like deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Proponents believe these measures foster economic growth, efficiency, and individual prosperity. However, critics argue that neoliberal policies can lead to increased inequality, social instability, and exploitation
And my point was here they were applauding policies involving clear government intervention.
tekla · 5h ago
> they were applauding policies involving clear government intervention
Yes the Economist will do that, because they believe in classical liberal markets
kfajdsl · 4h ago
(neo)liberal != libertarian.
The government has a clear role for internalizing externalities, which makes markets more efficient. Or, in this case, using price signals to allocate scarce resources when it was just a free-for-all before.
ahepp · 4h ago
Congestion pricing seems like a pretty liberal policy to me. Using supply and demand to set a price.
Sure, you could crank the Friedman dial to 11 by say, privatizing the roads and letting the operators set the price based on competition.
But the policy is liberal at its core. A “lefty, collectively enforced” policy would be something like a quota or permit system.
A key difference being that anyone who wants to drive on the road can do so as long as they pay. It isn’t “everyone with odd license plate numbers can drive today, evens can drive tomorrow” but rather “you can drive today if it’s worth $9 to you”.
varispeed · 4h ago
It is classist. If it was liberal, then it would be based on % of someone's wealth (and using progressive scale).
These policies are aimed at getting unwashed pleb off the roads so the rich can show off their cars in peace.
miguelxt · 4h ago
I think you and the parent comment are confusing the term "liberal". He refers to "liberal" in the classical sense: free markets, limited government, rule of law, etc. You mean "liberal" in the North American sense: lefty, social justice, etc.
varispeed · 3h ago
Free markets presume equal opportunity to access infrastructure, not the rich buying exclusive use of public goods.
queenkjuul · 4h ago
All the poor people on the buses were never gonna drive and now have faster more reliable service
TheGRS · 3h ago
Additionally all those emergency vehicles are going to have an easier time shuttling patients to hospitals and firefighters to fires. The whole spectrum benefits from that, not just the rich.
cute_boi · 4h ago
how are they going to have more reliable service?
TulliusCicero · 4h ago
They mean that buses are now faster/more reliable.
rsynnott · 4h ago
Buses work better when there's less traffic.
vkou · 4h ago
Buses spend less time stuck in traffic.
varispeed · 3h ago
Buses should serve both rich and poor. Otherwise this is a very definition of classism. The bus is the "back of the bus" now.
Marsymars · 3h ago
Liberal and leftist are two entirely different things.
naravara · 4h ago
It’s classist to not want pedestrians in cities to die and get asthma from traffic?
Got it.
varispeed · 3h ago
Amazing how pedestrian safety suddenly matters the moment it becomes a tool to justify purging the poor from city centres.
naravara · 3h ago
If you own a car and use it to get around in Manhattan you’re not “poor.” The poor are riding the bus.
jowea · 5h ago
Charging for an scarce resource instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out does sound like something obvious to come out of a neoliberal economist yes.
DangitBobby · 4h ago
Flat rates are not the only way to allocate scarce resources. Generally they would be called "regressive", even.
jowea · 1h ago
Well it's a flat rate on car drivers in Manhattan. How regressive is it really?
> The views expressed in the blog are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Economist Impact or the sponsor.
So not necessarily reflective of The Economist’s position.
jcranmer · 4h ago
The Economist has long been pretty outspoken over their preference for a carbon tax over cap-and-trade (see any article they write about carbon emissions).
vkou · 4h ago
Carbon taxes have always been a conservative/neo-liberal idea.
Modern 'conservatives' abandoning them tells you a lot about how far their politics have shifted over the past decade.
wat10000 · 3h ago
Just like the ACA/Obamacare was very similar to a proposal that came out of the Heritage Foundation, but was universally hated by the people on that side.
EA-3167 · 5h ago
While I support congestion pricing, I will say that The Economist is most notable these days a negative oracle: whatever it predicts, the opposite will happen.
bryanlarsen · 3h ago
Examples? Counter-example: the Economist predicted the 2007 sub-prime crisis and housing price crash.
ch4s3 · 3h ago
They were spot on about post covid stimulus fueling inflation.
tekla · 5h ago
Such as?
EGreg · 5h ago
The Jim Cramer of macroeconomics? :)
wakawaka28 · 4h ago
Since they define what success is, of course it will be.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
Which contrasting metrics that've gone in the negative direction would you like to highlight?
s1artibartfast · 2h ago
There are obvious winners and losers. Of course it is one sided if you dont care about the losers.
Those who want to drive, not pay, and not take mass transit are losing out and nobody cares.
Im not saying anyone has to care, but I dont think it is honest to call it a free lunch.
newyankee · 4h ago
Another predictable success would be converting entirety of NYC into a driverless car zone, but we are probably not ready for the repercussions as a society
ericmay · 3h ago
Maybe, or maybe just have more street cars and trams and such. More walking, and more biking to go from A -> B.
I'm not sure in the case of Manhattan that driverless cars are particularly valuable, and it's very much debatable whether they would be a predictable success for a few reasons.
Inevitably you arrive at a scenario where you have a limited number of them because of course otherwise would be to defeat the purpose of the congestion zone, and then you'll only have certain operators with the right permits able to extract money from moving people. Kind of like the taxi medallion scheme all over again.
One of the best things America could do is to be to reduce reliance and spend on cars. This applies to New York but even moreso to the rest of the country.
humanpotato · 3h ago
Already 90-95% get around without a car and the rest are paying. Car traffic is necessary to an extent. Compare how shipping companies offer Next Day Early AM shipping for 10x the cost of 4 day shipping. Hardly anyone uses it, but when you need it, you are glad to have that expensive option.
trgn · 2h ago
The future of nyc is one with electric kei cars puttering around for the one offs and trams and subways for everything else. I can see it in my minds eye and it is better in every way
post_break · 2h ago
Ironically NY bans kei vehicles.
trgn · 1h ago
Oh no!
TheGRS · 3h ago
Entirety seems a little extreme. Maybe gradually they could get there as society and technology changes. But yes changing large areas to pedestrian-only seems totally doable to me in NYC.
lysace · 5h ago
It’s great for the very wealthy.
See also: Singapore. When I first visited I was amazed at how little traffic there was. Turns out they had imposed so severe costs on car ownership that the vast majority can’t afford to own one.
Why Driving in Singapore Is Like 'Wearing a Rolex'
The biggest improvement are for the very poor, who rely more heavily than other socioeconomic classes on bus transportation, which has seen the greatest efficiency improvements from congestion pricing. The merely poor or middle class, in NYC, are already reliant on mass transit (although more likely the subway rather than the bus system), which sees somewhat more indirect benefits from increased funding as a result of the congestion charge.
The people whom congestion pricing hurts the most are those who feel that public transit is beneath them but still rely on driving in Manhattan to a degree that the congestion charge is a significant tax. Which unfortunately seems to include most of the media class in NYC, hence the incessant whining about it.
dh2022 · 4h ago
With this new moneys coming in they will not even fix one of these 50-year old subway switches. Nevermind buying some new subway cars, or improving ventilation / air conditioning during summer. This new moneys will go to waste. Meanwhile, yeah, rich investment bankers get to spend less time in traffic.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
> With this new moneys coming in they will not even fix one of these 50-year old subway switches. Nevermind buying some new subway cars...
"The M.T.A. expects to spend $10.9 billion to buy roughly 2,000 new rail cars, an order that will include 1,500 subway cars and more than 500 for the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road. Some of the train fleet has not been updated since at least 1980, the year of the M.T.A.’s first capital plan. Another $3.3 billion will buy and support 2,261 new buses."
"The plan includes $5.4 billion to modernize the subway signal system, which dates back to the Great Depression. Over the past 15 months, the antiquated system has led to an average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month, according to the M.T.A."
lokar · 5h ago
Driving into manhattan and paying for parking is something only the fairly wealthy could afford anyway.
tetromino_ · 31m ago
I have a school teacher friend who commutes by car every day between the Bronx and upper Manhattan (outside the congestion zone - but you said "Manhattan" without any qualifier). Obviously she doesn't pay for parking. Public transportation in her case would be quite inconvenient due to how the subway lines are laid out.
decafninja · 5h ago
Driving into Manhattan every day? Yes.
Occasionally? Tons of middle class people do it.
The majority of my social circle consists of middle and upper middle class Newjerseyans. Many commute daily into Manhattan via public transit. But if they’re going in for anything other than work, it’s always the car.
Which congestion price is perfectly fine for if you’re only going in occasionally.
the_mitsuhiko · 5h ago
> Occasionally? Tons of middle class people do it.
I would not be surprised if occasionally driving into Manhattan is cheaper now. Surely the excessive prices on parking should be going down.
lokar · 5h ago
It should be cheaper already if you place a non-zero value on your time.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Most normal people put a very low value on their time, because they don't have any practical way to monitize an extra hour. It's just "free" time.
mc32 · 4h ago
Do people put a value on time when not doing value added stuff? When they go for a walk, do they instead run? Do they try to only meet up with friends who can return an investment on their time? Do these people not shoot the shit? Are they busy beavers at all times maximizing wealth?
kfajdsl · 4h ago
These are all things that people find value in. Most people don't assign any value to sitting in traffic.
recursive · 4h ago
Shooting the shit could be precisely what they do instead of idling in traffic. Most people would prefer it.
mc32 · 4h ago
I dunno, man, It's rumored they have this thing called cellular telephony technology allowing just such a thing while in traffic --I could be wrong though, thems being wealthy and shit.
recursive · 4h ago
The rumors are true, but you seem to have missed my point. Some people might prefer to communicate in person. You might not be one of them.
echelon · 5h ago
The supply demand curve might mean prices temporarily drop with demand, but that might put pressure on some parking to convert to other uses, which will then lower supply.
lokar · 5h ago
I agree. Also, the money from the fee is supposed to improve transit (we will see how long that lasts…), and IMO a share should go to NJ transit into manhattan.
kjkjadksj · 5h ago
If that were true congestion pricing would not affect car counts
lokar · 4h ago
Like any moderate financial incentive it impacts a minority of people at the margin. For phenomenon like traffic that can make a big impact.
shipscode · 5h ago
Tell me you've never lived in lower Manhattan without telling me you've never lived in lower Manhattan.
Edit: Happy to be downvoted by people who actually live in Manhattan and take 5 seconds out of their day to talk to anybody who works in a local store. Brooklyn transplants can move along.
mtalantikite · 4h ago
Yeah, this is the only disagreement I have with congestion pricing too. I have a friend that lives in Tribeca (in the place he grew up in in the 80s) and needs a car to drive to his art studio in New Jersey. I feel like they should get an exemption or at least a heavily reduced rate.
But my in laws that drive in from the suburbs a few times a year? They can afford the $9.
righthand · 4h ago
Your buddy should move to NJ if he needs low cost access to his studio. The roads will be tolled and the price will only go up. The entire point is to reduce the amount of people using the roads for a cheap benefit (ex living in Tribeca one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city and complaining that you have no low cost access to NJ).
No comments yet
dml2135 · 3h ago
I’m unclear on how $9 is not a fair price to drive a car from lower manhattan to new jersey. Public transit would cost at least that much.
mtalantikite · 23m ago
I'm not saying it's not a fair price -- I think largely it's a positive to discourage people from deciding to commute into Manhattan by car. I'm in my 40s and only recently got my license, so I'm certainly on team public transit.
But I am saying that not everyone that lives in the congestion zone are well off office workers, particularly those born and raised in lower Manhattan that have housing arrangements that go back a few decades. An extra $2-300 month in tolls is not nothing for many people. You can't easily bring hundreds of pounds of art and building supplies to your art warehouse in Newark every day on the path train.
josephcsible · 1h ago
Because on public transit, you're paying to use someone else's vehicle, and needing to cover the maintenance, depreciation, etc., of it, plus the driver's time. But with your own vehicle, those are all already your expenses, so it's double-dipping to charge you like that at all.
const_cast · 1h ago
But it's not double dipping, because the cost of infrastructure for motor vehicles is absurdly high - higher than even a lot of public transportation. Because individual vehicles are horribly inefficient, and require significantly more space per capita. Roads are not free, congestion is not free, pollution is not free. You're used to being subsidized, so when you're not it may seem unfair. But it's not.
josephcsible · 28m ago
> You're used to being subsidized, so when you're not it may seem unfair.
It wouldn't be unfair if nobody were subsidized. It's unfair that just cars aren't anymore, but buses, etc. still are.
const_cast · 20m ago
Cars are still subsidized, just a little less. And public transit is absolutely subsidized, but in a similar position to cars - some of it is subsidized, and some of it you pay. It's not free to ride the bus. To me, it seems fair.
lokar · 4h ago
In such a dense and complex place it’s impossible to avoid at least some negative impacts, at least early on. Hopefully transit will improve.
shipscode · 4h ago
Yep. The people who agree with congestion pricing either hate or ignore these people, along with the thousands of lower Manhattan small-business employees, subsidized housing residence that have cars or street park daily.
I postulate it's because they don't actually live there, or just moved there, if they do actually live there, they'd have to be severely socially inept to never speak to a store or restaurant owner and ask what their commute is like.
To act as though it affects nobody of moderate or lower income is downright dishonest, when 22% of Manhattan households own one - it's no longer an upper class activity, just a basic tool to get to work.
dml2135 · 3h ago
The subway is also a basic tool to get to work, which even more people use, and we charge a fare for that. So why not for driving?
The point isn’t that it won’t negatively affect anybody of moderate or lower income, it’s that overall it will positively affect most people of moderate or lower income, because most of those people do not drive regularly into Manhattan.
lokar · 5h ago
17th and 6th av
lokar · 4h ago
I would (I’ve since moved) worry that less traffic would mean faster cars. As a pedestrian I did appreciate just how slowly cars normally move in Manhattan.
selectodude · 4h ago
Manhattan is blanketed in unmarked speed cameras.
CPLX · 5h ago
That was the original criticism, or rather the cynical attempt to block it.
It hasn't panned out that way at all however, it's just great for everyone.
OK, actually not everyone. There's one very specific group that this sucks for, which not-coincidentally was the group that was loudly opposing it using the excuse you tried.
That group is people who work for the city and/or are connected so they get free daily parking. That's a lot of cops and firefighters and various city functionaries at various levels and agencies that have been able to get their hands on parking placards. It's a core NYC subculture and they were the annoying loud voices that tried to stop this.
Almost anyone who was driving into central Manhattan and paying for parking already is thrilled by this, it's only a little more expensive and in exchange they shave hours of traffic out of their commutes.
It's the people that were gaming the system to get free parking that are suddenly screwed. Fuck them.
timr · 1h ago
> It hasn't panned out that way at all however, it's just great for everyone.
Oh, come now. Try a little bit harder to see the other side.
Live here, don't have a car -- haven't had one for 20 years. Ride the subway every day.
I freely acknowledge that the roads feel less crowded, but it makes no practical difference to me. As far as I am concerned, the entire thing is a small net loss, in that it's another tax, and on the rare occasions I do actually need a car or a service that requires a car (plumber, mover, etc.) it costs me more.
I look at congestion pricing purely as a question of "do I consent to another tax for the MTA?", and when framed in that way, the answer is emphatically "No."
wang_li · 4h ago
It's a bit absurd though. The roads are paid by tax payers from the general fund of the city, but they discriminate on how much it costs to use those roads based on where you live. If everyone entering the zone paid the same then it would be one thing. But they have exemptions and deductions based on residency and income. If they are going to charge people who don't live in the area and not charge the people who do live in the area, then the people in the area should have to buy all the roads and pay for the upkeep.
rozab · 4h ago
To someone who can't afford to drive it might seem absurd to be paying for roads with their taxes in the first place. Driving has been generally subsidized for so long that it's easy to forget it's subsidized at all. The backlash to proposals for free public transport demonstrates this.
CPLX · 4h ago
> It's a bit absurd though. The roads are paid by tax payers from the general fund of the city, but they discriminate on how much it costs to use those roads based on where you live. If everyone entering the zone paid the same then it would be one thing. But they have exemptions and deductions based on residency and income. If they are going to charge people who don't live in the area and not charge the people who do live in the area, then the people in the area should have to buy all the roads and pay for the upkeep.
These aren't deep moral questions. You're trying to draw some sort of universal fairness doctrine around this that doesn't apply. It's just public policy. The people who live in the area are buying all the roads, through various taxes and fees.
Roads don't work the way you describe. Are you aware that there's literally no way to drive to Long Island without going through New York City? Or that driving from Princeton New Jersey to Providence Rhode Island requires going through New York City or driving about 40-50 miles out of the way? Why is all this solely the problem of people who live in Manhattan below Central Park again?
maest · 3h ago
> vast majority can’t afford to own one.
Why is that an issue?
Public transportation and taxis are readily available.
timr · 4h ago
Elasticity of demand is not magic, so yeah, making something more expensive will likely reduce demand. While I have no doubt it is a success if you consider only reduced traffic, there are other considerations that override that for me:
1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding. The MTA rivals Tammany Hall in terms of waste and fraud, and the talks of budget cuts were political crocodile tears.
3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
---
Edit: I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
Ultimately, congestion was itself a cost, but it was a dynamic cost, increasing and decreasing with the amount of congestion to maximize utility of the roads. What the state has done here, effectively, is set the price of driving higher than the market at all times in order to guarantee a marginal reduction in demand.
rafram · 4h ago
It's a max of $21 for a truckload of goods, and that's if they deliver during the day. It probably costs the shipper more than that when the driver stops at a gas station to use the bathroom. Obviously the numbers will vary significantly depending on what the vehicle is carrying, but a truckload of groceries might go for around $100,000 retail [1]. The congestion charge is 0.02% of that.
> By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive.
That's not true. There's a tax credit for low-income residents and a full waiver for disabled people. The average person who drives in Manhattan makes $130,000, 40% more than the average income in the city as a whole [2], so letting them do it for free (while creating negative externalities that we all bear) is just a handout to people who don't need it.
— and speaking of truckloads, the truckers & delivery guys love congestion pricing.
After being the most vocal critics for years, they’ve learned that low traffic == more, faster deliveries == more business and more coverage, or same business with fewer drivers.
This is the real reason why I think it'll never get repealed. If anyone tries, the industry lobbies will be arguing to keep it instead.
timr · 4h ago
> That's not true. There's a tax credit for low-income residents and a full waiver for disabled people.
That's a fig-leaf argument. Yes, there's some theoretical tax credit that may or may not offset the costs for particular groups of people -- and it would be insane if they didn't exempt the disabled. But if the tax weren't causing the marginal driver to stop driving, it wouldn't work, by definition.
rafram · 4h ago
It's not a "theoretical" tax credit. Here's the application form: https://lidp.mta.info/
Congesting pricing has dual goals of reducing congestion and funding the MTA. Low-income drivers get a break on the charge, so they fund the MTA a little less than other drivers, but they're still less likely to drive than they were before, because it costs more now.
s1artibartfast · 2h ago
If nobody is inconveniences, then there would be no change.
It is reasonable to say that it achieved its stated goals. Its not accurate to say nobody is experience higher costs or prevented from doing what they want.
timr · 4h ago
It's theoretical in the sense that it requires that you apply for it, and hopefully you'll get your money back someday.
(...poor people being notorious for having lots of time for precise accounting and follow through on government bureaucracy.)
paulgb · 4h ago
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC, it just came in the form of a deadweight loss (paying delivery workers / tradespeople / professionals to sit in traffic) instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
timr · 4h ago
> Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC
I agree!
> instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
Telling me that the money will be set on fire by a public organization with good intent doesn't convince me.
What has happened here -- and mathematically, this has to be true, or it wouldn't work -- is that the city has taken what used to be the market cost of congestion, and set an artificial floor higher than that market. They then captured the difference as revenue.
That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.
paulgb · 4h ago
> That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.
I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the value of driving and the cost of congestion are the same to every driver.
For some people, driving is an elastic decision. They mode shift, or time shift to off-peak, or carpool, or combine errands in the city into one trip instead of multiple.
For other people, driving is necessary. They'll benefit from fewer of the first type of person being on the roads during peak hours.
josephcsible · 1h ago
> time shift to off-peak
One of the worst things about this congestion charge is that it applies even at off-peak times.
timr · 3h ago
No, I don't need to make assumptions about any of that. It's a complex interplay of factors (like any economic system), and everyone has their own reward function.
I'm just saying that if the marginal driver were still choosing to drive, then the system wouldn't work at all. That seems tautological?
The MTA has to set the price high enough above market that the reduction in demand is X%. Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.
paulgb · 3h ago
> Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.
It's a dynamic system though; as some drivers opt not to drive, the utility of driving for those other drivers increases. Yes, the market will find an equilibrium somewhere where some people will still drive, but that's kind of the point.
timr · 2h ago
I think the better argument for your side is that a large number of people have a utility function that isn't rational -- or at least, not based on commute time saved.
Yes, the market will find a new equilibrium, but if I'm right that the marginal driver is choosing to drive or not based mostly on a function of time saved, then eventually we'll see the market reaching an equilibrium where people are willing to pay up to the amount of money they save by getting somewhere faster via car (ignoring other costs for the sake of argument).
If that is true -- if the market is efficient for time -- then this plan can only ever work by making driving more expensive than the time lost to congestion.
(As an aside, thanks for having a serious, nuanced discussion about this. It's depressing how many people just want to fling insults and downvote/flag/censor stuff that they disagree with. I knew I was going to get ravaged for having a non-canonical opinion, but it's so hard to get people to just engage with the argument in good faith.)
8note · 4h ago
> higher than that market
i dont think thats true. the cost can also be much cheaper, but people price differentiate better when they can actually see the number than when they cant.
you can look at 19.99 as an example, vs 20 as example of making people feel a certain way to get them to shop differently, or credit cards - which get people to pay much more for an item than they otherwise would with the interest payments, or with the klarna styled buy now pay later.
its not a tautology that a higher price drives down cost.
i think the government price is likely much less than the cost of congestion, especially once you price in the externalities of pollution, but drivers werent aware of how much cost they were incurring from the congestion, and now that there's a number, they can make decisions based off of it
dml2135 · 4h ago
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
Aruguable. It’s very possible that the time saved by not sitting in traffic will outweigh the congestion charge for delivery trucks (which is what I assume you’re referring to).
8note · 2h ago
as far as i can read, your argument is that traffic jams are impossible, because congestion acts as a dynamic cost function to keep the road at its highest utility, when the throughput is highest.
unless you disagree with the that definition of the utility of the road?
how do you explain phenomena like shockwave traffic jams, where otherwise high utility roads get sections of nearly stopped traffic. eg. https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M?feature=shared in a closed system (30s of video)
can you spend some time showing your work, and both propose and prove what the cost function of congestion is? then, it should be clear whether the government set cost is higher or lower, and under what conditions. id especially want to see the limiting behaviour - standstill traffic. my gur sense is that the cost of congestion should be going towards infinity, but im interested in how the constant value from the government is still higher.
bryanlarsen · 4h ago
The MTA has massive waste in absolute terms, but divide its budget by 5 million passengers per day and those numbers become much more reasonable.
Money spent on the MTA benefits everybody, especially the poor.
timr · 4h ago
"Sure, Tammany Hall was corrupt, but the corruption was only a tiny amount per capita...and what a nice courthouse!"
rafram · 4h ago
Pointless strawman response. If you think the MTA's waste is in any way comparable to Tammany Hall, back that up with numbers.
> An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.
> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
> Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.
> Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
This is literally what Tammany Hall did.
8note · 4h ago
an alternative interpretation is that the union workers know more about how to safely do underground work than accountants and supervisors do.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
I think that particular theory is addressed by the "four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world" bit, if it includes the developed world. (Which I strongly suspect it does.)
chimeracoder · 2h ago
> an alternative interpretation is that the union workers know more about how to safely do underground work than accountants and supervisors do.
As someone in New York who supports congestion pricing and public transit, I will say this: yes, there is a ton of waste and mismanagement at the MTA, and the TWU is unfortunately frequently one of the impediments to progress here. They have a history of opposing things like industry-standard safety improvements, sometimes even things which create jobs for their members, for arcane political reasons that require a deep understanding of their internal politics to comprehend. It would be nice if the TWU were a more consistent force for efficiency and progress, but they are not. You can compare to unions elsewhere in the world, or even to other unions in the US, and the TWU still winds up as an outlier in many of these areas.
That said, OP is pointing the finger at the wrong party. The MTA is overseen by the state. The responsibility for these inefficiencies and cost overruns lie with the state legislature and the governor. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time that article was written, famously washed his hands off the MTA. He was so brazen as to even publicly claim that he had no authority over them, at the same time as he was making unilateral management decisions on their behalf, including ordering the MTA to write a check to an upstate ski resort, to bail the resort out after a low-business season.
Fortunately, the money from congestion pricing is legally earmarked by state law and under a settlement from a federal lawsuit (the lawsuit was unrelated to congestion pricing, but the funding was offered up as a settlement term), so there's a lot less wiggle room for things to go wrong.
Congestion pricing is a solid policy win. That doesn't mean the governor (Hochul) and the state legislature don't need to step up and do their jobs - which means real, material oversight - but criticizing congestion pricing on those grounds, when it's one of the few budget items which actually has been legally overseen and structured - is completely off-base.
quickthrowman · 3h ago
Accounts know nothing about running construction projects. If you want to control costs, use fixed price or GMP contracts instead of cost plus or T&M. You also need to make sure your engineers are accurately representing the work scope in the RFP so you don’t get change ordered to death.
That being said, there is definitely corruption in the NYC construction market that doesn’t exist in the market I operate in, and I’ve read articles specifically about sandhogs inflating contracts and so on. Their union contract could possibly specify certain positions being required that are extraneous to the work being performed that would inflate the cost of the project and line the union’s coffers.
Net margins on a 9 to 10 figure construction contract should be around 3-5% in a competitive market.
FWIW I am a construction management professional.
dh2022 · 4h ago
These new moneys coming in will not buy one new subway car, will not fix one mile of subway track, will not fix one mile of potholes-filled-streets. Will not even paint one mile of street sign. It will all go paying some bureaucrats to create some Tableau dashboards showing how much better something (anything) is.
const_cast · 1h ago
> These new moneys coming in will not buy one new subway car
I think it is literally being used to buy hundreds of new subway cars as we speak.
Y'all can't just make things up and say whatever you want. I get it, I get it, public sector evil. Unfortunately that's not an argument. Yes, you're going to actually have to try instead of being intellectually dishonest.
rafram · 4h ago
It already has done the former two. (Fixing streets is NYC DOT, a separate agency run by the city, not the state.)
Analemma_ · 4h ago
Citation needed. It drives me nuts when people treat their own Boomer Facebook-esque rants about "The System, Man" as adequate evidence in what should be empirical discussions about policy tradeoffs.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
Significantly? Aren't those delivery trucks spending a lot less time paying drivers to idle in traffic now?
timr · 4h ago
I don't know, but you don't have any evidence for that argument.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
I'm asking for evidence of your argument.
We do have concrete evidence the buses, at least, are moving around faster.
No comments yet
arolihas · 4h ago
We know there's less congestion, which means less time delivery trucks are idling...
arolihas · 4h ago
Buddy if you are going to make an argument where you make statements, people are going to ask for evidence. You are making statements in the affirmative. So you also have to give proof as well. You are arguing the tax should be removed. Do you have proof that literally everything will become cheaper without this tax?
maybelsyrup · 4h ago
> I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
> You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
You ok man? Like, respect for your passion on this issue but you’re also seething pretty hard about New York City having cleaner air and less traffic.
timr · 4h ago
I'm not seething, and I can assure you from the disgusting piles of city dust that accumulate in my apartment that the air is not cleaner in any way that matters to me.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
The difference might matter to your asthmatic neighbor. It's early to assess, but:
> The New York City health department’s readings of PM2.5, one air quality measure, improved citywide the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2024. The improvement was more pronounced within the congestion zone, but it’s too early to attribute that to the program, or to know if that’s a lasting pattern, experts said.
"My apartment still gets dusty" seems like a pretty desperate anti-congestion charge argument.
timr · 4h ago
I was not being serious, but as you've repeatedly said, there's no evidence for the argument you're making.
A three-month change at the beginning of the year in PM2.5 is noise.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
I provided clear, reliably sourced evidence for it, while noting it's too early for that evidence to be conclusive yet.
You've yet to provide any for your assertions. Just feels.
timr · 4h ago
Again, in case it's not clear: I was being whimsical. I'm obviously not resting my opposition to this on a one-off argument about dust in my apartment.
I personally don't think the PM2.5 thing would justify the implementation of the system even if it were true, but that's not a debate I want to get into.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
> Again, in case it's not clear: I was being whimsical.
In the Southern belle “bless your heart” sense, perhaps. In the “good faith arguing” sense, no.
CPLX · 4h ago
> 1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this.
That's an empirical question, you're going to have to prove it. The time saved by delivery drivers or contractors, for example, has value. If they can make more deliveries, or fix more elevators in the same day those services get cheaper. If the only downside is that the assistant patrol supervisor deputy liaison that would have driven to 1 Police Plaza takes the train instead it's clearly a net savings and economic improvement and makes everything we buy and use in the city cheaper.
> 2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding.
The MTA is chronically starved for cash and unable to do large scale long term projects because of unstable funding. If this policy, which as we saw above might well have literally zero aggregate economic downside, also builds more efficient transit, it's a virtuous circle of winning.
> 3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
Rich people can already drive. Now those rich people give money to transit for everyone else. Working people or people who need to drive (like those with a van full of stuff that needs to be somewhere) are able to do so much more efficiently and most likely face net lower costs.
The "downside" is midly affluent people who do have cars and regularly drive in the central area take fewer trips or take the train a few more times instead. And the other downside is that the tens of thousands of assholes who've been abusing the city parking placard process for decades have to find another way to get to work like the rest of us.
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
No comments yet
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
I would've had a hard time wrapping my head around being OK with ~$10/trip before this post
Goes to show time is the most valuable commodity anyone'll ever own
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
A problem with this theory is that, I imagine, a lot of such companies basically only have contracts with the government. So it ends up with the same singleton problems, just outsourced.
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)
These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time
I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!
My wife was a finance commissioner for a water utility. Guess what the most common clogger of storm drains was? Shopping bags. They did hundreds of service calls annually doing service that ranged from fishing them out to using a hydro-jet to clear a pipe.
Within 18 months of the bag fee, those calls dropped 60%. That’s easily $800k in wasted labor and dollars in this small city.
So it's just purely all downsides. Like security theater, but for the environment.
As a side effect, DC's water authority has also been able to cut maintenance budgets because clumps of bags were our main source of sewer clogs.
The downside of this stuff that we don’t have data on is how it affects big employers who benefit from car transit and benefit the city as a whole? How many patients are going to avoid NYU, Cornell or MSK in favor of a satellite site not in the city proper, for example?
NYC chased most of the big industries away already in my lifetime, I wonder if this will impact commercial business in the city in the long run.
Seems that renting a square foot of downtown Manhattan land is about $60/year. A parking space being about 200 square foot, that's $1k a month if paying the actual rate, just for parking (let alone the road space)
Seems that $200 a month is small when compared to the actual cost.
I ask because the "only rich people" criticism of NYCs project has been beaten into the dirt and discussed at nearly every level of politics for more than a year now. If there's anything you want to know the information is readily available.
I don't believe that for a second. They could afford to drive a car, insure it, maintain it, buy fuel, and pay for very expensive parking in NYC, but $9 is too much now?
I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong if there's any data that suggest that this is actually true.
You're trying to make it seem like driving in NYC is simply a lifestyle decision that people could choose to do or not do. For some people it is, for many people it's simply the only viable option. Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
Which implies that the people who continue driving are indeed those who have no other option, and those who do have taken it instead of paying the $9. Would you disagree?
And no, of course I don't imply it's a lifestyle choice - merely that some people(not all!) were driving in NYC even though they indeed had other options available, because there was no extra cost associated with it - now that there is, those people use those other options where possible.
Again, it's really fun to speculate why who and where is doing what, but if you have more specific data then please share.
This kind of argument reminds me of a French politician who defended a tax on sweet drinks as a way to fight against the obesity crisis looming (France performs better than most country in that regard, but the situation is still bad). She wanted a tax to deter the consumption of sweet drinks, but at the same time they wanted the tax to stay at “a level where it would not affect the purchasing power of people”.
Funny because I was going to use that exact example as something that absolutely works. I can easily afford the sugar tax where I live, it's been around for a few years now. But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
I understand the same mechanism works with cigarettes and loads of other things - even if you can afford them the increasing price puts you off.
But maybe for a more relevant example - I can comfortably afford parking right in the city centre where I live. But the idea of paying what's being asked for parking puts me off so much I just park at the nearest park and ride and take the metro in.
Using market-style policies to try to nudge people around only works if there are alternatives they can choose from. In this case for many people there are not.
Literally no one has stepped forward and said “I can’t afford $9 or $2.95 or the deep discount commuter tickets.”
It's almost never needed to faregate sidewalks. Tourist districts can organize a special improvement district tax on stores to fund sidewalk upgrades, trash collection, shuttles, security, parking, and planting flowers. This makes the zone more even more attractive to tourists.
Auctioning off to the highest bidder the right to move around is cruel because you make it so that some people simply can't afford to exist in public spaces, and because you're telling people that their own city or neighborhood doesn't even belong to them.
The correct analogy here would be access to healthcare, water, or electricity.
Providing additional impetus to make a change seems virtuous.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
Unless they really price it to deter people, they'll just drive. In London it's cheaper to pay the £15 charge than to get two adults return tickets on the tube from the outer suburbs. Once you factor in comfort, convenience, reliability and practicality of your private car Vs London's public transport it's obvious why more and more people just pay the fee to drive.
If they really wanted to stop congestion they'd increase the fee from £15 to something like £150-250 a day. But they won't do that because then hardly anyone would pay it and they'd lose the revenue.
This is actually a good point, because of the nature of what causes congestion.
It's that governments don't do the things that prevent it (e.g. allowing higher density housing construction to shorten commutes or adding capacity to both mass transit and road systems), until the congestion gets really bad.
So when you first introduce congestion pricing, congestion goes down, because of course it does -- increase the cost of something and you get less of it. But then, why do any of the other things that address congestion until it gets really bad again? So population grows over time or existing infrastructure decays and doesn't get replaced because it isn't "needed" yet. Until congestion is as bad as it ever was, but now people are paying a regressive tax.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours.
I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
To your point trucks already double park so both changes would be a positive for deliveries.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place.
One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places.
It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!
I'm struggling to imagine reasons why a significant number of people will now start walking to these businesses. What are some of these multiple reasons that have now been overcome to an extent as to cause shop traffic to increase ten-fold?
You’re hypothesizing that people are purposefully avoiding these streets because they have cars driving on them?
In Amsterdam there's been countless examples of this exact thing. Businesses booming after they rip out parking and make roads forbidden for cars, and I can anecdotally say I also love whenever they rip out parking near me in the Netherlands.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-c...
Every time I see a study like this it is similar results where the reality doesn't match the guesses of local business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYyQ8ev5yE
> Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds.
> “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses.
> Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior.
> “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
People should not forget that Europe has tons of car friendly towns and suburbs and many people live there. You can choose your lifestyle.
I have friends who chose to move into cities and sold their cars in the process. The pros of the cities outweighed the pros of car ownership for them. They also don't have to spend money on car maintenance, insurance, or gas. They can move around the city fine with public transit and ride sharing. They rent cars to make long trips.
Absolute statements rarely are absolute, particularly when the motivations and preferences of individuals are in the mix.
The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.
For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.
Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.
At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.
In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
Here is the place for a good public transport, even in US it should be trivial to make it financially self-sufficient and attractive. People always choose whats best for them (cost or time wise). European city centers work like that and everybody normal accepts that.
And, I can agree it is the kind of thing that can save time for anyone, but will spend time for everyone.
Which is to say: his case studies examining the details of specific cities, evaluating transit system design etc. are great. But his analysis of why the bad things are bad (especially when he starts blaming people and ascribing motivations) is utterly insufferable.
Happy to say I missed that one.
But yes, I completely agree with all of that. I'd love more of the analyses of why some systems work and less of the vitriol against everyone who isn't already totally on board.
Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City
> Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms.
> As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations.
There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
if you can reform the system fine but I don't have conidence. Human nature doesn't deal well with the needed power imbalance.
I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.
"Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta."
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
"A decade ago, Utah set itself an ambitious goal: end chronic homelessness. As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
"Finland has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%,[1] though other reports indicate it could be up to 50%. The number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains."
Having a stable housing situation turns out to make a whole bunch of other related social changes more feasible.
> If by 'mental health' you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
I mean, I'd start with therapy, addiction services, social supports, and the like. But I do think the complete removal of long-term inpatient mental health in the 50s/60s was an overshoot. Some people need that much help.
(I also believe there's a lot more we can do to prevent people from becoming that "kind of people" in the first place.)
I think the explanation of "some people are bad people" is a lazy explanation. The proportion of bad people to everyone else should be about the same everywhere. We have to take a closer look at incentives and systems in place.
(I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other in my comment, but as someone who rides local US transit regularly and has for over 10 years, my patience for using transit as a "solution of last resort" is wearing thin but still remains.)
Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes).
What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute.
The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there.
So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?”
A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?”
So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes?
Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours?
If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
Commute times: Faster.
Transit ridership: Up.
Visitors: Up.
- average commute time is up because transit is still much slower than driving used to be (this first point is definitely true), and many drivers were forced on to the slower mode of transportation (also true, but that doesn’t imply average times went up or down).
- Occasional visitors (that only pay once in a while) are up, but the number of people that can commute are down, hollowing out commercial office districts.
- polls showing it is popular under-represent people that can no longer afford to travel to the city.
The fact that the numbers being reported are so vague as to be compatible with my doomsday scenario is why I say the metrics seem cherry picked.
I’d love to see a study that reports enough of their methodology to disprove my three bullet points. I’m generally supportive of things like congestion pricing and public transit, but sloppy studies and sloppy reporting on their actual impact doesn’t help their cause.
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...
Then why, out of the countless alternatives, did they choose to raise the funds this way?
Just worth bearing mind when people talk about streets being emptier - just emptier of cars
I guess it is near a critical point where a relatively small change in traffic results in a large change in travel times, traffic jams, etc.?
Reducing traffic to 90% of capacity makes a huge difference. A little bit of room here and there allows for much smoother flow and a lot better experience for those who didn't get priced out. And almost certainly better flow for busses, which is helpful for a lot of people.
Yes, same as school traffic (certainly where I live in the UK). It's not all the traffic on the road, but the difference it makes is enormous.
Maybe we don’t need to burn the planet to “achieve AGI,” in order to “solve climate change,” and, “make cities livable.” It’s not like that tech, even is possible, is going to stop hurricanes or take cars off the streets.
Hope more cities in North America will follow suit. It’s sad how many have been doing the exact opposite of good ideas for so long.
That makes it seem like Trump was pro-congestion pricing... he was not. I remember reading there was a threat and attempt by him to reverse it. Lest it seem like I am a Trump hater, I am very much not impressed by Hochul's delaying which was certainly because of her special interests.
Yet they stay true to economics principles even when they are more lefty and collectively enforced :)
Now imagine what else Pigovian Taxes can do to help solve collective action problems, if we had a UBI and local city currencies: https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...
To quote: Finally, as taxes and fees are introduced in the local economy, the community can start to issue a Universal Basic Income in its own currency, without causing inflation.
Various taxes can be organically introduced, including sales taxes, land taxes 1, and pigovian taxes 3 on things like pollution, fossil fuels, meat or cigarettes. By redistributing taxed money equally to everyone, this can align public incentives with taxing these negative externalities, and avoid them falling disproportionately on the working class, as happened with the yellow vest protests in France.
As demand for the local currency (and thus local real estate and services) grows, so does the town’s ability to tax various transactions. The town’s citizens could be given the ability to democratically vote on the level of taxes, and thus the level of UBI, they want to receive.
Thus the town can have both sound money and true democratic control of its fiscal and monetary policies, all the while becoming more self-sufficient and stronger. Any town will be able to introduce a local UBI to end food insecurity, improve health outcomes, reduce dependence on means-tested welfare programs, and so on.
PS: Why all the downvotes? Why always silent with no reason?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
so there is nothing "neo" about their "liberal".
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
whereas I see it what the center-right would be if we had a healthy media/political environment.
I mean, like many things, the meaning of 'liberal' has shifted over the last few centuries, and always differed somewhat between regions anyway. Words in English mean what people use them to mean.
The term got its current usage when FDR came in because at that time it was a matter of "burn it all down" (real socialism) vs "fix the private property system around the margins".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
Neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes free markets, reduced government intervention, and individual liberty. It's often associated with policies like deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Proponents believe these measures foster economic growth, efficiency, and individual prosperity. However, critics argue that neoliberal policies can lead to increased inequality, social instability, and exploitation
And my point was here they were applauding policies involving clear government intervention.
Yes the Economist will do that, because they believe in classical liberal markets
The government has a clear role for internalizing externalities, which makes markets more efficient. Or, in this case, using price signals to allocate scarce resources when it was just a free-for-all before.
Sure, you could crank the Friedman dial to 11 by say, privatizing the roads and letting the operators set the price based on competition.
But the policy is liberal at its core. A “lefty, collectively enforced” policy would be something like a quota or permit system.
A key difference being that anyone who wants to drive on the road can do so as long as they pay. It isn’t “everyone with odd license plate numbers can drive today, evens can drive tomorrow” but rather “you can drive today if it’s worth $9 to you”.
These policies are aimed at getting unwashed pleb off the roads so the rich can show off their cars in peace.
Got it.
Update: wow you’re right: https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/net-zero-and-ene...
https://lomborg.com/news/how-avoid-political-pitfalls-carbon...
> The views expressed in the blog are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Economist Impact or the sponsor.
So not necessarily reflective of The Economist’s position.
Modern 'conservatives' abandoning them tells you a lot about how far their politics have shifted over the past decade.
Those who want to drive, not pay, and not take mass transit are losing out and nobody cares.
Im not saying anyone has to care, but I dont think it is honest to call it a free lunch.
I'm not sure in the case of Manhattan that driverless cars are particularly valuable, and it's very much debatable whether they would be a predictable success for a few reasons.
Inevitably you arrive at a scenario where you have a limited number of them because of course otherwise would be to defeat the purpose of the congestion zone, and then you'll only have certain operators with the right permits able to extract money from moving people. Kind of like the taxi medallion scheme all over again.
One of the best things America could do is to be to reduce reliance and spend on cars. This applies to New York but even moreso to the rest of the country.
See also: Singapore. When I first visited I was amazed at how little traffic there was. Turns out they had imposed so severe costs on car ownership that the vast majority can’t afford to own one.
Why Driving in Singapore Is Like 'Wearing a Rolex'
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/world/asia/car-certificat...
(https://archive.is/X6dpP)
The people whom congestion pricing hurts the most are those who feel that public transit is beneath them but still rely on driving in Manhattan to a degree that the congestion charge is a significant tax. Which unfortunately seems to include most of the media class in NYC, hence the incessant whining about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/nyregion/mta-budget.html
"The M.T.A. expects to spend $10.9 billion to buy roughly 2,000 new rail cars, an order that will include 1,500 subway cars and more than 500 for the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road. Some of the train fleet has not been updated since at least 1980, the year of the M.T.A.’s first capital plan. Another $3.3 billion will buy and support 2,261 new buses."
"The plan includes $5.4 billion to modernize the subway signal system, which dates back to the Great Depression. Over the past 15 months, the antiquated system has led to an average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month, according to the M.T.A."
Occasionally? Tons of middle class people do it.
The majority of my social circle consists of middle and upper middle class Newjerseyans. Many commute daily into Manhattan via public transit. But if they’re going in for anything other than work, it’s always the car.
Which congestion price is perfectly fine for if you’re only going in occasionally.
I would not be surprised if occasionally driving into Manhattan is cheaper now. Surely the excessive prices on parking should be going down.
Edit: Happy to be downvoted by people who actually live in Manhattan and take 5 seconds out of their day to talk to anybody who works in a local store. Brooklyn transplants can move along.
But my in laws that drive in from the suburbs a few times a year? They can afford the $9.
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But I am saying that not everyone that lives in the congestion zone are well off office workers, particularly those born and raised in lower Manhattan that have housing arrangements that go back a few decades. An extra $2-300 month in tolls is not nothing for many people. You can't easily bring hundreds of pounds of art and building supplies to your art warehouse in Newark every day on the path train.
It wouldn't be unfair if nobody were subsidized. It's unfair that just cars aren't anymore, but buses, etc. still are.
I postulate it's because they don't actually live there, or just moved there, if they do actually live there, they'd have to be severely socially inept to never speak to a store or restaurant owner and ask what their commute is like.
To act as though it affects nobody of moderate or lower income is downright dishonest, when 22% of Manhattan households own one - it's no longer an upper class activity, just a basic tool to get to work.
The point isn’t that it won’t negatively affect anybody of moderate or lower income, it’s that overall it will positively affect most people of moderate or lower income, because most of those people do not drive regularly into Manhattan.
It hasn't panned out that way at all however, it's just great for everyone.
OK, actually not everyone. There's one very specific group that this sucks for, which not-coincidentally was the group that was loudly opposing it using the excuse you tried.
That group is people who work for the city and/or are connected so they get free daily parking. That's a lot of cops and firefighters and various city functionaries at various levels and agencies that have been able to get their hands on parking placards. It's a core NYC subculture and they were the annoying loud voices that tried to stop this.
Almost anyone who was driving into central Manhattan and paying for parking already is thrilled by this, it's only a little more expensive and in exchange they shave hours of traffic out of their commutes.
It's the people that were gaming the system to get free parking that are suddenly screwed. Fuck them.
Oh, come now. Try a little bit harder to see the other side.
Live here, don't have a car -- haven't had one for 20 years. Ride the subway every day.
I freely acknowledge that the roads feel less crowded, but it makes no practical difference to me. As far as I am concerned, the entire thing is a small net loss, in that it's another tax, and on the rare occasions I do actually need a car or a service that requires a car (plumber, mover, etc.) it costs me more.
I look at congestion pricing purely as a question of "do I consent to another tax for the MTA?", and when framed in that way, the answer is emphatically "No."
These aren't deep moral questions. You're trying to draw some sort of universal fairness doctrine around this that doesn't apply. It's just public policy. The people who live in the area are buying all the roads, through various taxes and fees.
Roads don't work the way you describe. Are you aware that there's literally no way to drive to Long Island without going through New York City? Or that driving from Princeton New Jersey to Providence Rhode Island requires going through New York City or driving about 40-50 miles out of the way? Why is all this solely the problem of people who live in Manhattan below Central Park again?
Why is that an issue?
Public transportation and taxis are readily available.
1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding. The MTA rivals Tammany Hall in terms of waste and fraud, and the talks of budget cuts were political crocodile tears.
3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
---
Edit: I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
Ultimately, congestion was itself a cost, but it was a dynamic cost, increasing and decreasing with the amount of congestion to maximize utility of the roads. What the state has done here, effectively, is set the price of driving higher than the market at all times in order to guarantee a marginal reduction in demand.
> By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive.
That's not true. There's a tax credit for low-income residents and a full waiver for disabled people. The average person who drives in Manhattan makes $130,000, 40% more than the average income in the city as a whole [2], so letting them do it for free (while creating negative externalities that we all bear) is just a handout to people who don't need it.
[1]: https://selectliquidation.com/collections/grocery-liquidatio...
[2]: https://fiscalpolicy.org/impact-of-payroll-mobility-tax-on-n...
After being the most vocal critics for years, they’ve learned that low traffic == more, faster deliveries == more business and more coverage, or same business with fewer drivers.
This is the real reason why I think it'll never get repealed. If anyone tries, the industry lobbies will be arguing to keep it instead.
That's a fig-leaf argument. Yes, there's some theoretical tax credit that may or may not offset the costs for particular groups of people -- and it would be insane if they didn't exempt the disabled. But if the tax weren't causing the marginal driver to stop driving, it wouldn't work, by definition.
Congesting pricing has dual goals of reducing congestion and funding the MTA. Low-income drivers get a break on the charge, so they fund the MTA a little less than other drivers, but they're still less likely to drive than they were before, because it costs more now.
It is reasonable to say that it achieved its stated goals. Its not accurate to say nobody is experience higher costs or prevented from doing what they want.
(...poor people being notorious for having lots of time for precise accounting and follow through on government bureaucracy.)
Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC, it just came in the form of a deadweight loss (paying delivery workers / tradespeople / professionals to sit in traffic) instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
I agree!
> instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
Telling me that the money will be set on fire by a public organization with good intent doesn't convince me.
What has happened here -- and mathematically, this has to be true, or it wouldn't work -- is that the city has taken what used to be the market cost of congestion, and set an artificial floor higher than that market. They then captured the difference as revenue.
That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.
I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the value of driving and the cost of congestion are the same to every driver.
For some people, driving is an elastic decision. They mode shift, or time shift to off-peak, or carpool, or combine errands in the city into one trip instead of multiple.
For other people, driving is necessary. They'll benefit from fewer of the first type of person being on the roads during peak hours.
One of the worst things about this congestion charge is that it applies even at off-peak times.
I'm just saying that if the marginal driver were still choosing to drive, then the system wouldn't work at all. That seems tautological?
The MTA has to set the price high enough above market that the reduction in demand is X%. Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.
It's a dynamic system though; as some drivers opt not to drive, the utility of driving for those other drivers increases. Yes, the market will find an equilibrium somewhere where some people will still drive, but that's kind of the point.
Yes, the market will find a new equilibrium, but if I'm right that the marginal driver is choosing to drive or not based mostly on a function of time saved, then eventually we'll see the market reaching an equilibrium where people are willing to pay up to the amount of money they save by getting somewhere faster via car (ignoring other costs for the sake of argument).
If that is true -- if the market is efficient for time -- then this plan can only ever work by making driving more expensive than the time lost to congestion.
(As an aside, thanks for having a serious, nuanced discussion about this. It's depressing how many people just want to fling insults and downvote/flag/censor stuff that they disagree with. I knew I was going to get ravaged for having a non-canonical opinion, but it's so hard to get people to just engage with the argument in good faith.)
i dont think thats true. the cost can also be much cheaper, but people price differentiate better when they can actually see the number than when they cant.
you can look at 19.99 as an example, vs 20 as example of making people feel a certain way to get them to shop differently, or credit cards - which get people to pay much more for an item than they otherwise would with the interest payments, or with the klarna styled buy now pay later.
its not a tautology that a higher price drives down cost.
i think the government price is likely much less than the cost of congestion, especially once you price in the externalities of pollution, but drivers werent aware of how much cost they were incurring from the congestion, and now that there's a number, they can make decisions based off of it
Aruguable. It’s very possible that the time saved by not sitting in traffic will outweigh the congestion charge for delivery trucks (which is what I assume you’re referring to).
unless you disagree with the that definition of the utility of the road?
how do you explain phenomena like shockwave traffic jams, where otherwise high utility roads get sections of nearly stopped traffic. eg. https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M?feature=shared in a closed system (30s of video)
can you spend some time showing your work, and both propose and prove what the cost function of congestion is? then, it should be clear whether the government set cost is higher or lower, and under what conditions. id especially want to see the limiting behaviour - standstill traffic. my gur sense is that the cost of congestion should be going towards infinity, but im interested in how the constant value from the government is still higher.
Money spent on the MTA benefits everybody, especially the poor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
> An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.
> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
> Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.
> Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
This is literally what Tammany Hall did.
As someone in New York who supports congestion pricing and public transit, I will say this: yes, there is a ton of waste and mismanagement at the MTA, and the TWU is unfortunately frequently one of the impediments to progress here. They have a history of opposing things like industry-standard safety improvements, sometimes even things which create jobs for their members, for arcane political reasons that require a deep understanding of their internal politics to comprehend. It would be nice if the TWU were a more consistent force for efficiency and progress, but they are not. You can compare to unions elsewhere in the world, or even to other unions in the US, and the TWU still winds up as an outlier in many of these areas.
That said, OP is pointing the finger at the wrong party. The MTA is overseen by the state. The responsibility for these inefficiencies and cost overruns lie with the state legislature and the governor. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time that article was written, famously washed his hands off the MTA. He was so brazen as to even publicly claim that he had no authority over them, at the same time as he was making unilateral management decisions on their behalf, including ordering the MTA to write a check to an upstate ski resort, to bail the resort out after a low-business season.
Fortunately, the money from congestion pricing is legally earmarked by state law and under a settlement from a federal lawsuit (the lawsuit was unrelated to congestion pricing, but the funding was offered up as a settlement term), so there's a lot less wiggle room for things to go wrong.
Congestion pricing is a solid policy win. That doesn't mean the governor (Hochul) and the state legislature don't need to step up and do their jobs - which means real, material oversight - but criticizing congestion pricing on those grounds, when it's one of the few budget items which actually has been legally overseen and structured - is completely off-base.
That being said, there is definitely corruption in the NYC construction market that doesn’t exist in the market I operate in, and I’ve read articles specifically about sandhogs inflating contracts and so on. Their union contract could possibly specify certain positions being required that are extraneous to the work being performed that would inflate the cost of the project and line the union’s coffers.
Net margins on a 9 to 10 figure construction contract should be around 3-5% in a competitive market.
FWIW I am a construction management professional.
I think it is literally being used to buy hundreds of new subway cars as we speak.
Y'all can't just make things up and say whatever you want. I get it, I get it, public sector evil. Unfortunately that's not an argument. Yes, you're going to actually have to try instead of being intellectually dishonest.
Significantly? Aren't those delivery trucks spending a lot less time paying drivers to idle in traffic now?
We do have concrete evidence the buses, at least, are moving around faster.
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You ok man? Like, respect for your passion on this issue but you’re also seething pretty hard about New York City having cleaner air and less traffic.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
> The New York City health department’s readings of PM2.5, one air quality measure, improved citywide the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2024. The improvement was more pronounced within the congestion zone, but it’s too early to attribute that to the program, or to know if that’s a lasting pattern, experts said.
"My apartment still gets dusty" seems like a pretty desperate anti-congestion charge argument.
A three-month change at the beginning of the year in PM2.5 is noise.
You've yet to provide any for your assertions. Just feels.
I personally don't think the PM2.5 thing would justify the implementation of the system even if it were true, but that's not a debate I want to get into.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schrodinger%...
The benefits of reducing PM2.5 pollution are... not in dispute. https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/health-and-environmental-ef...
I've been nothing but polite to you.
That's an empirical question, you're going to have to prove it. The time saved by delivery drivers or contractors, for example, has value. If they can make more deliveries, or fix more elevators in the same day those services get cheaper. If the only downside is that the assistant patrol supervisor deputy liaison that would have driven to 1 Police Plaza takes the train instead it's clearly a net savings and economic improvement and makes everything we buy and use in the city cheaper.
> 2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding.
The MTA is chronically starved for cash and unable to do large scale long term projects because of unstable funding. If this policy, which as we saw above might well have literally zero aggregate economic downside, also builds more efficient transit, it's a virtuous circle of winning.
> 3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
Rich people can already drive. Now those rich people give money to transit for everyone else. Working people or people who need to drive (like those with a van full of stuff that needs to be somewhere) are able to do so much more efficiently and most likely face net lower costs.
The "downside" is midly affluent people who do have cars and regularly drive in the central area take fewer trips or take the train a few more times instead. And the other downside is that the tens of thousands of assholes who've been abusing the city parking placard process for decades have to find another way to get to work like the rest of us.
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