> "So are train tickets going down in price or more seats being added?"
You can answer this question by looking at the existing service.
Are the trains crowded, unreliable, and/or running over capacity? In that case it would be better to spend the extra money on upgrading the service. Or is the service good but not enough people are using it? In that case it may be better to use the money to reduce ticket prices.
Whatever gets more people to ride the trains is going to be the best solution.
It's actually "neither of the above": the congestion funding is simply going to replace federal funding (mostly Covid relief stuff) that is due to roll off.
The article links to another article[0] (way down in the final paragraph) about how some transit upgrades were put on hold because they were 50% funded by the congestion pricing:
> The MTA said money from congestion pricing makes up more than 50% of funding for the agency’s capital program
Presumably, those specific things can now get back underway:
> Projects that rely on the funding include modern signaling on the A train to Far Rockaway, more ADA-accessible stations and phase two of the Second Avenue subway.
I mean, sure, that's obviously the way the MTA wants you to look at this; and indeed the congestion pricing funds are restricted to be used on the capital budget.
But that's meaningless; since capital funding from the congestion pricing lockbox will just displace debt issuance, so it's effectively just taking pressure off the operating budget, which is where the current federal funding is going.
Nothing goes down in price. Ticket prices will remain the same, but salaries will increase because of inflation, so yes, they will become more affordable. At least that's the theory.
Nah. Those tolls go to new york. The people being taxed are predominantly from NJ. Our gov just raised the gas tax to help fund the transit system here, and he’s also suing NY over these tolls. Feel however you want about this, it’s a complicated issue because of our patchworks of states vs federal control.
If the people paying the tolls work everyday in New York, then I think it would be reasonable to consider them to effectively be New Yorkers as much as they are New Jersiers (New Jersites?).
Like you say though, it's complicated. Especially when you have New York and Jersey City that in a lot of ways are almost one city that happens to be in two states.
I will benefit personally as a NJTransit bus rider by, I hope, having a shorter bus ride (more time to do work and see family) since I sit in 1-2 hours of commuter car induced traffic several days a week
As an NJ resident, I very much look forward to this congestion pricing and wish it were $50 instead of $15...
Car congestion fees are touted but they are rarely effective, except at keeping poor people from moving around. It's just another dial the lazy can inflict on the population to pretend like they're solving the issue.
> Car congestion fees are touted but they are rarely effective
Citation needed. All studies I have seen suggest that congestion pricing achieves its desired outcomes of reducing car traffic and is the most effective way of doing so.
Nope. Draining the pool and filling it with more water is not an effective way of cleaning the pool. The pool ends up clean though so you can lead any study you want.
It's not effective. It's just prohibitive. Prohibiting people stops things, who would have guessed.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. If the goal is less traffic then steps that lead to less traffic are effective.
Presumably to get less traffic you need to make the choice (to drive a car into the city) less attractive. Making it cost more would seem to do that.
Of course $15 is not enough, because while that will act on the "unattractive" side, there will then be less traffic, which will the increase the "attractive" side. The toll will need to increase to find the balance where it dwarfs the no-traffic convenience.
This is how I played out in London for example. Traffic has been reduced, but the connection charge is quite high.
Which is fine, those who want the convenience, and feel it offers good value for money can use it. And public transport (busses) is faster.
Yeah you don't understand the point. Effective means it works well at the problem. Would you say chopping off an arm that is broken is an effective way of fixing a broken arm? It definitely eliminates the problem. It doesn't solve the problem effectively.
To get less traffic you need to make sure the roads are good enough to hold the amount of cars that come, or are designed in such a way that those cars don't go far or don't stop (hard). Public transport is a great way at reducing cars which may reduce traffic.
Putting a price on travel does not effectively manage traffic. It just chops traffic off. If we put a price on a bunch of stuff and stopped people enjoying the benefits of things that way, we'd also see sharp declines in whatever we wanted.... never because it is effective though.
Claiming a chopped off arm is good healthcare is a great falsehood to run with since it's easy, but it's not right. Instead of pushing that propaganda, let's actually mend the broken arm.
Non-toll roadways are a common-pool resource with significant externalities. They invite overuse and push most of the harms of overuse on others (locals, pedestrians, etc).
Congestion charges or tolls are a good way to put a price on the resource and make market mechanisms work.
Then the resources can be used for whatever produces the greatest benefit (and thus is willing to pay the most for use of the resource), and the tolls obtained can pay to address the externalities.
Tolls are there to pay for the new roadwork(s) (and in some cases, line private company profits). Nothing more. Anything else is not effective, it's just prohibitive.
It's good to have any scarce common resource be bid for, rather than giving it to whomever shows up first, is willing to wait longest, etc.
If 150k people want to go, it's usually better that the 100k people who value the road the most get through quickly, instead of having a random 110k get through after a large traffic jam.
150k people wanting to go and being able to go is better than a quarter being forced to stay home, a quarter being forced to not go and another half being allowed to go.
In many places, congestion pricing is dynamic and tries to keep roads at the highest throughput capacity.
Here, it's a pseudo-static value chosen to try and push the roads to the highest throughput capacity. (There is some variation by time of day, but not by actual demand).
It has a lot to do with market mechanisms. This is stuff that's within the capability of a high school student to perform a reasonable analysis about after a semester-long class.
I've never seen a toll road decrease in price because no one was using it. Wouldn't that be the easiest place to test congestion if "market played a role"? Car number go up, price go up. Bing bong.
No, it might take a high schooler to read too much into it and pluck things out of thin air though.
It's okay if you genuinely think prohibiting something is effective at providing people with more effective usage of that thing. You'll be wrong though.
> I've never seen a toll road decrease in price because no one was using it.
Have you ever seen a city with congestion charge have all traffic vanish? :P
> Car number go up, price go up. Bing bong
As already mentioned by me, to you, above: there are lots of roads with dynamic pricing with this exact characteristic. But there's a tradeoff to be made between having a simple charge and by having fancy dynamic pricing.
> It's okay if you genuinely think prohibiting something is effective at providing people with more effective usage of that thing.
Charging for something != prohibiting.
There's already a lot of costs driving into the city (including the opportunity cost of being stuck in traffic). Adding a charge can make driving cheaper for people who have a high value on driving (because they value their time).
Does the opportunity cost of driving fall if traffic decreases?
Is there an optimum amount of traffic on a given roadway for society?
Does society reach that optimum value on its own?
Does the current system (first come, first serve, best-effort) appropriately prioritize traffic with vastly different economic values and priorities appropriately?
Yep. I don't know the situation around NYC, but in the bay area, lower-income folks have been getting pushed out of SF and most of the peninsula, and have moved farther out. Something like this (e.g. if they were to analogously increase the Bay Bridge toll) just hurts lower-income folks even more. They have no choice: they need to drive to where the jobs are, but can't afford to live where the jobs are.
And the transit options are laughable. It's great for the people served by BART or Caltrain, but there are a lot of people far enough from a station to make it less than useful for them. So even with the traffic, they make the entirely logical choice to spend 2 hours commuting rather than 4.
It's easier to place the blame on something when you eliminate all casual or affordable use of that thing. You can stand back and say "see, it is this thing". Not mentioning the problems that eliminating and enforcing the ban of casual use brings about on required use.
Lazy weapons against problems are just barely better than sort-of-bad solutions. But if you look in the long term, the lazy weapons scorch the earth so that better solutions can't come along.
I agree that this will likely have a good outcome in the end but something about it just seems wrong to me.