I'm indifferent and glad I don't live there but why not just charge what it should cost to use Public Transportation/Subways? Why look for ways to subsidize it by taxing everything else but the people who use it?
It suffers from systemic issues. This is a fiscal patch over a corrupt system. The feds should go in there and clean it up, kick out all the unnecessary fat and install an efficient management anc restructure all their deals with everyone who abuses the system to line their pockets.
That might be true, but what people actually want may not be the same as the most proximate cause of what they want. For instance, if all carbon emissions were required to be carbon-neutral, then carbon emission on its own isn’t so bad. If the cost of every gallon of gas includes the cost of sequestering the same amount of carbon that the gas will emit, then who really cares how much gas is burned?
I don't think we're disagreeing on anything quite yet - if gas included the cost to offset all externalities from burning (not just carbon cost), but nox, ecological damage from drilling, transportation impact, sequestering airborne carbon near where it's burned, we'd probably be fine.
But gas isn't priced that way, because we don't do all of the above to offset its effect on our cities and the environment. So we're continuing to impose more disincentives to burn gas.
I’m in agreement. I just also approve of moving the externality adjustment closer and closer to its direct source as technology and processes make it efficient to do so.
Absolutely. I have no trouble with indirectly charging for negative externalities. As technology and processes improve that enable charging more directly for negative externalities, I approve of that.
Accurately & precisely pricing the externalities of driving vs public transit vs walking vs biking is currently impossibly difficult, so you could say this is just a really crude swing at exactly what you're asking.
These models are pretty much the same, just phrased a little bit differently. The reason you tax things you want less of is usually because of their negative externalities (and definitely is so in this circumstance).
I mean, the difference is that you don't actually want less of the thing, or even less of the externality, you just want the person buying the thing to pay for the entire cost of the thing.
You often do want less of a thing, in addition to the person buying the thing paying the cost for the entire thing.
As one example, we do actually want less CO2 being released into the atmosphere, full stop. Or alternatively phrased, it's impossible to pay the true cost of the thing, as the true cost of everyone doing unrestricted emissions is that the human species goes extinct (which has effectively infinite cost).
Or, similarly, imagine an industrial plant releasing waste that spreads through groundwater and poisons adjacent properties. We don't just want the industrial plant to pay the entire cost of the thing; we actually want them to not do that at all, because it infringes upon the properties of others, who do not want it to occur.
So there's room for multiple times of frameworks that operate simultaneously -- Pay for the entire costs of some things, but also have less of or do not allow at all some things.
Isn't congestion pricing taxing people who use the roads? An Uber driver uses the roads a lot more than your average New Yorker, what taxes exist to cover that imbalance? (asking in earnest)
Earmarking tax dollars for projects is kind of meaningless.
Subsidizing public transportation is a good idea anyway. High costs of transportation disproportionately hurt poorer people. If you're not for public transportation then I'm not sure we'd see eye to eye on much of anything.
Not with the strides we've been making in fuel efficiency.
An EV pays no gasoline taxes, but has similar impact on the roads to any other car. Now, EVs are a good thing... but they do expose issues with paying for transport via gas taxes.
Electric usage taxes or separate metering and rates for EV charging will be coming. That or much higher registration fees to offset the lost fuel tax revenue, which has already started happening.
That's fair I didn't think about EVs. For now their adoption rate is low enough that Gas Taxes are still a decent stand in (~2-4% it sounds like with quick googling). https://bnef.turtl.co/story/evo2018?teaser=true
In the future though it probably will be a bigger problem. I suppose you could add similar sales taxes to public paid charging stations, but without separately metering home charging you'll probably still miss the bulk of EV users. Either the separate metering or a mileage reporting/road tax seem like they could fairly account for EV usage though.
This link says that in 2017 EVs accounted for 1.2% of the US auto market in sales numbers [1]. (But half EV sales are in California, so elsewhere the numbers are even worse.)
In 1987, US average fuel economy was 22.0mpg. In 2018, it was 24.9mpg [2]. A 13% improvement in 31 years.
The idea that the US as a whole has made "great strides" in improving fuel economy, and that we therefore need to rethink the gas tax, is ludicrous. Even in California, it is mostly wishful thinking, and it is definitely not the case in New York.
Do gas taxes even pay for the negative environmental and health externalities of producing and burning the gas, regardless of road wear? I don’t have a source, but I highly doubt they do.
I heard a proposal to tax tires instead, which I suppose would let EVs and hybrids pay their fair share (although it would probably cause more cheapskates to drive around on bald tires)
There's a Federal-level excise tax on gasoline, so you could take that approach with tires. I don't think it's a great idea, though... too many people already drive on shitty tires years past their prime.
I'm okay with EV's getting a "discount" since they create less pollution. Gas vehicles can pay more than their fair share towards road repairs in exchange for the damage they're doing to the environment.
If there are eventually too many EV's to generate any road repair revenue, we can re-assess then. For now, the incentive structure makes sense, and should be increased if anything.
It's not a discount, it's free. And given the price of EV's, you're not just suggesting a regressive tax, your suggesting a regressive tax where near the top of the tax bracket pays no taxes.
EV's already have plenty of tax incentives. Taxes need to be both a stick and a carrot. EV's get a carrot, all drivers get a stick.
It will have to be fixed eventually, but it's not that big of a problem (yet) & reworking highway funding is going to be a horrifying & colossal undertaking we'd like to do only once!
Just as two datapoints, the Fed hasn't raised the federal gas tax in 25 years, and in my state voters have rejected state gas tax increases for 28 years. Whatever new funding source is identified to replace or supplement the gas tax, is going to have many enemies.
Shouldn’t gasoline taxes just cover the direct negative externalities of gasoline, namely the environmental and health impact of creating and then burning the gasoline?
Maybe in theory, but it was a useful shorthand for road usage fifty years ago when recording the number of miles each citizen drove (for a highway use tax) was a rather daunting task.
The difference is that the subway ticket directly finances your subway ride. It's just like how a private subway company would have financed it, so calling it a "tax" just because the train is run by a government entity is a bit weird.
Your subway fare goes into the city budget. The cost of the subway system comes out of the city budget. Your subway fare only "directly finances" the subway system as long as it's convenient to think of it that way. If there was ever a huge surplus of subway money, it would go to other projects. If there was ever a huge deficit elsewhere, money would come out of the subway system.
All that really matters is the effect on the bottom line, not the what you call each line item. Some debits map very logically to services like public utility bills, you pay for what you use, so it's convenieng to think of it in terms of usage fees instead of taxes. Some things don't map that clearly, like real estate taxes or sales tax, so it's convenient to think of them ad taxes.
This is a good point. People don't drive in Manhattan because it's cheaper (or less tax) than Public Transportation. There's a reason people aren't taking the Subway and the best way to fix the problem is to make that better instead of trying to make the currently better options less appealing.
Part of the problem is the NYC transit is frantically doggy paddling to keep its head above water. Decades of underfunding tunnel maintenance is coming due.
Very likely, but you can chart the actual funding over time, whereas a sudden spike in incompetence and corruption seems somewhat unlikely. There has to be some causal reason why everything is hitting the fan now, not ten years ago or ten years from now.
> Very likely, but you can chart the actual funding over time, whereas a sudden spike in incompetence and corruption seems somewhat unlikely.
Sure. There are likely many reasons why it's so bad. But the solution is to fix it, not penalize people because they use the obvious alternatives that are much better.
Why not tax people directly per meter of sidewalk they walk on? Why not tax them for each call they make to 911, or charge them each time they walk into a public park?
Because certain things are considered to be public goods, to greater or lesser extent, and therefore to follow the principle behind progressive taxation: that people aren't taxed by how much they use them, but that the rich pay far more in absolute terms than the poor.
The subway is the primary means of transportation that makes so much of the rest of the city possible, that it's certainly a public good to some extent. But it's also still so expensive to run, and people with cars have their own separate costs on top of it, that people don't generally feel it's fair for it to be 100% subsidized either.
If there’s an efficient and reliable way to tax usage directly, I think that’s always the better alternative. Social benefits like police, firefighting, 911 service, etc. are intended to be paid for with wealth distribution, at least to cover the least fortunate members of society (whether ones agrees with that policy is another matter).
But roads don’t really work like that. There’s no “social benefit” that wouldn’t already be priced into everything that derived benefit from the roads. If government road subsidies make road freight cheaper, charging those freight companies for their own usage would make prices reflect actual costs. We could still have redistributive social benefits for things like the road wear caused by police cars, but again, that’s a separate issue.
Because not doing so is more expensive and effectively subsidized in itself because road costs aren't factored into transit but track costs are. While tolls offer scalability (more users = more funding) shifting from cars to transit still saves money and reduces traffic.
The point of congestion pricing is to reduce car traffic, air pollution illnesses/deaths, pedestrian injuries/deaths, etc. The fact that it can also pay for the subways is just an ancillary benefit.
We don't mind the congestion in "downtown" Manhattan. The article also clearly stated the justification was raising funds to fix our daily encounter with 3rd world in subterranean Manhattan -- and I believe I can speak for the entire city of New York here -- we mind very much indeed.
Which "we" are you speaking for here? I live and work in Manhattan and I definitely am negatively affected by all the vehicle congestion, along with everyone I know. The vast majority of us here don't own or drive cars, and having fewer of them around will be much better for walking, biking, and taking the bus.
You can't possibly deny that the intent of congestion charges is to reduce congestion. That's been the intent (and effect) in every other major city it's been implemented in across the world. The simple fact of the matter is that single occupancy vehicles can't possibly scale to meet all the transit demands of an urban area as dense as Manhattan, so they need to be deprioritized in favor of more scalable modes of transport. Reclaiming car lanes for dedicated bus lanes and cycle lanes would be a great first start.
Frankly, this doesn't go nearly far enough. All of the free on-street parking in this zone needs to be removed as well, with people paying the true cost of storing a vehicle on the most valuable property in the US. That'll get rid of a lot of the vehicles on the streets and we can reclaim that space for much more productive uses. Many of these vehicles only move on alternate side parking days anyway, so there's really no reason they should be here at all. Charge the $500+/month that space is actually worth and they'll be gone.
It's definitely not 1978 in terms of violent crime but haven't you encountered aggressive panhandlers or obviously mentally ill people? If there is something violent going on, the vast majority of passengers won't intervene (see the recent attack on an elderly woman where everyone was just filming).
I suspect tourists would be frequently paying this when they get in a cab from the airport. Most commuters do not drive into the congestion zone anyway, they generally park-and-ride.
How would you even identify tourists to charge them extra? Make everyone show address proof before buying a ticket? Who's even a tourist? People living out of city limits or the state? That rules out large swathes of daily NYC commuters or weekend visitors.
As a vehical owner who parks on the street in NYC, hell yes! Charge me money for parking!
It’s insane that it’s free in this city. Get cars out from parking on the streets and do something useful with that space like wider sidewalks or bike lanes!
The European counterparts give substantial discounts to motorcycles. Probably won't happen here. Port authority only gives $1 off (< 10% discount) now.
Why do people between say 96th and 60th not count as congestion generators? Seems like they're "gerrymandering" the neighborhoods hit by the surcharge.
London did it, and it had the effect of pushing people onto buses, taxis, and private hrie vehicles. The vast majority of those use diesel. London has terrible air quality as a result.
You need to give incentives for electric vehicles (especially if that's electric buses) and disincentives to diesel for it to really work.
Ambient temperature in the Herald Square station (one of the biggest) in the summer is often well over 100 degrees, humid, and stagnant, while the platforms and tracks are filthy and smell like mold and pee everywhere. During rush times, there are half the number of necessary cars so you're crammed up against strangers. There's no way to tell when the trains are coming. 5 will get you 10 this tax does nothing to improve the subway.
"Though state leaders have not ironed out details, they had reached consensus on Monday that the plan was necessary to help pay for much-needed repairs to the city’s beleaguered subway system."
That's the sales pitch. The reality is that much of the money will disappear down the bureaucratic black hole with nothing to show for in the end. Byford isn't going to fix the entrenched corruption.
never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups with guaranteed income , i.e. bureaucracy.
having been a cyclist my wholelife, since childhood. i have no faith in the government to implement sensible policy. i have faith in them to tax more. and more , and more. uber and lyft have been DISASTERS for new york, but they were inevitable because of the disaster that was the method by which the tlc was creating artificial scarcity in the yellow tax licensing system.
and congestion pricing? no. it won't work. it wont' make the city more liveable or better. it's just a cash grab plain and simple.
There are many nice things that are off limits to the poor. I'm not sure if driving in manhattan should have a special exemption. Driving in manahatten is far from a necessity.
They passed low income metro cards last year for this reason. There is no great option here, there needs to be a new tax to raise money for new infrastructure and congestion pricing is the best of the worst options. It gives the city the flexibility to regulate future traffic flows and raises money for infrastructure. Raising taxes on the wealthy is a non-starter in NY state because they are not competitive as it is and the rich get up and leave.
Parking policy in New York City, including Manhattan, is actually designed quite thoughtfully to make parking accessible to everyone. It is certainly easier if you have money, but you could be living in a van on close to $0/day in Manhattan and still find a spot to park somewhere every day, even if it takes a while.
Will the congestion charge pay for all the road infrastructure in lower Manhattan? If not, it just becomes a publicly funded place that excludes some people from entering.
They probably would have if the regressive taxes (direct or indirect) related to owning a car in New York wouldn’t have been so high. But when you buy a $200 million penthouse you don’t want to breath in the engine fumes of a $1,000 daily driver.
Not sure why that's a bad thing. Driving a private car in Manhattan is a luxury and should be priced accordingly. Transportation options should be available to everybody, but not every transportation option needs to be available to everybody.
An unlimited MetroCard costs $121/month (or $61/month if you're >65 or disabled) and is good for all subway lines and buses. That's way, way, way less than the cost of owning a vehicle here -- parking in my building is $60 for 3 or more hours, for comparison's sake.
Driving in NYC is already off-limits to the poor and has been for awhile. Congestion pricing will be a net benefit to them because it will get a lot of car traffic off the road, thus reducing the chance of being struck by a vehicle (as a pedestrian), making buses much faster, and making biking more viable. Some of the poorest residents of NYC just use bikes, for example -- even the $121/month MetroCard is too much for them. Building out the bike lane network more would help them the most.
I literally don't understand what this is and how it will work. It's like ez pass for certain zones of nyc? Will it only be for certain hours? Will they bill from traffic cameras? "Congestion pricing" is a brand new term to me and I don't see a clean definition.. Sorry if I missed it in the article
You put cashless toll points above the roads. Cameras capture the license plates for those without toll passes. They can go online and pay within a few days or get fined. Not a new concept.
Eg. "New York's streets can optimally handle 1 million journeys per day. If the number of journeys is above/below that for 3 straight months, we increase/decrease the toll by 10%.
That way the roads stay near peak efficiency without needing the politicians to get involved every time the streets get too busy or too empty.
>London made the mistake of excluding Taxis from their congestion toll scheme.
It is a very simplistic view to call it a mistake, as the the issues and policies related to the Congestion Charge have changed and evolved over the last 16 years. For example, the PHV (Private Hire Vehicle) will not be exempt from the charge from 8th April 2019. However, licensed Taxi's (Black cabs) were still deemed to be exempt from the charge, following a public consultation last year[1].
Amongst various other considerations, some of these decisions were made on the basis that the number of PHV's entering the zone has nearly doubled in the last decade, whilst some traffic has been constant.[2]
Manhattan will have to deal with similar issues, which will generally coalesce around the central tenets of easing traffic flow, improving air quality and reducing accidents.
Thanks for the link. The only parallel I can draw with London proper in this case would be the 'Blue Badge' abuse. Although, it seems trivial in comparison to the Placard abuse.
Yeah it's bad. Having a placard is basically like getting a $6k+ tax-free transportation subsidy from the government (the cost of the monthly garage parking you'd otherwise need near your office), and over 100,000 valid placards are out there, plus all the fakes that people make up. It's a joke. All the time you see vehicles with placards parked on sidewalks, in bike lanes, in front of fire hydrants, in crosswalks, blocking curb cuts, or blocking daylight spaces necessary for safe lines of sight in intersections. And nothing is done about them because of the stupid placard.
This is still an improvement, as the taxis/Ubers don't need nearly as much parking as private vehicles do. This allows reclaiming a lot of garage and street space for more productive uses like apartments/offices.
But yes, it sounds like some kind of pricing scheme should be put into place to impose increased costs on taxis/Ubers driving into the zone first. I think that'd need app support first though; as an Uber/Lyft driver, you'd need some kind of toggle saying whether you're driving into the zone that day or not -- I'm assuming that the charge is once per vehicle per day, not once per entry into the zone. If it's once per entry into the zone, then just add that onto the passenger's fare.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadBut gas isn't priced that way, because we don't do all of the above to offset its effect on our cities and the environment. So we're continuing to impose more disincentives to burn gas.
https://www.thediscourse.ca/scarborough/full-cost-commute
As one example, we do actually want less CO2 being released into the atmosphere, full stop. Or alternatively phrased, it's impossible to pay the true cost of the thing, as the true cost of everyone doing unrestricted emissions is that the human species goes extinct (which has effectively infinite cost).
Or, similarly, imagine an industrial plant releasing waste that spreads through groundwater and poisons adjacent properties. We don't just want the industrial plant to pay the entire cost of the thing; we actually want them to not do that at all, because it infringes upon the properties of others, who do not want it to occur.
So there's room for multiple times of frameworks that operate simultaneously -- Pay for the entire costs of some things, but also have less of or do not allow at all some things.
Earmarking tax dollars for projects is kind of meaningless.
Subsidizing public transportation is a good idea anyway. High costs of transportation disproportionately hurt poorer people. If you're not for public transportation then I'm not sure we'd see eye to eye on much of anything.
An EV pays no gasoline taxes, but has similar impact on the roads to any other car. Now, EVs are a good thing... but they do expose issues with paying for transport via gas taxes.
In the future though it probably will be a bigger problem. I suppose you could add similar sales taxes to public paid charging stations, but without separately metering home charging you'll probably still miss the bulk of EV users. Either the separate metering or a mileage reporting/road tax seem like they could fairly account for EV usage though.
In 1987, US average fuel economy was 22.0mpg. In 2018, it was 24.9mpg [2]. A 13% improvement in 31 years.
The idea that the US as a whole has made "great strides" in improving fuel economy, and that we therefore need to rethink the gas tax, is ludicrous. Even in California, it is mostly wishful thinking, and it is definitely not the case in New York.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/wisniewski/ct...
[2] Table 3.1 in the 2018 report Excel file, https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/download-data-automoti...
If there are eventually too many EV's to generate any road repair revenue, we can re-assess then. For now, the incentive structure makes sense, and should be increased if anything.
EV's already have plenty of tax incentives. Taxes need to be both a stick and a carrot. EV's get a carrot, all drivers get a stick.
Just as two datapoints, the Fed hasn't raised the federal gas tax in 25 years, and in my state voters have rejected state gas tax increases for 28 years. Whatever new funding source is identified to replace or supplement the gas tax, is going to have many enemies.
Do you think of buying a subway ticket as a tax on travel?
Money is fungible. The MTA budget most recently subsidised upstate boondoggles.
So to be clear, you do consider subway and bus tickets to be taxes? How about US postage stamps? Public utility bills?
The transportation funding earmark is just sugar to help get it passed.
Sure. There are likely many reasons why it's so bad. But the solution is to fix it, not penalize people because they use the obvious alternatives that are much better.
Because certain things are considered to be public goods, to greater or lesser extent, and therefore to follow the principle behind progressive taxation: that people aren't taxed by how much they use them, but that the rich pay far more in absolute terms than the poor.
The subway is the primary means of transportation that makes so much of the rest of the city possible, that it's certainly a public good to some extent. But it's also still so expensive to run, and people with cars have their own separate costs on top of it, that people don't generally feel it's fair for it to be 100% subsidized either.
But roads don’t really work like that. There’s no “social benefit” that wouldn’t already be priced into everything that derived benefit from the roads. If government road subsidies make road freight cheaper, charging those freight companies for their own usage would make prices reflect actual costs. We could still have redistributive social benefits for things like the road wear caused by police cars, but again, that’s a separate issue.
The Dodgers actually got their name from the high rate of pedestrian fatalities in NYC, albeit from trolleys.
Traffic has been causing problems in NYC for over a century.
You can't possibly deny that the intent of congestion charges is to reduce congestion. That's been the intent (and effect) in every other major city it's been implemented in across the world. The simple fact of the matter is that single occupancy vehicles can't possibly scale to meet all the transit demands of an urban area as dense as Manhattan, so they need to be deprioritized in favor of more scalable modes of transport. Reclaiming car lanes for dedicated bus lanes and cycle lanes would be a great first start.
Frankly, this doesn't go nearly far enough. All of the free on-street parking in this zone needs to be removed as well, with people paying the true cost of storing a vehicle on the most valuable property in the US. That'll get rid of a lot of the vehicles on the streets and we can reclaim that space for much more productive uses. Many of these vehicles only move on alternate side parking days anyway, so there's really no reason they should be here at all. Charge the $500+/month that space is actually worth and they'll be gone.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080120/?ref_=nv_sr_5
It’s insane that it’s free in this city. Get cars out from parking on the streets and do something useful with that space like wider sidewalks or bike lanes!
Why do people between say 96th and 60th not count as congestion generators? Seems like they're "gerrymandering" the neighborhoods hit by the surcharge.
You need to give incentives for electric vehicles (especially if that's electric buses) and disincentives to diesel for it to really work.
You can't blame London's poor air on it having a congestion charge...
"Though state leaders have not ironed out details, they had reached consensus on Monday that the plan was necessary to help pay for much-needed repairs to the city’s beleaguered subway system."
never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups with guaranteed income , i.e. bureaucracy.
having been a cyclist my wholelife, since childhood. i have no faith in the government to implement sensible policy. i have faith in them to tax more. and more , and more. uber and lyft have been DISASTERS for new york, but they were inevitable because of the disaster that was the method by which the tlc was creating artificial scarcity in the yellow tax licensing system.
and congestion pricing? no. it won't work. it wont' make the city more liveable or better. it's just a cash grab plain and simple.
This ridiculous cynism is counterproductive and defeatist. We know a fair bit about effective urban policy.
> driving in manhattan
I think you may be confused.
The book Deschooling Society has a good explanation about how the design of public roads is used as a means of social control. Ctrl-F for the section on mechanical donkeys. https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Illich_Ivan_Deschooling_Soc...
No matter what you do you could never change this. You will simply create an alternative (and/or parallel) system with its own poors.
Driving in NYC is already off-limits to the poor and has been for awhile. Congestion pricing will be a net benefit to them because it will get a lot of car traffic off the road, thus reducing the chance of being struck by a vehicle (as a pedestrian), making buses much faster, and making biking more viable. Some of the poorest residents of NYC just use bikes, for example -- even the $121/month MetroCard is too much for them. Building out the bike lane network more would help them the most.
This kind of system is already implemented in many major cities, including London, Singapore, Paris, Stockholm, and Milan.
Eg. "New York's streets can optimally handle 1 million journeys per day. If the number of journeys is above/below that for 3 straight months, we increase/decrease the toll by 10%.
That way the roads stay near peak efficiency without needing the politicians to get involved every time the streets get too busy or too empty.
Now nearly all roads are jam packed with Taxis and Ubers, and no regular people drive at all anymore.
It is a very simplistic view to call it a mistake, as the the issues and policies related to the Congestion Charge have changed and evolved over the last 16 years. For example, the PHV (Private Hire Vehicle) will not be exempt from the charge from 8th April 2019. However, licensed Taxi's (Black cabs) were still deemed to be exempt from the charge, following a public consultation last year[1].
Amongst various other considerations, some of these decisions were made on the basis that the number of PHV's entering the zone has nearly doubled in the last decade, whilst some traffic has been constant.[2]
Manhattan will have to deal with similar issues, which will generally coalesce around the central tenets of easing traffic flow, improving air quality and reducing accidents.
[1]https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/phvs-and-...
[2]http://content.tfl.gov.uk/report-to-mayor-on-congestion-char...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-46715503
But yes, it sounds like some kind of pricing scheme should be put into place to impose increased costs on taxis/Ubers driving into the zone first. I think that'd need app support first though; as an Uber/Lyft driver, you'd need some kind of toggle saying whether you're driving into the zone that day or not -- I'm assuming that the charge is once per vehicle per day, not once per entry into the zone. If it's once per entry into the zone, then just add that onto the passenger's fare.