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Congestion pricing is such a good idea everywhere there is rock solid public transit alternatives. Where there’s not, it just becomes a tax on the poor.
bicycles are good too, though maybe not for the longer distances that you would put congestion taxes on
Can be good. I ride my bike when I can, but my area IS NOT built for it, so it actually pretty risky. Heck some normal routes for me would probably get me stopped by the cops for recklessness.
I’ve biked a lot in my life, and I’m very aware of my surroundings, and I know when to stop riding and start walking the bike.
For some reason…most bikers are NOT like me. I don’t know why, they just aren’t. They’re dumb and clueless and, especially if they’re men in athletic spandex, really entitled and do really dangerous shit. They get on bikes with their car-brain still loaded, and make decisions like they have a shell of metal and crumple zones and airbags around them. Even though they’re just squishy flesh on a bunch of metal tubes.
Last summer, I was driving through a construction zone, and some 9-5 commuter guy on a bike decided to bike through the construction zone too, right along with all the cars. The road was narrow even just for cars, and the pavement had been ripped up and filled in as they did work to replace water mains underneath the road, and he was trying to bike through it, next to the cars. I was worried for him and kept looking in my rear view after I passed him. Good thing I did. Behind me, a truck pulling a small trailer clipped him accidentally (since the trailers swing back and forth a bit when navigating an uneven, narrow construction zone), and it clipped the front tire of his bike and he fell. It wasn’t even purposeful, the guy who clipped him stopped too to make sure he was ok. It was just a dangerous area to bike in. I got to the guy first, so I stopped and called an ambulance for him.
Overall he got away lightly. He was shaken and bruised and had a small gouge on one finger, and was able to refuse the ambulance and have a relative drive him to an urgent care. But when we looked at his helmet, it was cracked, and if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet even that light lovetap he got from the trailer might have been much worse. The helmet probably saved him from even more serious harm.
I didn’t say it to his face, because I figured he’d learned his lesson, but it was REALLY fucking stupid to try to ride a bicycle through a construction zone like that, helmet or no. He was just a dumb 9-5 commuter guy in a dress shirt and tie trying to save on gas or the environment or whatever–and I guess he just never thought about what he was doing beyond that. He had car-brain, and was trying to ride his bike as if he were still in a car through a zone where it was really dangerous to NOT be in a car.
It doesn’t matter if the laws say cars need to share the road with you or whatever–the laws of physics are much more concrete than the laws of mankind, and you need to pay attention to your physical surroundings and get off when you end up in a situation like that.
Anyway. My whole point is–yeah, some areas just aren’t safely bike-able.
Dude should have taken the lane. Single lane roads are extremely safe for bicycles, as long as no one is recklessly passing each other.
In my city of origin, you would get robbed as soon as you jump on the bike or killed if you are from a dangerous area.
How long are those distances?
Here in Stockholm, the congestion tax zone is bordered by the inner ring highway (norra och södra länken), so a trip encountering the congestion tax would have to be between a suburb and downtown Stockholm.
It depends on where you’re coming from and where you’re going. In the closer suburbs, it’s bikable. You could live in Hagastaden and only go to st eriksplan which would only be 1km which is easily walkable. But even if you live in Solna centrum and you’re biking in, it’s at least 3km to get into town, and could go up to 8-10km if you’re going to the other side of town, so that’s about the limit of bikability.
If you’re in a more car focused area further out, like the end of the subway, it’s 10-15 km just to get into town, so you’ll need to take the train.
Thanks for that answer.
I think 10km is a great distance for biking, glad to hear my idea of it seems to match up.
If I were rich, I would support congestion pricing. I could sell my helicopter. Who needs to fly over traffic when there is no traffic?
Yeah but all this $9 add up to millions which you can funnel into heated massage chairs on the trolley, tram, boat, bus or train. I want Netflix and free WiFi.
They will never funnel that money into more comfortable transit.
Can you explain congestion pricing?
Think whole road tolls you can change based on a schedule, or based on current and expected traffic. All of it is meant to either disincentiveize driving to cut down total traffic, or at least shunt it to less congested times or roads.
Aside: I 1000% don’t consider individual toll lanes to be a type of congestion pricing. Those are just convenience surcharges (looking at you too TSA Pre check) and are complete elitist bullshit that hurts everyone but the city that takes in the fees.
Thanks
Can you explain congestion pricing?
How about you explain how BigFish@'s comment is wrong instead. You clearly have a point to make, so do the work to make it.
I’m genuinely asking. Chill
OK, but in that case, usually you’d want to send that sort of request to google instead of looking for a lemmy thread of questionable veracity to educate you. I’d be careful what you ask for and to whom you ask, but you do you.
It’s so great I’m considering implementing it for my driveway and only enforcing it for people I don’t like.
If you can afford a car, you can afford an e-bike, even a cargo e-bike. Cars are luxuries compared to bicycles. Never forget that.
I don’t know where you live, but that’s just not true in large swaths of America. The other options add multiple hours round trip anywhere and in many parts of the US it’s not an option.
My work is currently a 20 minute drive down a freeway going 60 mph. There is no bus to take that route. There isn’t even a connection, or a transfer, the only other option would be a cab.
Fortunately, places like this aren’t likely to need congestion pricing
indeed
I’m just talking basic economics. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. A car is, by any logical definition of the word, a luxury purchase compared to an e-bike. You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure. This would be like building all of our infrastructure to only accommodate stretch limos, and then trying to argue that limos are a necessity. It’s comically absurd. It’s a clown world.
You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure.
I did not decide that. The cold hard reality is that my work and my home are 15 miles (24km) apart. That’s a 1.5 hour bike ride, 3 hours round trip. You are absolutely right about costs, but I have NO option to bus, I cannot bike that daily, none of my coworkers live next to me.
I want more public transport. I would rather live with just a single car in my household that we use solely for large trips and moving large amounts of stuff. God knows it would be cheaper. I’d like that. I can’t feasibly do it.
How are you going to take an ebike for anything besides a short distance on non highway roads?
Maybe if you live somewhere it doesn’t snow
This is valid if your city doesn’t have dedicated bike infrastructure that gets plowed. Snow can be hardly an inconvenience at all if bike infrastructure is treated with equal importance as car infrastructure.
Oh the Urbanity! on Youtube has a really realistic take on this in Montreal: https://youtu.be/sokHu9bhpn8?si=C_2WD0WKDMKLVXIO
Linking w/o tracker here
How does one avoid freezing their nuts off riding in the snow? I used to bike to school when I was a kid and even at less than a mile ride with gloves and shit on my hands and face were killing me by the time I got there.
So, caveat: I think the guys in thi sthread trying to put ideals of a no-car society over the reality of what it’s like to be poor and commuting every day on bike are full of shit. That said, I have spent most of 20 years biking to work in the vicinity of a big city.
In winter, you have to dress like you’re prepared to be lost outside overnight with no shelter. Like, you have to learn to ACTUALLY dress for the cold, for extended periods of time. (And you have to pay attention to the weather report–if it’s going to be wet, you need something that can handle being wet.) Most kids who try to bike to school try to do it in the clothing that they’d wear to drive to school. They either do not physically own the winter layers they need to stay warm, or they were never taught to properly layer.
But basically, you need probably 3 layers minimum in Chicago-type weather. Probably more if you’re further north. I would regularly wear jeans with two layers of some type of pants underneath, like fleece and some other base layer, and on top I’d have long-sleeve shirt, t-shirt, another long-sleeve shirt or sweatshirt or sweater, and over all of that a heavy duty winter jacket. For my head I’d have a full-face mask with a thick warm hat on top. Sometimes a scarf too. For my hands, I’d have multiple layers, and I’d usually wear mittens rather than gloves because mittens are warmer, and I’d have more than one pair of mittens. When biking, at least one layer of mittens needs to be wind-breakery because that wind is COLD. For shoes, I’d have wool socks, sometimes two pairs, and real heavy-duty winter boots on (not sneakers or whatever).
The thing is, a lot of people who never have had to actually spend significant time out doors won’t even OWN sufficient layers to stay truly warm in the cold. Either due to poverty (it costs money to buy really, truly warm clothes of the right material), or lack of knowledge of how to dress for the cold. (I lacked both when I was young!) Or they’ll have thin cotton fast fashion when they actually need wool or synthetic warm-weather gear. Or they’ll be concerned about looking stupid (because if you dress properly, you look dumpy and not cool.)
But then you’re left with all those layers when you arrive at your destination and are back indoors? Like I understand you can take off a coat and gloves but if you’re wearing underclothes as well. Like if you’re in a business environment and have to wear a professional attire you’re limited by that in how you can layer up.
I was very lucky and worked at a place with a gym, so I just showered after my 18 mile commute, problem solved.
Surely even without a locker room, people can change out of the bottom layers for the workday though. You’d need a place to keep your clothing, but if you’re in an office with cubicles or something similar, that’s fine.
You assume people work inside the city and not in a factory outside of it.
Regular cars are far better equipped to handle snowy conditions than bikes. For instance a car can easily drive through thick fresh snow, even absent any cleaning because it’s heavy and high powered. Also, a car has windshield wipers. I have ridden my bike through heavy snowfall, and apart from how much it sucks, another issue is that you can’t see shit.
Great, and those places service maybe 10 percent of the United States.
This is about educating people so we can help fix this issues. No one is saying our system of car focused infrastructure isn’t there and fucked up. They’re saying car infrastructure costs significant amount of tax money (which you’re paying invisibly) and have a large cost associated with them. Bikes are relatively cheap, and their infrastructure is much cheaper, and the same is true for public transport.
Yeah, our society is dominated by car interests. Part of the problem is when anyone recommends a solution that isn’t cars people complain saying “this doesn’t work in this situation” and we never improve. Just agree it would be great and it sucks it isn’t better. You don’t have to always say it doesn’t work in a lot of places. We are all very aware.
For over a decade I went everywhere by bike in Sweden. They have bike lanes that get plowed and sanded in winter, the snow is not a problem, the problem is places with bad, car-centric infrastructure.
Congrats for having a good immune system. I was sick once a month the year I decided to bike to work in winter.
No, it’s about having the infrastructure for it. And even car infrastructure is a huge luxury compared to bike infrastructure. It costs cities 10x to support one car commute as it does to support 1 bike commute.
Most people just live in areas that demand that luxury transportation be the only form of transportation. That doesn’t mean cars suddenly are no longer luxuries, simply because your area chose to make practical transportation options impossible. You can pass a law making stretch limos the only road legal vehicle. That won’t change the fact that stretch limos are ridiculous luxury vehicles.
Don’t think that you understand the meaning of the term luxury and trying to rewrite the English language and correct all the people who do actually speak it isn’t helping.
It snows in Copenhagen, people keep biking.
Not true.
I haven’t owned a car for most of my adult life, and things start to get really difficult in winter with snow (insufficient bus routes in a given area, and sidewalks/bike lanes covered in snow and not able to be transversed).
When job-hunting I had to exclude a lot of places because of how impossible it’d be to do the commute in winter. Given how expensive rent is, plenty of people are forced to live with relatives or live in certain cheaper areas long past when they’d prefer to leave, which means if the roof over your head is in an area without sidewalks/bike lanes/public transit, you rely hardcore on a car to get to work and back. And if you don’t have that car, you basically lose your job. Maybe you can sustain it over the summer, but once winter snow kicks in you’re pretty fucked the first hard snow or ice that comes through. If you’re lucky, it’s close enough to walk–but not everyone is lucky like that. Also, if your job has mandatory overtime and you’re doing 50-60 hour weeks, walking 2-3 hours one way to work is a no-go.
I say this as someone who regularly biked/used public transit in Chicago winters. Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody’s lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.
I’m talking the machines themselves. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. Yes, infrastructure sucks in many places. That doesn’t change the fact that a car is objectively a luxury compared to a bicycle. You live in an area that has made getting around in a luxury vehicle the only practical option. That doesn’t mean cars aren’t luxury vehicles. People who live in areas that mandate that the all homes must be at least 10,000 ft^2 don’t automatically become poor.
Cars are a luxury, while bicycles are utility. We just build our cities with classism in mind. We build our cities to require expensive luxury travel modes, all in some misguided attempt to keep the poors out.
Your definition of objectively is off. Just because there is an alternate universe where cars would be a luxury doesn’t mean that cars are a luxury for all timelines.
Status quo of now demands a car. It sucks. We are now stuck in a vicious cycle of people need cars because there’s no public transit -> people don’t need public transit because they have cars -> people need cars because there’s no public transit
@IonAddis needs a car. Without it, their job options are limited. Much like me. We’d like to ditch our cars, but we can’t.
Aw, c’mon, cars are objectively speaking luxury items today. A modernized Daihatsu Opti with a sticker price of about $5,500 (the inflation-adjusted price of a Ford Model T) would completely meet the requirements for getting and keeping a job.
Sure would, where can you buy those?
I have the same question. I can’t. Cars are all luxury items nowadays.
A car can be used to move an entire family safely. You need 3-5 bikes to do the same far less safely including the very young, old, infirm.
Fatality rate for sedans is 2 per billion vehicle miles. Bikes are about 110.
Bear in mind that this is in the US which has bad drivers driving aggressively in environs ill suited.
Furthermore the average person commuting by car commutes 30 minutes by car the average bus rider an hour.
These are often distances too great to bike.
If you are moving a full car of people, it’s probably the best way to get around. However the average occupancy of a car is 1.2 people. The vast majority of cars have just 1 person, often driving less than 5 miles which is an easy distance to cycle.
Having more people cycling means the roads are less congested for the people who really need to use them. And with less people driving and more cycling, it should hopefully get safer.
People need the car for the average commute which is more than five miles its about half an hour by car which means half of commuters drive longer. Having already expended substantial resources on the car the cost of a 5 mile jaunt is about $1 to 1.50 round trip and 10 minutes or 30-45 minutes including waiting and 3-5 for the bus.
Alternatively if the wealter is neither very cold hot or rainy and you have an extra hour and don’t mind arriving sweaty and rumpled you could bike and risk your life more than driving a 1950s car!
Its an impractical idea that doesn’t scale compared to telecommuting and improving public transit.
The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.
But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites
bribedlobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it’s become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people’s (especially children’s, the disabled’s, and elderly’s) agency and freedom—because otherwise they’ll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you’ll encounter in all of those extra miles you’re forced to travel.Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.
VMT is the only reasonable metric to compare relative safety. It is literally the only metric that tells you how safe your family will be traveling.
The fact that its cars that mostly make bikes dangerous is important but mostly irrelevant to any individual making decisions.
Same with America being spread out. Mostly it is because it was cheaper and therefore more profitablr for individual actors not some grand conspiracy.
The elderly, young kids, and especially the disabled don’t need safer bike lanes they need better public transit
I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here’s a simple, constructed example of why:
There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.
Those two cities aren’t equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That’s a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.
As far as the American landscape, it’s spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.
I don’t claim it’s a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.
The metric you desire ought properly to be determined by what problem you are trying to address. We aren’t building America like sim city we are deciding what to do with our existing situation. For a person deciding what to do they need to weigh the actual consequences of various choices. Deaths per billion not million vehicle miles captures the actual costs of doing so. 2 for sedans 110 for bikes.
Anyone who drives 15,000 miles isn’t replacing their car with a bike. You would be asking them to bike 288 miles per week which is absolutely insane. Nobody is doing this. If they drive 5000 they might but at the cost of a drastic increase in risk. This leaves us where we are now where almost everyone either can’t or won’t.
And if you are too poor to live near your employer?
Even in contries where there’s good public transport that’s not really the case. My aunt lives in a town 40min from where I live, and she wakes up at 4am to go work at a factory 10mins from where she lives. There’s no public transport at that hour and no, an ebike is not a viable solution for those roads.
I’m all in for having big parking spaces outside of cities so people load off their cars and then use public transport, but in the countryside that’s just not viable.
That sounds like an infrastructure problem. If you built roads that were only accessible by literal monster trucks, would you try to pretend that monster trucks are suddenly practical necessities instead of ridiculous extravagances? Your aunt just lives in an area where they decided that it’s OK to require people to make a big luxury purchase just in order to get around. It may be necessary to buy a big luxury in some areas, but that doesn’t mean cars suddenly become the transportation of the working class.
You have to have to be suffering from a severe case of motornormativity to believe the clown math that a $2k purchase is a luxury while a $40k purchase is a necessity.
This is not the US, there are no monster trucks. It’s just a place in Spain where several towns are near each other and the factory is in-between so people go by car. We live surrounded by mountains my dude, it’s not an infrastructure choice.
Motornormativity holy shit you really have not stepped a foot outside cities huh.
I don’t have a car but good fucking luck telling factory workers that their car is a luxury lmao.
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I take it you’ve never been outside a big city in Texas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Et Cetera.
I’m only listing places I’ve been. An e-bike would just not cut it, especially if you have small children. There are places you can not go without getting on a freeway, and there is NO WAY IN HELL I’m putting a small child on the freeway or highway on a bike.
Why are you talking about infrastructure? You’re changing the subject. Obviously the infrastructure needs to support them, just as cars are pretty damn useless without good road infrastructure. But cars are objectively an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than e-bikes. Cars are a luxury, bicycles are a utility. The key problem is that many cities are built to require you to use the luxury means of travel instead of the affordable utilitarian ones.
Naw, we are talking about the same thing. I bring up infrastructure, as many have, because that’s the reality of the situation. The entire continental United States is built for cars, and that’s not changing anytime soon. The reality is that cars are necessary, and at this time, it is near impossible and a safety hazard for most americans to try and use bikes due to the hostile road infrastructure in place.
It is NOT economically more feasible here, at this time, and unless the investors that have put billions of dollars into lobbying for car-dependent cities suddenly want to default on their near-hundred year investment, it isn’t going to happen.
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.
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.
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 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
It lives!
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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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
Exhaust Now Vents Directly Into Cab: EPA says, “For your health!”
“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?si=6MBEF0r13GjUTprz
As long as that money is spent on public transit improvements, I think it’s a great idea for many large cities.
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
Sorry best we can do is 80% to the police department.
But we need more cops
And those cops need tanks.
And drones! With knife missles!
Yeah, that’s how we do it in Oslo. The road tolls mostly go towards funding transit and investments in bike and foot infra.
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
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.
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.
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.
That’s also very easily fixable
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.
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.
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.
The poorer you are the less you can afford paying for it. This is really just a method of opening the streets just for the rich.
Regressive solution.
Counterpoint, this funds public transport which is cheaper than car ownership and driving.
If you are poor, this pushes you to take a train or bus which saves you money.
The only people this taxes is the rich which makes this a progressive solution.
Cars in Manhattan were already “just for the rich”.
It’s simply making the rich think for a moment, before taking their car to the street. Which makes the streets safer for everyone who’s not rich.$9 doesn’t make any rich person think twice.
You might think that, but - they sure do like to complain about $9!
It adds up. There’s plenty of wealthy, but not obscenely wealthy people in NYC who would think twice about paying $9 for no reason even if they can easily afford it.
I don’t think they would ever have to pay it. It would be travel expenses on their accounting.
I think you might be misunderstanding the non-$100s of millions wealthy class.
They still do normal stuff, like go to shows and eat McDonald’s while driving themselves instead of having a chauffeur.
Having your business pay the toll for a personal trip is embezzlement and most people wouldn’t risk that over $9.
If companies are reimbursing people for commutes into work, that’s probably not an approved tax exempt benefit so you would still need to pay income tax on that $9.
Having business pay for your tolls is absolutely not embezzlement. It’s part of your compensation package. When charges increase or even gas prices, you list it and get paid back. Of course that rarely applies to poor people.
Decades ago my outside accountant passed all travel expenses to my business as part of his fees. His hourly time even included driving travel time to the office.
You’d think so, but the data clearly disagrees
Can you show the data? Because I find it extremely hard to believe multimillionaires would take the bus instead of being driven into the city in their limo.
The data this whole thread is about.
And you’re making assumptions about what “rich” means.
People only making half a million are rich. They still drive their own car. Those are most of the personal vehicles being driven in Manhattan.
The people you’re thinking of, are the wealthy. There are only a few hundred of those people in the city, they aren’t a major driver of traffic anyway, so nobody cares about them.Is there any data that shows people making $500k a year are deterred by a $9 fee?
Going to work 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year is $2,250. The average garage price is $15 a day.
This is really just a method of opening the streets just for the rich.
Anyone who takes the bus knows this is bullshit
You mean like how most things are anyways?
I’d say almost anywhere in the US besides the NYC area, this would probably be true. Given public transit is the norm there, it hardly seems regressive. I don’t think giving the rich the privilege of taking care through the city is a good thing, but at least the city gets to take some money from them. It would be much better if health care ceos all took public transit. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure an outright ban on private vehicles would be strongly opposed by such people right now…
congestion pricing doesn’t apply to public transit, which is the point. Take the damn bus to work. If it’s a long walk from your stop, you can buy an ebike with money saved from not maintaining a car.
It’s only regressive if you assume cars are a necessity, they’re really not in NYC. I sold my car after moving down from New England and haven’t regretted it, and it’s not an affordability issue for me either.
Also the rich will always have access to luxuries that poor people don’t. There will always be fancy restaurants and nicer clothes than are inaccessible to the poor, but that is separate from them having decent quality food and clothes, and maybe can go out to a nicer dinner every so often, just not a $500 tasting menu.
Public transport won’t be built?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
…if it isn’t the bridge I said I’d cross… Wait, not going to pay that congestion charge.
Fixing traffic by… discouraging people from driving, lol. Well I’m not complaining.
