What we can quantify is the economic impact the San Antonio River Walk has or the impact the Atlanta Beltline has which is billions of dollars in added economic activity. Based on those examples, likely it will increase the NYC GDP by millions if not hundreds of millions. We can prove with dollar amounts getting rid of cars in these cases increase the GDP by billions but in NYC they are only decreasing them so probably won't have the positive impact completely getting rid of cars does.
Does your goverment just let people die?
Dont be obtuse.
A sudden decrease in car crash would probably decrease the GDP the year it happen, then the fact that less people are dying or disabled would probably increase it in the long run. It will probably have the same effect here.
In terms of real economic output I'd guess it helped a bit as it made things quicker for workmen who needed to get around while reducing the more leisure driving. But we've had lots of much larger changes like covid and brexit that would probably drown things out in the numbers.
So yea, if you're poor, you're not driving your beater to SoHo and parking in a lot for $50 daily.
(Also, this thread's root was "regressive tax affecting the poor" which I assert again, is just a silly mischaracterization)
I mean... Toyota would beg to differ (and realistically US car manufacturers today are closer to the Toyota model of car mass production than the traditional US one).
I like walking around new cities, but a lot of people are car life types
Congestion pricing makes driving in New York better. Broadly speaking, the tendency for someone to have a problem with the scheme is proportional to their distance from and inversely related to the amount of time they've ever spent in New York.
Anyone Ubering to and from work is not among New York's poor.
I wonder how it's going to look like in 50 years.
From my limited reading, what fraction of road dust is from tire tread is unclear. The models trying to estimate it give anywhere numbers from 4 to 48%, but may be incorrect due to the citation problem above. Experiments seem to show 4-9%, but they have trouble excluding resuspended dust.
I'd also point out that if we're worried about air quality in NYC between modes of transport, then one should look at subways since PM2.5 in stations/tubes is many times that of the street and far exceeds EPA limits.
Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
You could even run them separate from the street with raised platforms for accessibility and sometimes even run them underground.
We could call this something like “underway” or “steel beam connect-o-cars”
And how fast would it be if Tokyo and Taipei's trains weren't handling 80% and 40% of trips, respectively?
If you reduce Tokyo's 80% trip usage rate down to 5% like many American cities, that means for every other car on the road in Tokyo you'd now see 5 cars instead. How's that Uber ride looking now?
I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities. You just don’t like the aesthetics of that approach. I don’t either. But it’s an aesthetic critique at bottom.
People in Tokyo will accept a longer commute for the sake of a better job or housing or both, because the commute is less miserable (and also because employers pay commute costs).
> I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities.
Transit-oriented cities provide access to more jobs within a fixed range like 30 minutes even for car commuters. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2/figures/4 . People in Dallas having shorter commutes isn't a sign that Dallas is built better, it's a sign that people in Dallas are avoiding switching to otherwise better jobs because it would make their commutes worse.
Got any real stats?
And I was traveling alone this time. Last year when I went with my wife and three kids the differential was even more extreme. I’m convinced public transit is a major reason for the birth rate collapse in east asia.
Sure thing. Just so we're on the same page, mind backing that up with the obvious basic research? You know, just a simple breakdown of birth rates vs public transit usage across the world. Rudimentary stuff.
Birth rate collapse itself is a positive thing, this planet can’t ecologically sustain pre-industrialization birthrates combined with modern medicine and life expectancy. Back in the mid-century there was a lot of academic concern about overpopulation.
Also if you travel (aka kinda pressed for time), esp. with larger group (aka family) a lot of time cars are cheaper and faster and more practical option.
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/mining...
Permitting can be a bitch though: https://www.afr.com/property/residential/rinehart-s-loses-bi...
so there's a reason not to.
- have a financial and physical barrier between the riffraff and paying customers
- spend less total money (for real, the cost of second ave subway alone is about 1/3 the market cap of waymo)
- sit down in comfort with door-to-door air conditioning
- go faster
wheverever the density justifies, autonomy will make "dollar van"-style minibuses financially viable too, since unionized drivers have made full-sized buses a money pit
Good luck climbing hills. A lot of systems like these moved away from rails onto rubber tires.
Rapid bus is probably best combination. Yes it will never match the throughput of rail, but it's vastly cheaper.
And don't get me wrong, some places in US (with extreme density) should do this. Personally it's not the places where I'd ever want to live ever again lol.
Driving down the marginal cost per hour to operate a vehicle on the road and removing humans who are averse to sitting in endless traffic is not going to result in the utopia people think it will.
For a few decades it seemed planners all over the world really had this crazy idea that everyone would just drive around for everything. Just put 10 lane highways straight through your town!
Aren't Euro cities generally much older than those in the New World?
Nah, it's just because it's very, very big, nearly 9 million people. Very big European cities have comparable transport, but most European cities are smaller than this.
NYC's subway system is a little smaller than London's (though its commuter rail system is much smaller), and both cities have similar populations. And a little bigger than Paris's.
(Comparing metro system sizes can get messy, because there are things that are called metros but aren't really (eg SF muni metro, which shares space with cars) and things which aren't usually called metros but are metro-like (some S-bahn type things, in particular))
I think that the numbers are already low enough that the drop is actually not very significant, at all. Is there any data that shows better health outcomes at 8 vs 13 for PM 2.5 levels? From my understanding adverse health outcomes come at exposure over the long term to higher levels like 30 minimum
For context I have several air purifiers in my home and I'm all for better air quality but the percentage difference makes it sound like a much bigger drop but when these numbers are already so small I just am skeptical it really makes a difference...
Is that low? I don’t know what is considered high or low here.
But more importantly, when it comes to PM 2.5 levels, there are really no safe levels, the risks are just dose dependent, so lower is always better. In a city the size of NYC, lowering air pollution by 20% means a significant decrease in effects.
To give a good analogy, driving a car on the US is still quite safe, most of us take that risk, but still, thousands die annually from car accidents. A one fifth reduction in deaths from car accidents, even from its current low level, would be a major deal. In NYC, around 1 in 20 deaths is linked to air pollution.
"In NYC, around 1 in 20 deaths is linked to air pollution."
A difference between 8 and 12 PM 2.5 levels won't change that
Yes, it will, and that's the point I was making.
There are some things that have no harmful affects below certain concentrations, in that they are not toxic at low levels. PM 2.5 particles are not one of those - they are toxic at all levels. It's quite similar, in this context, to ionizing radiation. There is no safe level of ionizing radiation - every X-ray you get will slightly increase your chance of getting cancer. Of course, in the risk/benefit analysis, the risk is low and the benefits for medical X-rays are high.
It's the same with PM 2.5 pollution - every percentage reduction results in fewer health effects and related deaths. It's fine to argue that some level of pollution is worth it to get the benefits of industrialization, but it's simply false to say a reduction from 12 to 8 PM 2.5 levels won't reduce related deaths.
The most recent epidemiology studies (studies on _very_ large cohort) do seems to favour a linear model without threshold (or, if the threshold exists, it is so low ambient radiation is enough to go past it), so I think you're right, but I wanted to nitpick because you wrote it like it was settled science and it's not yet, so I had to look up the PM 2.5 stuff too.
But 8-9 was already considered a safe level: "Most studies indicate PM2.5 at or below 12 μg/m3 is considered healthy with little to no risk from exposure. If the level goes to or above 35 μg/m3 during a 24-hour period, the air is considered unhealthy." (https://www.indoorairhygiene.org/pm2-5-explained/)
So, good job on reducing pollution, but you already had very safe levels (well, the article doesn't tell us what the old "peak concentrations" were). Since the levels were "little to no risk", the claim of "significant health benefits" (i.e. reduction in disease or death) should be challenged.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-02079-y
Smaller doses of a poison are better than less small doses. Using coarse linguistic categories to argue otherwise is an abuse of the purpose of categories as a linguistic tool.
Further, the article is essentially saying that there is far less difference between 11 and 13 than might be assumed by a categorical model that says one level is inside the "safe" level and one is outside of it. But that isn't the issue here - 9 was already quite safe, the risk is very close to zero, so going lower doesn't reduce risk much - because the existing risk can't get much lower.
> Smaller doses of a poison are better than less small doses
Since 1996, the EPA has mandated that unleaded gasoline must be below 0.05 grams of lead per gallon. While the elimination of lead up to this point was a massive benefit to public health, is there any significant health benefit to reducing this further below 0.05? If so, who's claiming that and why haven't the standards changed in 30 years?
Btw, it's a very legitimate remark, please don't down vote the parent. (Sorry about meta commentary I try to avoid)
People panic over the thought of free buses when we have millions of miles of free roads.
Are you familiar with the gas tax? Vehicle registration fees?
It's a distinction without a difference.
This is from July 2025: https://transalt.org/press-releases/new-data-from-transporta...
1970-01-01•1mo ago
afavour•1mo ago
JumpCrisscross•1mo ago
This is unfair. Nobody wants to pay more for anything. And many of the objections resulted in policy adjustments that made the programme better.
afavour•1mo ago
tux1968•1mo ago
GreymanTheGrey•1mo ago
5kh•1mo ago
Hammershaft•1mo ago
hammock•1mo ago
Hammershaft•1mo ago
https://bettercities.substack.com/p/congestion-pricing-is-a-...
CGMthrowaway•1mo ago
Hammershaft•1mo ago
adgjlsfhk1•1mo ago
kmeisthax•1mo ago
When you have everyone in cars, it's more convenient to go to one big store and buy everything in one place, than to go to three small ones to buy three different things. Shopping malls tried to bridge this gap for suburban retail, but the ultimate rules exploit was Wal-Mart: just build a giant box with a parking lot and sell absolutely everything in it.
The problem with one-stop shopping is the same problem as centralized app stores[0]: it creates a single buyer that can dictate to the entire market the terms of the sale. There's only room for 1 or 2 big-box department stores per market. General retail is owned by Target and Wal-Mart. Electronics is owned by Best Buy. Office supplies are owned by Staples and OfficeMax. Crafts and sewing supplies are owned by Michael's[1]. Pet supplies are owned by Petco[2] and Petsmart. Construction supplies? Home Depot and Lowe's. Each one of these are businesses that were built for maximum scale - to suck up all the demand in a market, region, or country for a thing and then mete it out to whatever supplier offers the best terms.
[0] The fact that arguments for the iOS App Store monopoly are the same as arguments for car-centric suburbs should not be lost on you.
[1] RIP Jo-Ann's
[2] Fuck Petco, all my homies hate Petco. Adopt, don't shop.
JumpCrisscross•1mo ago
The MTA "changed its flawed initial proposal to offer the [disability] exemption only to drivers or vehicles owners with state-issued disability plates" [1].
[1] https://www.nylpi.org/resource/letter-to-mta-regarding-conge...
polski-g•1mo ago
But obviously the latter is better. It offers more flexibility for consumers and more transmission of demand signals.
s1mplicissimus•1mo ago
Maybe that has to do with the fact that lifetime is somewhat (!) equally distributed, while wealth isn't
polski-g•1mo ago
hammock•1mo ago
lmm•1mo ago
knollimar•1mo ago
jkaplowitz•1mo ago
Both of these numbers are changing in early January to $3 and $35 respectively, but same idea.
Still, some European countries like Germany offer far cheaper than this, while others like the UK are probably pricer. NYC public transit gives very good value for the US at least.
seanmcdirmid•1mo ago
smileysteve•1mo ago
afavour•1mo ago
CGMthrowaway•1mo ago
You mean to say people without cars are paying the congestion tax? :P
adgjlsfhk1•1mo ago
lmm•1mo ago
lesuorac•1mo ago
But yeah, customers pay the congestion tax for the tradesmen to drive just like they pay the tariff taxes on the supplies the tradesmen use.
seanmcdirmid•1mo ago
hammock•1mo ago
AniseAbyss•1mo ago
lmm•1mo ago
hammock•1mo ago
ashleyn•1mo ago
jkaplowitz•1mo ago
tootie•1mo ago
masterphai•1mo ago
We’re basically shifting costs from people who can’t opt out of congestion to people who can. That’s about as progressive as a transport policy gets.
energy123•1mo ago
You can also offset the regressive nature of this taxation (if any) by putting the revenue into subsidizing public infrastructure like rail and bus.
seanmcdirmid•1mo ago
CGMthrowaway•1mo ago
Half of households in the congestion zone are living at or below 3x federal poverty level ($70K for a family of three). One in six residents makes $20K or less a year.
sysguest•1mo ago
really-rich people don't have to work/commute, so prefer to live in countryside with gardens
really-poor people can't afford cars, and rich(=busy) cities usually have accomodations for them -- so they live inside busy cities
seanmcdirmid•1mo ago
There are lots of middle class commuters who can’t afford to live in the city: they aren’t lucky enough to win the lottery with a rent controlled unit, and are too rich to live in public housing, but still too poor to live in housing of a standard they can tolerate in the city even if their job is there.
renewiltord•1mo ago
In fact, anything that requires a standard of performance will be regressive. We don't have to subordinate all goals to regression avoidance. In fact, no functioning society does that.
CGMthrowaway•1mo ago
Used to be that you had to purchase an officer's commission...
renewiltord•1mo ago
Ar-Curunir•1mo ago
orwin•1mo ago
anonymars•1mo ago
csomar•1mo ago
The solution was to re-structure the MTA. But that’s hard work. Politicians would rather blame the other side and just raise taxes. The people like it because they are grabbing money from what they consider it to be their oppressors.
jpalawaga•1mo ago
This comment is typical HN “government bad can do no right” fodder. The MTA is truly a marvel in the service it provides. The only advantage it has is age, which is why it is so expansive.
Invictus0•1mo ago
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rayiner•1mo ago
maxldn•1mo ago
amanaplanacanal•1mo ago
Invictus0•1mo ago
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lmm•1mo ago
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lmm•1mo ago
As for commercialising the stations, does the MTA try to do so and fail, or are they forbidden from doing so effectively (often by the same people who are pushing the narrative that there is something wrong with the organisation)?
bfeynman•1mo ago
kmeisthax•1mo ago
If you live anywhere in Brooklyn or Queens, the MTA is an inconvenience that constantly reminds you that the spirit of Robert Moses haunts your city to the present day, and that he really, really would like you to ride a private vehicle. Those boroughs are littered with coverage and frequency gaps that can turn a 40 minute car ride into a 2 hour subway ride. And god help you if you ever need to take a bus.
The capital improvements you mention are improvements on the margins. The MTA needs to engage in a radical rethink of NYC metro area transit. There needs to be radial lines - plural - crossing through Brooklyn and Queens at regular intervals to move as much traffic as possible out of Manhattan. The IBX is a good start, but it should also cross through Staten Island and the Bronx. Queenslink should absolutely be built[0], the N/W should extend to LaGuardia Airport, Utica Ave needs a subway line, and the subway in general should extend through Nassau County and Yonkers. Nassau and Suffolk counties need way more north-south rail[1] than they currently have (which is zero) and the same probably could be said for the service areas of MNR.
The bad part of government is not that it can't run a successful transit service. Actually, government is very good at taking a politically popular service and preserving it[2]. But this comes with a cost: extreme conservatism. You see, our government also happens to have a military that is obsessed with roads; and they pay a 900% subsidy to highway projects. So even states that like transit are hard-pressed to actually fund coverage improvements because it's capital inefficient to build anything that isn't a road. And private institutions building their own rail or transit services will just get absolutely crushed by the road subsidy making driving the only good option. So, government bad, actually, but not for the reason you think.
Also, you're replying to someone talking about NYC in particular. Politics in this area are notoriously corrupt; NJ had a mayor who literally closed a bridge to punish people who didn't vote for him. LIRR in particular has a labor scandal every decade or so. And don't forget, Trump was a NY real estate guy before he decided to tear apart America's political fabric.
[0] In fact, it's kind of absurd they didn't do this when they initially switched the Far Rockaway line over from LIRR to subway service!
[1] This would actually be a good opportunity for light rail, unlike the MTA's initial idea of making the IBX a light rail line
[2] See also: Amtrak.
ATMLOTTOBEER•1mo ago
What in particular about the MTA would you change?
JumpCrisscross•1mo ago
Remove the diversity compliance requirement from bids, e.g. [1]. Open up bids to any firm in the nation and select winners based on cost and competence only. Subject the MTA to a forensic audit every ten or twenty years.
[1] https://www.mta.info/document/180556
ako•1mo ago
JumpCrisscross•1mo ago
They come with certification requirements. The one that RFQ lists are NYC specific.
> are you suggesting that all non-white non-male people are incompetent?
I’m saying a local-only bidding pool will necessarily be smaller than a national one. And requiring local certification guarantees the former.
I’m objecting to diversity compliance. Not diversity requirements. (Though even there, one needs to be cognizant of how quickly intersecting requirements can rapidly cascade the candidate pool to small numbers.)