Criminal to ensure that regular citizens of America and NY can actually drive down the street?
These taxes are basically a way to exclude vast numbers of people from the city and embolden systems that cause economic asymmetry.
A 'pure market' solution would involve the streets being largely empty save a fleet of limos paid for by a tiny fraction of the population.
A lot of New Yorkers would be happy to pay a price to make sure that you can't drive your car anywhere near them.
How about: every few avenues and streets make them 100% public transit and have tons of 'no driver' trams running all the time so that anyone can get anywhere really fast? Get rid of all large cars? And cabs are not a particularly efficient use of space.
Besides, living in NYC already comes with so many de-facto taxes ...
Why not just apply the congestion tax to paid drivers while removing street-side parking? I don’t want to live in a city where there is zero chance of block-to-block motorised transport.
People who live in big cities are a lot like people who live anywhere - they generally try to fix problems and improve the place they live in. Some noise is inevitable. Excessive noise is a problem that can be fixed.
Given that the top complaint filed relates to construction noise, I can't imagine a way to fix that unless they don't allow construction.
I live near an airport and have neighbors who are always bitching about airplane noise. I'm not sure what they expected when they bought a house next to an airport.
People enjoy discussing potential solutions to problems and weighing the varying contrasting viewpoints presented in other comments.
This is a large community filled with engineers, researchers, and folk from all sorts of other interesting backgrounds who like to solve problems.
It's only natural that the comments on such an article would include such comments, so I guess my question is, why did you feel the need to post that valueless comment?
Did you think GP didn't know he has the freedom to move?
Anyways, as for the article, the huge influx of ride sharing vehicles has slowed traffic something like 15% in some parts of Manhattan. The trains are a disaster which they need to fix and expand.
I support taxing more heavily ride sharing services as they've already squeaked out of the medalion system and are clogging the roads. I'm not sure how you accomplish. Or limits to the numbers of cars riding around at any given time.
Expanding and fixing the MTA is a huge project that should be started immediately. Crippling the nations largest city with a terrible public transit option is death by a thousand cuts for a place like New York. Everytime someone can't get where they want or outright chooses not to the businesses they'd have visite suffer.
We should tackle this issue head on and from several angles to encourage the efficient transportation of citizens through the metropolis and allow them some solace at times.
Constructions a big one in terms of noise, it just goes on forever too. I'm not sure there's a way to solve that and the city needs a bit more construction to dampen housing prices. If there was a decent way to encourage actually affordable housing developments that'd be fantastic.
My issue here is that the "problem" as posed is stupid and so all "solutions" are trivial and irrelevant, particularly the suggestion to tax everything until only super rich people can afford to drive. That's the neoliberal fantasy of a "public/private partnership" at its finest.
Yes, because taxing minimum wage drivers in dying industries and only allowing car ownership to those who live in million dollar condos with underground parking is the perfect way to improve the lives of the common New Yorker
Ok then take away the 'state run' subway in American cities and see what happens? Or take away the 'state managed' roads and highways?
The state is not hugely efficient, but when it comes to these things, it's largely construction unions and the not-overtly-but-kinda-corrupt construction firms etc.. Doing any city work costs gazillions unfortunately.
But some forms of public transit (subways, maybe not buses) are as priceless as the highway system.
I don't think it'd make much a difference. But I didn't say take away all money from the state...
Funny how that's the knee-jerk these days.
From my experience Roads and subways are not being adequately maintained. At least in the big cities. But I do know every few years we pass a multi-billion dollar referendum for the BART that goes to... mostly pensions.
And when you point that out you get abuse. There is a very cover your ears and chant nah nah nah I can’t hear you! Then they counter that baby boomers are shit.
If inequality is your concern, guaranteeing that everyone sit in gridlock together is about the worst possible way you could go about it. Taxing people who want to drive and using that money on public transportation is an obviously more effective way of addressing "economic asymmetry", particularly in NYC where driving is already not the norm. Driving isn't a right, especially not in NYC. You could apply your logic to anything and get the same result: scarcity.
Only I think the tax should be indexed, and increase semi-exponentially based on the price of your vehicle.
That would satisfy both sides of the argument. The wealthy would pay WAY more for their ego-mobiles. The poor and middle class would be paying next to nothing for their Honda Civics. And all the money collected would be made available to improve public transit.
The problem with these "progressive" modifications is that they complicate a simple idea, add points of contention and ultimately kill the whole thing.
Just pass the tax in it's simplest form and then see if further adjustment is needed, the perfect being the enemy of the good and what not.
I agree in general, but think you might have it backwards in this particular case. Simple is better, but if the only way to ensure it gets through is to make it more complicated, then let's add the modifications.
Making the tax different based on the type of car is not the kind of 'complexity' that risks the nature of the tax. In fact, that's pretty easy.
Getting 'right of way', building permits, hiring firms, planning massive construction projects involving 'new technology' etc. etc - this is 'complicated' beyond the threshold that I would trust the NYC government.
But some kind of tax on cars is within feasibility.
There really can be no points of contention here. I mean, everyone is paying the same tax as you, providing they drive the same car. You own a stretch limo, fine, so long as you want to pay the tax. And everyone else owning that limo would pay the same tax as you. You own a tiny Civic or Corolla, fine, you pay the same tax as everyone else who owns that tiny car of yours.
I mean really, what's to argue? You could argue whether there should be a tax at all I suppose. But not much else.
The price of the vehicle doesn't matter; a Lexus takes up as much space as a Sentra. Vehicles should be taxed on factors that matter. In Manhattan, that means they should be paying congestion charges for using limited roadway, parking fees for using limited parking space, and emissions charges relative to emissions. Yes, that means that a "luxury" Tesla would be taxed less than a Sentra. I don't care. I don't have a car at all, but I do have lungs. Same for most Manhattanites. Get these gasoline and especially diesel burners outta here.
Look, there is a congestion tax for people too, only we implement it as "rent".
Guess what, you live in a large, crappy place in the worst parts of the Bronx, you pay less than the guy who lives in the tiny apartment in the luxury building in Manhattan. The small apartment likely even uses, less water, less power, less heat, and fewer city services like police and fire.
But so what?
You know why we do it that way? Because it only makes sense to do it that way.
Sorry, but of course it should be based on price. All things of this sort are.
I sold my car after I had to move my registration and I saw how much I'd be paying for insurance. Luckily, it's New York, where you don't _need_ a car. I just can't understand how anyone is against this, unless you personally enjoy driving in the city for some reason. There are too many cars on the road, in other words, there is a scarcity of space in the city. Scarcity can always be traced back to the same thing: prices are too low.
"Scarcity can always be traced back to the same thing: prices are too low."
And prices (i.e. the supply curve and the demand curve) are function of relative economic power.
If you want to sell the roads to the highest bidder, the 'expensive cost' of driving you had will go up 10x and you will never be able to drive in NYC because it will be a privilege of a class of very few individuals that you will never be a part of.
Like I say enough people would be happy to pay a price to make sure you can't drive near them.
> people would be happy to pay a price to make sure you can't drive near them
And I would be happy to receive their money and use it to fix and expand the subway.
This is obviously a larger discussion of ideology. I'm a left-of-center liberal and generally don't enjoy arguing from the right, but there are economic facts that I find to be just inescapable.
Of course I _want_ everyone to be able to drive whenever the want, but history and simple logic show that when you have a state of scarcity, societies need to pick one of two choices: higher prices or rationing. Rationing, in this case, either means the government telling you when you can or can't drive (I recall that Bogota had a system where license plates ending in odd or even numbers get to drive on certain days of the week), or just letting everyone sit in traffic, the equivalent of the bread line. It just seems screamingly obvious to me that taking money from rich people to drive in the city and using that money to fund the MTA will lead to the best outcomes.
Right, there should be accessible public spaces: sidewalks, buses and subways. The kind that can actually be provided in amounts sufficient to allow everyone to use it. Roads are inherently too limited in space to be usable by everyone in Manhattan. The people who get the privilege of using that space should be paying a fair price for it.
"Roads are inherently too limited in space to be usable by everyone in Manhattan."
This is simply not true.
With a little bit of intelligence things can be changed. Such as: allowing only smaller cars, getting rid of taxis or limos, having very fast 'above ground' public-ish transport etc..
No, that is pure fantasy. Manhattan is already insanely congested with only 25% of commuters traveling by car. There is no way you could possibly get four times that number into the same amount of space.
There are no bridge tolls on most of the NYC bridges -- just the bridges and tunnels to Manhattan.
Unfortunately driving still isn't nearly expensive because way too many people are doing it. Raise the tolls more and get rid of all the free on-street parking while we're at it. All the side streets are full of cars that are only moved twice a week for street-sweeping and it makes no damn sense. Make people pay the actual cost of keeping a car in the city and there'll be a lot fewer of them, and the majority of people will be better off.
We charge "congestion tax" on human beings in the form of rent. Are you opposed to that? I'd rather some of the space used on hulking metal boxes be used for humans instead.
Also the streets would get plenty of use. By people. Like we used streets for thousands of years before people in autos showed up and almost literally said "stop walking in MY street or I will kill you" and we decided it was OK, for some reason.
I was referring to streets, not roads. Also, automobiles are an appropriation of public space for private use (parking, denying others use of the street while you're driving on it, etc.) so I hardly see that as a counterexample.
Long-time (former) resident of NYC here (25+yrs) -- almost everyone I knew in NYC was open to using mass public transit, which is pretty impressive compared to what I heard in other cities. So in theory a congestion tax would work well...except...the NYC subway system has deteriorated precipitously over the past 4 years to the extent where you almost have to drive, especially on nights/weekends/evenings
I'd support a congestion tax if there was a way to avoid cars (in fact, i dislike both the concept and the task of driving)...but a congestion tax is just a regressive exclusion tax if mass transit does not work. In NYC mass transit does-not-work on weekends/evenings/nights.
EVIDENCE NOTE 1: Monitor claiming F trains would arrive
EVIDENCE NOTE 2: Sign contradicting what monitor says
EVIDENCE NOTE 3: Monitor and Sign side-by-side
I used the MTA Subway Time app and it also claimed F trains were on their way, these were obviously fake schedule data rather than real prospective arrivals data. So if you used the MTA Subway Time, you'd wait forever. This also suggests to me that perhaps some of the historical on-time uptime/arrival stats are fake as well.
Now, given this level of dysfunction...would you risk a subway ride or just take a car/uber/lyft?
The assumption is that tax revenue would go to mending the subway system and other public transport.
People will manage, it wouldn't be the first implementation of the tax, you'll end up with less cars on the road and more revenue and that is something you can work with.
That works in theory. In actuality the system is already overfunded compared to other cities and funds simply become fodder for well-connected contractors on large capital projects or union workers.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
"Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually."
The other elements of reform are orthogonal to a crackdown on driving, and could just as easily be undertaken first. It’s magical thinking to assert that they will sort themselves out just because we made it harder to drive.
New York is also rather more expensive to live in than those other places. And perhaps those other places underpay: I'm not really sure why it's scandalous that the average* pay for someone working on a key city service allows them to comfortably raise a family in the city that they work for. Do we need to race each other to the bottom?
---
*Note that it's "average", which means that there could indeed be some who are overpaid skewing the numbers for the rest.
I used to take it one stop uptown in the mornings - often several downtown trains would come and go before one going in my direction would arrive. Incredibly annoying.
We already pay tolls to access Manhattan on some bridges and all tunnels. With a congestion charge added, a return journey from Long Island City, Queens to Jersey, about 3 miles, would involve three tolls.
This is kind of a dumb article, I grew up on the Upper East Side in the 80s/90s and there was certainly plenty of construction noise.
Car alarms were way more of a nuisance back then as well...Darrell Issa's voice booming "please step away from the car" every 15 minutes from some dickhead's souped-up and window-tinted Lexus.
Better title for this article would be, "In Times of Change and Uncertainty, New Yorkers Still Really Good at Complaining About Everything".
This is exactly it. I grew up there as well and New York has always been a loud place, it's a fundamental part of the historic character of the city.
People have always been complaining about the noise and scaffolding from construction. The culture of the city deeply involves complaining about/yelling at everything that gets in your way.
I wonder how much the grid system affects noise transmission?
Being used to London, the first time I went to NYC I was surprised at how far you could see down the streets compared to London where at best it's a hundred metres or so before a turn (a few notable exceptions of course)
Do those long open spaces allow noise to travel further?
Meanwhile, Hong Kong and Tokyo have higher population density, and they're not as noisy. These cities have 2 things in common: first, they have top notch public transportation (especially HK. If you have tried the MTR, Elon Musk's past jabs at public transportation ring hollow: clearly he doesn't know), which means much reduced traffic -- it's still busy mind you, but "European capital" level of busy. And second, they have (or have learnt) that most essential of things in urban life: etiquette. They know when to shut up. I will add that around 40% of Hong-Kongers are immigrants, mostly from (much more noisy & unruly) Mainland China, so clearly that etiquette thing is not innate and can be learnt.
So I would make the case that if you want a high-density city in the West to remain tolerable noise-wise, basic regulations are not enough. You need some 'investment', both in the local administration and in the local culture.
Agreed. I used to live near a busy intersection in Brooklyn. Most of the noise was from cars. But not their engines: their horns.
There was a busy bus stop across the way, and drivers loved to lay on the horn when a bus would stop for passengers. Because, of course, traffic isn't moving, better start honking! This is something that basic etiquette would fix.
Wiring the horn to the brake lights was supposed to be a prank. But if the driver doesn't acknowledge that it's happening, the prank backfires on the prankster.
And most of that honking is actually illegal because in NYC it is illegal to honk except in an emergency. Even some basic enforcement of traffic laws would stop the honking. The US in general seems to have very little appetite for actually enforcing traffic laws, though.
Everytime I go to Tokyo I'm shocked by how few cars there are. Even in popular, inner-city neighborhoods the streets are largely quiet. Growing up in a major US city I didn't even realize a city could be that quiet.
as an auto mechanic I've been dying to touch on the subject of how cars and especially trucks have gotten louder over the years.
- hard tires that lower rolling resistance but increase noise. this combined with thin sidewall tires.
- lax enforcement of the noise ordinance with respect to riced out civic coffee can exhaust. these are rarer in 2018 as its impossible to install one without the emission control balking at you.
- streets that havent been paved since the carter administration
- heavy trucks with massive turbochargers and oversized "ram" air intakes (vortec, etc..) to appeal to businesses that want to save fuel costs. Vortec type intakes especially are deafeningly loud at scale.
- trucking companies that dont size their loads. Do not send a 53' lowboy into a densely populated city street. there are quieter options. sub it out to a millwright or last miler.
- heavy construction equipment companies that insist if they add catalytic converters, mufflers, or noise controls theyll have to declare bankruptcy. Same goes for companies that include the absolute loudest "motion" alarm for equipment (the beep beep sound.) Im looking at you, Komatsu.
- Cities that tolerate lax air standards for older construction equipment. these translate into lax noise standards as well.
- garbage trucks. Heil brand trucks are absolutely the noisiest trucks on the planet because they dont include ameneties like bumpers for their skids, or bumpers for the top of the truck to cushion the bin when it hits the rooftop. The arm for loading plastic bins was designed by a grad student and it shows. High speed lift and slam.
Don't forget non-existent enforcement of traffic laws. In NYC, it is illegal to honk except in an emergency situation. You would never know that from listening to traffic, though.
Thanks for sharing. People tend to think about engine noise when talking about loud cars, but I often remark to myself how loud Tesla’s et al electric cars still are due to road noise.
From my balcony a couple floors above street level I can’t tell the difference between any electric and most ICE vehicles traveling by without needing to look.
And Harley Davidsons. I especially like the ones that like to ride in large groups through state parks. I honestly think most Americans just have no appreciation for quiet. There’s not a day of the week there aren’t leaf blowers heard in my neighborhood. :-(
Points 4 and 8 also combine here. The new "green" garbage trucks the vendor in my city has begun using are so INCREDIBLY loud. Even just the engine noise from them. The PTO and gearbox noise is just atrocious, tons of turbo noise, tons of just weird mid frequency resonant whining. They're some of the loudest trucks i've ever heard, and are basically as loud as monster trucks or straight pipe hot rods. I'm completely not exaggerating that they're multiple harley davidson loud, and at a more annoying frequency.
I've gotten like stabbing ear pain from being near one of these accelerating hard.
I live in Manhattan and the biggest noise problem to me is from vehicles, mostly just cars honking their horns for no damn reason. It's hard to imagine there ever being any effective enforcement of this though, so I'd settle for reducing the number of vehicles.
Add a congestion charge a la London for all of Manhattan south of 72nd Street, remove all free on-street parking and replace some of it with a combination of meters and/or resident-permit-only parking (said permits would not be cheap -- I'm thinking hundreds per month), turn all the rest of the freed up parking spots into protected bike lanes, and turn a bunch of roads into the most popular areas into pedestrian plazas like Times Square (or what many European cities have in their downtowns).
Most people who live in this city do not drive (and cannot, for simple scaling reasons), and yet the majority of public space is reserved for vehicles. It makes no sense whatsoever and is a terrible misallocation of very limited and valuable space.
> It's hard to imagine there ever being any effective enforcement
CCTV to automatically record license plates and microphone triangulation to identify the noise makers. If the authorities really wanted to they could fix it.
73 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadIt's practically criminal that their mayor and other local figures are opposed to it.
These taxes are basically a way to exclude vast numbers of people from the city and embolden systems that cause economic asymmetry.
A 'pure market' solution would involve the streets being largely empty save a fleet of limos paid for by a tiny fraction of the population.
A lot of New Yorkers would be happy to pay a price to make sure that you can't drive your car anywhere near them.
How about: every few avenues and streets make them 100% public transit and have tons of 'no driver' trams running all the time so that anyone can get anywhere really fast? Get rid of all large cars? And cabs are not a particularly efficient use of space.
Besides, living in NYC already comes with so many de-facto taxes ...
I live near an airport and have neighbors who are always bitching about airplane noise. I'm not sure what they expected when they bought a house next to an airport.
Filing these sorts of issues under "user error."
This is a large community filled with engineers, researchers, and folk from all sorts of other interesting backgrounds who like to solve problems.
It's only natural that the comments on such an article would include such comments, so I guess my question is, why did you feel the need to post that valueless comment?
Did you think GP didn't know he has the freedom to move?
Anyways, as for the article, the huge influx of ride sharing vehicles has slowed traffic something like 15% in some parts of Manhattan. The trains are a disaster which they need to fix and expand.
I support taxing more heavily ride sharing services as they've already squeaked out of the medalion system and are clogging the roads. I'm not sure how you accomplish. Or limits to the numbers of cars riding around at any given time.
Expanding and fixing the MTA is a huge project that should be started immediately. Crippling the nations largest city with a terrible public transit option is death by a thousand cuts for a place like New York. Everytime someone can't get where they want or outright chooses not to the businesses they'd have visite suffer.
We should tackle this issue head on and from several angles to encourage the efficient transportation of citizens through the metropolis and allow them some solace at times.
Constructions a big one in terms of noise, it just goes on forever too. I'm not sure there's a way to solve that and the city needs a bit more construction to dampen housing prices. If there was a decent way to encourage actually affordable housing developments that'd be fantastic.
The state is not hugely efficient, but when it comes to these things, it's largely construction unions and the not-overtly-but-kinda-corrupt construction firms etc.. Doing any city work costs gazillions unfortunately.
But some forms of public transit (subways, maybe not buses) are as priceless as the highway system.
Funny how that's the knee-jerk these days.
From my experience Roads and subways are not being adequately maintained. At least in the big cities. But I do know every few years we pass a multi-billion dollar referendum for the BART that goes to... mostly pensions.
For the record, I did not say take away all money from the state, but I understand why you'd think that.
Only I think the tax should be indexed, and increase semi-exponentially based on the price of your vehicle.
That would satisfy both sides of the argument. The wealthy would pay WAY more for their ego-mobiles. The poor and middle class would be paying next to nothing for their Honda Civics. And all the money collected would be made available to improve public transit.
Just pass the tax in it's simplest form and then see if further adjustment is needed, the perfect being the enemy of the good and what not.
Getting 'right of way', building permits, hiring firms, planning massive construction projects involving 'new technology' etc. etc - this is 'complicated' beyond the threshold that I would trust the NYC government.
But some kind of tax on cars is within feasibility.
I mean really, what's to argue? You could argue whether there should be a tax at all I suppose. But not much else.
Guess what, you live in a large, crappy place in the worst parts of the Bronx, you pay less than the guy who lives in the tiny apartment in the luxury building in Manhattan. The small apartment likely even uses, less water, less power, less heat, and fewer city services like police and fire.
But so what?
You know why we do it that way? Because it only makes sense to do it that way.
Sorry, but of course it should be based on price. All things of this sort are.
And prices (i.e. the supply curve and the demand curve) are function of relative economic power.
If you want to sell the roads to the highest bidder, the 'expensive cost' of driving you had will go up 10x and you will never be able to drive in NYC because it will be a privilege of a class of very few individuals that you will never be a part of.
Like I say enough people would be happy to pay a price to make sure you can't drive near them.
And I would be happy to receive their money and use it to fix and expand the subway.
This is obviously a larger discussion of ideology. I'm a left-of-center liberal and generally don't enjoy arguing from the right, but there are economic facts that I find to be just inescapable.
Of course I _want_ everyone to be able to drive whenever the want, but history and simple logic show that when you have a state of scarcity, societies need to pick one of two choices: higher prices or rationing. Rationing, in this case, either means the government telling you when you can or can't drive (I recall that Bogota had a system where license plates ending in odd or even numbers get to drive on certain days of the week), or just letting everyone sit in traffic, the equivalent of the bread line. It just seems screamingly obvious to me that taking money from rich people to drive in the city and using that money to fund the MTA will lead to the best outcomes.
Also, the opportunity for great efficiency in transport ... either public or private I don't care that much as long as it works well.
This is simply not true.
With a little bit of intelligence things can be changed. Such as: allowing only smaller cars, getting rid of taxis or limos, having very fast 'above ground' public-ish transport etc..
Unfortunately driving still isn't nearly expensive because way too many people are doing it. Raise the tolls more and get rid of all the free on-street parking while we're at it. All the side streets are full of cars that are only moved twice a week for street-sweeping and it makes no damn sense. Make people pay the actual cost of keeping a car in the city and there'll be a lot fewer of them, and the majority of people will be better off.
Also the streets would get plenty of use. By people. Like we used streets for thousands of years before people in autos showed up and almost literally said "stop walking in MY street or I will kill you" and we decided it was OK, for some reason.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/05/footage-of-city-life-i...
I'd support a congestion tax if there was a way to avoid cars (in fact, i dislike both the concept and the task of driving)...but a congestion tax is just a regressive exclusion tax if mass transit does not work. In NYC mass transit does-not-work on weekends/evenings/nights.
Those not familiar with the decline of NYC transit can read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Here is a real example with evidence from two weekends ago when I was in NYC:
PICTURE EVIDENCE: https://imgur.com/a/p4JCaPP
EVIDENCE NOTE 1: Monitor claiming F trains would arrive
EVIDENCE NOTE 2: Sign contradicting what monitor says
EVIDENCE NOTE 3: Monitor and Sign side-by-side
I used the MTA Subway Time app and it also claimed F trains were on their way, these were obviously fake schedule data rather than real prospective arrivals data. So if you used the MTA Subway Time, you'd wait forever. This also suggests to me that perhaps some of the historical on-time uptime/arrival stats are fake as well.
Now, given this level of dysfunction...would you risk a subway ride or just take a car/uber/lyft?
People will manage, it wouldn't be the first implementation of the tax, you'll end up with less cars on the road and more revenue and that is something you can work with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Here is an excerpt from the article: "Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually."
---
*Note that it's "average", which means that there could indeed be some who are overpaid skewing the numbers for the rest.
Car alarms were way more of a nuisance back then as well...Darrell Issa's voice booming "please step away from the car" every 15 minutes from some dickhead's souped-up and window-tinted Lexus.
Better title for this article would be, "In Times of Change and Uncertainty, New Yorkers Still Really Good at Complaining About Everything".
People have always been complaining about the noise and scaffolding from construction. The culture of the city deeply involves complaining about/yelling at everything that gets in your way.
Being used to London, the first time I went to NYC I was surprised at how far you could see down the streets compared to London where at best it's a hundred metres or so before a turn (a few notable exceptions of course)
Do those long open spaces allow noise to travel further?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_coordinates
which might retain the convenient local regularity of street grids while preventing the streets from "channeling" wind/noise.
So I would make the case that if you want a high-density city in the West to remain tolerable noise-wise, basic regulations are not enough. You need some 'investment', both in the local administration and in the local culture.
There was a busy bus stop across the way, and drivers loved to lay on the horn when a bus would stop for passengers. Because, of course, traffic isn't moving, better start honking! This is something that basic etiquette would fix.
- hard tires that lower rolling resistance but increase noise. this combined with thin sidewall tires.
- lax enforcement of the noise ordinance with respect to riced out civic coffee can exhaust. these are rarer in 2018 as its impossible to install one without the emission control balking at you.
- streets that havent been paved since the carter administration
- heavy trucks with massive turbochargers and oversized "ram" air intakes (vortec, etc..) to appeal to businesses that want to save fuel costs. Vortec type intakes especially are deafeningly loud at scale.
- trucking companies that dont size their loads. Do not send a 53' lowboy into a densely populated city street. there are quieter options. sub it out to a millwright or last miler.
- heavy construction equipment companies that insist if they add catalytic converters, mufflers, or noise controls theyll have to declare bankruptcy. Same goes for companies that include the absolute loudest "motion" alarm for equipment (the beep beep sound.) Im looking at you, Komatsu.
- Cities that tolerate lax air standards for older construction equipment. these translate into lax noise standards as well.
- garbage trucks. Heil brand trucks are absolutely the noisiest trucks on the planet because they dont include ameneties like bumpers for their skids, or bumpers for the top of the truck to cushion the bin when it hits the rooftop. The arm for loading plastic bins was designed by a grad student and it shows. High speed lift and slam.
From my balcony a couple floors above street level I can’t tell the difference between any electric and most ICE vehicles traveling by without needing to look.
I've gotten like stabbing ear pain from being near one of these accelerating hard.
Add a congestion charge a la London for all of Manhattan south of 72nd Street, remove all free on-street parking and replace some of it with a combination of meters and/or resident-permit-only parking (said permits would not be cheap -- I'm thinking hundreds per month), turn all the rest of the freed up parking spots into protected bike lanes, and turn a bunch of roads into the most popular areas into pedestrian plazas like Times Square (or what many European cities have in their downtowns).
Most people who live in this city do not drive (and cannot, for simple scaling reasons), and yet the majority of public space is reserved for vehicles. It makes no sense whatsoever and is a terrible misallocation of very limited and valuable space.
Where is there free on-street parking? Certainly not in Midtown. Hell, most street parking in Midtown is commercial-only during the weekdays.
CCTV to automatically record license plates and microphone triangulation to identify the noise makers. If the authorities really wanted to they could fix it.
So your Saturday morning alarm clock is a jackhammer at 5am