Comment by jakelarkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelarkin | Hacker News Reader

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The financial & car industries have been immensely successful at making cars accessible to all consumers. Anyone with an income, a bit of credit history and a pulse can roll out of dealership with a car. Roads on the other hand are publicly funded and physical constrained. It's inevitable that car owning will have to become much more expensive via taxes in the decades ahead.

The mayors listed are not however making their cities particularly more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. They generally sandbag those improvements on the slightest complaints about loss of parking or access. DiBlasio drives to a gym in Brooklyn everyday and has the NYPD run a war on ebikes/bikes, Durkan just canceled a long-planned bike lane on an important arterial, Portland's doing a massive freeway expansion. Most of these cities are failing on Vision Zero efforts.

The reason congestion pricing is catching on is that the wealthy & politically connected older generations finally settled on it as the way to reclaim their privilege to drive straight into the downtown from their suburbs. Congestion pricing is now just another way to maintain a vehicular status quo.

I disagree. Pretty much any economist will tell you that the best way to reduce consumption of a good is to increase its price.

By implementing congestion charges only those with a good enough reason to drive will do so, and give an incentive to use alternatives.

Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

If people still decide they want to burn more of their money driving, they are welcome to do so. No one is telling anyone how to spend their money. We are simply adjusting the price of a good to price in things that aren’t taken into account (traffic).

People arguing that congestion charges dispropropprtioanlly affect the poor often also support pricing in the true cost of other things, like carbon emissions and plastic bags. Are you saying you wouldn’t support a tax on plastic? Or emissions? Cap and trade? Those things also increase the prices of things we want to discourage the consumption of and also probably affect people with lower incomes disproportiaonately. You can’t have it both ways.

> They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

As a cyclist, I'm interested in how much congestion pricing (and related ideas like eliminating free parking) would promote cycling.

For a while when I lived in the DC area, I would use a paid bike parking service. I parked in a parking garage that charged something like $10/day for car parking. If I recall correctly, I ended up paying $0.53/day, which seemed very fair to me. I wouldn't mind more paid bike parking if it were good quality like this was. I didn't have to worry about theft. I parked in a cage that took up roughly 5 car parking spots, yet could fit roughly an order of magnitude more bikes.

> Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

This is all very well in the abstract, but what exactly are those people supposed to do in the meantime - you know, while the public transit that they demand actually gets built?

True enough. I think the point here is to reduce that marginal car. When the decision is to drive or not drive and there is a viable alternative (which in NY there is, unlike, say LA), then this takes that marginal car off the road when people say, ah screw it its not worth the extra couple bucks.

Congestion pricing is great, but I am pointing out the underlying politics, its just being used to prolong the car first status quo in these cities. theres not really an earnest follow through for road/parking diets, protected bike lanes and 2x, 3x public transit that are actually needed.

This is the point being made by many of us here in Portland when congestion pricing is brought up. It makes vastly less sense here without good public transit, and it will disproportionately affect the working classes. While the wealthy will continue as usual.

It seems a lot of people here have never been to a larger city during rush our. Our traffic is nothing compared to say, LA or SF.

That's not to say it's not bad, but some people here make it sound like we're the only city with traffic.

Do you think congestion pricing would cause public transit to improve? (I'm interested in others' opinions as well.)

I think it's putting the cart before the horse. Improve the public transit first. I also have very little confidence that congestion pricing revenue would be spent wisely.

I ride buses. And the biggest reason the bus is late and slow is traffic. So yes, less congestion will help. Also the more riders, the more reason to add frequency.

The City of Portland is not doing a massive freeway expansion, the Feds are doing it. They deemed I5 going through Portland to be a bottleneck and required the expansion.

The majority want the bottleneck fixed. "massive freeway expansion" is absurd - it's less than a mile, and isn't adding more lanes than are already on points north and south of it.

Is optimizing for bikes worth the disruption to traffic? It seems like a handful of bicyclists hold up a lot of people in cars.

(Also, the anti-suburb sentiment is quite ... problematic. Hint: There is a reason most of the good ethnic food in New York is in actually in Westchester and Long Island.)

As a daily transportation cyclist, I doubt I add any measurable amount of time to the commutes of drivers I encounter on the road. In fact, it's not uncommon to see the same drivers at multiple stoplights because the effective speed (due to the stoplights) is sometimes a bit slower than I ride.

That of course leads to another problem: Impatient drivers giving me close "punishment passes" only to wait at the stoplight. This is a common experience for cyclists.

Add on top of this the fact that most cyclists usually take different routes than drivers would from point A to point B. (Routes with less cars.)

That "handful" you perceive are way more than the number of people in cars using the same space.

A bicycle needs less than a quarter as much space on the road as a car does, it seems there are fewer of them because they are physically smaller.

You have to realize the number of bicyclists is significantly constrained because of the danger caused by the cars.

So, not mixing cars and bikes together would be a win-win.

The Bronx is not Westchester.

And Queens is not Long Island.

1) Gentrification has moved most of the lower-income folks in Queens away from the subway lines. And in the Bronx, there is not much subway access to begin with (the lines are spaced as far apart as the entire island of manhattan).

2) The NYC congestion pricing scheme would apply to folks entering Manhattan. That would seem to include folks coming in from the Bronx and Queens.

The overall point remains--the "bridge and tunnel crowd" aspersions always were classist, but the gentrification of manhattan has now made it quite racist as well.

well, technically...

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