Congestion pricing is such a good idea everywhere there is rock solid public transit alternatives. Where there’s not, it just becomes a tax on the poor.
Can you explain congestion pricing?
Think whole road tolls you can change based on a schedule, or based on current and expected traffic. All of it is meant to either disincentiveize driving to cut down total traffic, or at least shunt it to less congested times or roads.
Aside: I 1000% don’t consider individual toll lanes to be a type of congestion pricing. Those are just convenience surcharges (looking at you too TSA Pre check) and are complete elitist bullshit that hurts everyone but the city that takes in the fees.
Can you explain congestion pricing?
How about you explain how BigFish@'s comment is wrong instead. You clearly have a point to make, so do the work to make it.
I’m genuinely asking. Chill
OK, but in that case, usually you’d want to send that sort of request to google instead of looking for a lemmy thread of questionable veracity to educate you. I’d be careful what you ask for and to whom you ask, but you do you.
If I were rich, I would support congestion pricing. I could sell my helicopter. Who needs to fly over traffic when there is no traffic?
Yeah but all this $9 add up to millions which you can funnel into heated massage chairs on the trolley, tram, boat, bus or train. I want Netflix and free WiFi.
They will never funnel that money into more comfortable transit.
If you can afford a car, you can afford an e-bike, even a cargo e-bike. Cars are luxuries compared to bicycles. Never forget that.
A car can be used to move an entire family safely. You need 3-5 bikes to do the same far less safely including the very young, old, infirm.
Fatality rate for sedans is 2 per billion vehicle miles. Bikes are about 110.
Bear in mind that this is in the US which has bad drivers driving aggressively in environs ill suited.
Furthermore the average person commuting by car commutes 30 minutes by car the average bus rider an hour.
These are often distances too great to bike.
The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.
But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites
bribedlobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it’s become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people’s (especially children’s, the disabled’s, and elderly’s) agency and freedom—because otherwise they’ll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you’ll encounter in all of those extra miles you’re forced to travel.Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.
VMT is the only reasonable metric to compare relative safety. It is literally the only metric that tells you how safe your family will be traveling.
The fact that its cars that mostly make bikes dangerous is important but mostly irrelevant to any individual making decisions.
Same with America being spread out. Mostly it is because it was cheaper and therefore more profitablr for individual actors not some grand conspiracy.
The elderly, young kids, and especially the disabled don’t need safer bike lanes they need better public transit
I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here’s a simple, constructed example of why:
There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.
Those two cities aren’t equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That’s a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.
As far as the American landscape, it’s spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.
I don’t claim it’s a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.
The metric you desire ought properly to be determined by what problem you are trying to address. We aren’t building America like sim city we are deciding what to do with our existing situation. For a person deciding what to do they need to weigh the actual consequences of various choices. Deaths per billion not million vehicle miles captures the actual costs of doing so. 2 for sedans 110 for bikes.
Anyone who drives 15,000 miles isn’t replacing their car with a bike. You would be asking them to bike 288 miles per week which is absolutely insane. Nobody is doing this. If they drive 5000 they might but at the cost of a drastic increase in risk. This leaves us where we are now where almost everyone either can’t or won’t.
I take it you’ve never been outside a big city in Texas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Et Cetera.
I’m only listing places I’ve been. An e-bike would just not cut it, especially if you have small children. There are places you can not go without getting on a freeway, and there is NO WAY IN HELL I’m putting a small child on the freeway or highway on a bike.
Why are you talking about infrastructure? You’re changing the subject. Obviously the infrastructure needs to support them, just as cars are pretty damn useless without good road infrastructure. But cars are objectively an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than e-bikes. Cars are a luxury, bicycles are a utility. The key problem is that many cities are built to require you to use the luxury means of travel instead of the affordable utilitarian ones.
Naw, we are talking about the same thing. I bring up infrastructure, as many have, because that’s the reality of the situation. The entire continental United States is built for cars, and that’s not changing anytime soon. The reality is that cars are necessary, and at this time, it is near impossible and a safety hazard for most americans to try and use bikes due to the hostile road infrastructure in place.
It is NOT economically more feasible here, at this time, and unless the investors that have put billions of dollars into lobbying for car-dependent cities suddenly want to default on their near-hundred year investment, it isn’t going to happen.
I don’t know where you live, but that’s just not true in large swaths of America. The other options add multiple hours round trip anywhere and in many parts of the US it’s not an option.
My work is currently a 20 minute drive down a freeway going 60 mph. There is no bus to take that route. There isn’t even a connection, or a transfer, the only other option would be a cab.
I’m just talking basic economics. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. A car is, by any logical definition of the word, a luxury purchase compared to an e-bike. You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure. This would be like building all of our infrastructure to only accommodate stretch limos, and then trying to argue that limos are a necessity. It’s comically absurd. It’s a clown world.
How are you going to take an ebike for anything besides a short distance on non highway roads?
Not true.
I haven’t owned a car for most of my adult life, and things start to get really difficult in winter with snow (insufficient bus routes in a given area, and sidewalks/bike lanes covered in snow and not able to be transversed).
When job-hunting I had to exclude a lot of places because of how impossible it’d be to do the commute in winter. Given how expensive rent is, plenty of people are forced to live with relatives or live in certain cheaper areas long past when they’d prefer to leave, which means if the roof over your head is in an area without sidewalks/bike lanes/public transit, you rely hardcore on a car to get to work and back. And if you don’t have that car, you basically lose your job. Maybe you can sustain it over the summer, but once winter snow kicks in you’re pretty fucked the first hard snow or ice that comes through. If you’re lucky, it’s close enough to walk–but not everyone is lucky like that. Also, if your job has mandatory overtime and you’re doing 50-60 hour weeks, walking 2-3 hours one way to work is a no-go.
I say this as someone who regularly biked/used public transit in Chicago winters. Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody’s lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.
Outstanding move on NYC’s part.
Prior to this going live there was a lot of talk about how congestion will simply move from one place to another. I don’t know new york so can’t name places but it was regarding commuters using a street or bridge that is now under congestion charge so they will flow an alternative route through roads that aren’t designed for the additional traffic.
Is that now the case?
Of all the things on Reddit, I miss remindmebot the most. They tried to kill it numerous times but it survived like a roach in radiation. On lemmy, I find an interesting question and have to set a timer for myself. This is the most first-world of problems, but I’m still moderately upset every time
@remindme@mstdn.social 10 days
@bdonvr Here is your reminder!
@bdonvr Ok, I will remind you on Monday Jan 20, 2025 at 12:08 PM PST.
@remindme@mstdn.social 10 minutes
@Gullible Ok, I will remind you on Friday Jan 10, 2025 at 1:05 PM PST.
It lives!
inb4 the supreme court rules that congestion charging is unconstitutional and furthermore that public transport, too, is unconstitutional.
This is great, should be implemented in all cities. Most people who can use public transport should.
Not all cities are equal. Many have large areas with no public transportation available.
In SF they allocated some extra carpool lanes (taken from the total number of highway lanes) and started calling them “express lanes” instead of carpool lanes. Everybody cheered-- because transit hipstering is a great thing for the people who it actually works well for in our mediocre system. I guess everytone else is SOL. In SF it started out that you could still use them for free if you had 2 people in the car. Now its 3 people minimum to ride free, and the prices crept higher. Now you’ll very often see all non-express lanes stopped with traffic but the price for express lanes high and the express lanes clear of traffic-- that road throughput capacity underused. Its become a rich persons lane, at the cost of reducing capacity of the total system. When it got put in they said the max would be $8.00, shortly after they doubled that, with no max per day. Fees rack up since they charge over short distances. Now I’ve started seeing express lanes on main thoroughfares that arent highways.
Theres a patchwork of diconnected and not well thought out transit systems, with little hope of retrenching them to have usable coverage like NYC has. You’ll end up using an uber or taxi to get to your final destination most of the time, and parking at transit stations is difficult, time consuming, and expensive.
This is not the solution you think it is. It just makes things better for the rich, and does nothing for the poor and middle class. This is like the “clear” lane at the airport security. Once its in, its not going away. Pricing is not in the control of people who have your best interests at heart. If you’re poor, your time is not worth as much as a rich persons. They are commoditizing the hours of your life and many of you cheer for it. Without progressive pricing for this you’re just getting fleeced.
The funds created arent going toward new projects . They are used for road maintenance, enforcement, and debt repayment in the county where the road is This simply frees up general funds that had been used for that before these went in, so no direct benefit in terms of transit projects is mandated.
As I understand it, poor and middle class people are already taking public transit. It’s the rich people who are driving in New York. This is making it easier for deliveries, taxis, buses, and emergency vehicles to get through by getting all of the entitled rich people off the road.
You think charging them 20 a day will get the rich off the road?
As long as that money is spent on public transit improvements, I think it’s a great idea for many large cities.
Sorry best we can do is 80% to the police department.
is spent on pubic transit
Hahahahahaha
Oh sorry, I thought you were joking. Of course they won’t
is there any particular reason you’re saying that besides cynicism? I am having trouble finding specifics, but there’s a lot of reporting that the MTA is expecting to raise $15 billion from congestion tolling to fund public transportation repairs and improvements and pretty much all of the proposals for this in the past required all of the revenues to be earmarked for use by the MTA
People are so used to how bad things are they don’t trust improvement, even when it’s real.
Sam from Wendover did a very good job explaining why Congestion Pricing is the best solution to address this particular problem, including arguments on why this is not a regressive tax when you analyze it closely.
Canonical YouTube link so you can use your favorite Invidious/Piped instance https://youtu.be/B2j-LgcA7Gk
And same on nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/wendover-the-battle-over-nyc-congestion-pricing/
Regressive tax. Yet another kick in the face of the lower class. Why not a progressive tax based on personal income? It works pretty well for speeding tickets in northern Europe.
We can’t hold every type of tax-incentive based progress hostage because our culture won’t tolerate day-fines or other income-scaled penalties. I mean we could, but it wouldn’t make sense. This is a good program and it has an option for low income people to pay less. Furthermore we can always funnel money from rich to poor in other ways (e.g. through unrelated).
and it has an option for low income people to pay less.
You’ve never been poor have you. Its an extra 300 bucks taken away for no benefit, assuming they qualify for the low income benefit, and its 400 fliushed down the tubes if they dont.
Maybe if you are that poor don’t pilot your personal vehicle into the congested parts of Manhattan, where you pay for parking on top of the general costs of your car such as insurance and fuel.
Take the subway like me and a million others.
Remind me your grand plan to institute day fines again?
Maybe if you are that poor don’t pilot your personal vehicle
And there it is. That privilege. “if you’re that poor”.
Remind me your grand plan to institute day fines again?
Progressive tax on a scarce resource based on income. Complete exemptions for disabled. Better rates for working poor than 25% off.
I’m all for reducing traffic, but yeah, how is this not at least partially regressive? Folks who can only afford to live in New Jersey but then have to work in NYC now have yet another new expense.
But maybe I’m not aware of just how ubiquitous subway stations are in New Jersey that go into NYC. Would it be an easy transition?
It’s my understanding that poor people in NYC already take public transit. It’s just the rich people who drive.
Besides, less traffic in NYC probably means cheaper parking, so people who have to drive will probably see their cost unchanged.
That’s not quite true https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/congestion-pricing-outer-borough-new-yorkers-poverty-data-analysis
There is a small percentage that are poor and will suffer more due to being out priced out of transit areas
That’s unfortunate. But does it balance out the better quality of living the poorer people who live in the city are going to have? Can it be mitigated by expanded bus lines?
I really don’t know. My gut says that this is still a net positive for equity, but don’t trust that guy, he’s an idiot.
