8 ms·

Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious. The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred me

Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious. The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like highlighting how many fewer chicken deaths would occur if we created an omnivore or meat tax. IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. How much fewer social interaction is happening across the distances that those car based trips used to occur. And how much harder is it to get goods into the areas. Is less economic activity happening. In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.

zzzeek 1y ago
there should be a meat tax, btw. I eat a ton of steak but it's costing the ecosystem dearly
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  How high would the tax have to be to get you to stop eating so much meat?
  - w0m 1y ago
    Think about it more; if the vegan and steak options were ~equivalently priced - more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive. The idea isn't to make it prohibitive; insofaras don't make the most environmentally-expensive choice also the cheapest. To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      As a committed meat-eater: I have no idea what vegan food costs, as the label almost immediate makes me skip over them. To make me look at them, you'd have to make the non-vegan options prohibitively expensive.
      - w0m 1y ago
        I'll reword it. The idea isn't to make everyone skip meat; but to make the non-meat options more competitive. I say this as one with multiple briskets in my chest freezer waiting for some good weather.
      - aziaziazi 1y ago
        Well most raw vegan food is already way cheaper that raw meat: Quality organic dry chickpeas, lentils, beans, soy etc… already are around 2€/kg where I live and when you add water they double/triple in weight so you end up at 1€/kg. You’ll probably eat a bit more weight than meat but still the price is nowhere comparable. Add some whole cereals instead of white bread for nutrition and better satiety: they’re more expensive but you got the price back on the quantity you eat (you won’t stuff yourself that much T165 bread or brown rice: the fibers will make you feel full super fast). And for the vegetable you usually can find stuff super nutritious for cheap : apples, leak, cabbages and alls sorts of oignons. Even fancy organic quinoa is like 10€/kg but also double in weight and you only eat ~1.3 times the meat weight you’ll eat in meat-meal. Industrial chicken is 5€/kg un the shop and "good" one 15€/kg. Quality beef is nowhere in that range.
        vidarh 1y ago
        Missing the point, which was that you're not going to convince people like me who ignore the vegan options just by having them be cheaper than meat, because I won't look. The only thing that would make me look at the vegan options would be if I felt I couldn't afford the meat options.
        zahlman 1y ago
  - tayo42 1y ago
    For me 20 dollars a pound to push it into a treat territory. I don't know know what would replace it though.
- AngryData 1y ago
  A consumption tax isn't going to make meat suppliers any more conscious of environmental effects from poor processes though, if any thing it will push them further away from it to try and lower prices more. Also steak is a terrible example, cows eat alfalfa which is a nitrogen fixating crop and reduces artificial fertilizer usage that doesn't require pesticides and is basically free to grow anywhere it rains. And we don't grow alfalfa in arid places to feed US people meat, we grow it in arid places because it is near the ports and container ships need some sort of cheap bulk weight to send back to China as ballast.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
They are tracking that sort of thing. One of the line items is "vistors to the zone - up". Another two are restaurants and Broadway receipts which have no data yet.
lokar 1y ago
There were critics who predicted that it would not reduce traffic and congestion. They argued people had no choice but to drive and would just be forced to pay.
PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> people's preferred method You have some evidence of this?
- taeric 1y ago
  To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference? Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.
  - blactuary 1y ago
    If you would normally do one behavior because it is being heavily subsidized by other people and you are not bearing the cost of that behavior. Of course people have a preference to not bear the cost of their own externalities
  - atq2119 1y ago
    Status quo bias. The previous behaviour was also affected by government policies including taxation and infrastructure spending. There is no objectively neutral baseline of preferences here as long as civilisation exists.
  - notTooFarGone 1y ago
    This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum. If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.
  - jasonlotito 1y ago
    > To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference? Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ). Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that. All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety. I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.
taeric 1y ago
I'm a little unsure how to read you. These results look, frankly, amazing. The benefits to schools and busses alone would have been good. That traffic is faster everywhere is a cherry on top of it all. And you did see that they had a section on restaurants, right? Those are up. They polled stores and found only 25% that report a negative impact. That looks concerning, I agree. Would love more polling on it with quantification. Could this still be a bad policy? Of course. Could it be a good policy today that trends to bad some day in the future? I'd think so. But we have tools to monitor this stuff that flat didn't exist before. We should be in a good place to try stuff like this. And, again, these results look amazing.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  Getting business stats is fraught. If a business is struggling, the owners opinion on the cause is important, but is it accurate? In Wellington, New Zealand, failing business love to blame cycle lanes for their woes. The government sacking a significant number of people and an economic downturn is apparently not the cause.
Vinnl 1y ago
I don't think you can infer that people were using their preferred method just from the fact that they were using it - after all, the status quo was also the result of policy. > IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. I think the article mentions this? > In March, just over 50 million people visited business districts inside the congestion zone, or 3.2 percent more than in the same period last year, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (its estimate tries to exclude people who work or live in the area). See also the "Other business measures are doing OK so far" heading.
jwagenet 1y ago
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up. If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users. IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.
- bunderbunder 1y ago
  It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending. I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
  - lostlogin 1y ago
    > extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It may also make running a business more expansive. It limits locations and pushes rent up.
    - jwagenet 1y ago
      I would assume any increase in desirability would be due to an increase in traffic and cash inflow to those businesses/area.
  - 1y ago
diogocp 1y ago
> $45M per year Well, in a hundred years they should be able to afford a couple of new subway stations. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- jannyfer 1y ago
  Maybe 10 years, because $45M is per month.
  - maerF0x0 1y ago
    yes my bad, I misread/mistook the period.
jacksnipe 1y ago
There are plenty of places where consumption taxes DON’T have a strong effect, like vice taxes on tobacco and alcohol. It’s absolutely worth actually testing it.
- mikeyouse 1y ago
  Vice taxes on tobacco have an incredibly strong direct effect.. especially on preventing youths from starting to smoke and on poor people continuing to smoke…. It’s something like a 7% reduction in the number of youth smokers for every 10% increase in price.
michael1999 1y ago
Every study I've ever seen showed that people on foot and on bikes are _much_ more likely to stop and shop or eat during their journey.
horv 1y ago
> In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option. The article highlights that was $45 million in the month of March alone: "In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year."
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  It's sort of weird, because taken to its logical conclusion (nobody drives into lower Manhattan) they would be collecting nothing. They are disincentivizing the thing that they are counting on to provide revenue. Of course, practically that will not happen, but it could be that they are overestimating the long term revenue stream. As more and more people get used to not driving into downtown, that will become the habit, and then their kids won't be used to it and they won't do it either.
  - mikeyouse 1y ago
    The cool thing about pricing is you can make the pricing variable to achieve whatever ends you want… if you’re desperate for more cars for some reason you can just lower the cost and the ‘market’ will respond. You can have lower costs in the afternoon or at night, or no cost on weekends.
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    No, people always value convenience, all you need is those money to value the convenience of driving in more than the price of the toll.
Mawr 1y ago
> The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. Do you think people in medieval times also preferred commuting by car but had to suffer through using horses? There's no such thing as "preference" that's somehow not influenced by the environment you exist in.

zzzeek 1y ago

there should be a meat tax, btw. I eat a ton of steak but it's costing the ecosystem dearly

shermantanktop 1y ago
How high would the tax have to be to get you to stop eating so much meat?
- w0m 1y ago
  Think about it more; if the vegan and steak options were ~equivalently priced - more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive. The idea isn't to make it prohibitive; insofaras don't make the most environmentally-expensive choice also the cheapest. To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    As a committed meat-eater: I have no idea what vegan food costs, as the label almost immediate makes me skip over them. To make me look at them, you'd have to make the non-vegan options prohibitively expensive.
    - w0m 1y ago
      I'll reword it. The idea isn't to make everyone skip meat; but to make the non-meat options more competitive. I say this as one with multiple briskets in my chest freezer waiting for some good weather.
    - aziaziazi 1y ago
      Well most raw vegan food is already way cheaper that raw meat: Quality organic dry chickpeas, lentils, beans, soy etc… already are around 2€/kg where I live and when you add water they double/triple in weight so you end up at 1€/kg. You’ll probably eat a bit more weight than meat but still the price is nowhere comparable. Add some whole cereals instead of white bread for nutrition and better satiety: they’re more expensive but you got the price back on the quantity you eat (you won’t stuff yourself that much T165 bread or brown rice: the fibers will make you feel full super fast). And for the vegetable you usually can find stuff super nutritious for cheap : apples, leak, cabbages and alls sorts of oignons. Even fancy organic quinoa is like 10€/kg but also double in weight and you only eat ~1.3 times the meat weight you’ll eat in meat-meal. Industrial chicken is 5€/kg un the shop and "good" one 15€/kg. Quality beef is nowhere in that range.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        Missing the point, which was that you're not going to convince people like me who ignore the vegan options just by having them be cheaper than meat, because I won't look. The only thing that would make me look at the vegan options would be if I felt I couldn't afford the meat options.
        zahlman 1y ago
- tayo42 1y ago
  For me 20 dollars a pound to push it into a treat territory. I don't know know what would replace it though.
AngryData 1y ago
A consumption tax isn't going to make meat suppliers any more conscious of environmental effects from poor processes though, if any thing it will push them further away from it to try and lower prices more. Also steak is a terrible example, cows eat alfalfa which is a nitrogen fixating crop and reduces artificial fertilizer usage that doesn't require pesticides and is basically free to grow anywhere it rains. And we don't grow alfalfa in arid places to feed US people meat, we grow it in arid places because it is near the ports and container ships need some sort of cheap bulk weight to send back to China as ballast.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

They are tracking that sort of thing. One of the line items is "vistors to the zone - up". Another two are restaurants and Broadway receipts which have no data yet.

lokar 1y ago

There were critics who predicted that it would not reduce traffic and congestion. They argued people had no choice but to drive and would just be forced to pay.

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago

> people's preferred method You have some evidence of this?

taeric 1y ago
To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference? Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.
- blactuary 1y ago
  If you would normally do one behavior because it is being heavily subsidized by other people and you are not bearing the cost of that behavior. Of course people have a preference to not bear the cost of their own externalities
- atq2119 1y ago
  Status quo bias. The previous behaviour was also affected by government policies including taxation and infrastructure spending. There is no objectively neutral baseline of preferences here as long as civilisation exists.
- notTooFarGone 1y ago
  This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum. If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.
- jasonlotito 1y ago
  > To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference? Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ). Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that. All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety. I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.

taeric 1y ago

I'm a little unsure how to read you. These results look, frankly, amazing. The benefits to schools and busses alone would have been good. That traffic is faster everywhere is a cherry on top of it all. And you did see that they had a section on restaurants, right? Those are up. They polled stores and found only 25% that report a negative impact. That looks concerning, I agree. Would love more polling on it with quantification. Could this still be a bad policy? Of course. Could it be a good policy today that trends to bad some day in the future? I'd think so. But we have tools to monitor this stuff that flat didn't exist before. We should be in a good place to try stuff like this. And, again, these results look amazing.

lostlogin 1y ago
Getting business stats is fraught. If a business is struggling, the owners opinion on the cause is important, but is it accurate? In Wellington, New Zealand, failing business love to blame cycle lanes for their woes. The government sacking a significant number of people and an economic downturn is apparently not the cause.

Vinnl 1y ago

I don't think you can infer that people were using their preferred method just from the fact that they were using it - after all, the status quo was also the result of policy. > IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. I think the article mentions this? > In March, just over 50 million people visited business districts inside the congestion zone, or 3.2 percent more than in the same period last year, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (its estimate tries to exclude people who work or live in the area). See also the "Other business measures are doing OK so far" heading.

jwagenet 1y ago

> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up. If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users. IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.

bunderbunder 1y ago
It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending. I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  > extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It may also make running a business more expansive. It limits locations and pushes rent up.
  - jwagenet 1y ago
    I would assume any increase in desirability would be due to an increase in traffic and cash inflow to those businesses/area.
- 1y ago

diogocp 1y ago

> $45M per year Well, in a hundred years they should be able to afford a couple of new subway stations. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

jannyfer 1y ago
Maybe 10 years, because $45M is per month.
- maerF0x0 1y ago
  yes my bad, I misread/mistook the period.

jacksnipe 1y ago

There are plenty of places where consumption taxes DON’T have a strong effect, like vice taxes on tobacco and alcohol. It’s absolutely worth actually testing it.

mikeyouse 1y ago
Vice taxes on tobacco have an incredibly strong direct effect.. especially on preventing youths from starting to smoke and on poor people continuing to smoke…. It’s something like a 7% reduction in the number of youth smokers for every 10% increase in price.

michael1999 1y ago

Every study I've ever seen showed that people on foot and on bikes are _much_ more likely to stop and shop or eat during their journey.

horv 1y ago

> In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option. The article highlights that was $45 million in the month of March alone: "In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year."

SoftTalker 1y ago
It's sort of weird, because taken to its logical conclusion (nobody drives into lower Manhattan) they would be collecting nothing. They are disincentivizing the thing that they are counting on to provide revenue. Of course, practically that will not happen, but it could be that they are overestimating the long term revenue stream. As more and more people get used to not driving into downtown, that will become the habit, and then their kids won't be used to it and they won't do it either.
- mikeyouse 1y ago
  The cool thing about pricing is you can make the pricing variable to achieve whatever ends you want… if you’re desperate for more cars for some reason you can just lower the cost and the ‘market’ will respond. You can have lower costs in the afternoon or at night, or no cost on weekends.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  No, people always value convenience, all you need is those money to value the convenience of driving in more than the price of the toll.

Mawr 1y ago

> The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. Do you think people in medieval times also preferred commuting by car but had to suffer through using horses? There's no such thing as "preference" that's somehow not influenced by the environment you exist in.