Outstanding move on NYC’s part.
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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.
Exhaust Now Vents Directly Into Cab: EPA says, “For your health!”
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
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.
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
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.
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.
This is great, should be implemented in all cities. Most people who can use public transport should.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
True wealth is not needing to drive a car at all.
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?
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.
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.
$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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Kinda unfair tbh
It’s like $9
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.
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!
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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.
…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.
Good.
