1y ago

New York Approves Historic Congestion Pricing Plan—Here’s How It Works And What Cities Could Adopt It Next

www.forbes.com

25 comments

Try it for a year, and I would love to see many new projects get funded. This is why I don't mind Toronto building lots more transit over SOGR, once a network is established, congestion pricing can be tried all over North America to solve the perennial "how do we get transit to break even" complaint
- Fuck no toronto does not need another tax on people driving in.
  
  Sure they do, so long as they have provided adequate alternatives like rail or other transit for people to use instead.
  Cities shoild be built for people. If you want to pollute the city with your car, waste space parking it somehwhere all day, and participate in one of the most dangerous forms of transportation, then there should be a fee associated with that to cover the costs of maintaining the infrastructure, pay for the parking, and contribute some money to healthcare to cover pollution health impacts/injuries from roadways.
  
  I can understand the initial hesitation to more and more fees. If you've ever tried getting out from Front Street at 5pm on a weekday you'd wish for something like that.
  Thing is that everyone inside and outside cars effectively subsidize the externalities of traffic. Everyone's wasted time, wasted gas money, health effects of breathing car emissions, noise, so on and so forth. Don't forget that every car on the road is being subsidized by taxpayers from road maintenance, gas tax subsidies, parking facilities in the suburbs, service delivery and upkeep to the far suburbs, so on and so forth.
  I agree that Toronto's network is not quite as good as New York to really justify such a toll at this very moment but within 10 years I think it will be, and if it shows early signs of success then I think many cities around both Canada and the US will be quick to adopt it.
This is just gonna limit how poor people move even more, pushing them into public transport while the wealthy keep doing whatever they want.
- My dude, poor people are not driving in New York lmao
  
  Lol touche. I have no idea, honestly, but there's always people with tighter budgets
- Looks like the congestion fees will be used to cover the public transportation expenses, so wealthy people will be sponsoring the poor people transportation options.
  
  And from what I recall there are discounts and some exceptions for poorer workers, albeit limited. Which it needs to be as pushing people to public and active transport is the point of the policy.
  
  If they do achieve less car traffic they may be able to dedicate more space to bus lanes making busses faster or more reliable for more people. Though I vaguely remember from tourist experience , busses seemed pretty good in manhatan at least north-south direction.
  Maybe also give some separated space to other modes that can also be quite cheap, like bicycles.
  
  I mean, that's great, but isn't this still seggregating people?
  Sorry, I'm not even familiar with how NY works, but as a generalization, I think that if you put a fee, you're not necessarily going to remove cars from the streets, but select what cars will be on the streets.
  Or maybe this does work, it's been succesfully done on other fields, like tobacco consumption. Idk, I just feel like these things are unfair somehow, I hope it helps tho.
- Not really there’s still mass transit, or walking, or cycling, or being close to the stuff you need. I speak from experience, lived in nyc all my life. If anything it makes life easier as a pedestrian because there’s less useless traffic from people crossing over from eastern ny to the rest of the tristate area and back, so there’s more consistent mass transit.

25 comments