> don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning”
In New York, low-income New Yorkers who own a car (or live in the zone) will be eligible for a waiver [1]. People with disabilities, too, will probably be eligible for a waiver. (Some carve-outs are still being pinned down.)
Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab.
(Crowded streets have all kinds of nasty externalities. I live in the zone. Crowded streets mean lots of honking at all hours of the day and night. It means the constant smell of brake pads at street level. When I look out of the window and see a stranded ambulance, it's a reminder of the risk my loved ones and I will face when the day comes when we need an ambulance. Et cetera.)
> Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab.
Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Simultaneously, they reduce the incidences of drunk driving, providing positive externalities.
Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone.
The failings of the subway and train infrastructure are due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA and untenable, collectively bargained contracts. At the same time that driving within the city will become more expensive, these forms of transport have been reducing service within the city and to the surrounding regions while simultaneously increasing fares.
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road.
This doesn't make sense to me.
IME - the vast majority of time there is a single customer or group in a taxi or uber. Assuming this is in fact the case. Taxis and ubers increase the number of trips taken by vehicle, but let's pretend in their favor that they leave that number flat. While they have a passenger in them they are trading 1-1 for a private vehicle to a "public" vehicle. While they don't have a passenger in them they are trading 0-1 for private vehicles to "public" vehicles. That results in a net increase in vehicles.
It would reduce the number of vehicles if they let people take a bus or train in one direction, and taxi or rideshare in the other. I used to occasionally do this for groceries: bus to the supermarket, taxi back to avoid carrying everything from the bus stop.
I'm not sure this is actually a common pattern, though.
It lessens the amount of car storage needed too, though, which is also important. It would be nice if multi-person trips like UberPool would be exempted to encourage their use, but I don't know if that's technically feasible.
Fewer overall cars because fewer people own cars due to taxis and uber
and
Higher utilization of the cars that do exist because a higher % of cars are taxis and ubers
Some combination of these two factors could mean that there are fewer cars idle at any time ("storage") and more cars in service at any time. I'm not necessarily saying that's what is happening but it's definitely possible.
Looking into the future, a great outcome of driverless cars would be the commoditization of car transport. You essentially say where you're going and whether you are willing to share the ride. A driverless car pops off the queue to pick you up, or a multi-person car slightly diverts from its route to pick up up (a la Uber Pool).
- Each physical car sees much higher utilization, allowing fewer cars to exist overall and parking space needs are reduced.
- A large network of efficient driverless cars means it's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion from everyone's route. Ideally an improved shared ride experience would result in higher usage of shared rides, meaning that fewer cars need to be on the road at any given time = lower pollution and congestion.
Fewer cars, but more miles. Every moment that a car is going between one drop-off and the next pick-up adds to the total.
> Each physical car sees much higher utilization
Higher utilization is a mixed blessing. The more a car is driven per day, the fewer days it will be until replacement. There's not much difference between two cars each being driven half the time all year and two cars each being driven all the time half the year. At best you get some benefit from keeping the car warmed up, but that's outweighed by the passenger-less miles.
> t's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion
That would work a lot better if demand were uniformly distributed, but in fact it's highly cyclic - toward office areas in the morning, away from them in the evening. This asymmetry is even worse for things like sporting events. Once a driver has taken a commuter to work, going anywhere else means 2x distance because they'll have to come back for the matching commute home.
The only way to reduce ecological footprint is to reduce the number of vehicle miles per person. It doesn't matter who or what is driving the vehicle. Reducing commute distance works, even when people are still in cars but especially when people can walk/bike instead. Increasing per-vehicle occupancy helps, whether it's car pooling or mass transit. Replacing private cars with shared ones doesn't make a dent, and in some cases can make things worse.
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road
The charge is levied on private transport and Ubers et cetera. It's unlikely to shift demand from Ubers to private vehicles.
On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect.
> The failings of the subway and train infrastructure is due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA
The MTA is a complicated problem. Part of it is high labor costs due to inefficient labor use. Part of it is conservatism with train speeds. Part of it is chronic under-funding.
The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
> On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect.
The congestion already does that. The issue is that it's a hard problem. You can't make deliveries to shops at 3AM because there is no one there to receive them. To the extent you can make deliveries at 6AM, they already do. But a delivery driver loads up the truck and then makes deliveries for eight hours. Telling them to work a de facto 14 hour shift because you're going to put two separate three hour blocks of "don't drive during peak hours" into the middle of their day is going to drive up costs.
And freight rail serves an entirely different market. That's used to transport bulk products in industrial quantities, not to deliver bread to the corner deli. Trucks sometimes are used in contexts where freight rail could be used but those aren't the ones driving through Manhattan during rush hour.
> The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
The problem is that the externalities are really just failures in the markets for alternatives that have dumped their natural demand onto the roads, because all of the externalities come from congestion, which could be absorbed by better alternatives if they existed.
If you make the subways better then fewer people drive. If you make them less expensive then fewer people drive. That means paying for them from taxes rather than fares -- just getting rid of the fares and using taxes instead would get a huge number of cars off the road and eliminate the overhead cost of all the fare collection infrastructure.
When you have things like minimum parking requirements or anti-density zoning rules, that makes it more expensive to build high density housing and subsidizes car ownership for people in urban areas. Then the people who live there drive more, because they have somewhere to park a car and therefore own one, meanwhile there is less housing there which means people need to live further away and then many of them will drive back in to their jobs.
Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives had already squeezed into congested roads. It makes driving worse when what we need is for alternatives to driving to be better.
> Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives
Every other city's experience with congestion pricing shows decreased car use in favor of alternatives. Effects on local grocery prices were minimal. And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion.
> Every other city's experience with congestion pricing shows decreased car use in favor of alternatives.
Suppose the forest is on fire and instead of spending money to put the fire out, we just ignore it. Then a bunch of wolves come into the city to flee from the fire.
Someone suggests that we introduce bears to the city in order to drive out the wolves. Many people point out what a terrible idea that is, but some cities do it anyway. Then the proponents point out that some of the wolves have fled back to the forest.
But now your city is full of bears. And the surrounding forest is still on fire.
> Effects on local grocery prices were minimal.
This is cost disease in a nutshell. "We did this one thing that was a bad idea, but the net effect was small, so that makes it alright." What's the cumulative effect of using that logic as a general principle?
> And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion.
Compared to the untenable status quo, or compared to the better alternatives?
When the status quo is a dumpster fire, "this is better than a dumpster fire" is not a very high bar.
Build more housing in cities so that more people can live there instead of having to commute in. Eliminate minimum parking requirements so that pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods can exist. Fund mass transit with taxes and eliminate fares to create a cost advantage over driving which is progressive rather than regressive.
##
Fix the subway (by which I mean make it more like Japan's rail):
* Make loitering illegal, enforce it
* A 'short loop' everything recorded space
This is anti-vandalism / for crimes within a day
* Since this is the US, safety barrier the train
* In-city Automated circuits, automated schedule.
There'd also need to be baked in maintenance, but I'm not an expert in subway repair so I'm not sure what's actually required vs nice to have. If the subway is down, surface buses should run to replace it.
##
An interface between the subway and the rest of the world:
Large parking silos close enough to the city to be on the subway grid (with good service), BUT, far enough out to have good use of the land. These too should have somewhat short loop subservience for security (maybe a 7-day rotation here). Parking can be charged for, but it should be less than the cost of having an automated driver take you in to the city, drop you off, and pick you up later.
##
Every-day Freight backhaul:
As a transportation utility, during the more downtime hours the subway could be used by semi-automated transport cars to route pallets (or a replacement transfer unit) of things classified in several storage classes: Frozen, Refrigerated, 'room temp', not conditioned, 'special'. (Special being an un-conditioned, but ventilated with normal air, room that provides power for local regulation.) The transfer pods would be ferried along normal subway lines between cars during the downtimes. The stops would probably mostly be off of the normal ones, but exceptions might be made. Nearby storage rooms would receive the contents and buffer them. Those rooms are a city owned public utility (somewhat like paid parking spaces are now). Again, subservience on short loop, with added restricted access via RFID fobs and needing to show faces. Automated logging of who's checking in and which pallets they're taking out. At this point they may be close enough to hand/forklift transport, or maybe form an airport luggage style electric powered tram delivery.
##
Reducing friction of desired transport methods:
Probably the free# (for people; #paid for with taxes) transport, and keeping the costs of the last-mile backhaul minimal for commercial ideas would be the biggest reduction. The increased patrols, and automated subservience backup (to trace fault after humans identify issues) are also supposed to reduce friction. In the narrative I've setup the civil enforcers are only supposed to be providing help, not hassling random people asking for papers.
make it more like Japan means privatizing the public transportation and giving the companies running the lines the ability to buy and own real estate in and around the stations as well as not giving all lines to one company
Your confusing analogy about bears and wolves was the counterargument. I didn't find it a persuasive response to the original argument: "Every other city's experience with congestion pricing shows decreased car use in favor of alternatives. Effects on local grocery prices were minimal. And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion."
>Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone.
You're already effectively paying a premium to account for the extra time the drivers have to spend in traffic. It's not clear whether the congestion charges will be more than the labor-time saved.
Also, a general point: typical market goods are, by default, "regressively priced", because most of them don't look at your income to determine the price. This is generally a good thing, because if every good's price scaled with income, there would be no material gain to earning an extra dollar.
Any time you recognize a real scarcity and ensure it's priced explicitly rather than allocated by an ever-choked queue, it's going to be regressive in this sense. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker by itself.
It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars on the road (and thus congestion) because they incentivize non-car-owners to take car trips they wouldn’t normally take. Uber and Lyft lead to a net INCREASE in cars on the road, not a decrease.
> It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars
>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.
I don't think the effect has been definitively proven one way or the other. While there are studies showing a decrease in congestion, there are also several showing a notable increase too[0][1].
I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say.
It appears the paper was published two years before the partnership began. There's also no disclosure in the paper that Uber provided any funding (for whatever that's worth).
The report came out in August of 2016, so the data must be from before then. The next question would be, what has happened to Uber ridership levels over that same timeframe?
According to this article [1], combined Uber and Lyft ridership in NYC was about 200,000/day in July 2016 (the most recent possible date for the original data). By July 2018, daily ridership was almost 600,000.
Is possible that Uber/Lyft lower congestion when first introduced, but worsen it over the long-run?
Ubers have been shown to increase vehicle miles driven, which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit. Historically the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves, we are still effectively subsidizing uber use in a way we aren't for regular driving.
> Ubers have been shown to increase vehicle miles driven
As other comments have said, the effects on congestion are controversial [0][1].
> which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit
Not necessarily. If a trip would not have occurred otherwise, then there would be no decline in public transit utilization (subway lines seem to be closing with increased frequency recently, and people may have no other means of returning home). Of course, this would point to increased congestion.
> the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves
Would eliminating street parking further this policy? On many streets, it would allow for 1-2 additional lanes to be created.
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation
Not under any definition of public transit I've heard. Lyft and uber are private companies that exploit labor in unsustainable ways to compete with actually efficient forms of public transit. Taxis are much closer to being actual public transit as their cost reflects the inefficiency of having a devoted driver, but they are still not owned by the government and are disproportionately available to the rich.
Busses are public transit and actually reduce congestion. Uber and lyft are well-marketed and vc-funded luxury services. They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
> Not under any definition of public transit I've heard
From source [3], as provided above:
>> The taxi should not be viewed as antagonistic to public transport, people who use taxis are in general 'public transport users' not 'car users'. Any improvement in the taxi service should therefore be viewed as an important improvement in public transport provision. Any improvement in the provision of taxi services will be very valuable for people with mobility problems since they rely on the taxi for a significant amount of their travel due to the door to door nature of the taxi service.
> They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
As other comments have discussed, this is controversial.
You're begging the question—you didn't quote a justification for the term, you quoted an argument that requires the same justification.
Taxis are absolutely antagonistic to public transit, as demonstrated by the ratio of human labor to humans transported. Cars are simply the most comfortable version of transit available to people who have the means. It is not available to those without the means. The idea that the taxi users are the same as bus users is simply being class-blind.
That's a hell of a claim to back up. Any kind of argument for this idea? Ownership is meaningful. What is access—is my local McDonalds a public service?
This smells very similar to "access to affordable" housing and healthcare. Sounds great, but at the end of the day, people are still without health care and housing, so they clearly DON'T have access. Ownership is the only way to guarantee material access.
buses, trains, subways, and other forms of transportation
that charge set fares, run on fixed routes, and are
available to the public.
I will agree, many taxi services are (in practice if not in principle) excluded by this definition. Discriminatory practices with how they select their fares, for instance. Also most don't have fixed routes so you'd have to relax that requirement to allow taxis (but some taxi shuttle services operate on more or less fixed routes).
I still don't see that as a materially useful definition but I'll admit I recognize the usage.
However, in the current context of discussing congestion—i.e. who gets to use the thing we all pay for—and other externalities like pollution and use of fossil fuels, public ownership is the salient thing to discuss.
Public transportation does not mean owned by the public, but generally accessible to the public. Many trains are privately owned, including most trains in Japan (maybe all post 1987, when the national railways were privatized). These are still considered public transportation.
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road.
I read a study not too long ago (sorry couldn't find it), but it found the opposite - that ride sharing increased the amount of congestion.
At first it didn't make much sense to me, but the study did acknowledge car ownership decreased, but that there was more congestion. This was largely due to the time between trips for Lyft and Uber - driving from a dropoff to a pickup.
Trucks cause the most wear and tear on roads so I’m not entirely against capturing some of that via gross tonnage (or weight per wheel) tax of some sort.
Ubers were growing like a cancer. With no limit in place they would just continue growing until nobody else could use the roads. They are a big factor in the current levels of congestion.
Disabilities should get a waiver. There is already a special license plate and a placard.
But now, low-income? There are problems:
. You can be low-income and still own a car, and still be near public transport. Why would you be incentivized to own a car, first off, and drive it into a congested area?
. It's not the "low-income" exception that's the last exception. There are tens of thousands of City-provided placards for teachers, firefighters and civil servants with an unspoken rule by the police to never ticket them, even if parked illegally. This, plus the idea of exceptions just smell like another foray into a De Blasio handing something out for please one union or group or another.
These are parking placards, and I used that example to demonstrate what happens when we pick and choose winners and losers - what criteria do we go by, in a city of 8.5M? Which group suffers the most?
. There are low-income allowanced for things such as HPD buildings and other subsidies. I know people who make (as a couple) half a million dollars a year who still own real estate with income restrictions, because the income was only verified Year 1 and it became de facto voluntary in the years after that.
. A huge percentage of people are low-income in this City. And hold on just a second - you're low income but you're spending how many hundreds of dollars a month on a lease, gas, maintenance, and so forth for a far, and insurance in one of the most expensive insurance markets? Have people lost their senses to not question that?
The carve-outs are precisely the problem with the congestion pricing. If everyone in mid-town just had to pay a flat fee, fine, that seems somewhat fair. But now every interest group is rent-seeking and going to lobby to be exempt. That's the unfair and corrupt part, not the fee.
NYC having congestion pricing isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world. Some might say it's long overdue. But the legislature doesn't have the political will or want to actually implement a fair, flat fee. Instead, the people who don't fit into a easily defined interest group will have to pay, and everyone else will get to drive for free.
If I have to pay to drive, then everyone else should to, regardless if they are poor, disabled, rich, taxis, ubers, or whatever.
This (like most other flat consumption taxes) is a regressive tax. It is a stated policy goal of the ruling party to reduce income inequality, not increase it.
The disabled are a group with very inflexible transportation demand, in that they are very unlikely to change their behavior in response to higher prices (because they can't); we already make a whole ton of legal accommodations for them like handicapped parking, and this fits into that overall policy.
It's not like having carve outs makes it any less regressive. It just allows the government to paper over a very complex problem with a naive and simple "solution".
Unfortunately, this sort of thinking has been the dominant mode in politics and legislation since, I dunno, the Roman empire? Riddle your laws and regulations and tax-codes with exemptions and deductions and carve-outs so you can please the people who put you in power and who will keep your in power. And since almost everyone is part of some random interest group (and many, part of a lot interests groups like married home-owning couples with kids), it usually works.
Can you explain how a flat fee is fair to someone making minimum wage versus someone making 90k+ per year? A flat fee would be a larger portion of their income which would be decidedly unfair.
There's also that not all vehicles are going to tear up roads in the same way. Why would it be fair for trucks and what not to pay the same flat fee despite causing far more wear and tear on the roads?
Your argument would result in the poor and disabled being priced out of driving on the road.
"Ugh, man, my trip length has ballooned three times because of all these drivers that want to use the same road. Wait -- ohhhh, they're all minimum wage workers! I guess my trip isn't actually delayed like it would be if they made $90k!"
Congestion dynamics don't care about your income. Same imposition on society, same scarce good consumed, same price to get the incentives right.
To be clear, I don't think there should be a congestion tax in the first place. But flat prices are how everything else works in a free market, so it seems fairer than carve-outs or god-forbid, a progressive congestion tax.
Which sounds fairer to you: a movie theater that charges $5 for a ticket, or one that charges a percentage of your income?
Roads are not a free market and attempting to apply free market logic to roads is a flawed argument.
People can choose whether or not to purchase a ticket. Many people cannot choose whether or not to drive. Which is why again, a flat tax would not be fair.
How would it be fair to expect someone on minimum wage or disability to pay the same amount to access a required service as someone far better off?
Parking, whether on street or off-street doesn't relate to congestion pricing. Congestion pricing charges for the luxury of driving into one of the most densely populated and well-served areas of transit in the country.
Charging people to offset a negative externality they are entirely responsible for should not be conflated with penalization.
How do people feel on a congestion fee for sidewalks. Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable. If you want to walk on a sidewalk during the busiest times you should pay a congestion fee. Why would we stop at just roads?
> Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable
One, pedestrian congestion doesn't exhibit traffic congestion's negative externalities. (You have to get to trampling-risk densities before that occurs.)
Two, "sidewalk passes" have no precedent. Congestion pricing has lots of precedent [1].
Three, this is a problem getting attention [2]. America has spent decades throwing lanes at traffic. Not all of that was a waste. Similar effort has yet to broadly benefit pedestrians.
Funnily enough, the area around Penn station allocates nearly 80% of the space there to cars, which carry only a tiny fraction of the people traveling through daily. For anyone not familiar with the Penn area, check out this Streetfilms video to get an idea of how lopsided the street allocation is: https://vimeo.com/268616894.
Because 20 people can and do fit into the same space that a single SUV occupied by one person takes up trawling for a fare through Midtown, yet 70+ percent of the streetscape is allocated to accommodate that SUV.
Also keep in mind pedestrians have to share space with sidewalk planters, outdoor seating, trash bags, and many times, cars parked partially on the sidewalk, making the usable walking space less than 10% of the size of the total street space, yet still allowing exponentially more people to move faster than the cars the street was designed for.
NYC sidewalks are only congested because 90% of street space is dedicated to cars. On 6th avenue near 42nd, there is 5 feet of sidewalk space that thousands of people have to squeeze onto, while cars enjoy a 6 lane highway totaling 70 feet.
Why do cars need a 6 lane road through the middle of the busiest pedestrian neighborhood in the world?
Walking is the most efficient mode of transportation, with regards to space used. The problem of crowded sidewalks is relieved by expanding the sidewalks at the cost of space for cars.
My understanding is that these are not "congestion fees", but "pollution fees". They are there to make air less unhealthy, not to make traffic more fluid.
You are getting lots of comments, but the most obvious reason is that the act of driving on a road degrades it much faster than walking on a sidewalk. Thus, it needs to be repaired more frequently. Increase the number of cars and the frequency of repair (i.e. costs) increases.
In New York, low-income New Yorkers who own a car (or live in the zone) will be eligible for a waiver [1]. People with disabilities, too, will probably be eligible for a waiver. (Some carve-outs are still being pinned down.)
Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab.
(Crowded streets have all kinds of nasty externalities. I live in the zone. Crowded streets mean lots of honking at all hours of the day and night. It means the constant smell of brake pads at street level. When I look out of the window and see a stranded ambulance, it's a reminder of the risk my loved ones and I will face when the day comes when we need an ambulance. Et cetera.)
[1] https://710wor.iheart.com/content/2019-04-01-congestion-pric...