Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success

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This is the story of the American public sector. Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector because clearly public organization X sucks. The private sector is greedy and a black box, so they're basically going to bleed the tax payers dry because they have no accountability to anyone. And the added complexity of hops between communication just burns money. And now the military is paying 150 dollars for a shovel.

The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.

Americans have a weird thing with government agencies (or government-owned companies, e.g. Amtrak) simply hiring people to do a thing the government is tasked with doing, or buying things the government needs in order to do that thing. So instead our governments at all levels rely heavily on contracting it out to private companies to do the exact same thing but with higher cost and turnover and no long term expertise built in-house in the government agency which is now tasked with managing and overseeing all this contracting.

The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.

Right. Presumably a car idling for ten minutes produces less pollution than a car being driven for ten minutes, but a car that is driven for ten minutes and idled for an additional ten produces more pollution than either of them. Any pollution produced by cars idling in bad traffic is superadded to the pollution produced in transit so improving the flow of traffic should reduce pollution even if the total number of cars remains steady.

I think that depends on the motivations of the driver. You (and I) are probably thinking of a trip that is motivated solely by getting from A to B (or A to B to C to A). In that case, any pollution from idling is strictly additive.

But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)

And more emissions. Idling is pretty efficent, as is driving at a constant speed. Repeatedly stopping or slowing, then accelerating is not. This is also an unintended consequence of "traffic calming" devices e.g. speed bumps or chicanes. People slow down, then hit the gas again which is awful for emissions.

I think I’m up to like 8 canvas bags, significantly thicker yet still significantly plastic, which I continue to forget at home.

These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time

I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!

Likewise with the canvas bags they are so much nicer but if I do end up needing an 8 or 10c bag I hardly care. If I spend 50 its 1/5 of 1% of the cost.

I think you’re agreeing with each other. GP was talking about at the aggregate level where your observation is about the individual specifically. At the aggregate level with traffic reduction you’d think individuals would weigh their money as a shortcut to regain time but they don’t. My personal guess is because Manhattan is not the actual destination, work and home are the destinations, Manhattan is just the environment. Before it was the cost of car maintenance to drive into Manhattan (in the individuals eyes “free”), now it’s car maintenance + $9/day.

That doesn't make much sense, driving a gas car from Jersey is gonna eat up a couple of gallons of fuel ($10x20=$200/mo), insuring it will be $200/mo, if it's not paid off it'll cost at least $500-600, parking will run easily $500 but likely more. Why is that $180 the straw that broke the camel's back?

Manhattan is at least as dense as London, and land values must be about the same. The market cost of parking in London far outweighs the cost of the congestion charge, so presumably that's the same in New York.

Seems that renting a square foot of downtown Manhattan land is about $60/year. A parking space being about 200 square foot, that's $1k a month if paying the actual rate, just for parking (let alone the road space)

Seems that $200 a month is small when compared to the actual cost.

Are you actually curious or were you just trying to make a gotcha against congestion pricing?

I ask because the "only rich people" criticism of NYCs project has been beaten into the dirt and discussed at nearly every level of politics for more than a year now. If there's anything you want to know the information is readily available.

Poor people were taking public transit already

$9 is basically an hour of parking or whatever so really it's likely to be saving people a lot of money since transit costs a lot less

$2.95 + planning time or you can walk for free

Literally no one has stepped forward and said “I can’t afford $9 or $2.95 or the deep discount commuter tickets.”

If you want the government to help poor people, there are much better ways to do it than giving away access to one specific kind of public resource to everyone.

The theory is that the price signal helps people make their own arbitrage between time and money and it would maximize society utility, but the reality is since people have a very different amount of money, it just do what you say: the rich pay without second thoughts and enjoy the higher quality of life when the less rich see a degradation of their own: they will either pay with money they don't have in excess and have to stop other consumption, or take public transports which is less convenient for them (since it's cheaper than car commute, they would be doing it if they didn't like it better).

> 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.

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.

This actually makes a lot of sense to me. My wife is disabled, so I’m probably one of those customers he would lose along with his parking, but there are probably 1.5x as many homes in my neighborhood (of condos) than there are vehicles actively parking here. It would likely be a huge boon for the places I frequent now. It might even have an effect of slightly countering market downturns as people in trouble sell/lose cars and move to public transit temporarily

One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!

> Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there.

I'm struggling to imagine reasons why a significant number of people will now start walking to these businesses. What are some of these multiple reasons that have now been overcome to an extent as to cause shop traffic to increase ten-fold?

> 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.

You’re hypothesizing that people are purposefully avoiding these streets because they have cars driving on them?

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!”

Yeah, this is what I'm talking about: 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.”

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.

It is not that cars are not useful. It's that people want to live in nice cities and too much car infrastructure ruin cities. You can't have both. You can't enjoy a nice terras next to a busy road. Or kids cannot safely cycle with their friends if there are many cars driving around.

People should not forget that Europe has tons of car friendly towns and suburbs and many people live there. You can choose your lifestyle.

They're only convenient in cities built for cars.

They are, and should be, huge time saver outside cities. But city centers? Those should be on purpose as annoying, time consuming and costly to regular traffic as possible. It should be only necessary services, taxis, public buses and so on.

Here is the place for a good public transport, even in US it should be trivial to make it financially self-sufficient and attractive. People always choose whats best for them (cost or time wise). European city centers work like that and everybody normal accepts that.

Not just that, his approach to the politics of it is incredibly obnoxious. He comes across as everyone who disagrees with him with the same brush, railing against some sort of ideological complex that includes everything his "team" hates and insinuates that it's all somehow interrelated. Of course he doesn't say those things, but it surfaced really prominently for example in his April Fools' video where he played the role of a suburbanite obsessed with his new truck. Satire is one thing, but if you see enough of it (also content from Twitter and other social media) you get the sense that he really does take his perception of other people way too seriously.

Which is to say: his case studies examining the details of specific cities, evaluating transit system design etc. are great. But his analysis of why the bad things are bad (especially when he starts blaming people and ascribing motivations) is utterly insufferable.

Mid-40s amateur urban planner YouTube is the worst social media trend to have come out of this decade bar none. They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed.

Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.

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

EVERYTHING you wrote was going GREAT until In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it - this cannot be further from the truth. some take it, not enough to make a dent in traffic congestion madness in any City (especially those you specifically listed, I live in one of them…)

A society that causes and/or permits homeless people pooping in the subway is, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City

> Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms.

> As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations.

There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."

For better or for worse a lot of US progressives view transit as a "solution of last resort" which is why so many progressives are okay with transit also acting as a homeless shelter and being tolerant of some drug use. One way to think of this is that progressives view government's role as a champion of the disenfranchised. Another is to think that the US is a class based society where transit is considered the domain of the disenfranchised, the lowest class. Which framing you choose is probably based on your experience and frustrations with your local US transit system.

(I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other in my comment, but as someone who rides local US transit regularly and has for over 10 years, my patience for using transit as a "solution of last resort" is wearing thin but still remains.)

Exactly. It’s the cleanliness and safety issues in US public transit that makes people avoid it. Fix that and more people will use it.

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.