Roads in cities are such a waste of space. A long time ago I did a quick survey of SF and found something like 20% of the land was dedicated to cars. Some articles from people here that talk about this [1] [2] [3]. That is the most subsidized land on the planet but people don't think of it that way. They think roads are free so any tax to use them is wrong. That space could be helping out the city in so many ways but instead it is just ugly pavement. Yes we need some roads, but cars driving in the heart of downtown as normal transit? It boggles my mind how dumb that is. Raise this tax until basically nobody is using the roads then rip most of them up except maintenance corridors and put that land to use.
You’re not incorrect per se, but it’s important to note that deliveries into downtown would be important for it to be a thriving destination for shopping, residential or business. Not to mention space for heavy equipment to come in to do repairs and construction. Minimal maintenance corridors may not be enough.
You also need public transit options into it as well as transportation solutions for “out of towners” who descend onto downtown for some event (eg public parking lots outside the city that has public transit to the event).
It can be an easier and more politically popular idea to just use streets to solve this problem at the individual level even if less efficient rather than requiring efficient central management planning by the government.
And just to be clear, I’m a fan of the changes SF is making, just highlighting some of the challenges, not to mention that SF isn’t going quite so far as to rip up existing streets with the exception of the latest vote where the entire city basically voted against the will of the outer sunset to convert the highway to a park and not just closed on the weekends as it’s been since COVID (increasing maintenance costs due to erosion are another huge reason it’s a good idea).
In any city that isn't hopelessly car-dependent there is some kind of rail to bring in commuters. A subway, tram, light rail, passenger rail, often a combination of all of them. Once you have a stable system to bring in commuters, adding a couple parking lots to stops on the outskirts for "out of towners" is pretty easy.
The rest is just about not removing all the streets. You also need enough roads for emergency vehicles. But simple two-lane roads for arteries and one-lane roads everywhere else are enough for deliveries, maintenance and (European-sized) emergency vehicles. All the other lanes are just there so everyone can travel downtown in their personal car instead of using more efficient transport options.
Just because a street is one way does not mean it is so narrow that only one vehicle can fit through.
Streets may be one way because it discourages unnecessary automotive traffic and it allows the rest of the space to be dedicated to bicyclist or use for residential and commercial purposes (outdoor seating, space for games, etc).
So even if the streets are one way, there will often be space for the ambulance to maneuver around blocked vehicles. And if there's not, the ambulance can take another street or road. If it's the only route that can access that location, then with any sane amount of urban planning then the ambulance will be within a short walking distance to the location (and more often than not within eyesight).
Prohibit on-street parking on at least one side of the road, make the side walk on that side big enough that an ambulance can use it to pass other vehicles if the road is blocked (I'll skip the question of why the street is blocked in the first place). Actually enforce the parking restriction.
You need space for pedestrians anyways, and with traffic restricted to the necessary minimum you don't need bollards everywhere
This isn't some kind of rocket science that has never been tried before, it's the reality in many cities around the world. You need an entire concept instead of adding half-backed solutions to an existing system, but the solutions are all well-tried and for the most part very straight forward.
Are you sure that’s not a path dependency that’s difficult to undo? Retrofitting this into a place like the Bay Area seems impractical given how bad public transit is there chronically.
>but it’s important to note that deliveries into downtown would be important for it to be a thriving destination for shopping, residential or business. Not to mention space for heavy equipment to come in to do repairs and construction. Minimal maintenance corridors may not be enough.
I used to work at a warehouse, the whole street of warehouses had a street width of at most 10m (30ft) wall-to-wall. People vastly overestimate how much throughput is needed purely for shipping, due to all the passenger cars on the road.
Heavy equipment is also less of an issue than you'd think, because it tends to expand to fit the space it's permitted - like all engineering projects.
Some cities manage fine with very small roads. Sometimes there isn’t exactly a road at all, but rather a pedestrian area that can be used for deliveries and such when necessary.
American city centers are overprovisioned on roads by probably a factor of 10 or more. Ironically, fixing that would be excellent for local businesses, and they’re usually the ones opposing it because they think there’s no way to get customers besides having them drive directly to the business and park on their property.
@wat1000 perfectly said. And the small businesses are the most easily frightened by well financed campaigns that make them afraid their business will shutter if car based traffic is even slightly reduced.
In Ancient Rome, private vehicles were banned during the first ten hours of the day. Doing the same for nearly all commercial deliveries would make a lot of sense today too. A huge number of delivery trucks are massively oversized and inappropriate for their task. Charging for oversized vehicles might wake some business owners up to more carefully evaluating their costs and making more rational choices. Heavy equipment is easy to permit.
Look at any car-free area and there are very reasonable exceptions to make them function. The important thing is to remove cars as the mandatory way to access locations, and to cease prioritizing cars over more efficient methods of transit. Forcing cars into our cities took a massive amount of changes to our legal and planning system, and huge huge subsidies. Just going back to thinking of cars as one of many ways to get around, rather than as the primary and prioritized method of getting around, would allow for much more efficient systems.
New York City has more than adequate public transportation, except for the private vehicles slowing it down.
SF has adequate public transit, but without all the cars in the way and with higher ridership it would be amazing.
> It can be an easier and more politically popular idea to just use streets to solve this problem at the individual level even if less efficient rather than requiring efficient central management planning by the government.
So how many 40 lane roads are you going to build instead of single train lines?
This is kind of like an argument-by-consequences since SF funding for transit and roads has viability problems due to SF's comparatively low residential density, as the funding from Covid, federal and then CA state emergency funding that replaced those disappear in 2025. This will cause big service reductions in SF MUNI [0], BART and Caltrain, starting this year.
And it wasn't about "the will of the Outer Sunset" [1], and some (local) people there rely on car or rideshare access, plus all the rest of us from everywhere that isn't the Outer Sunset also want to be able to drive there to visit. The existing post-Covid time-shared road/park setup on Highway 1 was already incredibly friendly to bikes, pedestrian, pets, children, surfers.
And SF Measure K only passed 54.7:45.3% [2].
> "increasing maintenance costs due to erosion are another huge reason it’s a good idea)"
You could argue the exact same that SF cablecars could be cut because they net lose money (federal subsidy), or about all of us constantly paying for the upkeep of Highway 1 down at Big Sur, which is regularly closed/subsided/storm-damaged, and costs $$$ to repair every winter, but the wishes of the (small population of) locals have to be balanced against the wishes of everyone else (CA + out-of-state residents, tourists) who use it.
In any case re the viability of transit at such low neighborhood densities, Seamless Bay Area [3] have for years been pointing out the ongoing insanity, duplication, waste, lack of ticket interoperability etc. of bankrolling 27 different agencies for 9 counties in a metro area of only <8m people [4], smaller than NYC/LA/Chicago. These operating costs are soaking up any passenger revenues, preventing it from being spent on services. SF was particularly disproportionately hard hit by the permanent Covid change of both WFH/remotework + exodus of tech employees and companies + record-high SF downtown office vacancy.
One extreme approach to that would be to pick some line in western SF neighborhoods, close all roads west of it, declare everything west of that a park, and reroute Highway 1 slightly eastwards. And compensate people affected by the change.
Or close that to regular car traffic but keep SF Muni buses and trams and maybe high-occupancy taxis/ shuttles/ rideshares.
This line of thought is pretty silly. Claiming that the city is subsidizing X billions because some public space is free.
The land there is so valuable because it's desirable. Sure, NYC could sell central park for a bazillion dollars. But the land there is so expensive because central park exists. If it were sold and became buildings, the price of sq ft in Manhattan would massively drop.
SF only approves something like 3-4 new housing construction projects a month for its 800,000 or so population. If I have that wrong, just chime in.
So even if you lucked out and acquired land , inherited it , or whatever . It could be years before you can do anything with it. If you even have the money to build on it.
Parking is the only rent you might be collecting on it.
Roads are useful, but what I really think we should get rid of is parking lots. When cars can drive themselves we should build over all the lots and knock down the garages. The cars can spend the day on the road and the night parked outside the city. There should be zero parked inside the city.
Abolish free parking, and raise prices on the parking meter until the parking spots are only ~80% occupied (if they're less than 80% occupied, lower the price).
If there's not enough parking, let the market fix that problem - if private parking lots are profitable use of land, then people will build them. But people will never be satisfied with private parking lots if they could have used free public parking instead (if they'd just looked harder for a parking spot).
In other words, giving out free shit discourages people from buying that shit. Which really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Sure - create urban and suburban environments where a car is a necessity for daily function. Financing, insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel...
Cars aren't cheap. Reducing the overall space devoted to them and utilizing that space for useful purposes would be a net benefit. Providing public transport services with that increased revenue would leave the vast majority better off financially, not to mention the quality of life improvements.
I don't disagree with the objective you describe, but I disagree with the Jonathan Swift-esque idea of abolishing free parking and increasing meters. That would increase the burden on the already-burdened and only nominally affect cost of convenience to the wealthy. I suppose everyone can tip their wait staff by letting them use their residential parking spot-- because without that pre-existing transportation infrastructure, employer provided transport/parking, affordable cost of living, and a living wage for all, I'm not sure how people are getting to work in dense urban areas. Although I love the idea of abandoned luxury vehicles lining the streets with boots on their wheels-- like a broken window theory for late stage capitalism.
If the cars can't park, then they're clogging up the roads and preventing them from being used as intended for transportation.
I am fine with parking lots as long as they're not publicly funded and are taxed just as every other parcel in the city. And on-street parking should be prohibited.
In fact I'd say that self driving cars will mean that it's important that parking is not more expensive than simply driving in circles. You can bet that companies will drive self driving cars in circles to store them while not in use if it's cheaper than parking, and that takes up both more space, and higher value space.
Perhaps there should be some sort of vacancy tax where the operators of driverless cars are charged for every mile they drive without a human passenger.
Just another unintended consequence of road use being free for its users, despite road space being a limited resource that's expensive to build and maintain.
Congestion pricing is already a (crude, but still rather effective) way of solving that problem. A more perfect (though impractical to enforce) solution would be charging by the meter-second of lane space consumed, with rates varying over time and location depending on congestion.
Under that pricing scheme, if driving in circles were still somehow cheaper than parking then cars could drive in circles to their heart's content without causing any issues.
This might seem like a good idea at first, but it would essentially result in complete gridlock as the roads fill up with circulating self-driving cars.
No, there's definitely a better solution for this - using self-driving trains to move people.
I'm not sure if people will want to deal with long wait times for their car to drive to them. Imagine watching the end credits roll at a movie theater only to be gripped by the sense of dread that you forgot to call your car during the climactic fight scene and now you'll be waiting half an hour for it to drive from the suburbs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of reducing car dependency, I'm just not optimistic that self driving cars will help.
Nah roads are great and cars are great. They let people get around in ways that are much faster than public transit, with your friends and cargo, protected from the weather, without the safety issues, directly to your destination. If you overbuild and create density of inhuman levels, and don’t build adequate road infrastructure, you will have problems. But otherwise, it’s fine and it works very well in cities of low-mid density.
While this is true, roads are also expensive; particularly in places like dense cities where space is at a premium. It makes perfect sense to charge road users for their consumption of of an expensive, limited resource, as long the price is fair (determined by supply and demand and not just as ploy by people who hate cars to eliminate their use).
>That is the most subsidized land on the planet but people don't think of it that way.
That's because it generally isn't in terms of paying cash subsidies. What happens
is that when the city is laid out areas are blocked out for access. Doing that doesn't really cost you anything. In places that get pedestrianised the road space is still there, just used for people rather than cars.
How do you propose we handle logistics or emergency vehicles? I’m all for more walkable cities but rip them all up and replace them with what? Rails which are more expensive and less flexible? Pneumatic tube? Even if you switched to single person cargo bikes you would still want dedicated areas for vehicles versus pedestrians.
This problem has been solved by equipment designed for narrower roads. It is not a hard problem to solve and cities like this have been around a very long time.
There are literally solutions to every issue you bring up that are already on the market.
> How do you propose we handle logistics or emergency vehicles?
Find the the width of said emergencies vehicles, and then build bike lanes that are a little wider than that: the emergencies vehicles can drive down them quite easily (and cyclists can get out of the way quite quickly).
Alternatively, if a city has trams, created segregated rights of way, and the emergency vehicles can use them.
Cities have had roads long before there were cars. So many people like to pretend that before "car culture" there were no roads in cities or that before cars there were no big roads. There were huge roads in cities in the 1800s to accommodate carriages, streetcars, and all the extra people on the road because a 5 minute trip by car takes 20 minutes on foot. Cities in 1000 AD had roads, and a lot of them were pretty damn wide. Ancient Rome was famous for building roads. Roads are not a waste of space. Roads are infrastructure.
Cars need a disproportionate amount of space for the number of people that they serve compared to every other means of transport. Bicycles, e-scooters, buses, etc serve many more people per square foot compared to mostly empty cars.
You can certainly pack more bicycles/e-scooters per square mile, but they also move a lot slower. Not to mention cargo capacity of trucks vs. things like e-scooters. Buses and trains also don't go everywhere. If you banned cars and expanded bus routes to compensate, you would get much less utilization of space for your buses. In other words, buses are dense because other modes of transport allow you to only put a bus route on very common paths.
The point still stands, though. The roads that they are complaining about were largely planned and built before cars. Downtown SF had roads that were very similar in size in 1900 as they are in 2025. The roads didn't magically get wider when cars came in. If they weren't a waste of space with no cars, they aren't magically a waste of space now.
Many other cities that were built up much later have huge parking lots in their city centers, which are a massive waste of space. Roads, on the other hand, are not.
Downtown only exists in the first place because roads go there. You know the old saying? All roads lead to Rome. Cities concentrate people and need a lot of resources to be sustainable, and roads are what bring these resources.
Giant American roads mostly don’t bring those resources. They bring vehicles passing through, they bring vehicles filled to 20% or less of their capacity, and they bring street parking, one of the most inefficient uses of land imaginable in a downtown area.
Look at what’s needed to bring those resources and people, only those, and you need far less than what American cities have.
You know what those roads originally had on them? Small carriages (see etymology) and foot traffic, not modern cars. It blows my mind that people think cars are necessary for modern cities when the best ones to live have very few or no cars
This entire comment section is simultaneously hilarious and sad to read, because it's obviously a bunch of myopic Americans who have never ventured outside of America and have no clue how other cities in the world work. Honestly I try to avoid commenting in forums like this because it's so fruitless: it's just like trying to have a rational discussion about vaccines (or anything really) with a bunch of Trump followers.
What’s funny is that I’m sure most of them know other kinds of cities exist. And they know that people somehow manage to survive and thrive there, even if they don’t know how. But this all gets ignored once you start talking about trying to emulate some of that.
For too many Americans, there’s no difference between “that can’t work,” “that can’t work here,” and “we don’t do that.”
Did you know that car ownership in the Netherlands has continued to rise?
This is a blog post of a cycling advocate, from 2019 but still relevant - [0]
Quote:
In 1992, 42% of Dutch households were car-free. By 2016 this had dropped to about a quarter. Car ownership has continued to increase since then. Higher car ownership leads to higher car usage. Almost anyone who can easily afford a car has one and there aren't many people at all who choose to go without if they can afford one: Amongst people of average income, just 12% of households don't have a car and that drops further to just 6% for high income households.
In other words, people choose to own a car if they can afford it, even if they cycle frequently at the same time.
All large European cities have a lot of traffic, public transit notwithstanding. And in the small towns, most people have a car because public transit is not economical in sparsely populated areas.
There is a happy medium between "cars must come first" and "no trucks ever, even emergency vehicles." There's even the easy happy medium of "no private vehicles during peak times."
Funny how you don’t see articles about people dying in fires because they live on a suburb that’s 10% as dense as it should be and so the fire station is 3x farther away than it should be.
No real surprise, though. People love stories where you can point to a few people and say, they’re the ones who did this. It’s much less fun when it’s systemic and no one person or group can be blamed.
Police response times in my "10% as dense as it should be" suburb (a place that would be the poster child for everything urbanists hate) are 3x faster than they are in NYC. That is largely due to having high mobility through the town. In pure distance terms, I live about 20x further from the police station, though.
The average door-to-door time between my house and the nearest level 1 trauma center is 10 minutes shorter than it would be when I lived in Manhattan. It turns out that having the paramedics wait for an elevator really cuts into their response time. A level 3 trauma center is 25 minutes closer (there are no level 3 trauma centers in Manhattan).
As a rule of thumb, you can't design anything trying to account for black swan events.
Optimizing for the regular, daily use case is hard enough.
It would help to think of this as a smart but random person reading about a security issue like spectre and offering you software design advice. Common sense arguments are only useful to an extent, the devil is in the details.
I’m not sure how to apply this here. What does optimizing for regular daily use and not black swan events look like when it comes to fire and ambulance services? It seems to me that black swans are a major purpose for them. That’s why the local fire station tends to have a lot of time where the firefighters are sitting around, and why simple calls often get 3x more response than they need. The services are greatly overprovisioned for daily needs because they also exist for the times when an entire apartment building burns down, or some maniac bombs the subway.
Who cares about news articles? If you're worried that dense cities are dangerous, then back it up with some statistics about deaths per capita due to EMS delays.
You keep roads but aside from a few arteries, allow only bicycles, pedestrians, emergency vehicles, and things like dropping off/picking up passengers with disabilities.
If the roads are closed to non-emergency traffic, fire trucks and ambulances get where they need to be faster than if the roads are clogged with personal vehicles.
This is a non-informational take which is just ahistorical, as evidenced by the fact that just 30 years a lot of European cities were very much car-centric and were much more awful by pretty much every metric than they are today.
About one in every two households in Amsterdam own a car. I would bet many that don't use taxi services themselves now and again, and almost everybody would indirectly rely on roads used for deliveries, workmen, emergency services. And that's about the best case for a European city. It's comparable to New York City.
Paris, London, Prague -- higher.
The reality is that these romantic notions people have of cities not relying on cars or roads is an unrealistic fantasy. Yes it's certainly nice if you have good public transport that many people can use for most of their transport. The reality is though that even in the very best cases of those like Amsterdam and Tokyo, personal car ownership rates are still enormous, and the cities would cease to function without small private vehicles for commercial operations, let alone removing the roads for garbage collections, busses, emergency vehicles, etc.
I haven't walked around those cities, I've walked around certain areas of London or Tokyo as a tourist mostly in central areas that are well serviced by public transport and are very dense, without any real understanding of what it actually takes to live, work, raise children, or anything else in those places. I certainly saw a lot of roads and cars, particularly when looking out the window of trains and busses into actual places people live.
> Cars certainly exist, but they are clearly not used by default for everything.
Sure, I've noticed a bunch of American cities I've been to are a more difficult to walk or get public transport than any big ones in Europe or Asia I've been to.
They're all automobile-centric though. You'll never get rid of cars, taxis, trucks, busses, or roads. Not in any of them. Better walking, riding, and public transport is great, it's just never going to do away with the car, nor is doing away with cars and roads ever going to solve any problems that cities have. There should be more honesty and pragmatism around this.
Everybody likes to drive. It's far more private, personal, and free than even the best public transport, which is why a country like Japan with some of the best public transport on earth has a car ownership rate of 1 per household, and even in Tokyo it's 33% of households, with a large taxi industry.
It astounds me that so many on the left seem to be converging on the opinion that it should be a goal to reduce, eliminate, tax private transportation for the common person.
Public transport is great and should be improved or encouraged, and road area usage should be as efficient as possible. But private transportation should be made cheaper and more convenient and accessible to as many people as possible. That is a great way to improve quality of life and expand opportunities for people.
I hate driving but every time I get on my bicycle I remember how fun it is... until a car starts driving behind me impatient to get somewhere a few seconds faster. I can bike to many places in my town faster than the drivers can drive if I put some effort into pedaling.
I don't mean everybody likes the act of driving, I mean everybody likes what driving [a private vehicle] can do for them. I didn't mean even that in the absolute literal sense either, but anecdotes from people who don't have a car or get driven by friends and never take taxis or uber anywhere would be interesting and will probably help us to understand why virtually everybody likes driving.
I don't think anyone literally likes driving. Some people like racing, some people like drifting. But who the heck likes getting in their car, waiting at stop signs and lights, staring down a road for hours, and wondering whether the oncoming vehicle veering left is going to turn on their turn signal or straighten their path.
No amount of reason will negate the fact that people like the convenience of cars.
There is a reason cars, and paradoxically larger cars are being bought in increasing numbers.
You can of course force people to give up conveniences they like, you just have to contend with the fact that the modern world makes it easy for people to move or vote with their wallet.
> Bus speeds also increased after the tolls were turned on. The Manhattan-bound B39 bus, which crosses the Williamsburg Bridge, ran 28% faster compared to a similar January week last year. Other buses like the SIM24 and and the M50 saw increases in speeds, as well.
I wonder how much cherry picking there is. Did they give the B39 because it's the most improved? Or for some other reason (especially busy?)
(Generally strongly in favor of congestion pricing)
I think B39 is a good example of an improvement most affected by the congestion pricing. It's a very short route, with very few stops, and the principal part of the route being the Williamsburg bridge. The rest of both Brooklyn and Manhattan traffic affects it rather little.
I think that "cherry-picking" is when you find outliers and show them off pretending they are typical examples. What I would call this is maybe a "poster child": a specially chosen example where the result is most dramatic and clearly seen.
I’d say a cherry picked example is backed by random chance (possibly counter to the trend) while a poster child example has an explanation (not necessarily correct) for being the most sensitive to the variable being changed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was across the board for buses into lower Manhattan/around bridges into Manhattan. When living in cities I usually use both buses and trains but when living in NYC I tried to avoid buses when possible as you are at the behest of an insane amount of traffic usually; meaning you can’t reliably be places on time if you are using the bus.
I like the theory of traffic that basically says traffic will always make the best mode of transportation as bad as the second best.
The problem with buses is that car traffic can never be bad enough to make cars worse than buses. Buses are doomed to always be worse than cars unless they have dedicated lanes or parking is unbearable. So cars slow down to equal the metro system, bikes, ferries, etc.
A dedicated bus lane can speed up cars more than another car lane because it pulls traffic off the road until driving convenience equals bus convenience.
We will get better stats as the data rolls in over the next several months, but is very unlikely this is cherry picked or unrepresentative of the broad benefits of less congestion.
In fact, I anticipate the city to expand dedicated bus lanes and bus frequency to take advantage of the reduced car traffic. Bike lanes too. Mass transit should steadily improve over the next year as enhancements made possible by less cars are deployed.
> I wonder how much cherry picking there is. Did they give the B39 because it's the most improved? Or for some other reason (especially busy?)
The allocation of bridge space to cars is entirely wasteful:
> If the job of the Brooklyn Bridge is to move people between the two boroughs, the reallocation of space from transit to cars has been disastrous. In 1902, one year before the photograph was taken, the Brooklyn Bridge moved roughly 341,000 people a day across all its modes, according to the Federal Highway Administration. It hit its peak capacity a few years later, with 426,000 people using it each day in 1907.
> Today, 125,000 motor vehicles cross the Brooklyn Bridge each day [PDF], as do roughly 4,000 pedestrians and 2,600 cyclists. For the bridge to carry as many people as it did at its peak, each of those cars would need to carry more than three people, but they do not. In 1989, when the city counted around 132,000 motor vehicles crossing, the FHWA estimated that 178,000 people crossed the bridge daily.
Not sure if NYC would do the same stunt, but London saw an amazing improvement in traffic flow after congestion charge was introduced. Turned out for several months prior to it they'd been slowly shifting the timing of lights to make things less optimal, and then reverted the day congestion charge went live.
This wouldn’t work in NYC even if they did try because the congestion pricing start date has been moved around a lot, including days before it was supposed to start the last time.
But even more relevant is the fact that people have seen Manhattan gridlock for decades. If they were planning a move like that they would have had to start it in the 1980s at least.
This was over 20 years ago, not sure what I'll be able to find.
This one is a bit frothing at the teeth, but I do recall a few others from after the congestion charge was introduced. It ended up being a minor controversy, and I could have sworn I read confirmation from later on, after the Ken Livingstone was no longer Mayor.
side note because I'm getting down votes: I'm one of those strongly in favour of congestion charges. I believe they made an improvement in London and not just because of these stunts. Of particular value was shifting a bunch of large vehicles to off-peak.
Hopefully this means improved response times for emergency vehicles, which have been pretty bad and getting worse due to traffic. I imagine we’ll start to see data in that in a couple months.
I hadn't thought about this part. I work with healthcare data for a living. I'll have to keep an eye out for changes once the 2025 records come across my desk.
I live at a _very_ loud and busy intersection in downtown manhattan, it's usually gridlocked every day from 4pm - 7pm at least. That hasn't happened once since congestion pricing kicked in (I'm enjoying the relative quiet, but I do sort of miss the chaos). The first two days, everything was covered in snow down here. I wonder how much this will hold up into summertime.
As an unrelated aside a new bmw sedan driving the wrong way on mulberry street intentionally ran into me at a crosswalk today. So don't let your guard down lol
Fewer drivers and less traffic can actually lead to more people being on the roads, because high-capacity vehicles like busses — which can efficiently pay the congestion pricing charges — are more usable when there is less traffic and faster commute times, so more people are likely to utilize them.
I’m curious what the real impact of this is as it only shows what the reduction in people entering the district is and not a reduction in traffic rates on any given street.
I’m surprised that they are allowed to have these rules as it appears to give preferential treatment to non-residents who don’t live in a district vs residents who live in a district, which runs counter to general principles that roads in America that are funded by all of our tax dollars should treat drivers equally and not offer preferential treatment to residents.
I was skeptical that this would work (I still am), but I would love for this to be the trend and welcome it. My most considerable curiosity is we're talking 9 dollars. Were the people who opted out of driving in on the fence due to this breaking their bank?
There is a number of driver categories that pay somehow less to enter. Also I suppose they predict that the number of daily trips will keep going down, and so will the revenue with it.
Delivery trucks get charged a higher amount and I don’t believe (I’m not sure on this) they have a daily cap, so they can also be charged multiple times.
$500M/year was the magical thinking that applies any time the NY government wants to create a tax. The revenue projected is always huge so they can spend big somewhere else while pretending to be revenue neutral. The soda tax had the same ridiculous overestimation.
OP's math doesn't account for the fact that a small fraction of trips into the city are personal vehicles, and many more are cabs/rideshare cars (which pay differently) and trucks making deliveries (which may be exempt).
In any case, there is also going to be widespread toll fraud here just like with every other toll in NYC.
I think an issue with this kind of policy (not necessarily in Manhattan) but in other cities is that often there is no alternative other than to drive to the city.
For example, my partner needs radiation for her cancer and the hospital is located in the city. There is no other option than to drive. I feel like this type of policy negatively affects people in this situation, with no other alternative.
A $9 congestion charge is probably a huge help to you. For just $9 per visit, you get much lower traffic and easier parking. Your very high priority trip is easier because lots of lower priority trips either didn't happen, or used transit instead.
Not if you're poor. $9 daily would be quite a lot for poor people, especially since radiation is daily. Furthermore you often have no choice but to use paid hospital parking due to mobility issues, as opposed to cheaper parking near the hospital.
I think this policy is only feasible in cities with decent public transportation. I’d struggle to list any more than 1-2 other American cities where this could be done though.
A lot of cities that do have public transportation seem to have extremely frustrating (i.e. multiple transfers) gaps if you aren’t using the system to-and-from work.
It’s also only feasible if actions like this congestion charge are taken to tilt the scales. Most people would not use public transit if they could avoid it. When there is enough road infrastructure to match the density, private transit is preferred because you can drive directly to your destination, not have public safety issues like on the subway, haul cargo, and do it all quickly. The only way to make public transit attractive is to artificially and maliciously mismanage things to make driving cars slow and expensive. Which frankly is hostile towards people.
Subway fatalities, from crime or otherwise, seem too rare to have actual stats; I found only one article saying about a fatal attack in March 2024, and none for prior years.
At the end of the day this is a political problem. People care more about feeling safe than actually being safe. Random acts of violence make people feel extremely unsafe in a war that car accidents just don’t.
As opposed to nobody getting to go anywhere on the roads?
Driving is expensive. Cars are complicated large machines and roads in the 4 seasons of the American north eastern seaboard require a lot to maintain. Real estate in New York is even more expensive, and it’s expensive to hire people who live in the area. The state can subsidize this only so much.
They can have it. I'd rather amazing transit oriented development and to enjoy the world on my feet than stuck in a box on an ugly road. Done right, cities designed for people are harder to get around by car even with a personal driver.
That's a different topic than whether driving is absolutely safe or not. It's been proven that it's very much not.
It's of course easy to be abstract and talk about the value of lives versus your favourite mode of transportation.
Would you have the same opinion if the deaths were concentrated to your particular branch of the human family tree? Everyone else gets to drive. Is the value proposition still as clear to you?
You could have progressive congestion pricing based on the value of the car. I didn't look at it, but what I think you're saying is that this is a regressive pricing control.
I think that's an important point: regressive taxes/fines shouldn't be used to control behavior as it disproportionately impacts the less affluent*
But a progessive scheme is more involved - it might require using the value of the car for example as a basis for the pricing. But I suspect it could be done.
There are reduced rates people can apply for. Agreed though, I think tolls, traffic tickets, and parking tickets should all be baselined against the KBB value of the car.
With these fancy AI systems, they could read the license plate and see the registered value and go from there.
My beef is with gas taxes, for which the $100k electric car owner pays none of and which are highly regressive to poorer ICE car owners. I suggest they should be abolished.
Ha, reminds me of when I lived in a place with a property tax on cars right after undergrad. I appealed my valuation and included pictures of my car and odometer. They wrote back saying I didn't need to pay any car tax.
Should everything be tied to income/wealth? Taxes and college tuition are already tied to income/wealth. Why not food, housing, travel, clothes, healthcare, even drinking water? At that point wealth will stop to have any meaning.
Yes - if we financialize all public services, then it makes sense to use income/wealth to subsidize (re-distribute to be more precise) the poor.
I remember reading a few weeks back that UK is getting the railroads back to public ownership - not sure if that is true, but would like to hear from UK readers on the impact of financialization (aka privatizing) of public utilities.
I am not a fan of public ownership - but a supported of public subsidies for utilities - transport / electricity / heat / water and in this case roads
It will help Amazon and other delivery companies. Less competition from people driving their own cars to get things. California is working to put on a per-mile tax onto drivers because roads wear out faster then gas taxes, sales tax on autos, sales tax on auto repairs/parts, and registration taxes can be collected...
Cars loans, insurance , fuel and maintenance all costs money. There are lot of people who cannot afford to pay for any of it, we subsidize them too[1] to buy cars or invest in public transit instead ?
In a capitalist society , benefits are enjoyed by those with wealth, this what we signed up .
I am not saying it is a good or bad we have this, just that congestion pricing is hardly the issue to discuss changing economic systems
[1] absence of congestion pricing is a subsidy, costs of transport infrastructure is only partly paid by users of the infra at present .
The poor and working class never drove in Manhattan. It’s too expensive to maintain a car and pay for parking.
With congestion pricing the poor (not to mention all of us) now get to enjoy more efficient and reliable bus travel. This is a net win for the working class.
This comment is a good example of the type of narrow minded progressive thinking that has held back good public policy like congestion pricing and carbon taxes. Both of these programs are criticized as being regressive. The criticism neglects to take into consideration the society wide benefits like more efficient bus travel or cleaner air that preferentially help the less well off.
I agree with your rebuttal in response to that other person's comment, but ultimately I do think those programs are regressive for the poor, at this very point in time.
I guess the question becomes, should those poorest suffer for the betterment of all future generations? I would personally say no.
Life is regressive. Charity is a good thing, but not every single conceivable public policy has to include a charity component. Charging citizens a reasonable price for the cost of services rendered is a perfectly fair thing to do. The fact that life itself isn't fair doesn't change that. I'd prefer we try to address that later problem separately through a centralized welfare program rather than by hamstringing good public policy.
Thank you for letting me clarify my point with two examples of how these seemingly regressive policies ultimately help the poorer among us: 1. carbon taxes will improve poor air quality which currently impacts the poor more than the wealthy who can afford to live in cleaner areas. The poor will enjoy significant health benefits that far outweighs the small regressive tax they pay know. 2. A Congestion pricing stands to dramatically improve mass transit options like buses, which the working class rely on far more than the wealthy to get to work on time and will even expand the job options they have available to them.
You paid far less. The top half of American pay almost 98% of federal taxes. The top 10% pay nearly three quarters. The American tax system is very progressive.
You have it wrong. You are grouping in that top 10% the millionaires/billionaires who pay nothing with the 6-figure W2 workhorses who cannot hide anything.
Stop equivocating. You said that ‘you’ (as in the lower income half) paid more. This is demonstrably false. The top half of Americans pay 97.7% of taxes.
It may be you paid a higher percentage of your income despite the progressive nature of the American tax code which has a higher rate the more you make, via some tax breaks some wealthy people take advantage etc... It can also be that you paid a smaller percentage through an EITC. I don’t know without know your situation. It is definitely false that Americans making between $200-400K paid a smaller rate than you did.
Your broad statement the poor are paying the bulk of support for public infrastructure is clearly wrong. Revise your priors.
Oh god. Didn't they try to do something like this in Mexico City and it resulted in no change? Clever policy is always rife with unintended consequences; prices are good.
Congestion pricing means less traffic so the bus can get to your destination faster. Right now there is no incentive to use the bus, so people don't. Everyone drives and everyone is worse off as a result of the greater traffic.
A bus ride in a congestion pricing scheme will almost certainly be faster than a car ride in a congestion-pricing-free scheme. The point you're missing is that congestion pricing massively reduces traffic.
It'll be a couple more years at least until people come around to decrying this because it hurts poor people. For now, just let them be happy that it annoys an imaginary suburbanite in a gas-guzzling SUV. In the meantime, let's appreciate the opportunity to loudly take a side without actually solving any meaningful problems.
To be fair, they were mostly right, since 93% continued to drive.
This is commute tax for the wealthy, and a time tax for lower income people. B39 only crosses the bridge, so there's waiting/transfer on both sides. Commute is generally 2-5x more time by public transport there, with all the stops.
The key point is that traffic is basically exponential in number of cars. Roads have a capacity below which there's almost no traffic, and above which capacity stays constant (or goes down). The amount of traffic in a city without congestion charging is the amount caused by the last couple percent of drivers most willing to wait in traffic. By introducing a fee that switches the decision for that small group of people, everyone else's commute gets a noticeably shorter (including all the people that were taking the bus previously).
Yes, by dramatically increasing the commute time of the poor, we can reduce the commute time of the wealthier, and give the city revenue in the process. Morals aside, this is the desired function of the fee. Morals in place, I think making B39 free, funded by the fee, would have been a nice move.
> The MTA is using the revenue from the congestion pricing tolls to issue a $15 billion bond to buy new train cars, install accessible elevators at subway stations across the city and other transit infrastructure improvements.
It's funding hardware. My point is that a free (or discounted), short, B39 commute across the bridge would have been a nice bone to throw to the poorer people who made this traffic flow improvement possible for the wealthier.
I suppose this was tongue in cheek, and I don't live in NYC - but where I live, a single ticket is 4 EUR, so that's 8 EUR there and back. So right now, parking up to a couple hours is already cheaper (if we ignore the wear and tear of driving 20km) per day in the city. If I manage to optimize for the parking price (or can do it for free) - the 9$ would still be a maybe 10% increase, not 'for the wealthy'. And I can imagine several of such scenarios, I guess you are only looking at "person commuting to work 20 days a month and thus paying 180$ extra"
Yes, monthly tickets exist but I've not used one for years because I usually cycle all the time.
It needs to be said, since there is such a big vocal group of people that are outright denying economic laws. Regarding rent control, minimum wage, price control etc.
Comparing to previous Januarys seems dishonest given the vast number of layoffs that have occurred over the past year. Doesn't appear as though they're controlling for this number at all..
What vast number of layoffs? The national layoff rate is currently 1.1%, which is lower than the the pre-pandemic average [0]. The NYS layoff rate is 0.5% which is one of the lowest in the country.
You are reading it correctly. There have never been more jobs in NY than there are right now. The unfortunately problem is that it appears all of the extra people are employed in making shit up and posting it on the Internet. "Vice President in Charge of Charlie Brown's Hoes" or similar roles.
This seems to be the goto method for most cities now. Got something that isn’t working anymore or the public needs more of it? Just start charging for it and make it a revenue source!
What a joke. Urban areas have been gutted so suburbanites can travel by car, park their metal death box, and travel back to their shitty home for decades.
Urban areas have also been subsidizing roads mostly used by suburban assholes. Then when those same roads need repair, guess who the burden falls on (it’s not the suburbanite living in shitville county)
As a thought experiment let’s take a technocratic moonshot: air traffic control but for 500k surface vehicles on 100k blocks.
Pricing reduces congestion, but only indirectly, and only in aggregate over the area to which it applies. Where is your ambition, hackers?! NYC could take this whole idea to the next level — level of hell, I’m sure some would think — and require that every vehicle needs a real time permit to be in motion on a block-by-block basis.
Permits are available only when the streets have capacity for another vehicle. When you park up, your permit gets released. When you want to get back on the road you join the back of the line for a new real-time permit to drive.
Stop lights could hold back traffic from entering congested areas. If you want to enter an area and it is full up, you have to sit and wait for another car to leave that cell. The central system manages the queues fairly: if a car exits the West boundary then you can enter on the East boundary if you were next in line.
It sounds like misery but honestly if the goal of any congestion policy is to ensure that traffic density never exceeds a given threshold, isn’t using globally coordinated block-level traffic control the ultimate way to achieve that goal?
The whole thing also sounds like a dream — again, possibly a fever dream — to implement and fine tune. NetEng has some transferable skills in this domain which could come in handy.
Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but also slightly hang on this is a great idea.
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/press-releases/sfmta-completes-citywid...
[2]https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities...
[3] https://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/11/03/study-quantifies-how-u...