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The thing that kicked off this week's controversy about NYC in particular is a geniune attempt to improve transit by focusing on how to move the most people as fast as possible. What is angering drivers is that the city turned much of 14th St into bus-only lanes, and removed some street parking in the process as well.

And, it seems to have worked, at least from early indications! Buses now move much faster! If that holds up, it would ideally allow for even more improvements, like running more buses, speeding up official bus schedules to account for the lowered congestion, which hopefully will in turn result in more ridership, etc. https://www.wsj.com/articles/buses-cruise-through-manhattan-...

> And, it seems to have worked, at least from early indications! Buses now move much faster!

The speed of buses is not the appropriate metric by which we should be evaluating policy. Speedy empty buses are not exactly a win. Instead, we should be asking how much time and money does it take to get from point A to B.

I agree, though weighted by actual people moved, not per-vehicle.

A guess: I'd be very surprised if speeding up the buses doesn't end up a net win here, given the density. In fact I believe that was evaluated in the proposal to make this change, but I haven't read it. I have been reading some preliminary proposals for new bus lanes in Washington, DC, and on the 16th St corridor there (which is less dense than Manhattan by a large margin), buses already, without dedicated bus lanes, account for 50% of passenger throughput during rushhour, despite being only about 3% of vehicles. At those kinds of ratios, it becomes fairly easy to come up with bus-prioritization schemes that end up as a net-win for commuting hours saved, even if you completely discount environmental impacts.

> I'd be very surprised if speeding up the buses doesn't end up a net win here, given the density.

I'm not so sure, especially on 14th street. 14th Street is one of the few east-west streets that has decent crosstown subway service, the L train. Even with faster buses, I suspect it's still faster to hop on the train to get across 14th than to take a bus.

But this doesn't have to be an rhetorical argument, it can be clearly backed by data. If, in 6 months, the MTA shows that more people are moving more quickly across 14th St than before the car ban, I'd support it. If it can't show that, I'll be against it. If it just says that its buses are moving faster without citing the number of people moved, I'd be very suspicious.

The restrictions on 14th Street were literally proposed as a mitigation to the L train upgrade. Have you seen an L platform recently? It's currently struggling to move as many people as it needs to.

Do you think there are less people on those buses than there was before the ban?

> Do you think there are less people on those buses than there was before the ban?

There probably are more people on buses, but that's the incorrect question to ask. You should be asking whether the additional people on buses is greater than the decreased people on cars. If before the policy, there were 3,000 bus riders and 10,000 car drivers, and after the policy there were 10,000 bus riders and 0 car drivers, that's still a net loss.

I agree in general, though bus route in question (The M14) has around 26,000 riders per day on an average weekday, making it one the busiest in the city. It doesn’t lack for people using it — it’s just been really slow until now.

http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ridership_bus.htm

The M14 buses are packed though. It's hard to imagine how you could have a speedy bus line in Manhattan that wouldn't be packed. If it's a good option people will definitely take it.

Another metric to optimize for would be safety. Having the occasional bus driven by a rules-abiding, professional driver is much safer than having constant cars whizzing by.

This was discussed yesterday, but I wonder if there is any economic analysis for how much a bus ticket should cost if they are operating on dedicated roads.

Whatever it costs to maintain 14th St between 9th and 3rd Ave, if it’s restricted to mainly buses, bus fares should pay to maintain it, like fuel tax and excise taxes from personal vehicles pay to maintain roads.

The idea that bus/subway fares should pay for X crumbles in the face of facts. They're not luxury, they're not useless, they being people to work and remove cars from the streets. The better and faster they are, the easier it is for a city to thrive. In fact, plenty of studies suggest that public transportation in big cities should be _free_, because when we'll managed, the benefits they bring far outweigh their cost.

> * I actually would support this if it was part of an honest effort to improve transportation and livability in the city, but most of these proposals make it harder to live here, not easier.*

My experience as a resident is that the fewer cars on the street, the easier it is to live here. (Sometimes in a strictly literal sense of fewer things that could run you over, less clogged road for emergency vehicles - I wouldn't want to have a heart attack in Manhattan at 5 PM - and so forth, but more generally in a quality-of-life sense.)

Can you expand on how it makes it harder?

Cars are also a huge safety issue. Cars are killing New Yorkers in record numbers and the average car is less safe for surrounding pedestrians and cyclists with every year (because they're being made bigger and with higher grilles).

There are a huge amount of people organizing here, me included, because cars are outright dangerous, and are driven by asshole drivers who are never held to account by the police. The safest thing to do for everyone is to just start getting rid of the cars, since it doesn't seem like there's any other way to make them safe.

I’ve lived in NYC for many years now and whenever a discussion about cars come up someone invokes class and “the rich”. It never ends up being a barback living seven to an apartment in Corona, much less someone picking up cans and living in a shelter in Vinegar Hill. Rather it’s invariably someone from Middle Village or Bay Ridge, often with a job in the trades or working a uniform job for the city, and not actually poor at all.

The idea that they’re banning cars for environmentalist reasons is a straw man argument.

Compared to all other forms of transportation in the city, cars transport the smallest number of people and take up a lot of space. Removing cars would free up space for other means of transportation that transport more people and use less space, such as buses, bikes, scooters, etc...

> If they want to ban cars due to effects on the environment, they should say that maybe promote electric vehicles.

Electric vehicules are usually better than thermal ones, but they're still a big carbon emitter. Except if they're shared. No individual vehicule heavier than 50kg can be considered good in terms of climate impact.

Where the carbon is emitted is important for city residents. Electric cars are better for the local environment.

>>Electric vehicules are usually better than thermal ones, but they're still a big carbon emitter

My argument here is always that even if all electricity was produced from coal power plants(it isn't) surely it's much better to have one big carbon emitter far outside of the city, than thousands of smaller carbon emitters in the middle of the city. Yes, it is just externalising the emissions, but I think it's important to improve the air quality where people actually live, no?

Sure, but it's even more important to make a dent in how severe the incoming climate apocalypse will be.

(I'm not against electric vehicles, I'm for aiming most subsidies towards mass transit and cycling infrastructure & most externalities taxation at carbon emitters).

If you have a large single source you can go to work on carbon reduction and carbon capture schemes that make more sense at scale.

You are correct in a harm reduction and progress sense. Unfortunately harm reduction and general progress were something we could have spent the 200X's or 201X's doing. The remaining carbon budget does not afford for such marginal optimization anymore. We need to reduce total vehicle-miles-traveled by something like 50 maybe even 80%, while making those remaining miles EV/ZEV driven with 90 to 99% less co2 per mile.

So yes, even powered by a coal plant, EVs are better than cars. But no longer better-enough for that to be ok on its own. It is more important to figure out ways to de-car lifestyles than it is to foster EV adoption. They're both important, just de-car'ing is more.

That would make sense if all things are equal, but there are efficiency issues here. Having to take the extra step to convert the fossil fuels into electricity first (plus the later battery storage) means the same fossil fuels don't deliver as much power to the vehicles. That said, it's probably a wise move to move to electricity powered vehicles anyway because of the slow shift to reusables.

That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying that it's better to have a pollution-spewing plant outside of the city than drive thousands(millions?) Of vehicles right next to the areas where people walk and live and work and eat. A taxi driver idling their shitty diesel outside of my window at 2am wouldn't be an issue if their vehicle was electric. A major throughway next to a kindergarten wouldn't be an issue if those vehicles were electric. At least not due to pollution, there are still other problems regardless of the fuel used.

Note, internal combustion engines are only about 20% efficient. Coal plants are ~37% efficient, natural gas plants are 55-60%, the grid is maybe 90% efficient, and an EV is about 60% efficient. So 20-32% efficiency.

I've glossed over many factors to be sure, but the point is while a lot is lost powering an EV, internal combustion engines are just as bad or worse.

> No individual vehicule heavier than 50kg can be considered good in terms of climate impact.

Such an argument requires citing a source, or I'll just believe it is cheap hearsay. What is your source?

> NYC politicians should be focused on how to move the most amount of people, the safest and quickest way, for the cheapest cost.

And the way to do this is with trains and buses, not cars.

And bikes. The reason London built its two major Cycle Superhighways (East-West and North-South) is because their modelling showed more people were going to need to cross the city, but a new tube line was unaffordable in comparison.

> how to move the most amount of people, the safest and quickest way, for the cheapest cost.

Cars are not known for being cheap[1], safe[2], or space-efficient[3].

1. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/

2. https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2018/12/21/child-dea...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/17/bikes-cars-cy...

> NYC politicians should be focused on how to move the most amount of people, the safest and quickest way, for the cheapest cost.

This is a great example of "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Expending vast resources to move people quickly is really something we should avoid. We should be working to locate people within easy walking distance of everything they want, minimizing the number of miles they have to travel using any vehicle.

Ultimately, maximizing the distance traveled on foot might be a good goal (since humans are pretty picky and will actively work to minimize this number.) Also, for most people failing to minimize this number has health benefits, while failing to minimize vehicle travel has health costs.

If you accept "reducing average trip distance" as one method of increasing the bandwidth & speed of your travel network, then your stated considerations are really already part of your parent's goal.

I suspect the real motivation is ... and classicism (only the rich drive cars in NYC)

Well, then banning cars is certainly one way to get the rich to care about making transit better...

Removing cars and adding bus lanes seems obviously designed to improve transportation and livability? Why do you think it's not?

While I like the idea of pedestrian areas, it does feel like this is another angle for our elites to prepare the lower classes for austerity. Owning your own home, eating meat, being able to raise a family; all of these are things that our parents and grandparents took for granted but are looking less and less likely to be affordable in the coming decades. Rather than fix our economic issues, the solution seems to be to frame them as unnecessary or even "bad".

On the other hand, available public transportation also increases economic mobility and decreases overall costs of the working poor. The ability to own, park, maintain a car is a large cliff, even in the cheapest of states. The ability to get to most jobs without a car in a reasonable time drastically decreases hurdles to economic mobility.

(and also of the middle class, whether that's the underinsured or carrying insurance against under insured divers.