NY isn't really smog filled. It is pretty windy and the straight broad streets ensure the wind flows. It's something that actually surprised me when I lived there. Trains, taxis and busses are also major contributors to the noise, along emergency services.
London had the first full assessment in 1964 that something ought to be done about cars on the basis of congestion, but sadly those building roads had the upper hand for a few more decades.
Supposedly they will all be electric by 2040, which is much later than I was expecting [1]. So far just 60-75 buses in NYC are electric out of 5,800.
That does not compare well with e.g. London, which currently has 950 electric buses out of 8,600. London plans to have all zero-emission buses by 2034 or 2030, depending on funding.
Here in Copenhagen the aim is to have entirely electric buses in 2025, although that seems to be apply only to the inner city. Some routes in the suburbs will not change until 2030.
If that was strictly true then the toll wouldn't make any difference. I don't have a better solution for Manhattan, but I can recognize that fixed-fee tolls select for traffic with the "most disposable income" rather than the "most economically beneficial" traffic.
Arguments can be made in places like Denver that high tolls means that those who have control over politics (who tend to be rich) won't feel much need to invest in additional road infrastructure, because their experience is that "the travel times are fine!". But they're using an up-to-$15-each-way toll road (E-470).
Similar to how the TSA procedures would get reformed if everyone flying had to go through the same process (most importantly, including anyone taking private planes). But almost no one who has power to force changes actually goes through the TSA lines because they mostly take private chartered planes which don't have any TSA process.
You have to align incentives with these things, and that can be tricky.
For TSA something like "if you're in line an hour before your flight and you miss your flight, the TSA pays for your ticket unless they can prove you got through in less than 15 minutes" might do the trick. You'd have to work out the details.
yes, these rates might rise. but it's the wealthy who are consuming these services. costs will obviously pass through to the rider (not be borne by driver)
If you're referring to the number of folks who work in the central business district of Manhattan but have no choice but to drive (given the enormous catchment area of MTA services), that number is vanishingly small, and congestion pricing does have low income discounts.
If you're referring to those who drive taxis or cars-for-hire in Manhattan, yes, the idea is the cost should be borne by riders who choose those services instead of transit.
There is no "CBD" in Manhattan. It's a made up term created for this program to make the pill less bitter. Let's be real, it's half the fucking island and where mostly everyone in the city works and shops. That's no small number.
It's everyone making deliveries to those businesses. It's every one doing manual labor jobs requiring tools. It's city workers on low salaries who have to live so far out in the boroughs where the MTA isn't even a good option to get to work anymore. The whole FDNY is losing their shit over this congestion pricing in particular because it hits them fairly hard.
> There is no "CBD" in Manhattan. It's a made up term created for this program to make the pill less bitter. Let's be real, it's half the fucking island and where mostly everyone in the city works and shops. That's no small number.
But it's not half of the city. NYC is more than Manhattan.
I'm sure all the plumblers, electricians, etc (the people who actually do the hard work of making the city actually function) are taking all their tools and materials around town on the buses and subways.
Boy is this being downvoted. Sorry to see that since this is very real. The "you can get half-price if you submit paperwork showing that you make less that $50k" is a joke.
I think like many things in NYC there's a bimodality to it -- the only people who can drive are the people who can afford to drive, or the people who can't afford to not drive. This will price out the latter but not the former.
It's literally the most used subway system in the United States, and one of the most used in the world. It has an annual ridership of over two billion people. Rail is one of the safest ways of moving people. Out of the two billion rides in 2023 there were 88 deaths and 146 injuries.
Same year, 238 people died and over 100,000 were injured on the road despite a similar share of commuters. So that would make driving at least 3X more dangerous by death toll, and 684X more dangerous by injury count.
Should everyone be forced to wrap themselves in bubble wrap and wear a football helmet when in or anywhere close to a car?
Most people that die on roads are drunk, tired, or speeding. If you don't do those things, your odds are much better.
Compared to the death on the train being almost totally random.
Totally random, and basically zero. People are awful at internalizing and handling tail risk.
This reminds me of the old Schneier article about how despite flying being the single safest way to get between any two places, post-9/11 people were so afraid they started to drive longer distances and the death toll was staggering. It's called "our decreasing tolerance to risk" and it's a good read. [1, 2]
It's true that "your odds are much better." But you can't control them completely. You can't control whether the person who hits you is drunk, tired or looking through coke bottle glasses and going 100mph. You're part of the equation. But even the safest drivers are going to be just about as safe as everyone on the MTA.
There were 88 deaths per two billion rides on the MTA. That's 0.00036%. Car deaths are 1.6 per hundred thousand, or 0.0016%, so 4-5X higher. Injuries though, several orders of magnitude.
I don't have to be concerned with being robbed, stabbed, beaten, abused, assaulted and pushed onto the train tracks in a car. In the NYC subway - you do.
Except the data (a) completely doesn't align with what you're saying and (b) you don't think your car gets broken into, and that those things can't happen to you on the street? You can't get pushed in front of a car? I suggest the burden of proof is on you to show the numbers, and tell us exactly how much riskier it is to take the train. It's not, at all, so it'll be hard to do, but I'm curious how you approach it.
There were 500 carjackings in 2021. 15,000 car thefts last year. Significantly more car break-ins than that.
Do you have some data to back up your assertion, actual numbers? If you'd like to enter that number into evidence, you should source it. If you think taking the subway is risky, back up your assertion, don't just gesture in the general direction. Simply feeling it in your heart isn't enough to make something true. Not that there isn't value in your perception, but if we're going to talk about it we should know which is fact and which is feels.
You've cited the number of people that were killed in cars compared to the subway. Don't you think you should have also included the number of people that were also killed during their journey to and from the subway? Unless you do I don't really think that's a fair comparison.
I'm not the one making the assertion, you are. The burden of proof is on you.
I refer you to Brandolini's law, or the bullshit asymmetry principal. It takes much longer to debunk claims pulled out of thin air than it does to pull them out of thin air. So I'm not going to play that game. If you would like to cite a statistic, you must provide that statistic, otherwise it's as good as made up.
You're saying "I bet a lot of people died leaving subway stations" -- cool. Don't bet. Find it, share it. Then we can talk. Otherwise, I bet the opposite direction and your bet is exactly as valid as mine.
When you're doing that don't forget to compare the number of people who are killed or injured getting from the parking lot to their final destination. Unless you do I don't really think that's a fair comparison.
Lots of the car injuries are to pedestrians and bikers, too, and while you're more in control of your risk profile, the risk profile remains significantly higher no matter how much you control it.
As for safety...
> In mid-2022, there was about one violent crime per one million rides on the subway, according to a New York Times analysis. Since then, the overall crime rate has fallen and ridership has increased, making the likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime even more remote. Last year, overall crime in the transit system fell nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 as the number of daily riders rose 14 percent.
The actual data shows the stations and trains are no more or less safe than any other public area. It's really just perception. [1] So I guess, don't ever go out in public?
> Maybe you don't care, but I'd prefer my little sister drive than take the train at night.
Let's stick to facts and leave the emotions to the side for a minute.
Less than 2% of major crime in NYC happens on the subway. [2] And crime rates on the subway specifically are falling.
Here's the MTA crime report for 2022. Remember to divide these by two billion. [3] Then compare to the odds of getting hit by a car, or while in a car.
Consider a relatively bulky item, say, a package of paper towel. Probably takes up about a cubic foot of volume, which is 0.027 cubic meters.
Suppose you drive that into NYC in a very small van, say a Ford Transit. A quick google tells me that has a cargo capacity of 10 cubic meters. The $15 toll amortized over 370 packages would add an additional cost of 4c per package.
This is the most extreme case I could think of off the top of my head. I believe most deliveries use vans with a much larger cargo capacity than a Transit.
Trucks already pay a significant cost on bridge tolls. Tolls will be dropped significantly at night, which is when trucks make most deliveries. It is unlikely to increase cost of goods.
Fair. That said, the goal is to shift a lot of that delivery traffic to other hours.
There are about 125K truck crossings into Manhattan per day. In a NYC pilot program with receiving companies, carriers, and truck drivers; some participants implementing the off-hour policy at a number of their locations and it went fairly well.
USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL and LaserShip won't do it. Home Depot, PC Richards and other appliance and furniture delivery companies won't do it either. Moving companies won't do it because residential buildings won't let them. That's a pretty large amount of your truck traffic right there.
Exactly, which is why I mentioned double parking in my previous comment[0].
It's a USD$115.00 ticket for double parking and delivery trucks do so even when there's space for them to park legally, lest they get blocked in by another truck -- it's just the cost of doing business.
And it's disgusting. Streets which should have four lanes of traffic are reduced to one or two lanes with all the double-parked trucks. Those fines should be $1000+ and entering into Manhattan from anywhere in a car should be at least $100. Sadly, no one asked me. And more's the pity.
> Those tolls will be discounted by 75 percent at night,
which is when most truck deliveries are made
I would bet the value in time saved to a freight delivery business to be stuck in less traffic (composed primarily of passenger cars!) is well worth more than the toll paid
According to INRIX, London is more congested than ever and it's so unpopular that 66% of residents voted against expanding the program and that very proposal is what sunk the Labour party in last year's by-elections.
Also London's public transit infrastructure is lightyears better than NYC's and way better managed. This whole pricing scheme is just to shore up the MTA which is massively wasteful with money and never gets any of its projects done on time (by decades).
a) You are confusing a congestion charge zone (CCZ) with an emissions charge zone (ULEZ) which specifically targets vehicles that do not comply with the latest emissions standards. These are two separate schemes, with different objectives. It is the later that was linked with Labour's by-election failures, in the very outer boroughs that have fairly poor public transport.
b) The INRIX scorecard is citywide. Assuming that they went with the conventional definition of "London", ie. whatever lies inside M25, this is an area of 1579 km2. The Congestion charge zone has an area of 21 km2, which is about 1.3% of the total.
It's still not enough (and don't get me started on the incredibly cheap double-parking fines!)
Ride the bus, take the train. Don't make my city more smog filled, noisy and nasty.