7 ms·

Are there any measures that show any downside to this? I confess a bit of bewilderment at how many people will assert there must be something bad every time th

by taeric 1y ago

Are there any measures that show any downside to this? I confess a bit of bewilderment at how many people will assert there must be something bad every time this comes up. I don't think a single measured outcome has gone poorly from this.

TulliusCicero 1y ago
It reminds me of what happens nearly every time car parking on a busy retail street is removed for bike lanes/bus lanes/better walking. Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead. It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
- proee 1y ago
  Some changes, like having a highway bypass a small city, can be catastrophic to local businesses. A restaurant that might have hundreds of out-of-town cars go by, now has only local residents.
  - TulliusCicero 1y ago
    That's a completely different sort of scenario than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about changes to streets that accommodate greater population density.
- mcphage 1y ago
  > It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
- ASinclair 1y ago
  I think it's often that the business owners themselves drive to their businesses and street park. They don't want to give up their own parking.
- timeinput 1y ago
  I think the businesses do kind of know their customers. This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers. I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I think this is basically hitting the nail on the head. My town has closed a lot of street parking in the downtown, and as a result I rarely do shopping or dining there now because I don't want to park in a garage 3-4 blocks away when I used to be able to park on the same block if not right in front of the business. In other words, I had no other reason to be downtown, so making it inconvenient is going to make me less likely to go there. But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by. So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
    - tzs 1y ago
      > But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by. This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place. One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places. It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
- acdha 1y ago
  > It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking. I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives. There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
  - timr 1y ago
    > In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking. Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours. I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
    - cco 1y ago
      Then the owner should prioritize things like congestion charges and removal of parking. To your point trucks already double park so both changes would be a positive for deliveries.
- norir 1y ago
  Yeah, I imagine they are often projecting their own frustration over parking onto their customers. Every time a customer comes in and grumbles about parking, it triggers their confirmation bias. Conversely, new customers who only popped in because they were on foot are probably less likely to express that fact. Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  There were some negative effects at a construction shutdown of a street recently where it temporarily did hurt some business, mostly retail shops but not the restaurants/bars which had a big boost in business. These boutique style shops were more patronized by people from suburbs or far flung parts of the city than actual locals, and their location was based on the owners wanting to live in the city vs their actual customers.
- focusgroup0 1y ago
  Small business owners in SF were pretty upset after the Valencia St bike lane killed their business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYyQ8ev5yE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYyQ8ev5yE
  - TulliusCicero 1y ago
    Yeah, this is what I'm talking about: https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/21/valencia-street-bike-lane-didnt-hurt-businesses-report-finds/ https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/21/valencia-street-bike-lane-... > Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds. > “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses. > Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior. > “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
- Tiktaalik 1y ago
  The business owners are clueless. Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical. https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-commercial-drive-data-shows-most-visitors-dont-drive/ https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-c... Every time I see a study like this it is similar results where the reality doesn't match the guesses of local business.
  - obelos 1y ago
    I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”
xvedejas 1y ago
I wonder whether pedestrian collisions will be slightly more deadly, since one effect is that traffic flows faster than before. Great for drivers but probably more dangerous for the jaywalking new yorker.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges... > With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
- zahlman 1y ago
  What matters in a pedestrian collision is the speed of impact. Traffic flow is about the average speed over time. Cars that spend less time stopped don't become significantly more dangerous when their maximum speed is still limited to, say, 30 km/h (20 mph). Certainly not for those who are aware of a constant traffic flow.
Herring 1y ago
It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pity because public transit done well is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw [NotJustBikes]
- conductr 1y ago
  We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)
  - siliconwrath 1y ago
    NYC generally doesn’t have this stigma as bad as the rest of the USA. Wealthy people and celebrities ride the MTA. https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
    - cguess 1y ago
      NYC really doesn't have this stigma at all. The narrative is more or less pushed by groups with anti-liberal agendas who want to convince people whom have never even visited NYC that it's just as bad as where they're from, when in fact the violent crime rate per capita in NYC is much lower than most medium sized midwestern and southern cities. Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
    - culi 1y ago
      Most of these photos are taken for their social medias. Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people
righthand 1y ago
The project was studied for 10 years so the nay-sayers really don’t have a platform because they’re up against a decade of research. Most of the anti-cp has a romanticized view of driving into the city as some sort of right or NYer benefit.
standardUser 1y ago
Other than Trump's seemingly knee-jerk opposition because it was implemented by, in his own oft-repeated words, radical left lunatics, I haven't really heard anything negative at all as a Manhattanite.
hedora 1y ago
The metrics I have seen all look cherry picked. Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute. The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there. So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?” A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?” So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes? Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours? If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities. It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges... Commute times: Faster. Transit ridership: Up. Visitors: Up.
  - hedora 1y ago
    Counterpoints (could be true or false, but do not contradict the data from any article I have found): - average commute time is up because transit is still much slower than driving used to be (this first point is definitely true), and many drivers were forced on to the slower mode of transportation (also true, but that doesn’t imply average times went up or down). - Occasional visitors (that only pay once in a while) are up, but the number of people that can commute are down, hollowing out commercial office districts. - polls showing it is popular under-represent people that can no longer afford to travel to the city. The fact that the numbers being reported are so vague as to be compatible with my doomsday scenario is why I say the metrics seem cherry picked. I’d love to see a study that reports enough of their methodology to disprove my three bullet points. I’m generally supportive of things like congestion pricing and public transit, but sloppy studies and sloppy reporting on their actual impact doesn’t help their cause.
prasadjoglekar 1y ago
The biggest downside is that the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect. It was to fill budget holes in the MTA, which is a notorious money pit that delivers far less value than the billions if gobbles up. There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-seeks-funds-congestion-pricing-project-pause-proposed-cuts/5547636/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...
- zahlman 1y ago
  > the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect Then why, out of the countless alternatives, did they choose to raise the funds this way?
  - prasadjoglekar 1y ago
    Au contraire, there aren't countless alternatives. Raise fares, raise taxes or impose a penalty on drivers, most of whom you think will come from Long Island, NJ and CT They chose the most politically palatable option.
erehweb 1y ago
Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.
zahlman 1y ago
>how many people will assert there must be something bad Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes). What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
tim333 1y ago
In London from 2020 till about 2023 congestion charging ran till 10pm and then that was moved back to 6pm. The reason was it was hurting nightlife especially west end theatre.
- anthomtb 1y ago
  I find it surprising that theatre would be harmed by a congestion charge. It seems like the cost of paying or planning around a congestion charge would be small relative to the cost and planning required to go to a live show.
  - tim333 1y ago
    Well, that was a reason given.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Are there any measures that show any downside to this? The opposition to Manhattan’s congestion pricing has a curious tendency to be inversely correlated with how frequently that person is in Manhattan. At this point I think it’s just another proxy for rural voters’ rage at liberal cities.
- taeric 1y ago
  I fully subscribe to this view. The obsession with people hating all things California is borderline insane, at this point. I probably too fully subscribe to this view. Seems a lot of "western" things that people love to complain about have been over indexed on. A lot are things that do need to get better, but when I hear people talk about how "actually, the US has been fascist for some time," I just... What?!
navane 1y ago
A downside could be that 2 years from now the effect has rippled away (the shock and awe of paying for it is gone), and everyone sits in the same traffic but pays more money for it.

by taeric 1y ago

TulliusCicero 1y ago

It reminds me of what happens nearly every time car parking on a busy retail street is removed for bike lanes/bus lanes/better walking. Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead. It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.

proee 1y ago
Some changes, like having a highway bypass a small city, can be catastrophic to local businesses. A restaurant that might have hundreds of out-of-town cars go by, now has only local residents.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  That's a completely different sort of scenario than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about changes to streets that accommodate greater population density.
mcphage 1y ago
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
ASinclair 1y ago
I think it's often that the business owners themselves drive to their businesses and street park. They don't want to give up their own parking.
timeinput 1y ago
I think the businesses do kind of know their customers. This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers. I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I think this is basically hitting the nail on the head. My town has closed a lot of street parking in the downtown, and as a result I rarely do shopping or dining there now because I don't want to park in a garage 3-4 blocks away when I used to be able to park on the same block if not right in front of the business. In other words, I had no other reason to be downtown, so making it inconvenient is going to make me less likely to go there. But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by. So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
  - tzs 1y ago
    > But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by. This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place. One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places. It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
acdha 1y ago
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking. I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives. There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
- timr 1y ago
  > In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking. Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours. I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
  - cco 1y ago
    Then the owner should prioritize things like congestion charges and removal of parking. To your point trucks already double park so both changes would be a positive for deliveries.
norir 1y ago
Yeah, I imagine they are often projecting their own frustration over parking onto their customers. Every time a customer comes in and grumbles about parking, it triggers their confirmation bias. Conversely, new customers who only popped in because they were on foot are probably less likely to express that fact. Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
ctkhn 1y ago
There were some negative effects at a construction shutdown of a street recently where it temporarily did hurt some business, mostly retail shops but not the restaurants/bars which had a big boost in business. These boutique style shops were more patronized by people from suburbs or far flung parts of the city than actual locals, and their location was based on the owners wanting to live in the city vs their actual customers.
focusgroup0 1y ago
Small business owners in SF were pretty upset after the Valencia St bike lane killed their business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYyQ8ev5yE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYyQ8ev5yE
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  Yeah, this is what I'm talking about: https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/21/valencia-street-bike-lane-didnt-hurt-businesses-report-finds/ https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/21/valencia-street-bike-lane-... > Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds. > “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses. > Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior. > “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
Tiktaalik 1y ago
The business owners are clueless. Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical. https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-commercial-drive-data-shows-most-visitors-dont-drive/ https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-c... Every time I see a study like this it is similar results where the reality doesn't match the guesses of local business.
- obelos 1y ago
  I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”

xvedejas 1y ago

I wonder whether pedestrian collisions will be slightly more deadly, since one effect is that traffic flows faster than before. Great for drivers but probably more dangerous for the jaywalking new yorker.

ceejayoz 1y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges... > With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
zahlman 1y ago
What matters in a pedestrian collision is the speed of impact. Traffic flow is about the average speed over time. Cars that spend less time stopped don't become significantly more dangerous when their maximum speed is still limited to, say, 30 km/h (20 mph). Certainly not for those who are aware of a constant traffic flow.

Herring 1y ago

It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pity because public transit done well is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw [NotJustBikes]

conductr 1y ago
We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)
- siliconwrath 1y ago
  NYC generally doesn’t have this stigma as bad as the rest of the USA. Wealthy people and celebrities ride the MTA. https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
  - cguess 1y ago
    NYC really doesn't have this stigma at all. The narrative is more or less pushed by groups with anti-liberal agendas who want to convince people whom have never even visited NYC that it's just as bad as where they're from, when in fact the violent crime rate per capita in NYC is much lower than most medium sized midwestern and southern cities. Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
  - culi 1y ago
    Most of these photos are taken for their social medias. Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people

righthand 1y ago

The project was studied for 10 years so the nay-sayers really don’t have a platform because they’re up against a decade of research. Most of the anti-cp has a romanticized view of driving into the city as some sort of right or NYer benefit.

standardUser 1y ago

Other than Trump's seemingly knee-jerk opposition because it was implemented by, in his own oft-repeated words, radical left lunatics, I haven't really heard anything negative at all as a Manhattanite.

hedora 1y ago

The metrics I have seen all look cherry picked. Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute. The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there. So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?” A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?” So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes? Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours? If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities. It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.

ceejayoz 1y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges... Commute times: Faster. Transit ridership: Up. Visitors: Up.
- hedora 1y ago
  Counterpoints (could be true or false, but do not contradict the data from any article I have found): - average commute time is up because transit is still much slower than driving used to be (this first point is definitely true), and many drivers were forced on to the slower mode of transportation (also true, but that doesn’t imply average times went up or down). - Occasional visitors (that only pay once in a while) are up, but the number of people that can commute are down, hollowing out commercial office districts. - polls showing it is popular under-represent people that can no longer afford to travel to the city. The fact that the numbers being reported are so vague as to be compatible with my doomsday scenario is why I say the metrics seem cherry picked. I’d love to see a study that reports enough of their methodology to disprove my three bullet points. I’m generally supportive of things like congestion pricing and public transit, but sloppy studies and sloppy reporting on their actual impact doesn’t help their cause.

prasadjoglekar 1y ago

The biggest downside is that the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect. It was to fill budget holes in the MTA, which is a notorious money pit that delivers far less value than the billions if gobbles up. There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-seeks-funds-congestion-pricing-project-pause-proposed-cuts/5547636/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...

zahlman 1y ago
> the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect Then why, out of the countless alternatives, did they choose to raise the funds this way?
- prasadjoglekar 1y ago
  Au contraire, there aren't countless alternatives. Raise fares, raise taxes or impose a penalty on drivers, most of whom you think will come from Long Island, NJ and CT They chose the most politically palatable option.

erehweb 1y ago

Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.

zahlman 1y ago

>how many people will assert there must be something bad Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes). What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.

tim333 1y ago

In London from 2020 till about 2023 congestion charging ran till 10pm and then that was moved back to 6pm. The reason was it was hurting nightlife especially west end theatre.

anthomtb 1y ago
I find it surprising that theatre would be harmed by a congestion charge. It seems like the cost of paying or planning around a congestion charge would be small relative to the cost and planning required to go to a live show.
- tim333 1y ago
  Well, that was a reason given.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> Are there any measures that show any downside to this? The opposition to Manhattan’s congestion pricing has a curious tendency to be inversely correlated with how frequently that person is in Manhattan. At this point I think it’s just another proxy for rural voters’ rage at liberal cities.

taeric 1y ago
I fully subscribe to this view. The obsession with people hating all things California is borderline insane, at this point. I probably too fully subscribe to this view. Seems a lot of "western" things that people love to complain about have been over indexed on. A lot are things that do need to get better, but when I hear people talk about how "actually, the US has been fascist for some time," I just... What?!

navane 1y ago

A downside could be that 2 years from now the effect has rippled away (the shock and awe of paying for it is gone), and everyone sits in the same traffic but pays more money for it.