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The new toll to drive into Manhattan won't change much by itself
- TowerTall 3y agoRelated: I saw a cool truck today (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309595
- keyle 3y agoLiving 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)
- mholm 3y agoEvery 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.
- apsurd 3y agoappreciate 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. "... charge private vehicles..."
- keyle 3y agoIf the public transport systems were that good, why would anyone need to drive in? 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.
- ceejayoz 3y agoCongestion pricing helps people determine if they need to or just want to take private transportation.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- barry-cotter 3y ago> If the public transport systems were that good, why would anyone need to drive in? 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.
- jackvalentine 3y ago> 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.
- DangitBobby 3y agoThat seems fair to me as long as people who live in the city don't get to visit suburbs or rural areas either.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> they’ll charge by ... the calculated emissions produced by your vehicle We all have dreams. If only.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> 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.
- WUMBOWUMBO 3y agoWho’s “we”?
- landoftheice 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bradleyjg 3y agoThis is not a big deal for most people that live in nyc. We don’t own cars. What’s getting worse and worse is rent …
- cagenut 3y agodone 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"
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoIf 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.
- metmac 3y agoCame here to say +1. The fact that motorcyclists are including in this is absurd.
- bubblydoops 3y ago[dead]
- opportune 3y agoI 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.
- bradleyjg 3y agoIf 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
- bardak 3y agoCompletely 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.
- lr4444lr 3y agoThe 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.
- 3y ago
- couchand 3y agoLots of bombast, little substance to this article. American infrastructure projects are behind timeline and over budget? Yawn.
- bradleyjg 3y agoThe 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.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoI would bet that is because a significant portion of the tax evaders are the cops or their families.
- googlryas 3y agoPossibly, 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.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNYC has a particular problem in this regard. They issue get-out-of jail cards... https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards 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 https://twitter.com/NYPD_Parking
- 3y ago
- matt3210 3y agoThis is going to eventually lead to general driving tax within the city. Also note that this only effects poor people in any significant way.
- bradleyjg 3y agoAlso 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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> 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-congestion-pricing-discounts-for-low-income-frequent-drivers https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/05/09/mta-will-offer-conges...
- lmm 3y agoPoor 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.
- WUMBOWUMBO 3y agoAre you guys living in NYC ?! …there is plenty of poverty in Manhattan and poor people with cars who use them to travel…
- satvikpendem 3y agoSometimes 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.
- threeseed 3y agoA similar approach is to ban vehicles during certain hours. 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.
- readthenotes1 3y agoDidn't London do something like that?
- Symbiote 3y agoBetween 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. https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge 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.
- jcranmer 3y agoNote 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).
- decafninja 3y agoMany 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.
- philip1209 3y agoSounds like a "feature factory" in tech teams - where they celebrate the launch rather than the impact.
- rgmerk 3y agoEven if not a single transit project is built, congestion charging in a place like Manhattan is a net win.
- jlund-molfese 3y agoIf 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?
- bradleyjg 3y agoI 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.
- HWR_14 3y agoThe 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.
- angmarsbane 3y agoAnother cost to RTO. Too expensive to live close to the office, and increasingly expensive to live far from the office and commute in.
- rafram 3y agoWe have trains.
- londgine 3y agoI 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.
- isykt 3y ago> 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.
- resuresu 3y agoGotta pay the troll toll to get in.