Living in big cities is becoming more and more the case of boiling frogs. If all these things came up at once, none of it would fly. But because year after year, it slowly gets worse, people just go along with it pretending it's fine.
It wouldn't be surprising in a few years that they'll charge by the streets you entered, or the calculated emissions produced by your vehicle.
(Note I have never visited NYC, on the bucket list)
Every category of living has these sorts of changes over time. The suburbs might complain about rising infrastructure taxes, the time to commute anywhere, road work. Rural areas might complain about lack of services and maintenance from the municipality.
The transit access/walkability of NYC gives it a LOT of leeway to squeeze some money out, especially with how expensive everything has gotten.
appreciate you being transparent with your disclaimer.
Living in the big city is not a frog boiling operation. These rules are pretty simple: cars are silly in dense environments. It's in the first paragraph.
> If the public transport systems were that good, why would anyone need to drive in?
Edge cases and laziness. For two thirds of my trips, I can and do take public transportation. For the remaining third, I'm some combination of lazy, needing to maintain a phone call or going between points inadequately served by public transit.
> If the public transport systems were that good, why would anyone need to drive in?
There is a question there about should the people already there have to accomodate people who want to live elsewhere and still enjoy the ammenity of the big city.
I personally err on the side of the people who live in the suburbs shouldn't dictate the built form to the people who live in the city.
I don't think anyone is saying the people from the suburbs can't visit. Just that they should visit the built form that makes cities great for people that live there. This also benefits the people that visit - because it makes cities great once you step out of the car!
Nobody from NYC visits rural Idaho expecting a 24/7 subway system to be provided for them.
If they want the visitors (and they do as you can hear from the pained howling about work-from-home, and before then about suburban malls) the answer is a big yes, you need to accommodate visitors. (Notably different than outright dictating the built form but ignore at your own peril.)
It is admittedly an awkward to do a proper 'transition' from cars in less dense areas to transit stations. in ways that parking lots and garages alone leave some problems.
It's a tragedy of the commons. If everyone took the bus, it would be a lot faster for everyone, but any individual gets there faster by using a car, so they do.
>If the public transport systems were that good, why would anyone need to drive in?
People take transit method A if it's better than transit method B no matter how shitty A is in absolute terms. And the US has invested 50 years into car infrastructure so it's pretty good actually. For example, Tokyo has a famously good public transit system and 70 minute one way commute time on average. NYC is half that.
I was in NYC yesterday. I had a somewhat heavy carryon and had to deal with a few too many staircases. I could not determine where the elevators and escalators were easily. I am sure that information exists, but countless subway stations are inaccessible. Buses are far more accessible.
> wouldn't be surprising in a few years that they'll charge by the streets you entered
The point is we don't want nor need private cars in central Manhattan. A simpler solution would be eliminating street-side parking, but that's a political hot potato.
done listening to "i would normally support this drastically overdue and necessary environmental policy but they're not doing it just right in my opinion so i can't"
If it was an environmental policy they'd follow London's lead and not charge Motorcycles. $23 for everybody is a pure money grab to backstop the MTA's ever expanding budget.
I don’t understand this criticism. It seems completely normal for a large MTA to use debt financing to fund big projects and not unreasonable at all for 20% of recovered fares to go to paying that debt. I’m sure most of that debt was incurred before the recent spike in rates too so there should be no rush to pay it.
Also, I think there’s some fallacious reasoning going on here as if congestion pricing by itself will not help unless timed to exactly coincide with other projects completing. It can as long there’s slack in the system (there is) and it doesn’t need those other projects to be done before it starts helping.
The MTA certainly overpays for projects but that is a much easier problem to point out than to fix. It ties into a huge and longstanding corruption/graft scheme, that has in practice a lot of public support, that you can’t just fix overnight.
If they were only over-budget that would be one thing. East side access has made commutes worse for Long Islanders, even those that work on the East Side!
How do you spend that much money and make things worse? The MTA isn’t just incompetent, it’s world-historically incompetent. Tens of millions of people’s lives would be significantly better if it was only as corrupt and incompetent as a typical metro system in Southern Europe
Completely agree with everything you said. If anything the biggest complaint I would have is that it seems like they only plan to charge people entering Manhattan and not cars that registered in Manhattan.
The author is not giving you enough context, so your criticism is understandable. The NY MTA has major preexisting infrastructure problems, a big fate evasion problem, a pension obligation problem, and a decreased ridership problem.
He's not spelling out how he'd prefer they repurpose the new funding stream, but he's right that the new projects are expensive window dressing on a burning house.
I just don't buy this. The city could easily afford to just foot the bill with the economic traffic it drives. It's just a non-problem they trot out to work people up.
If I apply your logic to all taxes, maybe if none of us paid them, we could expect to see a compensatory rise in economic activity? Doesn't hold water. This is a relatively new problem, and it's costing the city big money.
The person you're responding to is trying to establish a distinction between fares and taxes. They're saying that the public infrastructure drives economic growth, and posits that the growth in tax base from these projects should be enough to cover fares.
Whereas you see all government revenue as going into a single fungible bucket, and some people with your view may believe that recovering $700M of additional fare revenue is both practicable and necessary.
It's really more of a question of "who pays", in my opinion. I personally think any revenue system with low overhead is a good one.
I agree with you that those are normal things for a public transit agency.
I felt like the core of the article was that NYC had ignored an established pattern (outlined in a report[1]) that suggests that, for this to work like they want, they would need to increase non-car ways of getting into and around the city. I also thought the article did a good job of talking about how the legally relevant metrics are focused on financial targets rather than transit targets.
I do think this kind of article is hard to write clearly, but I do not think what you said is in conversation with the content of the article. I can see why they are worried that congestion pricing must fund new capital projects (i.e. expansion) instead of the existing system. You didn't mention that in your critique and I'm curious because it feels like a central point of the article.
I also do not think this article was exactly criticizing the MTA for overpaying? More than it was noting that it HAD overpaid to situate the reader as to the MTA's current financial situation.
Los Angeles is the closest metropolitan area to me and there's no comparison. You can't easily live in or around Los Angeles without a car. Los Angeles actually has the highest rate of private vehicle ownership for a metropolitan area in the US at ~88%. NYC is at ~45% to give a frame of reference.
I agree with you in principle that you can rent a scooter or get an Uber in LA, but it's much more expensive in general to get around. You can blame it entirely on the lower density, but it doesn't change the fact that NYC is the only major city in the US with less than half of residents owning a private vehicle.
Sorry, I don't count LA as a city. It's endless suburban sprawl. It doesn't have the density to live up to the claim to be a city.
I'm not claiming that other cities are NYC. There's only one NYC. But there are cities, even in the US, where there's an urban core that has useful "Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike" or equivalent.
It's not uniformly the case for all LA-area cities, but many of the densest urban areas in the US are in greater Los Angeles[1]. It's the 2nd most dense "metro area" in the US.[2]
Well congestion pricing improves vehicle traffic in tunnels, that's the point.
And trains can be ramped up and down mostly in response to demand, no? It's not a question of underlying track capacity, is it?
I mean I've never heard of someone driving from NJ to NY instead of taking the train because the train was too full. It's usually the opposite -- they take the train instead of the car because the traffic is too slow.
Ah got it, you're talking specifically about the Hudson. Turns out the new tunnels won't be finished until 2035.
Still, congestion pricing seems like the best solution even for right now. Reducing car traffic underneath the Hudson means buses can run faster and we can add more of them, since that's literally the only short-term solution.
Oh I agree! We need all these things, we can’t have them, but let’s do what we can to make things better. Driving south of midtown Manhattan for me is a luxury and paying the cost will clearly show how it’s wasteful and costly to the neighborhoods I’m driving through. I probably just won’t do it.
The article didn’t address one of the biggest issues: rampant evasion. Ever since automated toll collection and especially red light/speed cameras went in, fewer and fewer cars have legible, real license plates. Just like with mopeds, Adams’ NYPD doesn’t seem to care at all.
Possibly, but more likely is that cops don't like dealing with boring traffic offenses, and doing a bunch of paper work for them. And the money booked from the ticket, if it is even paid, goes to the general fund and not to the cops to buy fancy toys, so they have even less incentive to waste their time with it.
> “That was probably the tightest spot I could've been in,” Mike said. “Because [the offense] could've been ‘driving without a plate,’ ‘driving with no registration…’" By driving on the shoulder, too, Mike was driving illegally in at least three different ways.
> Despite that, he felt confident as the cop approached his car and told him to roll down his window. Instead of pulling out his driver’s license, Mike simply introduced himself and produced something better. “I just basically happened to have one of their PBA cards on me,” he said, referring to the small, plastic "courtesy" cards issued by the Police Benevolent Association, which usually have an officer’s name, phone number, and signature on the back.
This is a problem in major metro areas, and it's probably tied directly to being a wildly unpopular form of policing: a form that actually affects rich people.
I vaguely remember some YouTube vlogger that would walk around and spot the fake/modified/obstructed plate. One obstruction was a leaf. That doesn’t even begin to include the probably illegal tinted covers.
It’s a misdemeanor. Distributing them is a serious felony. They can get the buyers to flip. Don’t see why it isn’t worth their time.
Anyway, what isn’t they are so busy doing? It’s definitely not arresting shoplifters, fare evaders, public deficaters, or those that engage in aggressive solicitation.
> Don’t see why it isn’t worth their time.
Anyway, what isn’t they are so busy doing? It’s definitely not arresting shoplifters, fare evaders, public deficaters, or those that engage in aggressive solicitation.
The DA won’t prosecute any of those crimes unless it is large enough to be I the news and then it’ll be thought about.
No need to lay off, they’re quitting in droves and there are no new recruits to fill the void. Which is why some large cities have made it so non-citizens can join Law Enforcement.
> this only effects poor people in any significant way
How? There are discounts for the poor [1]. Those in the trades can add it to their bills. And there are precious few poor Manhattanites living within the congestion-charge zone who also have a car. (Parking a car in Manhattan is like renting another bedroom.)
Also note that this only effects poor people in any significant way.
Simply not true. The poor don’t drive into the city. They can’t afford cars, and even if they could, they can’t afford to park them.
This will most heavily affect taxi riders and city employees who park illegally and so don’t have to worry about paying, if they don’t just evade the rules by illegally obscuring or removing their license plates. Which they will—-secure in the fact that the NYPD will never do anything and even if they do OATH will have their backs.
Poor people can't afford cars (and certainly can't afford parking in Manhattan). Taking cars off the streets will make the buses faster and benefit the poor the most. The richest will keep using cars but they would have found a way to do that anyway (e.g. in cities that limit who can drive on which day by numberplate, you get rich people buying two cars) - at least this way they're paying directly for road use.
NYC across all of the boroughs has a car ownership rate around 45%. Being able to point to one poor person with a car who lives in NYC (probably in their car) doesn't make it a common occurrence or statistically significant. Also poor relative to what?
I've lived in NYC as well as upstate NY and I can tell you for a fact that my friends with cars in university statistically speaking were from Long Island. Total anecdata, but you can look at the actual demographics of who owns private vehicles in NYC and what economic class they belong to. It sounds like the results may surprise you!
Not to be callous but, so what? Just because you’re poor means you deserve to be exempt from measures to reduce traffic? Should poor people get tax free cigarettes or $0 fines for littering too?
I can buy that excuse in SF which has a lot of poor exurban car commuters by necessity, but NYC has a much bigger public transit network and parking is even more scarce and expensive in Manhattan than in SF (so unless you’re just taking a shortcut through Manhattan, which this is intentionally penalizing, you’re going to be paying a lot for parking anyway and are probably already wealthy).
However, the more pressing issue is whether the existing democracy is inherently designed to marginalize those below a certain economic threshold. I think it is.
Sometimes I think, we should ban private vehicles (excludes emergency vehicles, taxis, possibly Ubers, etc) inside cities. Of course, you'd need good public transport first, but often to get that, you'd need to force the issue such as by banning cars.
Having been to Asia where you could get anywhere with public transport, it's wild to see the dichotomy in many western countries.
Between 07:00 and 18:00 Monday-Friday, and 12:00-18:00 Saturday-Sunday, it costs £15 to drive into central London. Delivery vehicles and so on must also pay.
Restricting all vehicles except some/all during some part of the morning is often how pedestrian streets operate in Europe, but this is usually a much smaller area.
Note that this article is about NYC trying to add the exact same thing for Manhattan roughly south of Central Park (so incorporating the Midtown and Lower Manhattan CBDs, but not including Upper Manhattan).
Many Asian transit systems are also ultra clean, ultra safe, and ultra reliable compared to the U.S. The first two might not be achievable in the US due to socio-political reasons.
It’s ironic that many of the people most in favor of aggressively promoting transit (I.e. via aggressive measures like banning cars) are also the same that impede the safety and clean parts from happening. Instead they just handwave peoples’ concerns saying “oh that crazy psycho raving about murdering everyone in the subway car is really harmless. You should be worried about the thousands of people cars murder every day instead!”
Also, despite their amazing transit systems, many people in Asia still aspire to own a private car.
> Many Asian transit systems are also ultra clean, ultra safe, and ultra reliable compared to the U.S. The first two might not be achievable in the US due to socio-political reasons.
If NYC, which has the highest tax base and one of the highest public transit usage rates in North America can't get the MTA right, what hope is there for smaller, less dense cities in the US?
I think it’s the other way around. There’s been too much money for too long and an entire ecosystem of corruption, featherbedding, and inefficiency has bloomed into place. A hungrier environment might not attract so many parasites.
The MTA is a century old legacy system where all changes have to be made in production (because you cannot build parallel train tunnels, there just isn't unused space) with 24/7 uptime. It seems easy to assume a new system could avoid some of the issues that continue to plague it.
I was in London recently, and I noticed that there weren't too many vehicles, and even though roads had only one or two lanes per direction, there wasn't any traffic in the city center. I asked some locals why that was, and they said that the tube from the suburbs was fast and frequent, and it was expensive to bring your car into the city.
I hope the streets of NY will calm down, and then they can even start closing lanes and turning them into larger sideways, bike lanes, or trees.
> It is akin to someone knee deep in credit card debt taking a second job only to use the new income to open another credit card account and load it up with more debt
Any time an article compares government financing to your household finances, you can stop reading. The author is either misinformed, being disingenuous, or both.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadIt wouldn't be surprising in a few years that they'll charge by the streets you entered, or the calculated emissions produced by your vehicle.
(Note I have never visited NYC, on the bucket list)
The transit access/walkability of NYC gives it a LOT of leeway to squeeze some money out, especially with how expensive everything has gotten.
Living in the big city is not a frog boiling operation. These rules are pretty simple: cars are silly in dense environments. It's in the first paragraph.
"... charge private vehicles..."
Note: I am not a car freak. I'm a solarpunk guy, I'd rather have Futurama style tubes, or VTOL vehicles anytime!
But paying for horrendous traffic jams clearly shows to me that public transport isn't up to snuff.
Edge cases and laziness. For two thirds of my trips, I can and do take public transportation. For the remaining third, I'm some combination of lazy, needing to maintain a phone call or going between points inadequately served by public transit.
If they need to drive in that badly to the only city in the US with a world class public transport system then they can pay for it.
There is a question there about should the people already there have to accomodate people who want to live elsewhere and still enjoy the ammenity of the big city.
I personally err on the side of the people who live in the suburbs shouldn't dictate the built form to the people who live in the city.
Nobody from NYC visits rural Idaho expecting a 24/7 subway system to be provided for them.
It is admittedly an awkward to do a proper 'transition' from cars in less dense areas to transit stations. in ways that parking lots and garages alone leave some problems.
People take transit method A if it's better than transit method B no matter how shitty A is in absolute terms. And the US has invested 50 years into car infrastructure so it's pretty good actually. For example, Tokyo has a famously good public transit system and 70 minute one way commute time on average. NYC is half that.
I was in NYC yesterday. I had a somewhat heavy carryon and had to deal with a few too many staircases. I could not determine where the elevators and escalators were easily. I am sure that information exists, but countless subway stations are inaccessible. Buses are far more accessible.
We all have dreams. If only.
The point is we don't want nor need private cars in central Manhattan. A simpler solution would be eliminating street-side parking, but that's a political hot potato.
What’s getting worse and worse is rent …
Also, I think there’s some fallacious reasoning going on here as if congestion pricing by itself will not help unless timed to exactly coincide with other projects completing. It can as long there’s slack in the system (there is) and it doesn’t need those other projects to be done before it starts helping.
The MTA certainly overpays for projects but that is a much easier problem to point out than to fix. It ties into a huge and longstanding corruption/graft scheme, that has in practice a lot of public support, that you can’t just fix overnight.
How do you spend that much money and make things worse? The MTA isn’t just incompetent, it’s world-historically incompetent. Tens of millions of people’s lives would be significantly better if it was only as corrupt and incompetent as a typical metro system in Southern Europe
He's not spelling out how he'd prefer they repurpose the new funding stream, but he's right that the new projects are expensive window dressing on a burning house.
I just don't buy this. The city could easily afford to just foot the bill with the economic traffic it drives. It's just a non-problem they trot out to work people up.
Ahh, I was imagining a Final Destination scenario
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/nyregion/mta-fare-evasion...
If I apply your logic to all taxes, maybe if none of us paid them, we could expect to see a compensatory rise in economic activity? Doesn't hold water. This is a relatively new problem, and it's costing the city big money.
Whereas you see all government revenue as going into a single fungible bucket, and some people with your view may believe that recovering $700M of additional fare revenue is both practicable and necessary.
It's really more of a question of "who pays", in my opinion. I personally think any revenue system with low overhead is a good one.
I felt like the core of the article was that NYC had ignored an established pattern (outlined in a report[1]) that suggests that, for this to work like they want, they would need to increase non-car ways of getting into and around the city. I also thought the article did a good job of talking about how the legally relevant metrics are focused on financial targets rather than transit targets.
I do think this kind of article is hard to write clearly, but I do not think what you said is in conversation with the content of the article. I can see why they are worried that congestion pricing must fund new capital projects (i.e. expansion) instead of the existing system. You didn't mention that in your critique and I'm curious because it feels like a central point of the article.
I also do not think this article was exactly criticizing the MTA for overpaying? More than it was noting that it HAD overpaid to situate the reader as to the MTA's current financial situation.
[1] https://rpa.org/work/reports/congestion-pricing-in-nyc#key-f...
NYC already has the most non-car ways of anywhere in the country by a long shot. Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike.
What on earth more improvements do they want?
By a long shot? Those, or an equivalent, are pretty standard in all major cities.
(Lime/Spin rental scooters are in the same category as rental bicycles, imo)
I agree with you in principle that you can rent a scooter or get an Uber in LA, but it's much more expensive in general to get around. You can blame it entirely on the lower density, but it doesn't change the fact that NYC is the only major city in the US with less than half of residents owning a private vehicle.
I'm not claiming that other cities are NYC. There's only one NYC. But there are cities, even in the US, where there's an urban core that has useful "Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike" or equivalent.
Try:
* Seattle
* Boston
* Chicago
* Washington, D.C.
* San Francisco
* Philadelphia
* Baltimore
* Denver
* Portland
* Atlanta
* Minneapolis-St. Paul
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles
Even with all that crowding there are still parts of cars that everyone avoids because Adams’ NYPD won’t do its job.
And trains can be ramped up and down mostly in response to demand, no? It's not a question of underlying track capacity, is it?
I mean I've never heard of someone driving from NJ to NY instead of taking the train because the train was too full. It's usually the opposite -- they take the train instead of the car because the traffic is too slow.
Still, congestion pricing seems like the best solution even for right now. Reducing car traffic underneath the Hudson means buses can run faster and we can add more of them, since that's literally the only short-term solution.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-court...
> “That was probably the tightest spot I could've been in,” Mike said. “Because [the offense] could've been ‘driving without a plate,’ ‘driving with no registration…’" By driving on the shoulder, too, Mike was driving illegally in at least three different ways.
> Despite that, he felt confident as the cop approached his car and told him to roll down his window. Instead of pulling out his driver’s license, Mike simply introduced himself and produced something better. “I just basically happened to have one of their PBA cards on me,” he said, referring to the small, plastic "courtesy" cards issued by the Police Benevolent Association, which usually have an officer’s name, phone number, and signature on the back.
and openly flaunt parking laws: https://twitter.com/NYPD_Parking
Other evasions are actual crimes. Like all those fake paper plates—-criminal possession of a forged instrument.
It’s probably because as another commenter said not worth their time.
Seems like NYC has been battling this for years.
https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=Fake+plates+new+y...
I vaguely remember some YouTube vlogger that would walk around and spot the fake/modified/obstructed plate. One obstruction was a leaf. That doesn’t even begin to include the probably illegal tinted covers.
Anyway, what isn’t they are so busy doing? It’s definitely not arresting shoplifters, fare evaders, public deficaters, or those that engage in aggressive solicitation.
The DA won’t prosecute any of those crimes unless it is large enough to be I the news and then it’ll be thought about.
Why spend time on crimes that are not going to prosecuted? Even with violent crime we see the offender walk right back out to the streets.
The bigger question is why isn’t the DA prosecuting these crimes?
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-immigration-illinois-d...
Also note that this only effects poor people in any significant way.
How? There are discounts for the poor [1]. Those in the trades can add it to their bills. And there are precious few poor Manhattanites living within the congestion-charge zone who also have a car. (Parking a car in Manhattan is like renting another bedroom.)
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/05/09/mta-will-offer-conges...
Simply not true. The poor don’t drive into the city. They can’t afford cars, and even if they could, they can’t afford to park them.
This will most heavily affect taxi riders and city employees who park illegally and so don’t have to worry about paying, if they don’t just evade the rules by illegally obscuring or removing their license plates. Which they will—-secure in the fact that the NYPD will never do anything and even if they do OATH will have their backs.
I've lived in NYC as well as upstate NY and I can tell you for a fact that my friends with cars in university statistically speaking were from Long Island. Total anecdata, but you can look at the actual demographics of who owns private vehicles in NYC and what economic class they belong to. It sounds like the results may surprise you!
I can buy that excuse in SF which has a lot of poor exurban car commuters by necessity, but NYC has a much bigger public transit network and parking is even more scarce and expensive in Manhattan than in SF (so unless you’re just taking a shortcut through Manhattan, which this is intentionally penalizing, you’re going to be paying a lot for parking anyway and are probably already wealthy).
BIG claim. Especially because, obviously, all poor people and only poor people drive in NYC. Citation needed.
However, the more pressing issue is whether the existing democracy is inherently designed to marginalize those below a certain economic threshold. I think it is.
Having been to Asia where you could get anywhere with public transport, it's wild to see the dichotomy in many western countries.
Allow only delivery vans to operate between say 4am - 10am.
With rest of the time for cafes, bars, restaurants etc to open on the streets.
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge
Restricting all vehicles except some/all during some part of the morning is often how pedestrian streets operate in Europe, but this is usually a much smaller area.
It’s ironic that many of the people most in favor of aggressively promoting transit (I.e. via aggressive measures like banning cars) are also the same that impede the safety and clean parts from happening. Instead they just handwave peoples’ concerns saying “oh that crazy psycho raving about murdering everyone in the subway car is really harmless. You should be worried about the thousands of people cars murder every day instead!”
Also, despite their amazing transit systems, many people in Asia still aspire to own a private car.
Nor the third!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309595
Any time an article compares government financing to your household finances, you can stop reading. The author is either misinformed, being disingenuous, or both.