So why on earth did it take so long to start?
Read the original article
Comments
Congestion pricing is great. I routinely end up in Manhattan on Friday and Canal Street at 5pm is running smoothly (not packed end to end with idling cars as before), the city looks like a regular city instead of the packed cars honking and spewing tire dust and exhaust. Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. It’s a different environment and everyone is loving it that I’ve talked to.
> ”Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.”
Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
London is a pretty good city for walking around and public transport.
When I lived in London (pre congestion charge) I used to walk for pleasure a lot simply because I enjoyed it.
I think road design and good public transport have improved it (although reliability could be better sometimes) since then. I do not agree with all the changes over the years, but net its great.
Lots of expensive cars but never really noticed the loud revving.
By decremental 2025-06-2020:49 [dead]
By tim333 2025-06-2020:18 Also a lot of the flash car revving is around Harrods which is outside the zone.
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. I
I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
By righthand 2025-06-2017:03 Yes I imagine a handful of crime was caused by the sheer number of people on the street. Fewer people idling about looking to cause a ruckus has made a huge difference. Passive benefits are what will keep cp in place.
By fitsumbelay 2025-06-2020:48 Same
I would've had a hard time wrapping my head around being OK with ~$10/trip before this post
Goes to show time is the most valuable commodity anyone'll ever own
Congestion pricing is only a half of the solution. The second half should be the MTA reform. MTA has been a dysfunctional mess and a bottomless money pit for as long as I remember. MTA of today will squander any amount of money you throw on it wasting all the potential gains from congestion pricing.
By sethhochberg 2025-06-2019:062 reply Regrettably the only source I can find hosting this video is a reddit post, but you might find the remarks by the MTA chair interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/1iyve4d/mta_buildi...
In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction.
Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
By const_cast 2025-06-2019:275 reply This is the story of the American public sector. Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector because clearly public organization X sucks. The private sector is greedy and a black box, so they're basically going to bleed the tax payers dry because they have no accountability to anyone. And the added complexity of hops between communication just burns money. And now the military is paying 150 dollars for a shovel.
The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-06-2021:153 reply The real problem is public corruption. People got tired of public officials getting paid off by a public sector union to create a bunch of makework jobs at taxpayer expense. The theory of privatization is that you put the contract up for bids and then every private company has the incentive to get the contract until the profit margins are low enough, and "low profit margins" are to the public's advantage.
But then the contracting process gets corrupted to prevent most companies from bidding and direct the contracts to specific cronies.
What you actually need is better ways to stop public officials from screwing the public for personal advantage.
By const_cast 2025-06-211:14 I disagree fundamentally - as more things got privatized in the US, you can clearly see the degradation of our services. For example, the NYC subway.
The reality is we are now paying a lot of money for some of the worse public services we've ever had. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, our public services were considerably higher quality - AND this is with increased labor. We've managed to significantly lower labor cost through technology, and yet the quality has degraded.
We've tried the theory of privatization. In fact we keep trying it over and over. Look around you. Is it working? Yes or no? No, right? Then we should be on the same page.
By bsder 2025-06-216:55 > The real problem is public corruption
The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth combined with pique at government departments that had the temerity to point out that "Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)".
The problem is that you switch from the government doing something possibly inefficiently to private industry who WILL take their cut no matter what which leads to even less efficiency. The contracting companies are the same but they love privatization because the government has far less recourse when they don't deliver properly.
If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.
For the modern strain: see DOGE. And how much money got saved? Yeah, exactly like that.
There wasn’t really a “theory” behind all the privatization.
The theory was “if we do this we can get more of the government money in our pocket” and the arguments were backwards construction from there.
By potato3732842 2025-06-210:42 There wasn't a "theory" because this wasn't some garbage that aloof academics cooked up.
At the time thins were privatized (50s through 80s) the misalignment of incentives was plain as day obvious fact. People looked at <shuffles cards> New York City, and said "do not want" and they attempted to break the feedback loop between public agencies and the parties they were making work for and tried to resolve it by putting more of the decisions of what work needed to be done under the umbrella of the agencies doing it. With proper competition, this can work. But people like you have spent the last 70yr erecting barriers to competition and so in an environment where things are only ever getting bid on by the same few players the costs rise and the values go down.
By dhosek 2025-06-2020:58 The other thing is that privatization is old-school patronage on steroids: if you structure it right, you get to channel government money to the recipients in a way that continues even after you lose power.
By supertrope 2025-06-2023:24 Giving displaced workers some money or offering a free public service is frowned upon so we have to launder it through dummy jobs.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:25 > Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector
Do voters really push for this? I would have suspected it is the consultants and the unions.
By xnx 2025-06-210:05 Public or private, this is what happens without competition. Even with a fixed set of tunnels and tracks, there are ways to benefit from competitive market forces.
By krferriter 2025-06-2019:382 reply Americans have a weird thing with government agencies (or government-owned companies, e.g. Amtrak) simply hiring people to do a thing the government is tasked with doing, or buying things the government needs in order to do that thing. So instead our governments at all levels rely heavily on contracting it out to private companies to do the exact same thing but with higher cost and turnover and no long term expertise built in-house in the government agency which is now tasked with managing and overseeing all this contracting.
The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
By pfannkuchen 2025-06-2021:03 I suspect the theory is that private companies with many clients besides the government are less susceptible to bloat and waste than a government agency is because they are not a singleton entity and will be outcompeted if they are sufficiently inefficient.
A problem with this theory is that, I imagine, a lot of such companies basically only have contracts with the government. So it ends up with the same singleton problems, just outsourced.
By nobodyandproud 2025-06-2020:12 Largely because a hostile state government is given control over what’s largely a NYC issue.
By passivedonut 2025-06-2021:204 reply Congestion pricing is a regressive tax. It doesn’t actually ‘work.’
As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public.
Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result.
Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living.
If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
By ethbr1 2025-06-2022:40 It would be a regressive tax... if there weren't public transit alternatives.
As is, it's a tax on people who drive.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:27 > As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road
Most people in a car in Manhattan don’t need to be in one, and most of those that do are exempted from this charge.
(I say this as someone who is commonly in a car in Manhattan.)
By CPLX 2025-06-2023:00 It’s not a regressive tax, it’s a fee. Taxes and fees are related but distinct.
It’s possible for an overall fee based structure to be regressive, but it’s also possible for it to not be.
For example a fee for landing private jets at public airports is not regressive.
Given the contours of who does and doesn’t drive in Manhattan it’s almost certain that this one has a similar dynamic and is actually progressive.
By insane_dreamer 2025-06-2021:421 reply it works in places that are already gentrified, like Manhattan or the City (of London). No one is suggesting congestion pricing in Queens.
By righthand 2025-06-210:45 “Gentrified”, no. “Romanticized” to the extreme, yes
By tixocloud 2025-06-2020:22 Great to hear the positives about congestion pricing. It would be great to see how it can ease the congestion in Toronto. Unfortunately, I suggested congestion pricing as a possible solution as part of an academic project and was laughed off.
Surely the reduction in vehicle count is more than enough to cancel this out, but a moving vehicle does emit more exhaust and tire dust per unit of time than does a vehicle idling. For the environmental improvements it's more about the reduction in the number of cars than about the better traffic flow.
By mumbisChungo 2025-06-2016:511 reply The better traffic flow reduces the amount of time they’re operating for as well (assuming start/end of planned route is independent of travel speed)
Right. Presumably a car idling for ten minutes produces less pollution than a car being driven for ten minutes, but a car that is driven for ten minutes and idled for an additional ten produces more pollution than either of them. Any pollution produced by cars idling in bad traffic is superadded to the pollution produced in transit so improving the flow of traffic should reduce pollution even if the total number of cars remains steady.
By marcosdumay 2025-06-2019:34 It's worse than that.
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
Pollution per time doesn’t make any sense as a metric. A trip that includes a lot of idling will pollute more than a trip that doesn’t.
By sokoloff 2025-06-2018:58 I think that depends on the motivations of the driver. You (and I) are probably thinking of a trip that is motivated solely by getting from A to B (or A to B to C to A). In that case, any pollution from idling is strictly additive.
But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)
By mystified5016 2025-06-2017:221 reply The stop and start conditions of highly congested traffic produce more brake and tire dust
By SoftTalker 2025-06-2017:42 And more emissions. Idling is pretty efficent, as is driving at a constant speed. Repeatedly stopping or slowing, then accelerating is not. This is also an unintended consequence of "traffic calming" devices e.g. speed bumps or chicanes. People slow down, then hit the gas again which is awful for emissions.
By eddd-ddde 2025-06-2021:03 A moving car from point a to point b will always emit such "moving vehicle" pollution. The idle pollution is just extra.
By toomuchtuna 2025-06-2018:38 Won't those idling vehicles also end up moving?
By AnthonyMouse 2025-06-2021:081 reply > Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.
The people who blare loud music and rev their engines are the people with expensive cars? The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
>The people who blare loud music and rev their engines are the people with expensive cars?
Yes, this has been my experience as well.
>The people who can afford expensive cars are the ones being deterred by congestion pricing?
Who says they could afford it? Getting an insane car loan for a vehicle you can't afford is an American tradition.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-06-2022:52 > Yes, this has been my experience as well.
Are you adequately distinguishing between expensive cars and formerly expensive cars?
A brand new Rolls-Royce or Mercedes comes with an engine purposely designed to be audibly subdued and doesn't come with a sound system suitable for projecting a racket onto the opposite side of the city. A 10 year old Acura or BMW with a modified exhaust and a trunk full of aftermarket subwoofers, on the other hand... but that's available at a different price point.
> Who says they could afford it? Getting an insane car loan for a vehicle you can't afford is an American tradition.
The implication of the question was to point out that the purported advantage of congestion pricing is really in pricing out the riffraff, because "we've succeeded at keeping the poor people out of the borough" isn't a very sympathetic goal and is what "expensive cars" was presumably intended to deflect consideration away from. What other relevance does it have if the cars are expensive?
If you're admitting that the people being priced out are in fact poor regardless of the price of their cars, I guess that's kind of my point.
It remains amazing to me, time and time again, how relatively small fees can encourage large changes in behavior. At the aggregate level, people overvalue their time and undervalue their money.
i think it's the opposite right? people that didn't mind spending an hour in traffic are now unwilling to pay $9.
By righthand 2025-06-2017:13 I think you’re agreeing with each other. GP was talking about at the aggregate level where your observation is about the individual specifically. At the aggregate level with traffic reduction you’d think individuals would weigh their money as a shortcut to regain time but they don’t. My personal guess is because Manhattan is not the actual destination, work and home are the destinations, Manhattan is just the environment. Before it was the cost of car maintenance to drive into Manhattan (in the individuals eyes “free”), now it’s car maintenance + $9/day.
By 3eb7988a1663 2025-06-2019:282 reply I certainly refuse to pay $0.10 / plastic grocery bag since those fees were put in place. I have been exclusively shopping with a canvas bag for years now. Likely having saved thousands of bags in that time. In fact, I am angry at the half-dozen times where circumstances have forced me to pay for one.
I think I’m up to like 8 canvas bags, significantly thicker yet still significantly plastic, which I continue to forget at home.
These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time
I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!
HN likes to equate all environmental issues with carbon. It’s one dimension but not the sole dimension. Bags were a huge litter, wildlife and quality of life issue.
My wife was a finance commissioner for a water utility. Guess what the most common clogger of storm drains was? Shopping bags. They did hundreds of service calls annually doing service that ranged from fishing them out to using a hydro-jet to clear a pipe.
Within 18 months of the bag fee, those calls dropped 60%. That’s easily $800k in wasted labor and dollars in this small city.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-06-2020:32 Great example. FWIW I don't think this is just an HN issue. It's hard for most people to have a systemic view of policy. I'm pretty dialed in on these issues and I never even thought of the drainage impacts of the bags.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:311 reply > It's just the most important dimension, by far
Strongly disagree.
New Delhi’s has gotten more polluted over the last decades, to the point that it’s almost comical. (400+ AQI being normalised.) Post pandemic, it’s done a decent job in some parts at reducing the amount of trash on the roads. On the balance, I find it more pleasant now than before.
I’d also guess that most people would prefer trading emissions for e.g. not living next to a carcinogenic or toxic-waste dump.
No, it's still more important. Continued global warming would eventually render New Delhi uninhabitable.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:371 reply > Continued global warming would eventually render New Delhi uninhabitable
This is hyperbolic. It will make it more expensive. But not uninhabitable.
You know what would render sections of it literally uninhabitable? A Union Carbide incident [1].
Sufficiently high CO2 levels, such as existed at the end of the Permian period, can raise temperatures above that which would be survivable. Sure, people could huddle in air conditioned survival pods. This doesn't seem to be a sufficient rebuttal of the claim.
If you think an analogy with the P/T extinction is invalid, note that CO2 levels are rising now much faster than they did over that event.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:47 > people could huddle in air conditioned survival pods. This doesn't seem to be a sufficient rebuttal of the claim
I kind of think it does, particularly when we’re talking about temperatures that humans choose to live in (almost precisely as you describe) today.
CO2 is not going to render our inland cities uninhabitable. It will make them more deadly, more expensive and less comfortable. It will cause a continuation of the current extinction event, which is already comparable with (if not equivalent to) P/T.
Back when this was new, there were studies showing that the typical canvas bags sold at grocers are also breeding grounds for all sorts of nasty things that you don't want to be transporting your food in.
So it's just purely all downsides. Like security theater, but for the environment.
By showerst 2025-06-2020:18 Tell that to the Anacostia river in DC! They great at reducing watershed pollution. It's really noticeable how much better things have gotten since the bag fee.
As a side effect, DC's water authority has also been able to cut maintenance budgets because clumps of bags were our main source of sewer clogs.
By michaelmrose 2025-06-2020:06 Likewise with the canvas bags they are so much nicer but if I do end up needing an 8 or 10c bag I hardly care. If I spend 50 its 1/5 of 1% of the cost.
By supertrope 2025-06-2018:17 People are not perfectly rational. When there's no explicit price tag people tend to overlook costs. For example when Tesla Model S sold at $70,000 a decrease in gasoline prices was predicted to hurt sales even though a few hundred dollar swing in fuel cost for one year is not going to materially change total cost of ownership of a luxury vehicle.
By michaelmrose 2025-06-2020:04 Eg when plastic bags are free Grandma wants 5 things in 2 doubled bags but at 8 cents each she'll just stick them in the cart with no bag at all and transfer them to the back seat even if 8c for single bag to carry them in would add negligible costs to her $120 basket.
By GoatInGrey 2025-06-2018:382 reply I'm not sure why what is functionally a $180/month fee is considered "small". I think what we're seeing here is that public services (like roads) are more enjoyable, for those who can still use it, if the lower half of the income ladder is banned from using it.
That doesn't make much sense, driving a gas car from Jersey is gonna eat up a couple of gallons of fuel ($10x20=$200/mo), insuring it will be $200/mo, if it's not paid off it'll cost at least $500-600, parking will run easily $500 but likely more. Why is that $180 the straw that broke the camel's back?
By Spooky23 2025-06-2019:55 The Jersey thing isn’t the issue. Car commuters still commute. Most of the traffic volume are whiny Long Islanders who’d rather cut through Manhattan than navigate the belt parkway and bridges to New Jersey. Also poorly served Queens and Brooklyn residents — I grew up in Queens… my dads public transit time to Lower Manhattan or my mom’s time to Manhattan hospitals was about 2 hours — similar to taking Metro North from Dutchess county or LIRR.
The downside of this stuff that we don’t have data on is how it affects big employers who benefit from car transit and benefit the city as a whole? How many patients are going to avoid NYU, Cornell or MSK in favor of a satellite site not in the city proper, for example?
NYC chased most of the big industries away already in my lifetime, I wonder if this will impact commercial business in the city in the long run.
By kevin_thibedeau 2025-06-2019:062 reply When I lived in the area, I used to regularly drive in to lower Manhattan after 6PM for free parking because it was cheaper, faster, and more convenient than taking the train from right in front of my NJ apartment. The congestion charge would change that equation.
By const_cast 2025-06-2019:291 reply The parking should've never been free in the first place, that's always a mistake. Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain and own.
> Even a single parking spot costs many thousands of dollars a year to maintain
In what universe is this true?
There are 3 million parking spots in NYC. If each cost $3000/year to maintain (presumably that's "many thousands"), that would be $9 billion/year - considerably more than what's spend on the entire Department of Transportation.
I'd be shocked if a single spot cost even $100/year to maintain.
By supertrope 2025-06-2023:391 reply It's the opportunity cost of the land being used as parking.
Manhattan is one of the few parts of the US where we don't indirectly mandate seven parking spots per car on average. A surface lot ends up costing about $7,000/spot to pave. But at >$1,000,000 per acre garages are used instead. But then that's tens of thousands per spot in construction cost. Underground parking is the most expensive type due to excavation cost. Meanwhile the most convenient parking curbside is offered by the government for free or <$1. Is there something wrong with this picture?
What opportunity cost is there for existing city-owned curbside parking?
Are you going to build on something a couple feet wide on the wrong side of the sidewalk? Or tear down all the buildings then move the sidewalk first?
Treating curbside parking like it was exactly the same as large rectangular lots is nonsense.
By const_cast 2025-06-211:101 reply > Treating curbside parking like it was exactly the same as large rectangular lots is nonsense.
Yeah because the parking is already built. But obviously before you build the parking you have a choice - and building "free" parking is a really stupid choice you should never make. You can give that space to building or the road, either will be more productive.
By Aloisius 2025-06-211:31 That's quite a hypothetical to use as justification given how long ago lots were drawn up.
I prefer to value things based on what is rather than what could be if only we had a time machine.
By supertrope 2025-06-210:00 Restaurant tables.
By ta1243 2025-06-2019:10 So your land use is no longer subsidised?
By Aloisius 2025-06-2022:52 You can buy a used car that gets 30 mpg city for $7,000. Even with a loan, that's closer to $200/month at today's (rather high) rates, not $500-600/month.
Insurance on that will be on the order of $60/month for an adult safe driver, not $200/month.
Driving from say, Jersey City to the East Village and back every day is going to use about 10 gallons of gas per month @ $3.20/gallon that's $32/month, not $200/month.
Parking is bad though it depends on how long you park for, but that's because that has also been jacked up to only allow the wealthy to drive.
So yeah, $180/month extra would in fact be a lot.
Manhattan is at least as dense as London, and land values must be about the same. The market cost of parking in London far outweighs the cost of the congestion charge, so presumably that's the same in New York.
Seems that renting a square foot of downtown Manhattan land is about $60/year. A parking space being about 200 square foot, that's $1k a month if paying the actual rate, just for parking (let alone the road space)
Seems that $200 a month is small when compared to the actual cost.
By Aloisius 2025-06-2023:14 Not a fair comparison. Private owners have to pay property taxes and renters have exclusive use.
Never mind that the land value for a curbside parking spot on the side of the road is substantially less simply because you can't build anything on it.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2017:166 reply If you make it so only rich people can do a certain thing, you'll have way fewer people doing that thing. I'm curious what kind of inconveniences this has caused for people who can't afford to pay the fee though.
Are you actually curious or were you just trying to make a gotcha against congestion pricing?
I ask because the "only rich people" criticism of NYCs project has been beaten into the dirt and discussed at nearly every level of politics for more than a year now. If there's anything you want to know the information is readily available.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2018:012 reply I'm not curious because I already know the answer. The inconvenience is that driving through the city is $9 more expensive without any improvement in other transportation alternatives. For some people that's no big deal but obviously for a lot of people it is, hence why there's fewer people on the road. The "missing" people are the ones who simply can't afford to be there.
The OP, as well as plenty of other articles, pointed out a rather immediate improvement in alternatives: the busses are faster as a result of traffic being reduced.
By shawn-butler 2025-06-213:02 This is absurd. The data shows maybe a 1-4% gain.
I know that legitimizes a bunch of activist talking points but come on.
This is HN
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2020:34 If you're going to massively inconvenience millions of people then you have to do better than a couple buses running faster. Better as in, using the new funds to completely revamp the whole system. If those faster bus lines don't provide an alternative to my previous route then they don't provide me an alternative to paying $9, losing my job, or picking a different city to live in.
>>The "missing" people are the ones who simply can't afford to be there.
I don't believe that for a second. They could afford to drive a car, insure it, maintain it, buy fuel, and pay for very expensive parking in NYC, but $9 is too much now?
I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong if there's any data that suggest that this is actually true.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2020:371 reply People pay what they have to pay do get to work or get around. In that sense they could "afford" it, because the alternative is to move or get a different job.
You're trying to make it seem like driving in NYC is simply a lifestyle decision that people could choose to do or not do. For some people it is, for many people it's simply the only viable option. Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
By gambiting 2025-06-2020:47 >>Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.
Which implies that the people who continue driving are indeed those who have no other option, and those who do have taken it instead of paying the $9. Would you disagree?
And no, of course I don't imply it's a lifestyle choice - merely that some people(not all!) were driving in NYC even though they indeed had other options available, because there was no extra cost associated with it - now that there is, those people use those other options where possible.
Again, it's really fun to speculate why who and where is doing what, but if you have more specific data then please share.
By littlestymaar 2025-06-2019:041 reply Why would they not be there then? How is that supposed to even work if it doesn't affect consumers' behavior?!
This kind of argument reminds me of a French politician who defended a tax on sweet drinks as a way to fight against the obesity crisis looming (France performs better than most country in that regard, but the situation is still bad). She wanted a tax to deter the consumption of sweet drinks, but at the same time they wanted the tax to stay at “a level where it would not affect the purchasing power of people”.
>>Why would they not be there then?
Funny because I was going to use that exact example as something that absolutely works. I can easily afford the sugar tax where I live, it's been around for a few years now. But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
I understand the same mechanism works with cigarettes and loads of other things - even if you can afford them the increasing price puts you off.
But maybe for a more relevant example - I can comfortably afford parking right in the city centre where I live. But the idea of paying what's being asked for parking puts me off so much I just park at the nearest park and ride and take the metro in.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2020:401 reply These are all lifestyle choices. You don't need to do any of those things. Getting to work or getting around one's own city are not lifestyle options. They're necessities.
Using market-style policies to try to nudge people around only works if there are alternatives they can choose from. In this case for many people there are not.
By gambiting 2025-06-217:09 >>In this case for many people there are not.
And like I said in my other comment - those people most likely still continue driving and pay the $9 fee. It's people who have other options or who simply don't really need to be there who have now stopped.
This exact same scheme has played out in many other cities already, this isn't new.
By sokoloff 2025-06-2019:38 I can also afford the parking in the city center, but mostly choose to patronize businesses in the suburbs where the parking is free (and usually plentiful). That I think is what city business owners are worried about.
By littlestymaar 2025-06-2022:04 > But when I go to a store and a box of regular coke is more expensive than diet it makes me not pick regular even though the difference is meaningless financially to me.
So you're telling me that the very same people who refuse to buy non-brand Coke copies whose taste is indistinguishable from true Coke in blind tests would accept to buy Diet Coke despite it tasting like shit in a way that everyone can feel? And they would do so for a smaller gain than what it would save them to buy the cheap copy?
$9 is basically an hour of parking or whatever so really it's likely to be saving people a lot of money since transit costs a lot less
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2018:041 reply If transit is an option for those peiple and if all other things (transit time, safety, etc) are equal, then yes.
By const_cast 2025-06-2019:30 It is, the subway is a few orders of magnitude safer and cheaper. Sometimes it can take more time... now. Because of congestion pricing. Before, it was often faster to just walk next to the cars than be in one of the cars.
By cortesoft 2025-06-2018:46 Poor people were taking public transit already
$2.95 + planning time or you can walk for free
Literally no one has stepped forward and said “I can’t afford $9 or $2.95 or the deep discount commuter tickets.”
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2018:031 reply I assume you're referring to just taking the metro instead. Not everyone who drives lives near a metro. Not every destination is accessible via the metro. Many people commute from more affordable areas far from the city where public transportation isn't always a viable option. Driving gets $9 more expensive but public transit doesn't suddenly get better for the people who can't pay $9.
By overflow897 2025-06-2018:471 reply There are very very few places in nyc not accessible via some combo of bus, metro and ferry. It's not as reliable as say Japan but the public transit network is pretty extensive.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2020:441 reply Not everyone who drives through NYC lives in NYC. Even if it were, those transit hops add time. Now you're forcing people to choose between paying money they don't have or spending time they don't have.
If you want the government to help poor people, there are much better ways to do it than giving away access to one specific kind of public resource to everyone.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2018:082 reply Would you be in favor if they also wanted stop "giving away" access to the sidewalk and fresh air?
By supertrope 2025-06-2018:251 reply Sidewalks can fit an order of magnitude more people than roads can fit cars. Especially if one car lane was re-allocated to make sidewalks wider. Less traffic means less air pollution.
It's almost never needed to faregate sidewalks. Tourist districts can organize a special improvement district tax on stores to fund sidewalk upgrades, trash collection, shuttles, security, parking, and planting flowers. This makes the zone more even more attractive to tourists.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2020:502 reply This analogy pretty much gets at the heart of what makes these policies distasteful. Me walking or driving through my own city or neighborhood, where I live, pay taxes, and vote, is not the same as me taking a trip to Disney. I don't do it just for fun. I do it because living requires me to occasionally move from place to place.
Auctioning off to the highest bidder the right to move around is cruel because you make it so that some people simply can't afford to exist in public spaces, and because you're telling people that their own city or neighborhood doesn't even belong to them.
The correct analogy here would be access to healthcare, water, or electricity.
By supertrope 2025-06-2023:08 Are people entitled to drive through an area? Or are people entitled to travel through an area? When you live in a car dependent society the two seem to be the same. But they're not the same. Only 22% of Manhattan residents own a car!
Look at a school. Many make the front driveway bus only. Because parents dropping off kids one at a time was very low capacity and causing a line of cars to form every morning backing up into the road. There's just not enough space for everyone to drive single occupancy cars to the same destination within the same half hour time slot. Favoring school buses in the school driveway is not an attack on drivers. It's acknowledging the limits of geometry and time, and choosing to get the most out of our common space.
By wat10000 2025-06-2021:34 Does this imply that the government should buy everyone a car? Or is driving not actually necessary for existing in this space and it's enough to let people walk for free?
Keep in mind that we're not talking about some suburb where you have to drive two miles to get to the store, but rather about the most walkable place of its size in the US.
By wat10000 2025-06-2021:28 Air isn't created or owned by the government. Sidewalks are not capacity-limited in real-world usage and so there would be no point.
By littlestymaar 2025-06-2017:341 reply The theory is that the price signal helps people make their own arbitrage between time and money and it would maximize society utility, but the reality is since people have a very different amount of money, it just do what you say: the rich pay without second thoughts and enjoy the higher quality of life when the less rich see a degradation of their own: they will either pay with money they don't have in excess and have to stop other consumption, or take public transports which is less convenient for them (since it's cheaper than car commute, they would be doing it if they didn't like it better).
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2018:061 reply Yeah, and I'm guessing the opinions of those people don't get taken into account by folks who are studying or manufacturing consent for these policies.
By michaelmrose 2025-06-2020:202 reply We have finite space for roads and an expanding population. Doing nothing means people spend as much time on congested roads as they would taking public transportation. Objectively the worst of both worlds and people having invested in a car and being used to it will continue living in it as it gets worse and worse.
Providing additional impetus to make a change seems virtuous.
By yupitsme123 2025-06-2020:521 reply If there's an overall plan to revamp transit and public spaces to accommodate all people then I'm in favor of it. That's how functioning cities do it. This is clearly just a money grab by a corrupt city.
By michaelmrose 2025-06-2020:59 If slack capacity exists in public transportation and roads are way over what's needed immediately is for people to switch over. Making it more expensive to drive instead of subsidizing it is a way to achieve this.
By littlestymaar 2025-06-215:51 I'm convinced that having individual cars as default mean of transportation sucks, don't get me wrong.
But it's not because “doing nothing” is bad that any decision is good.
This kind of decisions that reduces the freedom of movement of the majority but spare the rich is exactly how people like Trump reach power.
You want to solve the urban planning problem that is car congestion, then the solution is a urban planning one, not a new tax.
Or at least if you want to leverage economic incentives, you have to give everyone working in Manhattan and not living there $200 a month so that their overall purchasing power isn't impacted (the marginal price of taking the car stays the same, and so does the incentive).
By dcchuck 2025-06-2018:00 Really? I must admit I have not noticed it. I've had nightmare trips trying to get into the city still during traditional heavy traffic times. Frankly I've thought more "the pandemic is finally over" than I did "congestion pricing is working" over the past few months.
I'll be curious what happens come winter time. Midtown becomes gridlock in the evenings. I do not expect that to change.
All that being said - probably my own biases skewing things. I will keep my eyes peeled!
Are there any measures that show any downside to this? I confess a bit of bewilderment at how many people will assert there must be something bad every time this comes up. I don't think a single measured outcome has gone poorly from this.
By TulliusCicero 2025-06-2016:379 reply It reminds me of what happens nearly every time car parking on a busy retail street is removed for bike lanes/bus lanes/better walking.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
> In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent.
I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours.
I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
By acdha 2025-06-210:07 > I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Maybe, but wouldn’t they say deliveries if that’s what they meant? If I had a shop with no rear access, I’d be asking the city to create and enforce a dedicated short term delivery zone because unrestricted parking is going to full of private cars when the delivery driver arrives. It’d be totally reasonable to ask for that but it’s really rare compared to assertions that most customers drive which are obviously false because they need more than 1-2 customers per hour.
This keeps coming up in every area: discouraging private vehicle use in a dense area makes everything better for everyone. It’s safer, healthier with less pollution, more pleasant with less noise, easier for people who need accessibility accommodations, easier for delivery drivers and contractors who actually need trucks, and reduces congestion. Once you stop pretending there’s any way to make one car per person work in a city, there actually is enough space for everyone else.
By cco 2025-06-2020:42 Then the owner should prioritize things like congestion charges and removal of parking.
To your point trucks already double park so both changes would be a positive for deliveries.
I think the businesses do kind of know their customers.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
By SoftTalker 2025-06-2017:541 reply I think this is basically hitting the nail on the head. My town has closed a lot of street parking in the downtown, and as a result I rarely do shopping or dining there now because I don't want to park in a garage 3-4 blocks away when I used to be able to park on the same block if not right in front of the business. In other words, I had no other reason to be downtown, so making it inconvenient is going to make me less likely to go there.
But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
> But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place.
One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places.
It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
By yesfitz 2025-06-2022:06 Another possible answer: It sucks to be a pedestrian around cars, so people decide to drive.
As a pedestrian, cars take up space and block your vision when they're parked, they're dangerous, loud, and (can be) smelly when they're moving, and even when the cars themselves aren't around, the space between buildings is dominated by their required, exclusive infrastructure of asphalt.
Usually when parking is removed, it's replaced with planters, seating, and things for people instead of cars, which makes it more attractive to be a pedestrian.
By SoftTalker 2025-06-213:06 More choices. The places within easy walking distance get boring after a while. Also because it’s cheaper (but they probably aren’t fully considering the cost of the drive)
By sokoloff 2025-06-2019:05 > Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there.
I'm struggling to imagine reasons why a significant number of people will now start walking to these businesses. What are some of these multiple reasons that have now been overcome to an extent as to cause shop traffic to increase ten-fold?
By kulahan 2025-06-2019:40 This actually makes a lot of sense to me. My wife is disabled, so I’m probably one of those customers he would lose along with his parking, but there are probably 1.5x as many homes in my neighborhood (of condos) than there are vehicles actively parking here. It would likely be a huge boon for the places I frequent now. It might even have an effect of slightly countering market downturns as people in trouble sell/lose cars and move to public transit temporarily
One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!
> Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do.
You’re hypothesizing that people are purposefully avoiding these streets because they have cars driving on them?
Yes? Cars are loud, they smell, take up a tremendous amount of space & are gigantic metal boxes that can cause serious injuries even at low speeds.
In Amsterdam there's been countless examples of this exact thing. Businesses booming after they rip out parking and make roads forbidden for cars, and I can anecdotally say I also love whenever they rip out parking near me in the Netherlands.
By lurk2 2025-06-211:18 > In Amsterdam there's been countless examples of this exact thing.
Anything by way of peer reviewed empirical evidence?
The business owners are clueless.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/new-vancouver-c...
Every time I see a study like this it is similar results where the reality doesn't match the guesses of local business.
By obelos 2025-06-2020:49 I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”
By norir 2025-06-2017:32 Yeah, I imagine they are often projecting their own frustration over parking onto their customers. Every time a customer comes in and grumbles about parking, it triggers their confirmation bias. Conversely, new customers who only popped in because they were on foot are probably less likely to express that fact.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
By ASinclair 2025-06-2017:09 I think it's often that the business owners themselves drive to their businesses and street park. They don't want to give up their own parking.
By focusgroup0 2025-06-2018:351 reply Small business owners in SF were pretty upset after the Valencia St bike lane killed their business:
By TulliusCicero 2025-06-2020:43 Yeah, this is what I'm talking about: https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/21/valencia-street-bike-lane-...
> Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds.
> “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses.
> Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior.
> “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
By ctkhn 2025-06-2018:27 There were some negative effects at a construction shutdown of a street recently where it temporarily did hurt some business, mostly retail shops but not the restaurants/bars which had a big boost in business. These boutique style shops were more patronized by people from suburbs or far flung parts of the city than actual locals, and their location was based on the owners wanting to live in the city vs their actual customers.
Some changes, like having a highway bypass a small city, can be catastrophic to local businesses. A restaurant that might have hundreds of out-of-town cars go by, now has only local residents.
By TulliusCicero 2025-06-2016:42 That's a completely different sort of scenario than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about changes to streets that accommodate greater population density.
By mcphage 2025-06-2016:45 > It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited
Movie production companies compared VCR sales to a serial killer. These were the leaders of large, successful companies, and they didn’t know shit.
It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pity because public transit done well is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw [NotJustBikes]
I'm torn on this. It is a very appealing way to blame people in discussing why it goes this way.
It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
It is not that cars are not useful. It's that people want to live in nice cities and too much car infrastructure ruin cities. You can't have both. You can't enjoy a nice terras next to a busy road. Or kids cannot safely cycle with their friends if there are many cars driving around.
People should not forget that Europe has tons of car friendly towns and suburbs and many people live there. You can choose your lifestyle.
I fear it often cuts a different way. Everyone wants it so that they can have the benefits of the car, along with the benefits of nobody using a car. A friend I was talking with called it the "main character syndome."
It is a lot like people wanting city life to look a lot like college life. Without wanting to live in dormitories where people are also raising kids.
By supertrope 2025-06-2022:531 reply Car commercials always feature completely empty streets, no red lights, and no speed limits.
By taeric 2025-06-2023:05 To be fair, videos of ideal walkable cities always have an absurd amount of active space. :)
By austhrow743 2025-06-2022:431 reply Do people raise kids in college dormitories?
By taeric 2025-06-2022:56 Not to my knowledge. My point is that that is probably closer to what is needed for a lot of the dream cities than people acknowledge.
Granted, college dormitory is a hyperbolic. More realistic, will be your standard smaller apartment blocks.
By some_random 2025-06-2018:414 reply That's just not true, cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use. If you have a pros vs cons list, it's not a lack of pros that causes people to stop using cars it's an overabundance of cons in every single case I know of.
By sjsdaiuasgdia 2025-06-2019:49 > people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use
I have friends who chose to move into cities and sold their cars in the process. The pros of the cities outweighed the pros of car ownership for them. They also don't have to spend money on car maintenance, insurance, or gas. They can move around the city fine with public transit and ride sharing. They rent cars to make long trips.
Absolute statements rarely are absolute, particularly when the motivations and preferences of individuals are in the mix.
By const_cast 2025-06-2019:40 I don't think this is true, cars truly only make sense in places where every single detail is built to accommodate cars. In an absolute sense, public transit is wildly more efficient.
The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.
For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.
Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.
At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.
In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:351 reply > cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use
I happily take the train and ferry in New York over a car. For some journeys, e.g. into Long Island with a group, renting a car would actually be cheaper.
If you haven’t spent any time not driving, it’s hard to imagine the luxury going car-free brings. Not the least of which is the ridiculous amount of privacy and law-enforcement interference we tolerate for drivers.
By rafram 2025-06-2022:47 It is genuinely such a luxury to spend zero minutes of your day looking for parking, remembering where you parked, memorizing parking regulations, planning out the parking situation around a place you might want to go… All of that feels so silly when you have to go back to it after living without a car for a while.
By vinoveritas 2025-06-2019:42 The math doesn't math when the city grows around car-centric design. All the extra space taken up to separate people from unpleasant high-speed roadways, all the huge parking lots, the extremely-wide roads, it pushes travel times up so much that between the extra distance between everything, and the time spent earning money to pay hundreds a month to have a car (insurance, depreciation, maintenance, gas) ends up significantly exceeding the benefits of car ownership.
They're wildly nice if only a few people have them. The more do, and the more parts of a city cater to cars, the worse they get, even as they also become totally necessary (so, not having them also gets far, far worse, even untenable).
I was introduced to this notion reading an analysis from some French social-philosopher and was initially like "that... can't be right, surely?" so ran conservative numbers on my own situation, with an average-or-better commute distance for my city, a cheap paid-off car, and nearly double median individual income for my city, and... yep, dude was right, living in a city designed around cars was costing me time, not saving it. It'd be a ton worse for people with worse commutes and lower-earning jobs. They were getting totally screwed on the deal.
And in towns, suburbs, rural areas, and pretty much everywhere except the densest city centers.
In Europe, most of those places were built before cars existed (and certainly before they were popularized). Still, people overwhelmingly prefer to drive cars there.
By trgn 2025-06-2020:36 Yeah, and if you have a car in any of those city centers dating from before the car, it's inconvenient and you'll walk for little errands, it'd be insane to drive. In suburbia, car is convenient, and sure, europe has a lot of suburbia too
They are, and should be, huge time saver outside cities. But city centers? Those should be on purpose as annoying, time consuming and costly to regular traffic as possible. It should be only necessary services, taxis, public buses and so on.
Here is the place for a good public transport, even in US it should be trivial to make it financially self-sufficient and attractive. People always choose whats best for them (cost or time wise). European city centers work like that and everybody normal accepts that.
By taeric 2025-06-2019:06 Right, but if you already have a car, you are likely to reach for it quite often.
And, I can agree it is the kind of thing that can save time for anyone, but will spend time for everyone.
By kevin_thibedeau 2025-06-2019:20 MTA is a corrupt money pit. It will never be self-sufficient.
We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)
By siliconwrath 2025-06-2017:153 reply NYC generally doesn’t have this stigma as bad as the rest of the USA. Wealthy people and celebrities ride the MTA.
By cguess 2025-06-2018:13 NYC really doesn't have this stigma at all. The narrative is more or less pushed by groups with anti-liberal agendas who want to convince people whom have never even visited NYC that it's just as bad as where they're from, when in fact the violent crime rate per capita in NYC is much lower than most medium sized midwestern and southern cities.
Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
Most of these photos are taken for their social medias. Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people
By jryle70 2025-06-210:00 > Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people.
According to you? Riding subway in NYC and you'd see plenty of rich people. Go to any station near the financial district, or Park Ave.
By conductr 2025-06-2020:44 NYC is an outlier of US cities though. The long narrow island of Manhattan makes everything more efficient in terms of the subway, etc. Most other large US cities sprawl endlessly in all directions.
Not Just Bikes is such a terminal pessimist. I enjoy his videos but I think he really has trouble acknowledging the counterpoints to his doom-and-gloom rhetoric. What he says in that video just barely applies to NYC at all.
Not just that, his approach to the politics of it is incredibly obnoxious. He comes across as everyone who disagrees with him with the same brush, railing against some sort of ideological complex that includes everything his "team" hates and insinuates that it's all somehow interrelated. Of course he doesn't say those things, but it surfaced really prominently for example in his April Fools' video where he played the role of a suburbanite obsessed with his new truck. Satire is one thing, but if you see enough of it (also content from Twitter and other social media) you get the sense that he really does take his perception of other people way too seriously.
Which is to say: his case studies examining the details of specific cities, evaluating transit system design etc. are great. But his analysis of why the bad things are bad (especially when he starts blaming people and ascribing motivations) is utterly insufferable.
By rafram 2025-06-2019:08 > his April Fools' video where he played the role of a suburbanite obsessed with his new truck
Happy to say I missed that one.
But yes, I completely agree with all of that. I'd love more of the analyses of why some systems work and less of the vitriol against everyone who isn't already totally on board.
Mid-40s amateur urban planner YouTube is the worst social media trend to have come out of this decade bar none. They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed.
Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
>They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed.
I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. Just personally visiting cities and suburbs from (still car loving!) Germans v/s most US cities validates the fuckcars camp. The example my Chilean city should follow is certainly not Dallas, no matter how cringe NJB might be.
By lurk2 2025-06-211:17 > I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s.
They are a particular variety of policy wonk that conflates positive claims with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are a matter of preference.
Consider urban sprawl; the desire to live in a larger home farther from the city center doesn’t go away with trains, the throughput is just more efficient. The question then becomes whether the denizens of a city would prefer to travel by car or by train. Given that car-centric urban sprawl is still ongoing, Americans appear to prefer the car.
By ch4s3 2025-06-2017:11 Wealthy people use the subway in NYC, it's often the fastest way to get somewhere.
I created an account because of how terrible this comment is.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
By bdangubic 2025-06-2020:15 EVERYTHING you wrote was going GREAT until In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it - this cannot be further from the truth. some take it, not enough to make a dent in traffic congestion madness in any City (especially those you specifically listed, I live in one of them…)
By anthomtb 2025-06-2017:45 In my lived experience, public transit is not actively avoided by so-called upper castes (I am not convinced you know what a caste is). Rather, it is so straightforward to take ones own automobile that you don't even consider public transit options.
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
By some_random 2025-06-2019:09 First off, comparing classes in the US to a caste system is genuinely delusional. The US doesn't have a caste system (except where it has been imported by immigration) and if you think it does either you don't know what a caste system is or you are completely out of touch with American culture.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
Refusing direct contact with homeless people's excrement is not based on class/self-respect.
A society that causes and/or permits homeless people pooping in the subway is, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City
> Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms.
> As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations.
There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
By aerostable_slug 2025-06-2017:323 reply 'Society' doesn't make people shoot up, turn tricks, or attempt to set up permanent shop in public toilets inside train stations. Also, they're great places to put bombs (in theory at least).
I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
Society absolutely does do that.
Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.
The kind of people who destroy public spaces and public toilets will also destroy any free housing you give them. If by "mental health" you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
By ceejayoz 2025-06-2018:30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
"Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta."
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
"A decade ago, Utah set itself an ambitious goal: end chronic homelessness. As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
"Finland has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%,[1] though other reports indicate it could be up to 50%. The number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains."
Having a stable housing situation turns out to make a whole bunch of other related social changes more feasible.
> If by 'mental health' you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
I mean, I'd start with therapy, addiction services, social supports, and the like. But I do think the complete removal of long-term inpatient mental health in the 50s/60s was an overshoot. Some people need that much help.
(I also believe there's a lot more we can do to prevent people from becoming that "kind of people" in the first place.)
By const_cast 2025-06-2019:43 I think it does, which is why this is a problem in some societies but not others.
I think the explanation of "some people are bad people" is a lazy explanation. The proportion of bad people to everyone else should be about the same everywhere. We have to take a closer look at incentives and systems in place.
What makes a toilet a better place to put a bomb than a full train car?
By sokoloff 2025-06-2019:42 IANAB, but I'd imagine the privacy inherent in a toilet makes it easier to assemble a dangerous bomb from transported-safe components than doing so in a full train car would, and to leave it long enough that the bomber can get away without getting caught.
The bathrooms become too expensive to maintain because they are being used by people who need to be institutionalized. When this is suggested the Civil Liberties people get into an uproar. You could build one wall and keep people who suffer from psychosis inside of it, or you can put them on the street and watch as everyone else finds ways to build walls of their own.
By bluGill 2025-06-2019:58 The institutions of the past were so bad that it is more human to let those people fend for themselves than put them in one. Yes some people freeze to death now but that is better than before.
if you can reform the system fine but I don't have conidence. Human nature doesn't deal well with the needed power imbalance.
By gosub100 2025-06-211:46 thats changing the topic. The topic is public transit, and I'm giving a practical example of why a rational person would choose not to use it. It's disingenuous to make it sound like people avoid the bus because "only those people ride the bus" and then refute it with "well, yeah, we gotta fix homelessness first, of course!". No we dont have to fix homelessness, I can ride my car and lock the doors, preventing it from being defiled by homeless people.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-06-2018:041 reply For better or for worse a lot of US progressives view transit as a "solution of last resort" which is why so many progressives are okay with transit also acting as a homeless shelter and being tolerant of some drug use. One way to think of this is that progressives view government's role as a champion of the disenfranchised. Another is to think that the US is a class based society where transit is considered the domain of the disenfranchised, the lowest class. Which framing you choose is probably based on your experience and frustrations with your local US transit system.
(I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other in my comment, but as someone who rides local US transit regularly and has for over 10 years, my patience for using transit as a "solution of last resort" is wearing thin but still remains.)
By gosub100 2025-06-211:52 I agree with you. This is why in newer public transit systems they will use honor-systems that don't actually prevent people from entering without paying. This encourages them to ride because its a "non-violent offense" so they won't be arrested, but if you or I rode without paying, we would have a criminal charge and possibly be arrested since they can claim they solved a crime without harming "disparaged groups" or whatever. So we have 2 classes of people: those who can ride for free and those who can't.
The system I'm referring to is San Diego's light rail. The 2nd (and last) time I rode it I saw someone get assaulted on the train (and what appeared to be homeless people riding it). The first (and last) time I rode the MARTA train in Atlanta last year, I saw a homeless man passed out sitting in a puddle of his own urine. I will never use public transit again unless there are exigent circumstances. Liberals have completely ruined yet another thing that used to be great.
By epicureanideal 2025-06-2018:15 Exactly. It’s the cleanliness and safety issues in US public transit that makes people avoid it. Fix that and more people will use it.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-2022:321 reply > Are there any measures that show any downside to this?
The opposition to Manhattan’s congestion pricing has a curious tendency to be inversely correlated with how frequently that person is in Manhattan.
At this point I think it’s just another proxy for rural voters’ rage at liberal cities.
By taeric 2025-06-2023:08 I fully subscribe to this view. The obsession with people hating all things California is borderline insane, at this point.
I probably too fully subscribe to this view. Seems a lot of "western" things that people love to complain about have been over indexed on. A lot are things that do need to get better, but when I hear people talk about how "actually, the US has been fascist for some time," I just... What?!
By righthand 2025-06-2017:05 The project was studied for 10 years so the nay-sayers really don’t have a platform because they’re up against a decade of research. Most of the anti-cp has a romanticized view of driving into the city as some sort of right or NYer benefit.
By erehweb 2025-06-2018:17 Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.
By zahlman 2025-06-2018:36 >how many people will assert there must be something bad
Some of my friends seem to be convinced that Pigouvian taxes don't work, that hoi polloi just suck up the extra cost and complain more. Also they'll say that it's regressive (i.e. the thing being taxed already represented a higher proportion of income for the lower classes).
What I'm getting at is, I agree with you, but I don't think the objections are all that nebulous, nor based in "too good to be true" intuition.
By navane 2025-06-2023:14 A downside could be that 2 years from now the effect has rippled away (the shock and awe of paying for it is gone), and everyone sits in the same traffic but pays more money for it.
The metrics I have seen all look cherry picked.
Archaeology tells us that for ~ 4000 years, people have tolerated an average of a 30 minute commute.
The usefulness of a city goes up (superlinearly!) with the number of people that can work / shop / live there.
So, the universal metric for any city, and therefore transit system is: “How many people can regularly make use of the city?”
A simple proxy for that is: “How many people live within a 30 minute commute of the city center?”
So, at peak times, how many people can simultaneously get to their destination in NYC in under 30 minutes?
Second: How many of those people can do so during non peak hours?
If congestion pricing is a success on all metrics, then both those numbers will have increased. Those metrics have worked well for 4000 years of cities so they are as close to a natural law as exists for cities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers went up (or down) but the lack of reporting on “is NYC’s effective population increasing or decreasing as a result of congestion pricing?” makes me skeptical.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
Commute times: Faster.
Transit ridership: Up.
Visitors: Up.
By hedora 2025-06-2019:18 Counterpoints (could be true or false, but do not contradict the data from any article I have found):
- average commute time is up because transit is still much slower than driving used to be (this first point is definitely true), and many drivers were forced on to the slower mode of transportation (also true, but that doesn’t imply average times went up or down).
- Occasional visitors (that only pay once in a while) are up, but the number of people that can commute are down, hollowing out commercial office districts.
- polls showing it is popular under-represent people that can no longer afford to travel to the city.
The fact that the numbers being reported are so vague as to be compatible with my doomsday scenario is why I say the metrics seem cherry picked.
I’d love to see a study that reports enough of their methodology to disprove my three bullet points. I’m generally supportive of things like congestion pricing and public transit, but sloppy studies and sloppy reporting on their actual impact doesn’t help their cause.
In London from 2020 till about 2023 congestion charging ran till 10pm and then that was moved back to 6pm. The reason was it was hurting nightlife especially west end theatre.
By anthomtb 2025-06-2021:14 I find it surprising that theatre would be harmed by a congestion charge. It seems like the cost of paying or planning around a congestion charge would be small relative to the cost and planning required to go to a live show.
By standardUser 2025-06-2017:26 Other than Trump's seemingly knee-jerk opposition because it was implemented by, in his own oft-repeated words, radical left lunatics, I haven't really heard anything negative at all as a Manhattanite.
I wonder whether pedestrian collisions will be slightly more deadly, since one effect is that traffic flows faster than before. Great for drivers but probably more dangerous for the jaywalking new yorker.
By ceejayoz 2025-06-2018:03 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
By zahlman 2025-06-2019:15 What matters in a pedestrian collision is the speed of impact. Traffic flow is about the average speed over time. Cars that spend less time stopped don't become significantly more dangerous when their maximum speed is still limited to, say, 30 km/h (20 mph). Certainly not for those who are aware of a constant traffic flow.
By prasadjoglekar 2025-06-2017:481 reply The biggest downside is that the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect. It was to fill budget holes in the MTA, which is a notorious money pit that delivers far less value than the billions if gobbles up.
There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...
> the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect
Then why, out of the countless alternatives, did they choose to raise the funds this way?
By prasadjoglekar 2025-06-2021:16 Au contraire, there aren't countless alternatives. Raise fares, raise taxes or impose a penalty on drivers, most of whom you think will come from Long Island, NJ and CT They chose the most politically palatable option.
By Tangurena2 2025-06-2015:47 Alternative link: https://archive.ph/6qlmb
