NYC Congestion Pricing Cuts Air Pollution by a Fifth in Six Months
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As New York City's congestion pricing scheme celebrates six months of operation, the news that it's cut air pollution by a fifth is sparking a lively debate about its true impact. While some commenters, like eutropia, are celebrating the improved reliability of buses and increased subway ridership, others, such as RhysU, are grumbling that the tolls merely shift the burden to drivers, who must now offset the costs through additional economic activity. The discussion reveals a deeper divide over the merits of congestion pricing, with some, like ch4s3, viewing it as a targeted tariff on driving in Manhattan, where it's least needed, while others, like jeffbee, quibble over the semantics of calling it a "tariff." Amidst the back-and-forth, it's clear that this scheme is having far-reaching effects on the city's transportation landscape.
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Instead of making public transport more appealing we've made non-public transport less appealing.
Remember kids: congestion pricing is nothing but a tariff on transportation.
Public transit got better.
On driving. And it actually makes driving more appealing, there’s much less traffic so you can get where you’re going much quicker.
> Instead of making public transport more appealing through competition
Like having multiple subway systems? NYC did that already.
Congestion pricing brings in a toll above the 16$ you pay throu the tunnel. I think it's 18, So 34$ total?
So you are incentivized to get more than 2 people by car. Less traffic.
Because tariffs are imposed on trade between countries. That was easy!
> everyone paying the tolls who now needs to engage in additional pollution-causing economic activity merely to offset the costs of government-mandated congestion pricing
I don't think that's how economics work. People are already doing their best to generate money. Also even if that did happen, the thing you're describing as "pollution-causing" is GDP growth, which is overall desirable.
> tariffs
Whether a tariff is good depends on what the goal is (and whether it works toward that goal).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not putting up with YC any longer. Delete my account.
instead, its a toll or a usage tax.
but also, you want the economic activity of having people in the city, not the cost of supporting their light trucks. people coming from outside of new york are very costly in terms of pollution, road maintenance, and losing real estate to parking spaces.
This is unfair. Nobody wants to pay more for anything. And many of the objections resulted in policy adjustments that made the programme better.
https://bettercities.substack.com/p/congestion-pricing-is-a-...
When you have everyone in cars, it's more convenient to go to one big store and buy everything in one place, than to go to three small ones to buy three different things. Shopping malls tried to bridge this gap for suburban retail, but the ultimate rules exploit was Wal-Mart: just build a giant box with a parking lot and sell absolutely everything in it.
The problem with one-stop shopping is the same problem as centralized app stores[0]: it creates a single buyer that can dictate to the entire market the terms of the sale. There's only room for 1 or 2 big-box department stores per market. General retail is owned by Target and Wal-Mart. Electronics is owned by Best Buy. Office supplies are owned by Staples and OfficeMax. Crafts and sewing supplies are owned by Michael's[1]. Pet supplies are owned by Petco[2] and Petsmart. Construction supplies? Home Depot and Lowe's. Each one of these are businesses that were built for maximum scale - to suck up all the demand in a market, region, or country for a thing and then mete it out to whatever supplier offers the best terms.
[0] The fact that arguments for the iOS App Store monopoly are the same as arguments for car-centric suburbs should not be lost on you.
[1] RIP Jo-Ann's
[2] Fuck Petco, all my homies hate Petco. Adopt, don't shop.
The MTA "changed its flawed initial proposal to offer the [disability] exemption only to drivers or vehicles owners with state-issued disability plates" [1].
[1] https://www.nylpi.org/resource/letter-to-mta-regarding-conge...
But obviously the latter is better. It offers more flexibility for consumers and more transmission of demand signals.
Maybe that has to do with the fact that lifetime is somewhat (!) equally distributed, while wealth isn't
Both of these numbers are changing in early January to $3 and $35 respectively, but same idea.
Still, some European countries like Germany offer far cheaper than this, while others like the UK are probably pricer. NYC public transit gives very good value for the US at least.
You mean to say people without cars are paying the congestion tax? :P
But yeah, customers pay the congestion tax for the tradesmen to drive just like they pay the tariff taxes on the supplies the tradesmen use.
You can also offset the regressive nature of this taxation by putting the revenue into subsidizing public infrastructure like rail and bus.
really-rich people don't have to work/commute, so prefer to live in countryside with gardens
really-poor people can't afford cars, and rich(=busy) cities usually have accomodations for them -- so they live inside busy cities
There are lots of middle class commuters who can’t afford to live in the city: they aren’t lucky enough to win the lottery with a rent controlled unit, and are too rich to live in public housing, but still too poor to live in housing of a standard they can tolerate in the city even if their job is there.
In fact, anything that requires a standard of performance will be regressive.
Used to be that you had to purchase an officer's commission...
The solution was to re-structure the MTA. But that’s hard work. Politicians would rather blame the other side and just raise taxes. The people like it because they are grabbing money from what they consider it to be their oppressors.
This comment is typical HN “government bad can do no right” fodder. The MTA is truly a marvel in the service it provides. The only advantage it has is age, which is why it is so expansive.
As for commercialising the stations, does the MTA try to do so and fail, or are they forbidden from doing so effectively (often by the same people who are pushing the narrative that there is something wrong with the organisation)?
If you live anywhere in Brooklyn or Queens, the MTA is an inconvenience that constantly reminds you that the spirit of Robert Moses haunts your city to the present day, and that he really, really would like you to ride a private vehicle. Those boroughs are littered with coverage and frequency gaps that can turn a 40 minute car ride into a 2 hour subway ride. And god help you if you ever need to take a bus.
The capital improvements you mention are improvements on the margins. The MTA needs to engage in a radical rethink of NYC metro area transit. There needs to be radial lines - plural - crossing through Brooklyn and Queens at regular intervals to move as much traffic as possible out of Manhattan. The IBX is a good start, but it should also cross through Staten Island and the Bronx. Queenslink should absolutely be built[0], the N/W should extend to LaGuardia Airport, Utica Ave needs a subway line, and the subway in general should extend through Nassau County and Yonkers. Nassau and Suffolk counties need way more north-south rail[1] than they currently have (which is zero) and the same probably could be said for the service areas of MNR.
The bad part of government is not that it can't run a successful transit service. Actually, government is very good at taking a politically popular service and preserving it[2]. But this comes with a cost: extreme conservatism. You see, our government also happens to have a military that is obsessed with roads; and they pay a 900% subsidy to highway projects. So even states that like transit are hard-pressed to actually fund coverage improvements because it's capital inefficient to build anything that isn't a road. And private institutions building their own rail or transit services will just get absolutely crushed by the road subsidy making driving the only good option. So, government bad, actually, but not for the reason you think.
Also, you're replying to someone talking about NYC in particular. Politics in this area are notoriously corrupt; NJ had a mayor who literally closed a bridge to punish people who didn't vote for him. LIRR in particular has a labor scandal every decade or so. And don't forget, Trump was a NY real estate guy before he decided to tear apart America's political fabric.
[0] In fact, it's kind of absurd they didn't do this when they initially switched the Far Rockaway line over from LIRR to subway service!
[1] This would actually be a good opportunity for light rail, unlike the MTA's initial idea of making the IBX a light rail line
[2] See also: Amtrak.
What in particular about the MTA would you change?
Remove the diversity compliance requirement from bids, e.g. [1]. Open up bids to any firm in the nation and select winners based on cost and competence only. Subject the MTA to a forensic audit every ten or twenty years.
[1] https://www.mta.info/document/180556
They come with certification requirements. The one that RFQ lists are NYC specific.
> are you suggesting that all non-white non-male people are incompetent?
I’m saying a local-only bidding pool will necessarily be smaller than a national one. And requiring local certification guarantees the former.
I’m objecting to diversity compliance. Not diversity requirements. (Though even there, one needs to be cognizant of how quickly intersecting requirements can rapidly cascade the candidate pool to small numbers.)
Does your goverment just let people die?
Dont be obtuse.
In terms of real economic output I'd guess it helped a bit as it made things quicker for workmen who needed to get around while reducing the more leisure driving. But we've had lots of much larger changes like covid and brexit that would probably drown things out in the numbers.
A sudden decrease in car crash would probably decrease the GDP the year it happen, then the fact that less people are dying or disabled would probably increase it in the long run. It will probably have the same effect here.
What we can quantify is the economic impact the San Antonio River Walk has or the impact the Atlanta Beltline has which is billions of dollars in added economic activity. Based on those examples, likely it will increase the NYC GDP by millions if not hundreds of millions.
So yea, if you're poor, you're not driving your beater to SoHo and parking in a lot for $50 daily.
(Also, this thread's root was "regressive tax affecting the poor" which I assert again, is just a silly mischaracterization)
I mean... Toyota would beg to differ (and realistically US car manufacturers today are closer to the Toyota model of car mass production than the traditional US one).
I like walking around new cities, but a lot of people are car life types
Congestion pricing makes driving in New York better. Broadly speaking, the tendency for someone to have a problem with the scheme is proportional to their distance from and inversely related to the amount of time they've ever spent in New York.
Anyone Ubering to and from work is not among New York's poor.
I wonder how it's going to look like in 50 years.
From my limited reading, what fraction of road dust is from tire tread is unclear. The models trying to estimate it give numbers from 4 to 48%, but those might be incorrect due to the problem above affecting how much wear happens. Experiments seem to show 4-9%, but they have trouble excluding resuspended dust.
I'd also point out that if we're worried about air quality effecting people in NYC, then one should really focus on subways since PM2.5 is several times that of the street and far exceeds EPA limits.
Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
You could even run them separate from the street with raised platforms for accessibility and sometimes even run them underground.
We could call this something like “underway” or “steel beam connect-o-cars”
People in Tokyo will accept a longer commute for the sake of a better job or housing or both, because the commute is less miserable (and also because employers pay commute costs).
> I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities.
Transit-oriented cities provide access to more jobs within a fixed range like 30 minutes even for car commuters. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2/figures/4 . People in Dallas having shorter commutes isn't a sign that Dallas is built better, it's a sign that people in Dallas are avoiding switching to otherwise better jobs because it would make their commutes worse.
Got any real stats?
Sure thing. Just so we're on the same page, mind backing that up with the obvious basic research? You know, just a simple breakdown of birth rates vs public transit usage across the world. Rudimentary stuff.
Also if you travel (aka kinda pressed for time), esp. with larger group (aka family) a lot of time cars are cheaper and faster and more practical option.
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