A better fix would be to just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive. Reduce the price of the train by $15 and, without this new toll, voila, your commute is cheaper by transit.
On top of that, make transit faster and more frequent so people look at driving & transit directions side-by-side and see that there's not much difference time-wise. This is already true for many trips inside NYC.
One problem is that cars take up the space that other transit options need, or alternately, cars themselves are the reason other transit options are unattractive.
For example:
- many people are afraid to ride bicycles because they are (justifiably) afraid of being run over by cars
- separated bike lanes cannot be created because the space is already used for parking spaces for cars
- street level trolleys or buses can move people very efficiently, but when cars block their path, they are slowed to the same pace as the traffic jam
I could go on and on and on. Unless you take back the space used for cars, it is very difficult to make space for anything else.
This is a daily occurrence in some parts of the city. Notice how unfazed everyone is by it, but also how untenable it would be to someone with a wheelchair, walker, stroller, or frankly anyone who isn’t young and thin and nimble.
Technically yes, but sadly in practice rarely enforced. Stand on a street corner in NYC for five minutes and you will see dozens of traffic violations that go unenforced. I don't agree with it, but there is a certain amount of accepted lawlessness here when it comes to driving.
Technically it is ticketable, but they don’t really have a choice. The traffic often moves at a crawl so they might enter the intersection at the beginning of a light cycle and not get further than the crosswalk. If they decide not to move until there is a car length of free space on the other side, cars behind them will honk up a storm. Ticketing them would effectively just be a stochastic congestion tax anyway.
I agree we should ticket anyone who is blocking the box and I wish they still enforced those fines/points. But as drivers become increasingly lawless, especially in NYC, being the only person following the law can make you and the people around you less safe. Similar to driving in a developing country, driving safely in NYC requires learning the actual rules of the road which are not the same as the legal rules.
(Personally I avoid driving and biking in midtown these days because I am uncomfortable breaking the law, but when I do have to choose between following the law and operating safely I choose the latter.)
> If they can't clear the intersection they have no business entering it.
In heavy urban traffic, it is impossible to know if you can clear the intersection before entering it. You can often predict it with some degree of accuracy, but only if you are already familiar with this particular intersection; forget about out of towners being able to make that judgment.
This is just putting them on a similar model (user pays). Currently, a train ticket has to cover the capital and operating costs of both the vehicle (train, driver) and tracks. For driving, the driver pays the operating and capital cost of the vehicle only - the road budget comes out of general revenue (of the city, state, etc).
Your suggestion of dropping the cost just means the transit agency would have to make up the cost elsewhere - any suggestions? General revenues backed by a tax hike? Shifting burden of track construction and maintenance fully to tax-funded?
It is common worldwide for governments to subsidize public transit. - in this case a ~300% subsidy on the fare.
However, in 'failed states', where the government presumably doesn't subsidize anything, you often find independent minibus operators zooming around town, carrying ~20 passengers each, offering in aggregate a very good public transit service, charging a few coins adding up to barely more than the fuel cost for the bus.
How come poor nations and failed states can manage to provide good public transit so so much cheaper than anyone else?
Because their labor costs nothing. I took these minibuses a lot in Ukraine, Georgia (the country), Armenia, Russian Far East and Kazakhstan. The cars work and aren't entirely unsafe, but I bet none of them would pass western technical and emission inspection. They fix it themselves using scrap and they keep it running for 1M+ km.
Yeah last time I rode in a minibus (guagua (sp?)) was in the dominican republic. It was a 4 door sedan carrying ~9 people. I had shift the car into drive from park because the driver didn't want to reach across the lap of the female passenger who was also sitting in the drivers seat with him.
My memory was that the car had many warning lights on and turned off while we were driving. Somehow he was able to restart it without it being in park while we were coasting.
> you often find independent minibus operators zooming around town, carrying ~20 passengers each, offering in aggregate a very good public transit service, charging a few coins adding up to barely more than the fuel cost for the bus.
NYC actually has an analogue to this! (Had? I’m not sure how many of these routes survived covid)
> How come poor nations and failed states can manage to provide good public transit so so much cheaper than anyone else?
By using badly maintained, very old vehicles, with low to no enforced standards of operations for safety.
By operators exploiting themselves because of only coarsely tracked costs and low level of reserves.
By not having to conform to strict schedules and not providing service in off hours, only when good business is expected. This makes the infrastructure virtually nonexistent, hurting the general economy by limiting the possibilities of those having to take these forms of public transport.
By applying demand based pricing, for example when working off hours charging more to cover the running costs which are split among less users.
By not working for peanuts, it is your false perception because you have far more income (and disposable income) than those who have to live on incomes local to that area. If PPP adjusted it is often quite a sum.
Just to name a few factors. In general well run welfare states, or at least moderately well run authoritarian states (also having some welfare aspects many Americans would probably call communism) tend to have good public transport, for different reasons, and share taxis are generally not considered a good public transit.
>By operators exploiting themselves because of only coarsely tracked costs and low level of reserves.
Let's also not ignore outright gang/mob style affiliation of minibus transit organisations that will then also actively sabotage government public transport on their post profitable routes.
These private entities in the third world fill a role, but often are also rent-seeking and carve it out for themselves from a government without the willpower to A) build proper public transit infrastructure and B) defend it from bad actors.
Yeah, it was a huge simplification to be sure. The comment was talking about cutting his train ticket by $15, so I assumed it was more of a long distance thing - amtrack has farebox recovery of 95%
Drivers pick up some portion of the road budget through fuel tax, and NJ even recently invented a way to make EV owners pay for same in lieu of fuel tax.
Except that road maintenance is a bit more expensive than you'd think.
From memory, a politician claimed a few years ago that 40 km of highway was about as much as 1 JSF (~$110mln). Let's pretend that that is a rough proxy for what maintenance of NYC's streets & public parking would cost.
How often do you have to fillerup before you've spent about $100mln in fuel taxes?
> just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive
If ppl drive more than use transit, they won't support improvements to transit. This is the first step to improving transit. Make driving less attractive, more ppl use transit, complain about its shortcomings, and then fixes get implemented.
I also don't see why we shouldn't make driving less attractive. As the grandparent comment said, drivers should be the ones paying for the problems caused by drivers, not residents.
The Dutch model is the best example of this, using "autolow" methods to force cars onto certain routes while leaving the most direct ones to people, bikes and public transport.
It's surprising whenever these conversations come up that many seem to miss the extensive body of lessons that can be taken from the research and practice already done around the world. Is it a kind of "Not invented here" sort of thing?
What Dutch city looks anything remotely similar to NYC? There are very good reasons to drive into NYC for many people, due to density - much more people have much more diverse needs, and need much more workers moving around with their equipment and much more goods.
I only meant that their methods should be part of the conversation, not implemented uncritically or without being adapted to local needs.
Many people in the Netherlands also need to drive and the system supports this while also offering alternatives. Many people means diverse needs indeed, so the reliance on and the defaulting of car travel runs counter to many of those needs.
The point I was trying to make is that much more people need to drive in NYC and can't use the alternatives. Sure, I'm all for it - but the problems and solutions are of much different magnitude from anywhere in the Netherlands.
People in the Netherlands made it hard to drive through their cities, which led to more people not driving. In NYC it's going to lead less people driving too, but still a massive clusterfuck on the roads that will be only worse if the solution of the Netherlands is implemented there.
I’m not sure why “it can’t work here”, even if it’s what every city says.
It did not work in the Netherlands either; in fact, after WW2, they imported “traffic planners”, i.e. people who want — and create! — traffic from the US, and set out to destroying their old city centers to create highways etc, until people said: enough!
To a greater or lesser degree, similar solutions work in Copenhagen, and in some German cities, and are starting to work in Paris, once one of the most car-crazed cities in Europe, and in other places.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying that it can be done. It sure takes a lot of work, but it can be done.
To be clear, I'm not saying preserve the status quo. I just don't think the changes the cities you listed made have any chance to work in NYC. Most notably, all of these cities existed way before NYC and we're built with limitations of medieval technology. All the changes you mention are just rollbacks to last working state.
NYC is a new city built with comparatively godlike tech applied without restraint. The NYC-style solution "I guess I'll just commute by helicopter, no problem putting another skyscraper right here" was incomprehensible to the rich people who built the European cities - they had to go a little further away if they wanted their quiet comfortable life.
Which European country has a city with nearly 10M people on 300km2?
America is exceptional - in the literal sense, it's an exception compared to organically grown cities that existed for hundreds of years. It doesn't mean it's better, it's just very different and so naturally the solutions are going to be very different too.
> Which European country has a city with nearly 10M people on 300km2?
I have no idea, can you share specifically why you think autoluw only works for certain levels of population per square kilometer? To the point that the lessons couldn't be adapted and would have to be "very different?"
Much more people on that extremely small area actually need to drive - because they have reduced mobility, because they are carrying a lot of stuff, goods, materials or tools... Reducing NYC to one lane would stop all life in the city. You can drive through Amsterdam too in these cases - it works because incomparably less people need to.
There's also the problem of mass transit - you can't simply have enough bus/tram lines to cover people's needs if you have so many people who need to go everywhere around the city at one place. You'd have to build an incredibly number of subway lines like Chinese cities have, which is a huge investment.
Ah yeah that same Dutch policy that made public transport 12% more expensive this year while simultaneously reducing service and with outages up a literal 300% from pre-covid times.
I'm curious what fraction of people who drive a personal vehicle into lower Manhattan on a regular basis are poor or middle class. What would your guess be?
Mine would be a tenth or less. When I lived in NYC the only people I knew who commuted by personal car in Manhattan were people who made mid-six-figures and lived in some NJ/Westchester suburb. Everyone else took the train/subway.
>I'm curious what fraction of people who drive a personal vehicle into lower Manhattan on a regular basis are poor or middle class. What would your guess be?
Beats me, I haven't been there since the late 90s. If 90% of the people who drive personal cars are rich people who can afford it, it's just a tax that doesn't accomplish anything (except revenue generation and keeping the poor/middle 10% off the road) because they will most likely be annoyed but not deterred.
It will hurt the Uber drivers and delivery drivers and whatnot too. Probably tourists as well. I wonder if the city will keep metrics up to see how well it's working. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem well thought out.
Why just Manhattan you think? I guess it's where are the businesses are.
Right, I suspect that $15 will prove to be far too low to dissuade 90% of lower Manhattan drivers. Having said that, it's a reasonable (and politically palatable) starting guess, it provides funding to improve transit, makes drivers pay for at least a fraction of the negative externalities they impose on the neighborhoods they drive through, and it can always be increased over time until it has the intended effect.
> I wonder if the city will keep metrics up to see how well it's working.
Certainly they've talked about tracking travel times before and after, but I think the real test will be the long-term changes in land value. My guess is that eventually land value in car-dependent communities in the NYC metro area will decrease relative to those with transit access.
> It will hurt the Uber drivers and delivery drivers
That is a reasonable hypothesis, but I'm sure we'll find out. I would wager that the reduced travel time will allow drivers to make more deliveries which will make up for the daily $15 fee. In the end, the market will decide.
> Why just Manhattan you think?
That's where the supply/demand imbalance seems most acute. Well, there and many of the brides which we should be charging for as well. Any place that becomes gridlocked on a regular basis should probably have a price applied to ensure efficient utilization.
Finally, if we're worried that this fee is regressive, I think a better solution would be to use some of the funds to make the state income tax even more progressive. Subsiding driving for a small number of poor and middle class drivers seems less fair and efficient than letting people keep more of their money at tax time.
Most people commuting to manhattan are not wealthy or middle class, judging by the makes and models and visual conditions of the cars that you see on the bridges entering Manhattan.
400k in Manhattan with ~50% total tax, 2 kids in private school and a 2BR condo mortgage. I bet a lot of those families care about an extra 15/day. They can pay it yeah.
Sure but it's just an annoyance to them, not a deterrence. The objective is deterrence. This tax is targeting poor and middle class because it's a regressive tax. Pretty shitty.
The issue is that there are too many cars (including pollution, congestion, noise), not that there is not enough transit - or at least this is a separate issue.
If you could multiply by 10 the number of people using public transport without changing the number of cars on the road, would the car make less noise, or pollute less, or take up less space? I don't see how.
So the two policies we are discussing really are:
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars directly more expensive
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars indirectly more expensive, by lowering the cost of the alternatives and funding this extra cost _somehow_ (taxing everyone whether they use cars or not?)
It seems to me that solution 2 is potentially less effective, definitely way more complex and basically make everyone pay rather than just car users.
Of course if the goal is either to be ineffective (just subsidy transit but don't make me abandon my car) or shield car users from most of the cost (create an expensive solution to reduce car usage by making everyone pay, not just car users); then sure, it's better.
> A better fix would be to just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive.
It is clearly not fiscally better, and its probably not better in terms of speed of induced behavior change. The best mix is probably some of both; make transit better and make driving more expensive so that people who have preconceptions about transit nevertheless feel that the absolute cost of driving (not the cost delta of driving vs. transit) is sufficient that it is not worth the trip without taking transit despite their prejudgement against it.
I agree transit is the solution but NYC transit is kind of crap and it will take decades and billions to get it up to the standards of more mondern systems. Just lowering the price is not enough. More lines and a cleaner safer system would attract more people
On top of that, make transit faster and more frequent so people look at driving & transit directions side-by-side and see that there's not much difference time-wise. This is already true for many trips inside NYC.