> Particulates issued from tailpipes can aggravate asthma and heart disease and increase the risk of lung cancer and heart attack. Globally, they are a leading risk factor for premature death.
Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
It always surprises me when people want stop signs in their neighborhood for traffic calming. The last thing I want is all of the noise and pollution of vehicles stopping and starting over and over again; surely various piece of road furniture like bulb-outs, roundabouts, etc, do a better job with fewer drawbacks. Other than cost, of course.
There are some early tyre and brake dust collection systems which might help, but that won't do much for the road dust.
I've been wondering whether, theoretically, if self driving cars become widely usable and deployed in cities, will they be able to safely operate with harder tyre compounds and harder road surfaces that shed less but don't grip as well?
If nothing else, less aggressive driving should lead to less shedding.
There was a study published about how much air pollution dropped in NYC during the COVID lockdown. PM2.5 was found to have dropped 36%. However with more robust analysis, this drop was discovered to not be statistically significant. I would caution anyone reading this who is tempted by confirmation bias.
To head off the almost inevitable recapitulation of yesterday's parade of misinformed complaints by teenage libertarians, please actually read the paper before commenting. The paper shows there was no significant reduction in entries to the congestion charge zone by cars, vans, and light trucks. And you can confirm this conclusion is consistent with their source data using their github repo. The reduction in pollution is coming from the significant decline in heavy truck traffic. Truckers were using lower manhattan as a cut-through route to other places and they are now doing that less, exactly as congestion pricing planners long argued.
Not surprising. The real question is how do we measure the opportunity cost of these measures? Is it a net gain? You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits.
This article confirms my existing bias/belief that user pays and auction[0] based systems improve governmental programs and finite supply systems in a society like the USA.
[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.
The article speaks to this as well, "Pricing led to a drop in pollution across the greater metropolitan area, according to the study, published in the journal npj Clean Air."
So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.
The study found the opposite: people are picking healthier choices throughout the region. This makes sense: if you switch to taking the train, in addition to not driving in the congestion zone you also aren’t driving the distance between the closest train station and Manhattan, which for many people will be more engine operating time than they spend in the zone itself.
I would really appreciate it if the Bay area got real congestion pricing and also enforcement. We have lots of HOT lanes here, but they are basically unenforced so everyone sets their ez-pass to “3” and gets the free HOV pricing, which rapidly becomes economical at the rate of enforcement in the Bay.
Frankly, if they let me citizen report - I could likely cover my entire tax burden in 2-3 days. At $490/ticket, the ROI for enforcement seems obviously there.
I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
> The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
You're curious how an issue where government listening to experts results in obvious good outcomes and no serious failures became a national culture war issue?
New York has long been an influential city. It was the Robert Mosses deputies that spread all over the US to drive highways threw every city center. If New York can do something, it might be copied everywhere.
That and right-wing politics where anything that harms the car as a religious symbol is seen as a 'values' based attack.
One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes.
I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
Both NY and SF were regional hubs before cars disfigured them. No commercial vehicle is going to be discouraged by a $10 dollar charge, and trade is so much easier when the roads aren't clogged by single people demanding 1000 sq-ft of ground space to move around.
What you're describing as a problem is actually the solution, and what you think is the solution is actually the problem.
Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.
They should make pedestrian-only streets in most dense places of Manhattan and use these money to improve public transportation. Even just a few blocks of no cars would make a huge difference for livability of the city center.
There's a large (long time) movement to do this to lower Manhattan, the most public transit connected area in the US (probably North America, definitely up there in the world). It's getting pick up again.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] threadMinor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44407-025-00037-2
I've been wondering whether, theoretically, if self driving cars become widely usable and deployed in cities, will they be able to safely operate with harder tyre compounds and harder road surfaces that shed less but don't grip as well?
If nothing else, less aggressive driving should lead to less shedding.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7314691/
[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.
So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.
Allowing employees to work remote.
Frankly, if they let me citizen report - I could likely cover my entire tax burden in 2-3 days. At $490/ticket, the ROI for enforcement seems obviously there.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
People say they hate socialism, but drivers love car-socialism.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
That and right-wing politics where anything that harms the car as a religious symbol is seen as a 'values' based attack.
I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.
EWR is in New Jersey, so... not technically the NYC Subway. But taking the subway to Penn Station, then hopping on NJ Transit is pretty easy
LGA is the only one that straight up has no subway/train option.