Congestion Pricing Is a Policy Miracle
bettercities.substack.com
bettercities.substack.com
People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible for a million people to each own a home in an area where there are only 650,000 homes which is why the price increases until a third of them can't; there is no other solution than building more housing. The people opposed to this are opposed simply because they already own property and want housing prices to remain high and then come up with various excuses to rationalize their avarice.
Congestion pricing is a trade off. The proponents will point out that it "works" in the sense that high taxes deter use, but that's ignoring the other side of the ledger. There are many other ways to reduce congestion than deterring use through taxation. One of them is to build more housing, for example, so that people can live closer to work and have shorter commutes. Another is to eliminate the fares for mass transit, so its relative cost advantage increases but the difference is created by using ordinary general purpose progressive taxes to fund the system instead of imposing a regressive tax on anyone with an unavoidable need to drive a vehicle. The latter also improves privacy for both drivers and riders by removing both mass surveillance systems that tie everyone's movements to them through the payments system, and increase government efficiency because revenue collection through general taxes has much lower overhead than transit collections infrastructure.
There are actually reasons to oppose congestion pricing because there are alternatives to it that achieve the same goal more efficiently with fewer negative externalities.
Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there.
Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston.
> many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.
There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever.
The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.
This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling. https://www.fastcompany.com/90968891/estonias-capital-made-m...
Cheaper is relative. If transit costs $130/month and driving a car you already own costs an incremental $150/month but is $50 more convenient then you value the $50 in convenience over the $20 savings. If you eliminate the fares then the difference is $150 which is more than $50.
Collecting the money via taxes rather than fares also allows the transit budget to be increased relative to the same cost burden on the local population because you don't have to pay for the collections infrastructure, which goes to the article's point about increasing service contributing to the solution as another alternative to congestion pricing.
> This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling.
You're citing a study where the existing mass transit cost was only ~$20/month to begin with. Meanwhile their GDP increased by 50% over the period in question and the area underwent a shift in the location of employment away from the city. Having only a modest increase in car use against that context is evidence that it does work.
Most data is trash. If the data is contrary to reason then either the reasoning is wrong or the data is wrong, but for anything with public policy implications it's more likely to be the data because policy data is disproportionately generated by people trying to influence the result.
Also notice that the benefits of the policy aren't limited to the thing you're disputing. Eliminating transit fares still removes a regressive tax, increases the government's revenue collecting efficiency by eliminating the transit collections infrastructure costs and improves privacy by stamping out a mass surveillance system regardless of what extent it reduces traffic congestion. Which means that if you're trying to reduce traffic congestion, you should definitely start there because it very well could work and it's something you should be doing anyway.
Is it also “taxation without representation” when NJ Transit charges me a fare to go to New Jersey or to drive on the Turnpike? Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.
Is it a tax, i.e. a fee charged by a government? Yes.
Do you have a vote in that government, as a non-resident of New Jersey? No.
It's taxation. Without representation.
This why roads used in interstate travel are one of the few specifically enumerated powers of the federal government (the constitution calls them "post roads"), and funding them from general federal revenue rather than tolls is completely appropriate.
> Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.
Infrastructure is dominated by fixed costs. Amortizing fixed costs per-use is economically inefficient because it deters productive uses whose value exceeds the (negligible) incremental cost but not the (sunk) amortized fixed cost.
This operates to the extreme in the case of mass transit because the incremental cost of mass transit use is negative, since its use remove congestion from the roads. Paying people to use it would be an obvious perverse incentive, but paying for a collections infrastructure in order to deter people from using it instead of just making it free is an obvious own-goal.
That isn't the commonly-held definition of a tax. The key thing about taxes is that they are compulsory. Transit fares are purely usage-based, and therefore optional, as you aren't forced to use transit. Fares are not commonly considered to be "taxes" in anything I've ever read.
No, it is a usage fee just like stamps.
Given that NYC's population density is already nearly double that of London, how exactly is housing construction being constrained in NYC?
Housing is expensive in NYC because it's a popular place to live.
> If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state
If you make the subway free, that only helps for travel within NYC, but not for the portion of travel from out-of-state e.g. NJ Transit rail, NJ Transit bus, Port Authority's PATH subway. These are completely separate from the MTA.
> Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation
Nonsense, this line of thinking assumes that everyone coming from out-of-state drives. I live in NJ, and am strongly in favor of congestion pricing, because I take public transit into NYC, and use public transit within NYC.
Most of the existing tall buildings in NYC would be illegal to build today under the current zoning. You also can't build buildings in the other boroughs of the sort currently in Manhattan. The supply needed is relative to local demand, not relative to other cities.
> Housing is expensive in NYC because it's a popular place to live.
Housing is expensive because there is more demand than supply. This happens when there is high demand and increases in supply are constrained. Otherwise supply would respond to increased demand.
> If you make the subway free, that only helps for travel within NYC, but not for the portion of travel from out-of-state e.g. NJ Transit rail, NJ Transit bus, Port Authority's PATH subway. These are completely separate from the MTA.
If you make the subway free, you remove the fare associated with taking the subway, which is part of the cost of using mass transit.
You could also remove the cost of the other mass transit. That might require you to do things at the federal level or in partnership with other states, but that doesn't mean it's something you can't do, it's just something you'd be doing in a different way.
> I live in NJ, and am strongly in favor of congestion pricing, because I take public transit into NYC, and use public transit within NYC.
You're in favor of congestion pricing because you don't pay it. This is unsurprising, right? It's the people who do pay it who are opposed, and that appears to be a majority of the people of NJ since the governor elected by the people of NJ is opposed, but then those people don't get a vote, which is the issue.
Citation please? I've lived in this metro area for 18 years, and the only constant has been that they keep building more giant buildings all the time, so clearly something there doesn't add up.
> You also can't build buildings in the other boroughs of the sort currently in Manhattan.
What type of building are you talking about here?
If you mean skyscrapers, they're plentiful in Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, among other outer-borough neighborhoods. But many skyscrapers aren't residential (regardless of borough) so I'm not sure if that's what you mean.
If you mean mid-rises, there are large high-density apartment buildings in all five boroughs, in quite a few different neighborhoods.
I must ask, do you actually live in NYC?
> Housing is expensive because there is more demand than supply.
Yes, and realistically there's no practical amount of construction that would cause NYC to become inexpensive, because the demand is too great.
> Otherwise supply would respond to increased demand.
That doesn't happen overnight and is subject to physical limitations: finite space constraints / a lack of purchasable land for development or re-development, finite limitations on building rate (e.g. the size of the construction sector), and the time required for infrastructure improvements to support an even higher population density.
> You could also remove the cost of the other mass transit.
Paid for how, and by whom?
> You're in favor of congestion pricing because you don't pay it.
No, I'm in favor of it because it makes bus commutes substantially faster, and the revenue will support the continued operational needs of the subway system.
> that appears to be a majority of the people of NJ since the governor elected by the people of NJ is opposed
Murphy very narrowly won reelection in 2021 and is now term-limited from running again. You're asserting that because Murphy is opposed to congestion pricing several years later, this somehow means a majority of NJ residents are also opposed? That's ridiculous and doesn't logically follow. In truth a majority of NJ residents don't ever drive into NYC anyway and don't care one way or the other about this issue.
> but then those people don't get a vote, which is the issue.
Why should people living outside of New York get to vote on something affecting local roads in New York City?
NYC zoning is public record:
The highest density residential buildings are zoned R10. Go uncheck all the boxes and then check that one to see where they're allowed. Spoiler: It's almost nowhere and the few places that have it also already have those buildings; there is basically nowhere to put new ones and some of the existing ones aren't even zoned for their current location anymore.
That is how zoning works to constrain housing supply. There will be large areas zoned R1-R5 and you can't put tall buildings there. There is a smaller amount of space zoned R6, which is kind of dense, but those areas already have those buildings too, so making them taller is still prohibited. That's the trick: In any given place, buildings are only allowed to be as tall as they currently are; little space is allowed for new buildings taller than what's already there.
Another giveaway that this is done to constrain the housing supply is that the land area allocated to each zoning level is inversely proportional to the density it allows.
In a dense city like NYC this means you can still see a lot of "tall" buildings, but you still can't put a 13 story building in the places where there is currently a 2-story one and you can't put a 30 story building in the places there is currently a 13 story one, so the existing density persists but isn't allowed to increase.
> Yes, and realistically there's no practical amount of construction that would cause NYC to become inexpensive, because the demand is too great.
Well that sounds like a testable hypothesis. Why don't we find out?
> That doesn't happen overnight
Best to get started then.
> and is subject to physical limitations: finite space constraints / a lack of purchasable land for development or re-development
Space constraints are solved by taller buildings. They can't be infinitely tall, but neither is there infinite demand, and you don't even have to satisfy all of the demand to cause prices to be lower than they are now or allow more people to live in the city than they currently do.
> Paid for how, and by whom?
By taxes, the same as interstate highways or law enforcement.
> No, I'm in favor of it because it makes bus commutes substantially faster, and the revenue will support the continued operational needs of the subway system.
You're saying different words that mean the same thing. You're in favor of it because you want improvements to the thing you use that come at the expense and inconvenience of someone else. It's the people paying the cost rather than receiving the benefit who are the ones objecting.
> You're asserting that because Murphy is opposed to congestion pricing several years later, this somehow means a majority of NJ residents are also opposed? That's ridiculous and doesn't logically follow. In truth a majority of NJ residents don't ever drive into NYC anyway and don't care one way or the other about this issue.
It's evidence that the majority of NJ residents who care about the issue are opposed to it, because the governor has reasons to satisfy constituents even if not running for another term in the same office if he wants to run for some other office or continue doing business with the representatives of various parts of the state during the rest of his term.
> Why should people living outside of New York get to vote on something affecting local roads in New York City?
Because they use those roads, have an interest in government policies that directly affect them, and are citizens of the country in which New York is a city.
Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. If people relocate from another area, rather than breed, you get expensive housing even more quickly.
After each round of the cycle, there is less nature, less beauty, more traffic congestion, less parking, more noise, more pollution, more crowded parks, more mouths to feed, and more hassle. Look at what happened to California as an example.
The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. The world population has almost tripled since 1960. The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.
The sustainable solution is human habitat control: keep housing supply at population replacement levels only. Don't build infinitely just to allow the human population to reach 20 billion (which is not a net benefit to anybody). 8 billion people is plenty. Be happy with that number.
The difference is that using a road is free but having a house very much is not.
The fallacy is the assumption that the resulting increase in demand can never be met by any increase in supply. You need more supply to meet the demand at the lower cost than the demand at the current cost; that doesn't imply that the demand at the lower cost is infinite and can never be met.
The real question is, what's the best way to do it? But that's context-specific. If you could satisfy road congestion by building a single new subway line because all the traffic is really going between two points, maybe that's better than adding eight more lanes to the highway, even though that would also work. Whereas if you would only need to add one lane to the highway, but the traffic then branches off in every direction so the alternative would require eight new subway lines, maybe the extra lane is what you want.
Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.
Do you somehow have access to free fuel or electricity?
> Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.
You want to ignore the fixed cost of owning a car but not the fixed cost of owning a home?
It does, in both cases. Induced demand is a garbage theory. It's basically the idea that if you increase supply by 50%, and then lower prices increase demand by 20%, you would then have to increase supply by another 20%. Which would increase demand by 5%. But that just means you should increase supply by 80% to begin with so you have enough for both the existing and additional demand. The latter is finite.
> Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle.
More kids are good, actually? It prevents economic collapse as a result of an ageing population. The US fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate -- in significant part as a result of high housing costs.
> The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full.
You need to build more housing even for a given level of population because demand shifts around, e.g. Detroit has negative population growth so existing housing in Detroit doesn't satisfy demand in San Francisco.
> The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions are solvable independent of housing. You can heat a house using electric heat pumps and power heat pumps from renewable or nuclear energy without CO2 emissions. If you want to solve CO2 you use a carbon tax, not zoning laws.
If anything restricting the number of kids does the opposite because you get more childless retirees with little incentive to vote for preserving the future because they were deprived of the opportunity to have a family to care about the future of.
With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough.
Obviously the average meal is on the pricier side but there are tons of great options that don’t break the bank.
Driving in New York is for the wealthy. Who has money to pay for parking in New York?
You max out paying $34 a week, or $17 if you qualify for reduced fare.
I do take multiple other rides a day and in the weekend though, so I hit 12 rides pretty quickly, probably in around 4 days.
It's not dumb to not want to be the sucker, the urban yuppies on transit routes are great at squeezing the working class that way.
I assume an "unlimited metro card" also includes unlimited buses too?
A 2 zone is $220. I think in size that's roughly comparable?
And in my experience people who mostly take the tube rarely make use of buses. They'll walk or take the tube
Edit: well if you live in a part of the city that has good coverage - up in the Bronx it's not so great naturally so I wouldn't be surprised if those people didn't get as much value out of a monthly card.
in fact, it is a progressive tax since reinvestments into public transit are phenomenal for the vast majority of low and middle Americans (and ALL the rest too, but especially those who can't afford a car in NYC)
The guy who gets shafted here is the middle to upper middle class with a job that requires driving into NYC.
For the working contractors that need to drive their van around no matter what, the reduction in transit times seems like a big benefit.
Or is land just far cheaper in Manhattan?
I'm sure any repairman would rather be doing 2x repair jobs in the time it'd take to do one + sitting in traffic for an extra thirty minutes. Most don't get paid to drive between jobs.
In Manhattan only 22% of households own a car, and the number is probably a fraction of that in the congestion relief zone.
There could be, and are, (truly) progressive normal taxes that could be invested into public transit. And now there's a reduced pressure to use tax money for public transit, so it can be used for a nice tax break.
City planning seems to be a particularly inflexible issue on this forum, possibly because the majority of this board are upper-middle income, urban, childless, 20-30s males.
Most in the thread seem to miss the fact that flat congestion pricing (even with the 50% reduction for those making <50K), is regressive, like a carbon tax. It's made progressive by allocating the revenues to transit upgrades, which would outsizely benefit lower income communities. But as you say, the redistributions aren't liquid, so progressive feels like a slight stretch.
Here in Canada, the carbon tax is regressive (carbon consumption is not graded as steeply as income is). However, the canada carbon rebate redistributes all revenues flatly, and makes this scheme truly progressive. Though some debate can be had about liquidity diffs of tax-at-use and rebate at end-of-year.
It is okay to admit a scheme is not progressive, and still support it!
I've made that very argument here in favour of higher tolls, but I'd like to see if it's actually happening.
A tax doesn't have to hit just the poorest people to effect the poor. This probably hits middle-upper middle the hardest, and anyone taking a hired car (like a cab) as well* (There's a chance that sort of fee is elsewhere, like the medallion registration).
The correct place to levy the fee is on demand sources that draw people into the area at given times. Reduced fees should be offered to business that schedule shifts earlier or later to avoid the congestion windows.
The change here is also reporting when those hours are worked, possibly to local govs instead of just state/national, and then a zoned tax based on the start and stop times relative to 'congestion windows'. Similarly with 'open hours' for businesses.
That seems more simple and more direct than taxing individual people, taxing the drive of the demand instead.
People are not good at making rational decisions when hit with nominal fees.
That's exactly the reason why pricing should drive services. The underlying reasoning is so complex, that most of the time you'd never actually be able to understand why things are going for the rates they are.
1. Even the reduced $9 toll would have a larger-than-anticipated impact
2. Increasing the toll to $15 would have a smaller-than-anticipated impact
i.e. the presence or absence of a toll matters more than the dollar amount (obviously to a limit)
We'll see about #2 when it increases to $12 in 2028 but #1 seems spot on!
There's other factors in demand for trips, like congestion went way down during the peak of covid, and typically drops during a recession, and return to the office increases congestion, etc. But mostly it's more people; hold population steady and congestion will be more stable.
More relevantly though, it is a "Policy Miracle", i.e. the writer is saying it's a miracle that an effective policy was finally enacted. In the second sentence: "but Governor Hochul finally made the right decision". The writer also praises how effective it is, not just that it is effective.
I would have expected car usage to be inelastic and for this to basically just become a tax on commuters
These policies don’t affect me
That's the crazy thing. Driving into lower Manhattan costs society hundreds of dollars, but to an apparently huge fraction of drivers it wasn't even worth nine lousy dollars.
"The improvements lead us to believe that a large number of the cars in NYC were driving around with no particular reason"
Effectively, people were spending time in their cars that they DID NOT VALUE at $9.
From TFA:
“… congestion pricing is a policy unicorn - it accomplishes a key goal (reducing congestion) and raises money. This is in contrast with highway widenings which are the opposite: they cost money (often billions of dollars) and fail to accomplish the goal of reducing traffic due to induced demand.”
I'm in London and can't see myself switching back to a car. Public transport is so much more convenient.
Fewer cars -> fewer accidents -> fewer delays -> much better experience.
The p90 of the Lincoln tunnel trip is 100% a "when numbers match gut feel" experience.
Congestion pricing explicitly wants to move people to transit infrastructure. More people using buses allows buses to be more frequent which is more convenient, reduces transfer times, and reduces the impact of outlier slow buses. My understanding is that the NY Subway is near it's trains/hour capacity otherwise the subway would also be able to benefit (although with subways the reliability thing goes in reverse because a stuck train blocks others vs a stuck bus being saved by other buses).
The exceptions are providing parking and special spending accounts to buy a bus/subway/train pass.
~15% of the PM2.5 pollution in NYC comes from vehicle traffic, so if you're concerned about that then maybe driving isn't the solution to your problems. if you were actually concerned about your PM2.5 exposure levels, you should be applauding any effort to get cars off the street.
https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/data-stories/tr...
Mind you, overwhelmingly more people are killed by cars directly or through environmental pollution than from breathing in toxins while riding public transportation. Your focus on this is bizarre.
No, the pollution in the subway contains high amounts of iron which comes from the trains (the metal wheels, brakes, and rails) and doesn't come from the cars on the street. Cars have their own pollution problems sure, but they're also out in the open. The neurotoxins produced by the trains are building up in tunnels and flooding enclosed stations every time a train goes by.
If you have to spend an hour either standing outside on the sidewalk near the deadly and evil cars or down on the platform near the trains, choose the sidewalk.
If we're determined to use things like congestion pricing to strong arm more and more people into going into the subway tunnels the very least we can do is make them safe to breathe in first. Improved ventilation and replacing the wheel system on the trains should help to do that. Then we can reduce the number of cars on the road without knowingly poisoning more and more of the population in the process.
Do you have any idea of how many pedestrians are killed by cars every year? This is like choosing to drive across the country instead of taking a plane out of fear of the additional X-rays you get while flying.
This is not a serious argument.
If I knew that by flying I'd be exposed to radiation at levels 17 times higher than what was already considered unsafe* driving might start to look a lot better.
*Yes, technically, there isn't really a "safe" level of radiation. There is a range that is generally considered acceptable and a range which is basically unavoidable, but you know what I mean
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3907023/ https://www.med.ubc.ca/news/living-near-major-roads-linked-t...
At this point it is clear you are trolling, either intentionally or not. You want to drive more people to cars, which are a leading cause of death in the United States. Trains don't even rank.
We've tried for decades to make cars safer. They still kill more people than virtually everything other than heart disease, lung disease, and cancer (which themselves are all positively correlated with car use).
Where is your concern about this?
No, and I never said that. Acting as if I just want more people to drive cars would be like me acting as if you just want to gas the poors in subway tunnels all so that you have less traffic to deal with while you drive into the city in your car.
By all means, let's get more people into trains and out of cars, but before we do that, let's remove the dangerously high levels of neurotoxin that makes the trains unsafe to use. It's not as if we can't, so why wouldn't we choose to?
I'm not arguing that cars are ideal and we should all use more of them. I'm just saying let's not force people into tunnels filled with neurotoxin when we can just remove the neurotoxin first.
Acting as if I just want more people to drive cars would be like me acting as if you want to gas the poors in subway tunnels just so that you have less traffic to deal with while you drive into the city in your car.
Congestion pricing and carbon taxes.
So easy. Nobody will object
No way. Adding an additional $4800 a year expense is not nothing. And if you aren't at least thinking about that cost, that's crazy to me. That's a significant chunk of potential investments.
Right, saving them the obvious 400 dollars we tacked on, and then an additional ~15% of their gross income by not operating a car.
Operating a car is unbelievably expensive. The subway is significantly cheaper, and it’s not even close.
It is too bad the rates could not be set based upon the income level of the driver. Make it hurt for everyone.
For example, if you make say 100,000 per year, it is say 100/day. I am sure it was thought about, but was ignored because the people in power want the best of both worlds. Cheap access and low traffic.
I think some countries in Europe use a graduated rate for this.
If you haven't lived in NYC it's a bit weird to wrap your head around vehicle ownership vs public transportation here. The subways run 24/7. Manhattan, the borough with the highest income, has the lowest vehicle ownership at about 22%. Staten Island, the second richest borough, has the highest vehicle ownership at about 84%.
And probably quite a bit larger majority after a while of congestion pricing.
Also AFAIK apart from being a bit better on schedule, there have been no material improvements for public transportation.
A typical parking spot is $500-$800. Spread amongst 4 workers, that’s “only” $125 a month, plus the tolls, fuel etc., and then is a significantly higher quality of life (mostly due to a shorter commute time) than trying to take public transit, particularly from places poor people live. (They could obviously use high occupancy vehicle lanes which makes a big difference going from NJ->NYC.)
I used to park alongside quite a few people doing this. Everything from construction workers to people working in restaurants. Rents were much cheaper if they were willing to drive an hour.
You’re conflating short term change with long term change. In the long term reducing car dependency is hugely beneficial
To the extent there’s any truth to this at all people drive to suburban bus and train stations from very far out. That’s definitely a thing.
But even if what you are saying is true the congestion pricing doesn’t change the math much for each person when split four ways.
CSS studied the outer boroughs and found roughly 4% driving into Manhattan versus 57% taking transit, with a 50:1 ratio of low income workers benefiting from the congestion charge versus paying it.
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/congestion-pricing-outer-bo...
https://www.replicahq.com/post/whos-paying-the-literal-and-m...
> Compared to those who take transit, those who drive into the zone have an average household income 11% higher ($189K vs. $171K) and median income 15% higher ($136K vs. $114K).
There are some poor people who drive in, but it’s a tiny fraction of the total and there is a generous discount for them. It’s almost certain that transit improvements paid for by the mostly affluent drivers will help a fair number of them stop driving to work, too, and losing that expense is a big financial win.
The only people negatively affected are those moderately wealthy who are unwilling to pay the charge for improved times and highly dislike using public transport. It's the same people that will circle around a block for 20 minutes to get a free parking spot instead of going to a garage.
Moving away from car centric urban spaces makes it better for everyone, including the poor. Owning a car shouldn't be a precondition to live in a society.
The people really negatively affected and the ones screaming their heads off are city employees who scam free parking via dubious placards and parking illegally. It’s a whole NYC subculture which is hard to miss if you live here. That’s what Hochul was scared of, it’s what everyone is scared of since they’re often somewhat connected. But fuck those people.
(Yes, I know you could haul all your stuff on public transit; I’m simply observing that many workers choose not to and they probably have a good reason. Those of us whose tools are limited to a MacBook Air in a designer bag should hesitate to dictate how other people live.)
Car dependency reduces the efficacy of public transit, so it actually does the opposite of what you say. If we didn’t build around cars you’d still have farther flung residential development. It’s just be close to a train stop so you could easily get around.
There’s really no benefit to car dependency outside rural areas. Entirely a mistake with no benefits at all, because the alternative design that would have arisen without car dependency is better in every way.
Once I got to college, I was so happy to move to a tiny basement party near university so I could live a better life. When I lived in Beijing, everything was accessible by subway, but we also had a mall a couple of blocks away that had a grocery store in the basement. I chose this lifestyle for my kid, we walk to school in the morning, he's in 2nd grade of a K-8 but the highschool he will go to is about the same distance. He is now the opposite of me, wanting to drive places instead of walk...ugh.
Children can take buses and trains by themselves. Children living in towns and cities with public transport can access far more services.
And yes, a lot of this is about a level of privilege. My wife doesn't have full time paid employment, so she has time to cycle to the kids' school, get them, walk them to a brilliant extra curricular over the other side of the city and back after, walk them back after, then cycle them all to our house. And she takes another kid with her whose parents both work full time, and that's amazing. It's just not normal in the two-parents-working world we live in.
Living near good services is a privilege. Having the time to take children around, regardless of mode of transportation, is a privilege. Having a work from home job where you aren't in a van to a nearby town to do some construction work, but can just relax all day and have a cycle ride be the hardest thing you do is a privilege. Privileged instincts about what's possible for those with that privilege are not generally applicable.
If transit were the same speed or faster than carpooling, it wouldn’t be nearly as significant. In NYC it is not.
"Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer. If you're luck enough to live by a cheap ones like Trader Joes, they are ridiculously crowded so you're paying in a different form. Or you can try your luck with Bodegas but they're often sell expired food, are overpriced and rarely have anything fresh . Then you're stuck with how much you can carry or try to use one of those granny pushers. Kids could be very difficult to wrangle as well and there are plenty of unpleasant things you have to explain to them or ignore. It's very dehumanizing
My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things. They don't belong everywhere, like NY. But overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation.
Then you maybe haven't spent too long thinking about it.
Climate change is a big one.
Microplastics from tire wear.
Asthma rates in children.
Obesity rates.
Etc etc etc.
Car centric design makes us poorer, fatter, less healthy. It makes our cities and towns poorer, less resilient, and uglier. I can go on.
It'd be better to make sure that people can still access the things they want conveniently while minimizing the harms. I think it's a good thing to improve and promote public transportation by making them the more attractive option rather than just punish drivers and restrict their options until they have no choice but to settle for something less than what they have.
It doesn’t, it does the opposite. It pushes everything further away which means you no longer have the freedom to not have a car. It, quite literally, redesigns our cities to become dependent on them.
It’s like heroin. Sure, it feels good, but at what cost? How do we stop now?
Give people something better and they'll line up to take it. The problem is that doing that requires a major public investment. It's a lot harder to say "We're going to spend billions to make public transport worth taking even for people who already own cars" than it is to say "We're going to punish people for using cars and take their money and make many people's lives worse, but mostly just the poorest people so you probably don't have to worry and in fact you'll have fewer cars on the road when you drive them"
The auto industry had no problems spending a fortune bribing politicians in order to make cars more attractive to people by redesigning our cities around them and hurting anyone who didn't own a car. We need to be ready to spend the money to undo what they did.
Yes, society should help those in wheelchairs, but shouldn't we aim to give everyone use of their legs?
Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water
Figure out what's causing asthma in children
Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply?
A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive.
Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?
Physically impossible to have them pollute less than methods of mass transportation. Mathematically, even. Just divide the number of people carried per pollution caused by cars vs trains, bikes, or even buses. There's nothing you can do to make cars competitive.
> Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water
"Just figure it out", ok. But even then, an ounce of prevention is worth the pound of a cure.
> Figure out what's causing asthma in children
A little random but ok. I'm guessing grinding up rubber and metal particles into the air right next to where said children live isn't the best for their lungs.
> Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply?
1. Wake up
2. Walk 30 feet to your car
3. Sit as you drive to work
4. Spend 8 hours at your desk
5. Walk 30 feet to your car
6. Sleep
7. Why am I fat?! Maybe improve the food supply?!
> A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive.
Virtually none are, an electric car is still a car, see point 1.
> Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?
Highly dependent on your definition of worse; I'd argue the sort of streets and environments you can find in the Netherlands [1][2][3] are way better than in the US.
Not everything is a technical issue that can simply be solved by better engineering.
[1]: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=862
Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions.
They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.
Public transportation can be improved to be better than it is and cities can be redesigned to make using public transportation easier, but until both of those things start happening, people will resist replacing all the good things cars offer with something that is much worse for them.
When car companies wanted to sell cars, they changed the roads and cities. The more they changed the roads and cities to make cars more attractive the more cars they sold. Cars already solved a lot of the problems people had, but car companies went even further to create many new problems that only their cars would solve. Making life worse for people without cars just to increase car sales was a dick move made by a bunch of assholes. Why is everyone so willing to make life worse for people with cars to sell public transportation now?
What we have now are people selling public transportation without bothering to change the roads and cities. There is no priority on making public transportation more attractive, instead the attention is all on how to make cars more painful to use.
Nobody has worked out how to get public transportation to solve the problems that only cars do currently. Nobody has addressed the problems that cause people to avoid public transportation. The entire attitude is basically "We're going to keep punishing car drivers until they put up with something far worse than what they have now so that maybe eventually we can have something better".
All the discussion is "take away parking" and "narrow the streets" and "charge drivers more money" but nobody is saying "We've made our public transportation systems clean, safe, pleasant, and dependable" or "No one ever has to wait more than 7 minutes at a station" or "We've expanded service to new areas and put in stations every three blocks"
It's true that in an ideal world we would be far less dependent on cars, but we'll never get there without making the alternatives more attractive and until that happens, punishing drivers is only going to piss people off and rightly so. It's a dick move.
I'd argue that if you were correct people would have already been using alternatives and there'd have been no need to punish people for driving. When you give people a better option they take it.
NYC could have improved alternatives to make them more attractive, but they choose to make driving worse instead forcing people who can't afford it to use less convenient ways to get around.
The convenience of driving depends on traffic. If you're the only car on the road then it's very convenient. In gridlock, it's very inconvenient (but also takes the convenience of buses down with it).
So you reach some equilibrium of traffic levels where the marginal person opts for walking / subway rather than driving in all that traffic. But if you could magically reduce traffic, then driving becomes the better option and people take it.
If you want to sustain an equilibrium of lower traffic, you need to add a penalty to driving to stabilize the convenience of being the marginal driver in that equilibrium.
There are knock-on benefits to doing so, including that it makes alternatives to driving such as busses more effective.
Road congestion is only one factor. If you ignore all the other things that keep people from wanting to use public transportation then punishing drivers is just going to piss people off.
People want to do what works best for them. Make public transportation work best for them and they'll use it no matter how deserted the streets are. Better yet, as traffic dies down, roads and parking lots can be reclaimed and nobody will care. Start closing roads and parking lots without solving the problems public transportation has, and people will be upset.
Increased ridership (as people are pushed to alternatives from cars) also leads to increased bus frequency, which also greatly improves the experience for all riders.
So it's actually a big step towards solving some of the major problems with public transit, but of course not exclusive with other steps being taken too.
Plus, reduced car traffic directly increases comfort and safety for walking and cycling as well.
Punishing drivers until they have no choice but to accept that their lives will be worse is not a good way to promote public transportation, even if you pinkie promise that the pain will lessen over years/decades.
It's not necessary to strong arm people into using alternatives to cars if you make those alternatives genuinely better for more and more people in an increasing number of situations. As people naturally choose the path of least resistance, everything just gets better for everyone.
Roads and signaling infrastructure are an expensive public good whose value is enjoyed unevenly. Attaching usage fees to public goods is never popular but makes sense when they are not limitless.
https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that...
While transit infrastructure isn't perfect and many areas are underserved, this doesn't really change that calculus that much. The Staten Island Ferry remains free. There are plenty of express bus routes for people with long commutes, and the express buses now move more quickly. (New Jersey seems to benefit most from this. Commuting on NJT to the Port Authority Bus Terminal is a shockingly common, but unloved, commuting pattern.)
Making cars preferentially affordable for the poor isn’t ever going to work.
I wish traffic fines worked like this as well.
All sorts of fines and fees and many underpinning laws would evaporate overnight if the HN and up tax brackets got hit as hard by them as the people who are usually targeted for selective enforcement get hit (and they will because there will be huge revenue potential in doing so).
Sitting in gridlock already does this. The more valuable your time the harder it hits.
I hate to break it to you, but congestion is primarily caused by "the poor", which is to say, the middle class, because the poor in cities are usually taking public transportation anyway. If a city is 50% poor, 40% middle class, and 10% wealthy (to pick arbitrary numbers), then the wealthy only comprise ~20% of the traffic on the road. You need significant reductions in traffic from the 80% of middle class drivers in order to significantly reduce congestion.
If you reduce the congestion tax to make it easier for the middle class to afford, so that they can get on the road, then you haven't achieved anything.
And while you're right about the charge itself being regressive in nature, the reality of NYC is that the vast, vast majority of poor people (and middle class people) are already taking public transit.
Celebs on the subway isn't that unusual in NYC. https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
[0] https://www.trenitalia.com/it/le_frecce/frecciarossa-per-il-...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/12/04/that-time-the-pari...
I've never seen it on a purely urban or suburban train within Europe, but then encountering a "screamer or crazy person" is something that happens perhaps once a year, and only if travelling at unusual times like at night.
However, if one car costs $3 and the other costs $6, the person who is statistically likely to urinate on the seats is more likely to pick the $3.
I will honestly pay double fare just to sit in a car with others that can afford to pay double fare.
I've been to other countries where the public transportation was amazing, and unsurprisingly there were almost zero people urinating (once in Japan I saw a drunk salaryman passed out with his pants around his ankles at a station and he was quietly whisked away less than a minute after I spotted him) so it's not as if a nice train system for everyone is some pipe dream that can't work in reality.
What about the poor people who live in Manhattan, who are negatively affected by increased pollution from increased traffic in their neighborhoods?
What about the poor people that will have better access to public transit, with the funding derived from the congestion zones?
It’s analogous to a movie theater that is free to enter, but with no capacity limits, so zero people have a good movie viewing experience. When you start charging for tickets, and only sell one ticket per seat, it’s true that the poorest people may get priced out. But I do still recommend that movie theaters sell tickets and limit capacity to prevent congestion.
I could even imagine a more program that allows a certain number of free rides per day.
I support not wanting a regressive tax, but there are just so many complications in trying to do that.
The arguments that this is a way to penalize poor people should be immediately seen for what they are, absolute bullshit and propaganda.
The only real refinement to this is there's a large and vocal community of people in NYC who work for the city (mainly cops and firefighters) who aren't all that rich and get free parking, almost always via illegal or questionable means, through use of city placards and parking by police stations and so on. But there's literally no reason to reward those people for anything, they've been gaming the system for decades.
Alaska does that with its Permanent fund.
Even Elon and Trump caught on, wanting to give 20% of the DOGE to people.
That makes the program popular, and people say "more taxes, please!"
In fact, maybe if they do it enough, they'll realize that funding a UBI with pigovian taxes is an economic and environmental policy miracle!
That's the point of policies like this. It's always about penalizing the poor.
I don't own, or plan to own, a car, but I still oppose congestion charges based on the marketization of basic public goods.
It's unfortunately mutated from the Economics definition to a more loose "good for the public" in public discourse, confusing everyone.
Street space in Manhattan is not a public good, because with enough cars using it, it becomes more and more useless. To fix that you have to make fewer people want to drive there some way. There are other methods than pricing, but they have problems of their own.
Very widely used methods are e.g. reducing lanes, reducing speed limits, banning (private) cars on some roads and decreasing parking space. These are used a lot more widely, and probably a lot more succesfully, than pricing systems. Notably these all are about as discouraging regadless of how much money you have.
In general the primary purpose of these pricings is to discourage people from using the priced thing, revenue from the fees is a bonus. The price naturally is more painful to pay the less you have money, so the less you have the more you are discouraged.
this kinda just exposes the depth of car-centric bias. to any competent urban designer, in a place like Manhattan, public transit is the "basic public service" and cars & roadways are a LUXURY.
(Because the wealthy can easily afford the extra cost, but non-wealthy cannot, making travel on public streets more convenient for the wealthy, while denying public streets to others?)
I'd want to explore options that are more fair, but that the wealthy wouldn't like, because it doesn't give them preferential treatment.
For example, start with only public mass transit, emergency vehicles, delivery vehicles, workers needing to transport equipment, and walking. And then figure out what else needs to be added in, and how you prevent it just being gamed. (Nope, the public streets don't necessarily owe ride-hailing apps, taxis, and limos use of the public streets; nor is anyone necessarily entitled to use of a non-mass-transit vehicle on public streets when in Congestion Mode, no matter how wealthy or royal they are.)
* Anyone who takes a Bus benefits as well
* The wealthy pay with their fee to make public transit better for everyone
The trickle-down we've been seeing is the wealthy urinating upon everyone else from a great height.
Wouldn't increased bus ridership and lower car traffic point to the opposite?
Note that you dropped the word "public".
I take issue with the framing of this. Sure public transport is "safe" as in you are very unlikely to get assaulted or murdered. But I think most people use that word as a stand in for general unpleasant experience. If you have to avoid a train car because someone decided to camp out there, or you nearly get kicked in the head by a subway dancer, you're not exactly not "safe" but you'd rather not be there.
Also drugs are dangerous. I really don't want to see someone die, pass out, fall or vomit on me.
It's kind of bizarre I have to make this point.
In the realm of major inconveniences, I'd much rather deal with someone being aggressive on the subway than be in a major car crash.