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This is great, should be implemented in all cities. Most people who can use public transport should.
Not all cities are equal. Many have large areas with no public transportation available.
That’s also very easily fixable
I get suggested to drive for 11 minutes and ALSO take a lyft if I wanted to use public transportation to get to work.
Do you always go to work in the middle of the night on a Sunday?
That’s just when I browse Lemmy 🥲
So, what you posted is not really meaningful and representative of your daily commute, right?
I’m so confused about what’s wrong, the bus stop doesn’t suddenly get closer if I leave at 9am monday…?
Doesn’t seem to apply to your specific case but usually there’s a big difference between middle of the night vs. during the day. Even though I live in a city with a good public transit infrastructure, if I try to get to my workplace at three in the Morning on a Sunday I will still have a bad time:
vs.
That’s why your first screenshot didn’t really prove much.
In SF they allocated some extra carpool lanes (taken from the total number of highway lanes) and started calling them “express lanes” instead of carpool lanes. Everybody cheered-- because transit hipstering is a great thing for the people who it actually works well for in our mediocre system. I guess everytone else is SOL. In SF it started out that you could still use them for free if you had 2 people in the car. Now its 3 people minimum to ride free, and the prices crept higher. Now you’ll very often see all non-express lanes stopped with traffic but the price for express lanes high and the express lanes clear of traffic-- that road throughput capacity underused. Its become a rich persons lane, at the cost of reducing capacity of the total system. When it got put in they said the max would be $8.00, shortly after they doubled that, with no max per day. Fees rack up since they charge over short distances. Now I’ve started seeing express lanes on main thoroughfares that arent highways.
Theres a patchwork of diconnected and not well thought out transit systems, with little hope of retrenching them to have usable coverage like NYC has. You’ll end up using an uber or taxi to get to your final destination most of the time, and parking at transit stations is difficult, time consuming, and expensive.
This is not the solution you think it is. It just makes things better for the rich, and does nothing for the poor and middle class. This is like the “clear” lane at the airport security. Once its in, its not going away. Pricing is not in the control of people who have your best interests at heart. If you’re poor, your time is not worth as much as a rich persons. They are commoditizing the hours of your life and many of you cheer for it. Without progressive pricing for this you’re just getting fleeced.
The funds created arent going toward new projects . They are used for road maintenance, enforcement, and debt repayment in the county where the road is This simply frees up general funds that had been used for that before these went in, so no direct benefit in terms of transit projects is mandated.
As I understand it, poor and middle class people are already taking public transit. It’s the rich people who are driving in New York. This is making it easier for deliveries, taxis, buses, and emergency vehicles to get through by getting all of the entitled rich people off the road.
You think charging them 20 a day will get the rich off the road?
Looks like it is! (See above)
As someone who takes public transit into SF every work day. It exists. It works. It’s faster than driving
It works.
It works for you in your current situation. But this policy affects people who are not in your exact situation as well, and it DOESNT work for them. I know you want to do something, anything, but we need it to be more than this.
we need it to be more than this
That goes without saying?
Also, those lanes were open to everyone for 2 months before they had everything online. There was absolutely no traffic those months. Once they turned on the scam lanes, traffic was back with a vengeance… Unless you paid.
That is expected. When a lane is added it fixes traffic for some time then it goes back to the same due to induced demand. Look at Texas and their 26 lane highway, it has not fixed their traffic problems and never will. It is always hard to move towards less car dependence, but it will never happen if we keep adding lanes.
Fixing traffic by… discouraging people from driving, lol. Well I’m not complaining.
As long as that money is spent on public transit improvements, I think it’s a great idea for many large cities.
Sorry best we can do is 80% to the police department.
is spent on pubic transit
Hahahahahaha
Oh sorry, I thought you were joking. Of course they won’t
is there any particular reason you’re saying that besides cynicism? I am having trouble finding specifics, but there’s a lot of reporting that the MTA is expecting to raise $15 billion from congestion tolling to fund public transportation repairs and improvements and pretty much all of the proposals for this in the past required all of the revenues to be earmarked for use by the MTA
People are so used to how bad things are they don’t trust improvement, even when it’s real.
Ugh, I hate how true that statement is.
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don’t trust improvement
*By a corrupt government which has proven itself to mismanage funds as a default.
Can’t really speak to NYC local but time will tell. Although to give them credit, most NYers I’ve met enjoy their public transportation. But the admonishment of general government expenditure distrust is completely valid imo
NYC as an institution has many hard-working people at all levels dedicated to their communities.
The mayor, however, is a worthless self-serving piece of shit that sold out to foreign nationals, and a good chunk of the city elite are corrupt one way or another.
It’s a very, very mixed bag.
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Mostly because tolls have always been a promise to improve infrastructure and then sometimes end up going to other things nobody wanted. A big one I hear about is my understanding that the NJ parkway toll promised that once the toll money made enough to pay for the highway it would be removed. Well, we all know how well that went… it’s just hard to hear anything they say and not go I’ll believe it when I see it.
I certainly hope it won’t be spent on pubic transit, at least.
UberXXX
Yeah, that’s how we do it in Oslo. The road tolls mostly go towards funding transit and investments in bike and foot infra.
But we need more cops
And those cops need tanks.
And drones! With knife missles!
inb4 the supreme court rules that congestion charging is unconstitutional and furthermore that public transport, too, is unconstitutional.
Congestion pricing bad, private tolls good
Thanks Lars.
If the founding fathers didn’t explicitly mention it in the Constitution then clearly it’s unconstitutional.
Pooping is unconstitutional.
But removing the separation between chruch and state is, any part of the constitution (ex: Article six, the first amendment, the fourteenth amendment, and multiple supereme court rulings on the constitution) are clearly just liberal lies
“Ladies and gentleman of the committee, I put it to you: thousands, perhaps millions, of American songwriters have written about missing their truck. How many have written about missing the bus? I rest my case.”
Counterpoint, “the wheels on the bus in fact, go round and round.”
Objection! Does the baby on the bus not likewise go wah wah wah?
I’d like to enter into evidence “skankin pickle” CW:ska https://youtu.be/FBtFbxhpmfc
Exhaust Now Vents Directly Into Cab: EPA says, “For your health!”
Outstanding move on NYC’s part.
Prior to this going live there was a lot of talk about how congestion will simply move from one place to another. I don’t know new york so can’t name places but it was regarding commuters using a street or bridge that is now under congestion charge so they will flow an alternative route through roads that aren’t designed for the additional traffic.
Is that now the case?
Some people may be inclined to go up and over Central Park to get to the other side without paying the $9. That likely only affects uptown residents. I can’t imagine anyone driving around the park from midtown to avoid the fee.
The only legitimate concerns I’ve read are from contractors with tools and small businesses who deliver. They should be offered exceptions if walking or mass transit are unrealistic options. You’re not riding the subway with acetylene tanks or delivering fresh meat on Metro North. Other than that, I love it.
They should be offered exceptions if walking or mass transit are unrealistic options.
No they shouldn’t. That’s how you let rich people skirt the law.
Tradespeople should just treat it like any other business expense. Eat it or raise your rates a little bit.
eat it
They never do
a little bit
It’s never a little, and we all bitch about inflation.
There’s never a simple solution.
They sometimes do, at least temporarily. But yes on the whole I agree. I can almost guarantee that it’s a net benefit, that the time saved by traffic reduction makes up for the additional cost in congestion charges
The other concern I’ve heard, and has not been brought up in this thread yet, is the lobbying influence from rideshare companies to pass the congestion laws.
It’s arguable that ride share vehicles are a better traffic density alternative to single rider personal vehicles, but there are pretty clear downsides to consider as well.
Source:
You can be self interested and still accidentally be on the right side of an issue. It doesn’t spark joy, but I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this. It’s still a win, imo.
The only legitimate concerns I’ve read are from contractors with tools and small businesses who deliver.
Maybe, but anecdotally the lighter traffic allows contractors to accomplish more jobs per day because they spend less time in traffic, which more than offsets the congestion charge.
Going from three hours per day in traffic down to even just two means there’s an extra hour a contractor has available to make money each day.
sure, but you can also deliver those with lighter vehicles that don’t cause traffic. Congestion is congestion.
I’m confused. How will I deliver 15 pounds of Trump skirt Steaks if I can’t drive my lifted Ram 3500 Heavy Duty with the high-output Cummins Turbo Diesel engine in downtown Manhattan?
Construction firms make a ton of money in NYC, they can handle it, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone delivering food from a car in the city, they all use bikes.
Commercial deliveries, not consumer. Every pizza joint needs flour, cheese, and tomatoes.
We’ll see how it plays out. I could see less traffic meaning you can make more deliveries in a day, I figure one extra commercial delivery more than makes up for $10 extra.
Possibly. It may disproportionately impact eateries with more diverse menus or foods with shorter shelf life. Time will tell.
Eh, it’s NYC food is already super diverse. There’s fairly established infrastructure for niche food products. If that truck needs a single restaurant to eat that $10, they were probably already paying an arm and a leg for that delivery.
I’ve paid more just to go through the park lol
For real.
Of all the things on Reddit, I miss remindmebot the most. They tried to kill it numerous times but it survived like a roach in radiation. On lemmy, I find an interesting question and have to set a timer for myself. This is the most first-world of problems, but I’m still moderately upset every time
@[email protected] 1 year pls
Good luck. The bot hasn’t sent a message in almost a year.
@[email protected] 10 days
@[email protected] 10 minutes
@bdonvr Ok, I will remind you on Monday Jan 20, 2025 at 12:08 PM PST.
The other location would be the Subways and buses in this case. I went home at 5 yesterday, right in the heart of rush hour, and it seemed like a normally packed subway not an especially congested one.
Unsure, I don’t live in NYC. However, I can say that this will encourage many more people to take transit, which is good. Plus, I don’t doubt that the tolled routes will still see active use by millions as they’re still the fastest way to and from work.
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Sam from Wendover did a very good job explaining why Congestion Pricing is the best solution to address this particular problem, including arguments on why this is not a regressive tax when you analyze it closely.
Canonical YouTube link so you can use your favorite Invidious/Piped instance https://youtu.be/B2j-LgcA7Gk
And same on nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/wendover-the-battle-over-nyc-congestion-pricing/
See the Congestion Pricing Tracker for day by day measurements of the impact on congestion.
This is an incredible resource. Love stuff like this And I pin this comment if I had that power.
I’m trying to see the big improvement but it looks like there’s only a few minutes at best difference in drive time going on. What don’t I understand?
Wait time is getting slashed across the board. An example: If in rush hour traffic, 8 minutes was added, but now it’s 3 minutes, that’s five minutes of car fumes and CO2 avoided, of more cars moving about, of goods being transferred. We’re not shaving seconds, we’re shaving literal minutes!
We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of vehicles. This is New York with millions of people. People, businesses, all these things are affected. If you combine this with other data, you might better see the outcomes.
This isn’t tiny incremental gains. From a economic/environmental/commerce standpoint, these are multipliers.
Great points, I think it’s hard for me to conceptualize without any experience with the numbers being talked about. I probably only see 500 cars going to the grocery store and back, including all of the ones in the parking lot. The numbers you’re talking don’t seem possible to me. That’s not me questioning them just saying why I think it’s hard for me to understand.
I think it would behoove all of us to wait a month and see how things shake out. As it is there was snow last week and it was just coming off the holidays. Let patterns stabilize.
I REALLY wish they’d implement that in my home city of Montréal, Québec. We’re facing huge traffic congestion because of construction. It’s so bad it’s actually costing lives due to driver impatience.
Downtown Toronto too, please. This last year was the first time I have seen multiple emergency vehicles not being able to get to their destinations because of traffic gridlock. It’s insane.
Properly built bike lanes can be used as an emergency lane for emergency vehicles.
I know its not torontos fault they are getting removed. At least Chow seems to be trying to reduce traffic by ensuring transit fares stay the same by freezing fare imcreases and also investing into various parts of the network.
But the emergency vehicle access might be useful as an argument against Ford’s decisions, not that he would care.
Their counter argument would actually be, “Nah, get rid of the streetcars instead” and people would unironically agree. I wish I was kidding.
The hostility towards non-car/public transit infrastructure I am seeing in Toronto after coming home post-pandemic is insane to me. And, no, it’s not coming from the Indian immigrants everyone keeps trying to blame everything on.
From my observations, immigrants rely on transit more than other demographics.
It’s because of everyone being forced back into the office to help “reinvigorate the downtown core” and to help landlords cover real estate costs
Dude Montreal is currently insanity. You couldn’t pay me to drive there. Lovely city otherwise
Yeah. I live in Montreal and try to avoid driving anywhere if I can help it. That’s why I got a place near a metro station not too far from downtown. I have bus routes that go to all the nice places in 20-30 minutes. And my neighborhood is awesome. Everything I need is walking distance and it’s a cool place in the summer with lots of activities, bars, restaurants, specialty stores, etc.
Wait until the elevated highway collapses
Less cars is the answer! And in what transit is concerned I would say that convenience is very important. Like in Netherlands they got bike locking stations. Not simply a tube that you lock your bike into which is screwed to the front door of a building and fits 3 bikes. I’m talking massive building with an automated system that keeps your bike secure for when you get out of work after the train ride. And restrooms… With cleaning.
Are we sure that it’s causing people to take alternative transit more vs just… Not going to Manhattan though? I’m all for it, just worth studying more.
Either way, the policy is working as intended; there are fewer superfluous car trips being made to lower manhattan. If people are deciding not to go over a $9 fee, I don’t think they really needed to go that badly.
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That’s incredibly short sighted. How long before companies realize that they aren’t paying employees enough to live in NYC or deal with the congestion tax and the company has no choice but to leave NYC altogether? Then tax revenue declines and the city is short on the budget!
If you understand that the congestion tax (and lets face it, it’s a tax) goes up in years 3 and 5, you’ll realize that this isn’t going to get better. I commute to work in NYC every day and drive my personal vehicle probably once a month. It was never cost effective to drive into NYC. Someone who’s already paying $850 for parking, $300 for bridge tolls and the cost of their car is not worried about the extra $9/day.
Oh and BTW, the first day of the congestion tax was a snowstorm so no one was driving in anyhow!
It’s been widely studied in other cities already. Studying it more is ok, but at some point you gotta wonder whether we need all that many studies about whether water is wet, or if the resources and manpower could be better spent elsewhere.
That’s why the congestion pricing revenues ought to be spent on improving public transit, to maintain the tourist economy.
The congestion zone only covers lower and midtown Manhattan. Most traffic not heading to that part of Manhattan is either going to take I-95 through Harlem, I-87 through upstate New York, or I-278 through Staten Island and Brooklyn.
You don’t need to study it more.
We’ve been seeing a lot of anecdotal posting on Xitter of people who were skeptics or in opposition to this suddenly realizing that they just gained an hour or more per day because the traffic has been significantly reduced. So even some regular people (i.e. not the wealthy) who have to drive in NYC because of their job are realizing that there’s a cost benefit even if they do pay for the congestion pricing.
Can anybody tell me how much a drive through the congestion priced road would cost? Like a straight line?
It’s not so much a congestion prices road, it’s a zone. So anytime you enter that zone you pay $9 unless you make less than like $60 k then it’s like $4-5, and emergency vehicles are free.
That sounds pretty reasonable actually.
$9 for cars, no matter if you go one block in or all the way through. And no daily charge for staying there multiple days, only charged when you enter.
That’s super reasonable, and if it actually helps it’s probably fantastic. I wonder if things like emergency response times will significantly improve as a result.
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Could they make it more expensive for cars that enter the zone once and drive around all day (Uber)
They actually made it cost less for them. They can either pay the $9 each day or choose $1.50 for each trip (passenger pickup/dropoff) they make within the zone
So they carved out a protected class for the capitalists. Great.
Kinda unfair tbh
Roads aren’t fair
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It’s like $9
Nice. Now cars are only for the rich like they should be.
Real solution: Ban cars in parts of NYC.
Right because everyone needing a car means everyone who can’t afford one just automatically gets one.
Step one of reducing car-dependency is to reduce their number on the road. Then you can start bulding shit that accommodates the poor through actually nice-to-use public transit, bicycle paths, and walking routes.
Charge the rich. Build for the poor. Better yet, charge the rich, build for everyone. Not just cars. Because not everyone has cars.
Like FFS “good job now the poor can’t drive” is hardly a comeback when it’s like the most expensive mode of transit, massively subsidized with taxpayer money, just to kind of make it work. It wasn’t something that could be made affordable or even efficient enough for everyone to use on a daily basis to begin with.
Zippity zoppity let’s redistribute some property
Cut to me dramatically removing my “fuck cars” jacket like a Yakuza character to reveal a “fuck private property” t-shirt
Step one of reducing car-dependency is to reduce their number on the road. Then you can start bulding shit that accommodates the poor through actually nice-to-use public transit, bicycle paths, and walking routes.
Why can’t you start building shit before reducing their numbers? I don’t see what one has to do with the other.
Of course you can. I’m using “step one” as a figure of speech to express importance.
Controlling vehicle numbers is a very “low hanging fruit” that can do a lot to improve things for a very low cost.
What was that saying again, something along the lines of: A great city is not where the poor own and drive cars, but the rich take public transportation.
A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.
- Gustavo Petro, current president of Colombia, former mayor of Bogota
I feel like what this good intentioned quote misses is that the poor are priced out of the city core entirely and pushed into banlieus
Now cars are only for the rich
More that roads are for high occupancy or professional vehicles - buses, ambulances, construction vehicles, commercial trucks - that still need access to Manhattan but can’t be placed on a train.
Buses --> tram
Ambulances --> single lane road/biking path
Construction vehicles, commercial trucks --> single lane road
Problem solved, no need for cars inside the city
Ambulances --> single lane road/biking path
I should not need to explain why running an ambulance down a bike lane is a bad idea.
Construction vehicles, commercial trucks --> single lane road
Why would reducing the number of road lanes without implementing congestion pricing be a preferable solution? How would this improve access to construction vehicles and wide-body trucks?
No, you should explain why ambulances using bike lanes is a problem as multiple european countries do that and it works perfectly.
Because reducing lanes means less people will use the road because if you literally cant get anywhere with a car you will use an alternative(of course that has to be provided). Also this is another european thing but you can just ban cars that are not there to do stuff(idk what they call it english but in hungarian its “célforgalom”).
multiple european countries do that and it works perfectly
You know that ambulances also cause accidents on roads?
What does that have to do with the OP?
True wealth is not needing to drive a car at all.
Banning cars actually works really well if you can prepare parking spaces or fully focus public transport
Source: Taksim Street
Please elaborate the “if you can prepare parking spaces” part.
Multistory and underground parking spaces with a toll on how long a car stays, turkey has İSPARK which maintains this
This’ll both allow people with cars to travel here, and will also lead to people preferring to walk or use public transport
The profit incentive to build parking is through the roof in NYC, they can charge a ton for parking, and there’s still not enough.
Now do the Van Wyck. Disincentivizing cabs, livery, rideshare, car service, whatever else constantly clogs that that few miles of road that takes 25-30 minutes could be done in five.
Does anyone have a good before screenshot of the same map view / area? I want to stitch together a before shot before I share so that people not from the area can get an idea of the change and not just immediately think “oh well my small town has traffic and it looks like that so what’s the big deal”
not exactly but with Google Maps you can setup a route with a start time set in the past and look at the congestion at that moment:
Gotcha, I found that on desktop you can do “average traffic” for a day of the week and time for the whole map without putting in a destination so I picked an average Monday at 5:30:
oh nice then that’s exactly what you needed :)
Lmfao, that’s the same distance as my commute to work, and I can bike that in 17-20 minutes
Yeah, but you can’t bike through the tunnels
Why not?
There’s no space for you to bike safely in the Holland or Lincoln tunnel.
Half an hour to cross that bridge isn’t even that bad.
yeah i wasn’t sure when rush hour would be, i just put something random and took a screenshot before my battery would die ^^
Make sure you compare apples to apples. The day that images was taken may have been the snowstorm… No one was going to drive in anyhow.
