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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

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iambateman·

Some numbers don’t make sense here…

They’re saying a 7% reduction is 43k cars, which infers 550k daily trips into the city.

But they think they can make $500M/year. At $9 per trip, that’s only 150k tolls daily. (500M / 365 / $9).

In any case, I’m glad it seems to be working. Congestion pricing has the potential to do a lot of good in this country.

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There is a number of driver categories that pay somehow less to enter. Also I suppose they predict that the number of daily trips will keep going down, and so will the revenue with it.

$9 is for personal vehicles.

Cabs get charged per trip with no limit.

Delivery trucks get charged a higher amount and I don’t believe (I’m not sure on this) they have a daily cap, so they can also be charged multiple times.

you mean implies not infers.

You infer, they imply.

Not driving is gonna make the drivers happier? A lot of good, depends on who you are really

$500M/year was the magical thinking that applies any time the NY government wants to create a tax. The revenue projected is always huge so they can spend big somewhere else while pretending to be revenue neutral. The soda tax had the same ridiculous overestimation.

If I’m reading OP’s math correctly, you’ve got it backwards. They’re saying NYC should be in practice making significantly more than $500M/yr.

OP's math doesn't account for the fact that a small fraction of trips into the city are personal vehicles, and many more are cabs/rideshare cars (which pay differently) and trucks making deliveries (which may be exempt).

In any case, there is also going to be widespread toll fraud here just like with every other toll in NYC.

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