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I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone

I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. If people are commuting into Manhattan, they should take public transit to and from parking lots in Brooklyn/Queens/New Jersey. You will never convince me that there are low income workers who need to drive in the city as an essential part of their livelihood. That’s just not a real thing here.

miketery 8y ago
Couln't agree more. Better for walk ability, can increase number of dedicated bus lanes, have express lines, and local van lines. With the density in new york, you could have these buses and vans running all day, it would give much better access to subways and importantly can alleviate subway needs at night (why run a train every 30 minutes with 8 nearly empty cars, if you can instead run 2 buses every 30 minutes, or a bus every 15 min). for buses Otherwise there will be clear roads to have a good bus system that can run express and local lines better, can start shutting down the subway for a few hours a day, and the bus should work just as well
treis 8y ago
>I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. How do you expect to get your plumbing fixed?
- nihonde 8y ago
  Expand my original post from “delivery trucks” to “small trucks/vans on demonstrable business”. Also, other than for major construction, no more semi-trucks in the city. And electric buses ASAP. They’re the loudest and dirtiest vehicles out here. And definitely no more tour buses. That would make this city soar in terms of places people want to live and visit.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    > And definitely no more tour buses. You do realize tourism accounts for a great deal of income for NYC, yes?
    - nihonde 8y ago
      You don’t need poorly-maintained double-decker ICE buses to have tourism. You also don’t need to accommodate fleets of tour buses on the narrow streets of Manhattan. Drop them off in Dumbo and let them walk or ferry over. They probably need the exercise anyway. Seriuosly though, I really doubt banning tour buses will have an appreciable effect on tourism here.
  - masonic 8y ago
    No ambulances, either. Or law enforcement. Or fire trucks.
gpm 8y ago
Trades people can have legitimate reasons to need vehicles. Imagine your in charge of, say, taking care of a large planter. You need to bring with you: - Half a pickup truck of new plants - A few bags of fresh soil - A few shovels, buckets, a hose, and other similar tools They key is really just that vehicles are necessary to transport large quantities of stuff, regardless of whether or not it's a delivery vehicle. I think you'll find that a number of trades include low income workers who are moving around large quantities of stuff. (This is not intended to be taken as arguing for or against congestion charges or any other policy involving shuffling money around, just against the logic of the above post and outright banning things other than delivery vehicles)
- alistairSH 8y ago
  Modify the original post to "nobody needs to commute in a personal vehicle" and it works. The truck full of plants is a commercial truck (it might be personally owned, but should be getting reimbursed for mileage).
  - gpm 8y ago
    Commercial is the wrong qualifier for two reasons. The first is that you're going to have investment banks declaring their employees cars as commercial. The second is that you don't have to be a business to take a job taking care of a planter (or whatever). You probably are, but it's not required. I agree with the principal that "nobody needs to commute in a personal vehicle", but I find it hard to codify it into a reliable law. Edit: Actually I like Nihonde's own modification: “small trucks/vans on demonstrable business”, I'd add "involving transporting stuff for use in the city". It will probably still be gamed, but the ambiguity of the wording allows selective enforcement to fight the worst of that. Edit 2: Actually I don't, considering the other discussions in this thread about police abusing their authority giving them more ambiguous laws seems like a bad idea. Also - This is a perfect example of why I try to avoid advocating for/against policies on the internet unless it's abundantly clear that they are good/bad.
    - nerdponx 8y ago
electric_muse 8y ago
My compelling reason is that I live in Manhattan and frequently make trips to visit family that are not well served by public transportation. And when I'm there, I prefer using a vehicle to get around. I often return to New York with a carful of groceries, luggage, etc. I've tried this via public transit -- it's a miserable affair. The utility of a personal vehicle for me is very high -- perhaps substantially higher than it would be for you. There's no need to justify vehicles based on economic classes and livelihood. Why does the car debate need to be made into some kind of class conflict? It's just more convenient and pleasant, and that's how some choose to spend their money. I'm sorry it inconveniences you, but our society exists because we're willing to be slightly inconvenienced by our neighbors (especially those with different preferences than us) in exchange for certain benefits.
- notatoad 8y ago
  that's not a very compelling reason. Making it slightly easier for you personally to carry your groceries isn't going to convince anybody that personal vehicles are a necessity. >Why does the car debate need to be made into some kind of class conflict? because it's simply not sustainable for everybody who wants to drive a car to do so. there isn't physically enough space. The only way to let some people drive a car is to make it expensive enough to discourage most people from driving a car.
- gpm 8y ago
  The argument against here that I find most compelling is that the externalities of you driving your car are so insanely huge that it should be priced into the range of ridiculousness. Things that you have to consider (The numbers attached are completely made up and probably off by multiple orders of magnitude in most cases, but are to make the point that you should be assigning costs to these things. Then you should multiply by them by reasonable estimates of the quantities that make up the denominator on the unit and see what you come up with. Also note that as there are less cars on the road the externalities per car probably go up): - Air quality (say, 0.1c per person you drive past?) - Noise polution (say, 0.1c per person you drive past?) - Road size - realestate cost (say, 0.000001c/trip per per person who pays taxes?) - Road size - increased walking (and other travel) time (say, 0.0000001c/trip per person who crosses a road you drove on?) - Congestion (say, 1c for everyone on a bus behind you?) - Road maintenance (probably negligible compared to the other costs) - Pedestrian safety (...) - Climate change (...) Our society exists not just because we're willing to be slightly inconvenienced by our neighbors, but because we are willing to go to reasonable lengths to avoid inconveniencing our neighbors. Perhaps, reasonable lengths includes not driving into the city.
chroma 8y ago
People would just get their cars registered as delivery vehicles. NYC already has rampant abuse of placards and literal "get out of jail" cards. A ban on personal vehicles wouldn't go any differently than those.
alasdair_ 8y ago
>There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. It's remarkably difficult for disabled people and many elderly people to get around by public transportation.
GhostVII 8y ago
Seems like it might be easier to eliminate parking, rather than ban vehicles. If there was no street parking, a lot of people would have no choice but to park outside of Manhattan. That would also still allow taxis and ride sharing to drive people from the subway to wherever they needed to go.
- nihonde 8y ago
  I’m good with that plan too. I wake up every morning to giant trucks beeping in reverse because the street parking blocks them turning a corner. And thirty jerks who drove in from Long Island are honking their horns behind that truck. Every day!
  - airstrike 8y ago
    This literally every day... and I live on the 30th floor
- ouid 8y ago
  can't shit in your car.
jefftk 8y ago
> My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. I recently played for a contra dance in Manhattan. My band members and I drove in a small car, with a sound system, keyboard, and other instruments. I would have been happy to pay some sort of toll/charge/fee/tax but any other way of getting our equipment to and from the gig would be far more expensive and a lot of a hassle. (My family doesn't have a car, and I commute to work on the subway)
- thoughtfunction 8y ago
  That is a form of delivery vehicle in a way, right?
  - jefftk 8y ago
    Sort of, but it's not registered as "commercial", driven by a professional, or anything else people would normally think of as a "delivery" vehicle. Like, if you call any vehicle that moves things from place to place a delivery vehicle then everyone who drives to the grocery store to buy milk is operating a delivery vehicle.
- zwayhowder 8y ago
  Try getting a Ceili band to a gig :D I think the article is trying to get to this train of thought. We want X that requires a vehicle, instead of assuming that this is a zero cost activity lets factor in the cost of parking, mileage etc. Assuming for a moment that the total cost was an extra $200 any self respecting contra dance should be able to spread that out at $1-$2 per person. I grew up in a musical family and spent many a weekend covering vast distances in the back of an old car so my dad could play a gig that barely broke even. Reminds me of the definition of a musician: "A musician is someone who will load $5,000 worth of gear into a $500 car to drive 100 miles to a $50 gig." But seriously, people need to value things correctly. I spent some time on a local council and the shopkeepers would be up in arms whenever they thought they'd lose a parking spot, despite every census showing most of their customers walked to their stores. The shopkeepers viewed the parking as "their parking" and not "our parking" (As in the community). Yet for some reason the footpaths were most definitely "ours footpaths" (The council's) so repairing or even cleaning them was the Council's job, and heaven forbid we suggest the shops pay towards that cost.
michaelcampbell 8y ago
Because everyone in Manhattan is like you; a young, perhaps single, with no kids; especially not many, and none with special needs, who doesn't need to routinely carry or cart anything around.
- hatchnyc 8y ago
  People were living in cities for many years before cars were invented, presumably at least some of them had children and were not young. Hell, people still live in modern cities around the world outside of the United States where car ownership rates are extremely low.
  - casefields 8y ago
    And people used to die from infection before antibiotics. What's your point?
    - DFHippie 8y ago
      I think you get the point. We have an existence proof that people don't need cars to live in cities. We don't need everything in the past to have been better than everything in the present for the logic to work. (People aren't driving cars to avoid infection.)
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  Where are you parking and how are you getting from wherever you park to where you live or a shopping or whatever? It seems to me some of these arguments prove too much. If you are rich enough to pay for convenient parking garages everywhere you want to go, you are rich enough to pay a congestion charge. And if you aren’t then how does a private car solve the problems you are pointing out?
cryptonector 8y ago
Imagine no parking on streets. That would triple the bandwidth of many streets. You could remove parking on every four streets today and greatly improve congestion. Some parking would be needed for ride sharing cars, naturally, but much less than is needed for private cars not used for ride sharing.
tartoran 8y ago
How about going from queens to NJ? Some people need to pass through Manhattan in order go somewhere else. Because it was designed this way unfortunately
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  I wouldn't count the highways. If you take the BQE to the Harlem River Drive to the George Washington, I'd call that fine. It's the people that want to drive a single passenger vehicle from Midtown tunnel or 59th street bridge to the Lincoln or Holland tunnels smack dab across some of the densest concentration of people in the entire country that ought to be highly discouraged.
airstrike 8y ago
How do you propose the CEO of a Fortune 500 company should get to his meetings with his team? On a bus? Ban cars and you make NY terrible for business. And if you haven't noticed, Manhattan exists for business. Everything else is either necessary for that goal or an unintended consequence.

miketery 8y ago

Couln't agree more. Better for walk ability, can increase number of dedicated bus lanes, have express lines, and local van lines. With the density in new york, you could have these buses and vans running all day, it would give much better access to subways and importantly can alleviate subway needs at night (why run a train every 30 minutes with 8 nearly empty cars, if you can instead run 2 buses every 30 minutes, or a bus every 15 min). for buses Otherwise there will be clear roads to have a good bus system that can run express and local lines better, can start shutting down the subway for a few hours a day, and the bus should work just as well

treis 8y ago

>I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. How do you expect to get your plumbing fixed?

nihonde 8y ago
Expand my original post from “delivery trucks” to “small trucks/vans on demonstrable business”. Also, other than for major construction, no more semi-trucks in the city. And electric buses ASAP. They’re the loudest and dirtiest vehicles out here. And definitely no more tour buses. That would make this city soar in terms of places people want to live and visit.
- jedberg 8y ago
  > And definitely no more tour buses. You do realize tourism accounts for a great deal of income for NYC, yes?
  - nihonde 8y ago
    You don’t need poorly-maintained double-decker ICE buses to have tourism. You also don’t need to accommodate fleets of tour buses on the narrow streets of Manhattan. Drop them off in Dumbo and let them walk or ferry over. They probably need the exercise anyway. Seriuosly though, I really doubt banning tour buses will have an appreciable effect on tourism here.
- masonic 8y ago
  No ambulances, either. Or law enforcement. Or fire trucks.

gpm 8y ago

Trades people can have legitimate reasons to need vehicles. Imagine your in charge of, say, taking care of a large planter. You need to bring with you: - Half a pickup truck of new plants - A few bags of fresh soil - A few shovels, buckets, a hose, and other similar tools They key is really just that vehicles are necessary to transport large quantities of stuff, regardless of whether or not it's a delivery vehicle. I think you'll find that a number of trades include low income workers who are moving around large quantities of stuff. (This is not intended to be taken as arguing for or against congestion charges or any other policy involving shuffling money around, just against the logic of the above post and outright banning things other than delivery vehicles)

alistairSH 8y ago
Modify the original post to "nobody needs to commute in a personal vehicle" and it works. The truck full of plants is a commercial truck (it might be personally owned, but should be getting reimbursed for mileage).
- gpm 8y ago
  Commercial is the wrong qualifier for two reasons. The first is that you're going to have investment banks declaring their employees cars as commercial. The second is that you don't have to be a business to take a job taking care of a planter (or whatever). You probably are, but it's not required. I agree with the principal that "nobody needs to commute in a personal vehicle", but I find it hard to codify it into a reliable law. Edit: Actually I like Nihonde's own modification: “small trucks/vans on demonstrable business”, I'd add "involving transporting stuff for use in the city". It will probably still be gamed, but the ambiguity of the wording allows selective enforcement to fight the worst of that. Edit 2: Actually I don't, considering the other discussions in this thread about police abusing their authority giving them more ambiguous laws seems like a bad idea. Also - This is a perfect example of why I try to avoid advocating for/against policies on the internet unless it's abundantly clear that they are good/bad.
  - nerdponx 8y ago

electric_muse 8y ago

My compelling reason is that I live in Manhattan and frequently make trips to visit family that are not well served by public transportation. And when I'm there, I prefer using a vehicle to get around. I often return to New York with a carful of groceries, luggage, etc. I've tried this via public transit -- it's a miserable affair. The utility of a personal vehicle for me is very high -- perhaps substantially higher than it would be for you. There's no need to justify vehicles based on economic classes and livelihood. Why does the car debate need to be made into some kind of class conflict? It's just more convenient and pleasant, and that's how some choose to spend their money. I'm sorry it inconveniences you, but our society exists because we're willing to be slightly inconvenienced by our neighbors (especially those with different preferences than us) in exchange for certain benefits.

notatoad 8y ago
that's not a very compelling reason. Making it slightly easier for you personally to carry your groceries isn't going to convince anybody that personal vehicles are a necessity. >Why does the car debate need to be made into some kind of class conflict? because it's simply not sustainable for everybody who wants to drive a car to do so. there isn't physically enough space. The only way to let some people drive a car is to make it expensive enough to discourage most people from driving a car.
gpm 8y ago
The argument against here that I find most compelling is that the externalities of you driving your car are so insanely huge that it should be priced into the range of ridiculousness. Things that you have to consider (The numbers attached are completely made up and probably off by multiple orders of magnitude in most cases, but are to make the point that you should be assigning costs to these things. Then you should multiply by them by reasonable estimates of the quantities that make up the denominator on the unit and see what you come up with. Also note that as there are less cars on the road the externalities per car probably go up): - Air quality (say, 0.1c per person you drive past?) - Noise polution (say, 0.1c per person you drive past?) - Road size - realestate cost (say, 0.000001c/trip per per person who pays taxes?) - Road size - increased walking (and other travel) time (say, 0.0000001c/trip per person who crosses a road you drove on?) - Congestion (say, 1c for everyone on a bus behind you?) - Road maintenance (probably negligible compared to the other costs) - Pedestrian safety (...) - Climate change (...) Our society exists not just because we're willing to be slightly inconvenienced by our neighbors, but because we are willing to go to reasonable lengths to avoid inconveniencing our neighbors. Perhaps, reasonable lengths includes not driving into the city.

chroma 8y ago

People would just get their cars registered as delivery vehicles. NYC already has rampant abuse of placards and literal "get out of jail" cards. A ban on personal vehicles wouldn't go any differently than those.

alasdair_ 8y ago

>There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. It's remarkably difficult for disabled people and many elderly people to get around by public transportation.

GhostVII 8y ago

Seems like it might be easier to eliminate parking, rather than ban vehicles. If there was no street parking, a lot of people would have no choice but to park outside of Manhattan. That would also still allow taxis and ride sharing to drive people from the subway to wherever they needed to go.

nihonde 8y ago
I’m good with that plan too. I wake up every morning to giant trucks beeping in reverse because the street parking blocks them turning a corner. And thirty jerks who drove in from Long Island are honking their horns behind that truck. Every day!
- airstrike 8y ago
  This literally every day... and I live on the 30th floor
ouid 8y ago
can't shit in your car.

jefftk 8y ago

> My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. I recently played for a contra dance in Manhattan. My band members and I drove in a small car, with a sound system, keyboard, and other instruments. I would have been happy to pay some sort of toll/charge/fee/tax but any other way of getting our equipment to and from the gig would be far more expensive and a lot of a hassle. (My family doesn't have a car, and I commute to work on the subway)

thoughtfunction 8y ago
That is a form of delivery vehicle in a way, right?
- jefftk 8y ago
  Sort of, but it's not registered as "commercial", driven by a professional, or anything else people would normally think of as a "delivery" vehicle. Like, if you call any vehicle that moves things from place to place a delivery vehicle then everyone who drives to the grocery store to buy milk is operating a delivery vehicle.
zwayhowder 8y ago
Try getting a Ceili band to a gig :D I think the article is trying to get to this train of thought. We want X that requires a vehicle, instead of assuming that this is a zero cost activity lets factor in the cost of parking, mileage etc. Assuming for a moment that the total cost was an extra $200 any self respecting contra dance should be able to spread that out at $1-$2 per person. I grew up in a musical family and spent many a weekend covering vast distances in the back of an old car so my dad could play a gig that barely broke even. Reminds me of the definition of a musician: "A musician is someone who will load $5,000 worth of gear into a $500 car to drive 100 miles to a $50 gig." But seriously, people need to value things correctly. I spent some time on a local council and the shopkeepers would be up in arms whenever they thought they'd lose a parking spot, despite every census showing most of their customers walked to their stores. The shopkeepers viewed the parking as "their parking" and not "our parking" (As in the community). Yet for some reason the footpaths were most definitely "ours footpaths" (The council's) so repairing or even cleaning them was the Council's job, and heaven forbid we suggest the shops pay towards that cost.

michaelcampbell 8y ago

Because everyone in Manhattan is like you; a young, perhaps single, with no kids; especially not many, and none with special needs, who doesn't need to routinely carry or cart anything around.

hatchnyc 8y ago
People were living in cities for many years before cars were invented, presumably at least some of them had children and were not young. Hell, people still live in modern cities around the world outside of the United States where car ownership rates are extremely low.
- casefields 8y ago
  And people used to die from infection before antibiotics. What's your point?
  - DFHippie 8y ago
    I think you get the point. We have an existence proof that people don't need cars to live in cities. We don't need everything in the past to have been better than everything in the present for the logic to work. (People aren't driving cars to avoid infection.)
bradleyjg 8y ago
Where are you parking and how are you getting from wherever you park to where you live or a shopping or whatever? It seems to me some of these arguments prove too much. If you are rich enough to pay for convenient parking garages everywhere you want to go, you are rich enough to pay a congestion charge. And if you aren’t then how does a private car solve the problems you are pointing out?

cryptonector 8y ago

Imagine no parking on streets. That would triple the bandwidth of many streets. You could remove parking on every four streets today and greatly improve congestion. Some parking would be needed for ride sharing cars, naturally, but much less than is needed for private cars not used for ride sharing.

tartoran 8y ago

How about going from queens to NJ? Some people need to pass through Manhattan in order go somewhere else. Because it was designed this way unfortunately

bradleyjg 8y ago
I wouldn't count the highways. If you take the BQE to the Harlem River Drive to the George Washington, I'd call that fine. It's the people that want to drive a single passenger vehicle from Midtown tunnel or 59th street bridge to the Lincoln or Holland tunnels smack dab across some of the densest concentration of people in the entire country that ought to be highly discouraged.

airstrike 8y ago

How do you propose the CEO of a Fortune 500 company should get to his meetings with his team? On a bus? Ban cars and you make NY terrible for business. And if you haven't noticed, Manhattan exists for business. Everything else is either necessary for that goal or an unintended consequence.