However NYC's transit is notoriously bad at spending, so not sure it would achive that. Which studies linked in this thread are you refering to? I cant see them.
How many people on Wallstreet do you know that drive to work?
However you did mention some other studies on this thread that support your claim this is a regressive tax, I'm worried I missed them, can you share the links?
I wish as a society we'd use this form of taxation more, and widely applied taxes less. In theory insurance is supposed to have the actuarial people who figure it out and properly price the choices in, but it's also surprising how crude they can be-- lumping very distinct situations as "the same". eg aggressive drivers are only penalized after they hurt someone, like the phrase "no harm no foul" (until there is harm). It'd be better if telemetry was collected and penalized in realtime.
In this case, you have a regressive tax with a huge positive side effect due to taxing an externality. If the funds are also spread into progressive services it can be a net positive for all income brackets.
The truck carrying $10k in sushi can afford and justify the daily $9 fee.
Reducing the number of cars on the road helps everyone: we tend to focus on the enormous quality of life and health benefits to residents but it also helps everyone who doesn’t have the option of not driving, too. Ambulances getting stuck in congestion less is a win. Deliveries which can’t be done using cargo bikes similarly benefit from reducing the single greatest source of delay: cars.
If you need to reach Long Island, the incentive to avoid the (tolled) Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Verrazzano, and RFK bridges are gone; now you're paying for the privilege of sitting in Manhattan traffic.
[0]: https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info/faqs
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-congestion-pricing-...
[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/parkway-restricti...
this claim has been debunked many times and anyone with eyes can see who the private drivers in NYC are
Transit is $3/ride (in a few weeks), 24 hours, and all over the city. It's not perfect, but for the vast majority of cases owning a car in NYC is just not really worth it. If you need one because you have a weekend home out in Long Island or up in the Hudson Valley, you can afford the $9 toll.
That's true even without congestion pricing. A city would go broke and bulldoze itself trying to add enough stacked lane, highways, and parking to handle everyone who would prefer to drive in or through if the capacity existed.
Take a look at their figure, especially in May 2020—the average appears lower, but, more significantly, there is much less variability in May 2020 compared to earlier years.
The authors' model quite strongly includes their preferred confound (secular decrease in PM2.5) but doesn't explore what other covariates could explain the differences between years.
It's fine to say that one should be skeptical, but one contrary report doesn't invalidate an antecedent report, and the structure of a linear model strongly influences an outcome.
Given the physical mechanisms involved it is implausible that pollution did not decline. And if you look at their data you see a marked drop in 2020 at day 70
This is March 10 or thereabouts, I think. And there are ZERO high pm 2.5 days for a 20 day stretch or so. This isn't seen in other years. The vast bulk of days are below the trend.
And then for the rest of the year there are some days above the trend line but no high pm 2.5 days.
This fits with people being extra cautious in the early days and then relaxing a bit as things went on.
Now, I'm eyeballing this so I could be incorrect. But:
1. The effect was found in other cities
2. The physical mechanism makes it highly expected that there would be a drop
The study was about the slope of the regression modal, but if you had scrambled the years I'm fairly confident I could have picked 2020 out of the set.
Popular truck route from Queens->Bronx was 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd then immediate left onto 59th, and another left onto 1st and take 1st all the way to Willis Ave bridge to beat the RFK bridge (formerly the Triborough) tolls.
It could also be the case that making it viable to drive personal vehicles at all inside a dense city comes with opportunity costs (parking, roads that cut through infrastructure, pollution, noise) that aren't worth it.
And I'd wager that it is the case.
We did this in Times Square and on Broadway, and it's honestly been great. I say this as someone who takes cars far more frequently than most New Yorkers and has a place I lived at full time for over a decade off one of those closed-off sections of Broadway.
[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.
Why? Fewer cars into Manhattan means fewer cars through the boroughs. And even if they all diverted, you’re still looking at less idling and less stop and start braking.
In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights, which are predictable, rather than the traffic itself.
Is that because of gridlock or because of the higher energies?
> In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights
Source? In my experience it's unexpected incursions, whether that be cars changing lanes, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk or food-delivery bikers yeeting themselves into an intersection.
Rich people now have a great way to continue driving their cars, everyone else is fucked?
A parking spot will cost you more than rent in some other cities.
The more money you have, more you benefit from this ruling. Now you can buy a service which was not possible before.
It wasn't possible to drive a car in NYC before congestion pricing? I find that… unlikely.
This is nonsense.
The poor of New York benefit from congestion pricing. It means more funding for the public transit they predominantly take. And for the minority who drive for a living it increases their revenues.
The opposition to congestion charges comes from principally outside New York, often from folks who have little to no familiarity with it.
The difference is that now they are paying for that service they were already using, and those funds are going to public transit which serves the majority of New Yorkers especially those with lower incomes.
They're already using them, and the results show. They could have done it cheaper. But the LIRR is operating at Swiss rail efficiecies since the recent electrification and signalling improvements.
> In June 2025, revenue from the congestion toll was used to increase service on more than a dozen bus lines citywide… In October 2025, the MTA sold $230 million worth of bonds to help fund the first projects that were being partially financed using congestion-toll revenue.
Because the poor don’t drive in New York, and to the extent they do, they likely qualify for an exemption.
This mechanism allows people with more money to enjoy driving in the city or is this congestion prcing based on your salary? no its not its based on the time in the city independent of what you make.
A person with their high end car and miillions now can buy himself a nice little drive into the city while everyone else can't.
This was already the case in NYC without congestion fees. (For example: https://nypost.com/2025/07/12/us-news/park-slope-parking-spo...)
Now they get to fund public transit a little bit while they do so.
Have you ever talked to poor people in NYC?
Should i said poorer people who still need a car to drive in NYC to make it more understandable to the hn crowed Oo?!
This does not exist. Parking in the congestion zone starts at $25 for an hour and regularly goes above $100 for an evening.
The whole issue with car dependency is that it is a massive barrier for participating in society.
Public transit is orders of magnitude cheaper, and very viable and often the better option in the New York area.
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/the-cost-of-killing-congest...
Allowing employees to work remote.
https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/the-...
> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.
> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.
The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.
What’s your source for this?
Also, why would a goal matter more than results?
They have, for decades. https://nyc-business.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/idling-...
Most certainly regulated. There are people who make a living off of reporting idling trucks and collecting the bounty.
They do, in fact, regulate idling my dude- https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02222
> In New York City, vehicle idling is illegal if it lasts more than 3 minutes or more than 1 minute when adjacent to a school.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
Had most people outside the tri-state area not heard and formed an opinion about congestion pricig before Trump brought it up?
I've lived all over the world and in NYC for decades so it seems silly to me. Bust most Americans have never seen or ridden an effective form of public transport. So they view congestion pricing as an infringement on their rights and quality of life.
Especially considering that
* Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers, as they spend the most amount of time actually driving in congested roads
* Congestion pricing makes the trips self-select on cost/benefit in actual dollars, perversely you're likely optimizing your limited road space better if people are figuring that their trip is not worth the price, yet it was still worth their time
* Car use remains heavily subsidized, as motorists do not come close to paying the full costs associated with their road usage
Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York.”
I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
There are no highway arteries running through the congestion zone. Building one would require hundreds of billions of dollars of eminent domain.
Manhattan has a $1tn GDP [1], on par with Switzerlad [2]. Its economy is larger than all but 6 states (between Pennsylvaia and Ohio) [3]. More than all of New Jersey. If it crossed the pond it would be the fifth-largest member of the EU, between the Netherlands and Poland [4].
It's a tremendously productive jewel that towers–literally–over the economic activity in its vicinity. Sacrificing Manhattan to save a few bucks on a trucker not taking a highway through the Bronx is absolutely mental from a social, economic and environmental perspective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City $939bn in 2023
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Is this happening in/around NYC?
> Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
The are the same, you just have to pay the fee.
Also, for like 90% of NJ you'd be going the southern route into Brooklyn anyway, no congestion pricing involved.
lkbm•1h ago
Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44407-025-00037-2
throwawaypath•1h ago
kyleee•1h ago
HPsquared•1h ago
ceejayoz•34m ago
For example, I have Michelin's CrossClimate tires, which are all-weather tires that do better in snow but don't break down as fast as dedicated winter tires do in warm weather.
jgeada•1h ago
Angostura•1h ago
ceejayoz•1h ago
Same trick with solar farms: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
And wind: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-oil-and-gas-ind...
bpt3•43m ago
If you're claiming that the oil and gas lobby is facilitating their criticism of any automobile, I hope you're right because that would be hilarious.
ceejayoz•32m ago
That's not shocking to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)
> Friends of the Earth U.S. was founded in California in 1969 by environmentalist David Brower after he left the Sierra Club. The organization was launched with the help of Donald Aitken, Jerry Mander and a $200,000 donation from the personal funds of Robert O. Anderson. One of its first major campaigns was the protest of nuclear power, particularly in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
> Robert Orville Anderson (April 12, 1917 – December 2, 2007) was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist who founded [the United States' sixth-largest oil company] Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).
Spivak•56m ago
Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
jibe•49m ago
fullstop•40m ago
eunoia•48m ago
I have a much better time in my EV than my ICE car but to each their own.
fullstop•41m ago
You likely don't need to replace the panel, as load management options exist. Wallbox, in particular, has an option where you can add a modbus doo-dad (carlo gavazzi energy management module) to your panel and it will monitor the overall usage and drop the EVSE current to keep it at a safe level.
It's more expensive than if you had a modern panel, but less expensive than replacing the panel itself.
mikestew•40m ago
Says the person who has never owned an EV. Fifteen years of EV ownership, I’m never going back. Environmental factors aside, an EV is the overall better vehicle. You can keep your rattling ICE vehicles that need special fluid from specific vendors.
kevstev•15m ago
Depending on your commute length, you may be able to just use your regular plug to top up over night. Infra upgrades to support the future are unfortunate, but it should be a one and done kind of thing. It was probably time to update the panel and get 200 Amp service- you will recoup a portion of that if you ever sell the house.
The best part is batteries get signficantly (for some values of signficant) cheaper and better each year. Gen 1 Nissan Leaf owners can now actually replace their batteries for about 1/5th the initial pack cost and increase their range.
lkbm•11m ago
aeronaut80•3m ago
colechristensen•58m ago
nonethewiser•55m ago
hamdingers•43m ago
The auto industry has positioned EVs as that solution, even though it's mostly not.
throwawaypath•37m ago
KptMarchewa•27m ago
SoftTalker•25m ago
lkbm•1h ago
EVs do also have higher torque, so that may increase tire-based particles, but you're right that it avoids the brake pads for the most part.
Fewer cars in general is the win from congestion pricing, though.
tart-lemonade•1h ago
And lower VMTs (vehicle miles traveled) is also a win for the planet, it's probably the best weapon the average person has access to in the fight against climate change. Transit usage begets transit usage; more fares paid to the agency enables better frequencies and more routes, leading to more people opting to take transit instead of driving... In a well-run system, it's a positive feedback loop (and the inverse, where people stop taking transit, can also lead to a death spiral, as happened across America in the mid-20th century).
oasisbob•1h ago
treyd•45m ago
bluGill•12m ago
sokoloff•37m ago
If you substitute with “don’t travel far [or at all]”, it’s a big savings. If you substitute flying 1000 miles on an airliner with “drive 1000 miles instead”, or flying US to Europe with a cruise ship trip to Europe, you’ve probably made it worse; in that regards, it’s less the mode of travel and more the total distance in these trades.
littlestymaar•1h ago
nabla9•1h ago
a_paddy•59m ago
The high torque of EVs results in frequent wheel slippage for those eager to pull away from traffic lights quickly. Just like with high BHP ICE vehincles, smooth and gentle acceleration/deceleration will result in long tire life.
PunchyHamster•54m ago
Brake dust is mostly some iron, carbon, silica. Not great to ingest but very much recyclable by the environment, unlike rubber.
And possibly much easier to greatly reduce (just build some shielding around the brake to catch most of the dust) than the tyre
bryanlarsen•47m ago
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
non-exhaust emissions on an ICE vehicle are roughly 1/3 brake dust, 1/3 tire dust and 1/3 road dust. EV's have almost no impact on road dust, 83% lest brake dust and 20% more tire dust.
mikestew•43m ago
I guess those narratives aren’t going to support themselves.
biophysboy•1h ago
nabla9•1h ago
ceejayoz•1h ago
entropicdrifter•1h ago
Which, as an EV owner, feels like an "oh no, my steak is too buttery" kind of problem to have.
ceejayoz•59m ago
Aurornis•58m ago
Aurornis•59m ago
Not relevant for normal driving. The tires aren’t spinning appreciably due to acceleration except in brief moments with aggressive driving.
EVs can actually have higher acceleration related tire wear because they weigh more and have more instant torque on demand.
A lot of consumer EVs have filtered throttle pedal inputs to reduce the torque spikes though.
sandworm101•53m ago
conception•1h ago
micromacrofoot•34m ago
stewarts•23m ago
I would not doubt I use my breaks 1/20th of the amount that our X5 or Silverado use theirs.
fullstop•9m ago
nonethewiser•55m ago
LogicFailsMe•51m ago
TLDR regenerative braking reduces this significantly, nut getting the raw numbers is always fraught with today's horrific AI-addled search engines.
Also seems like a wonderful opportunity for the materials science people to print money coming up with better brake materials here. And if anyone here who can say "clean coal" with a straight face disagrees, point and laugh at them.
MSFT_Edging•39m ago
lonelyasacloud•36m ago
Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.
See for instance https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...
biophysboy•27m ago
oersted•1h ago
cenamus•1h ago
maerF0x0•1h ago
hamdingers•38m ago
maerF0x0•14m ago
Also for what it's worth you have no idea if it's good or bad faith.
toomuchtodo•1h ago
Premature mortality related to United States cross-state air pollution - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1983-8 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1983-8
throw-qqqqq•1h ago
While that is true, PM2.5 is still a major cause of lung cancer in non smokers, see e.g.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11729863/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11969995/
oersted•1h ago
CalRobert•1h ago
aurareturn•1h ago
lkbm•1h ago
Two-stroke engines are terrible, classic automobiles are terrible, cars with no emission regulations will tend to be terrible. Cars in NYC will have catalytic converters and other technologies to reduce tailpipe emissions.
fsckboy•1h ago
fullstop•1h ago
lkbm•19m ago
The good news is that I believe Ho Chi Minh City is about to start, so hopefully they'll have much cleaner air in a couple years.
macNchz•1h ago
lkbm•15m ago
kccqzy•1h ago
And oh also the small engines powering street food carts.
mc32•1h ago
fortran77•1h ago
lkbm•1h ago
theurerjohn3•1h ago
Are Yale's media releases typically done by the people who do the study?
acdha•1h ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44407-025-00037-2
scythe•1h ago
Also, I thought tire particles tend to be larger.
MLgulabio•1h ago
Nothing i would breath in a garage. Nothing i like to breath in while i'm driving.
Aurornis•53m ago
Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles.
The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
PM2.5 is also a broad category of particulates that come from many sources. The PM2.5 levels in the air depend on many sources, with wind being a major factor in changing PM2.5 levels. It’s hard to draw conclusions when a number depends on the weather and a lot of other inputs.
stetrain•47m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
When you remove the cheating and give adequate weight to those emissions, diesel for passenger vehicles makes a lot less sense.
cool_dude85•38m ago
stetrain•33m ago
The focus has more recently shifted to reducing overall emissions of CO2 and other harmful gases and particulates, which makes diesel much less appealing.
SECProto•23m ago
rdm_blackhole•37m ago
That's why before EVs started to show up on the market en masse if you walked into a dealership they would always recommend that you pick the diesel engine if you wanted to save money of fuel costs.
That was actually the reason why the Yellow vest protests started in 2018 when the French government announced that the taxation gap between diesel and regular gasoline was going to disappear gradually.
Small edit to add to the context:
By that point, when the protests started in 2018, the governments(right and left) of France and the many French automakers had been pushing diesel engines as THE solution to alleviate rising fuel costs and so justifiably, the protesters thought that someone had just pulled the rug from underneath them.
Also this measure was in direct contradiction to Macron's campaign promise which was that he was going to reduce the tax burden or at least not increase it on the middle class, especially the rural middle-class that basically cannot get a job without having a car as public transport is almost non-existent in rural France.
That and many other things which I won't get into since it is not relevant for this discussion really riled people up.
mikepurvis•29m ago
Based on this, I've always thought of diesel as "more expensive", like you better get 15% more power/miles out of it if it's going to cost more! However, I suspect that most people purchasing diesel vehicles have as their other choice a car that would slurp premium, so for those buyers perhaps diesel is still a discount, even in Canada.
efaref•43m ago
awongh•37m ago
And turns out the whole thing was a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
It's unfortunate that so much rhetoric around environmentalism is based on faulty claims. It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.
The latest one is AI data center water use- the extreme numbers like 5 liters of water per ChatGPT image just makes me feel sad that we can't have a civil discussion based on the facts. Everything is so polarized.
wiether•29m ago
You link an article that talks about how manufacturers lied on their emission figures.
But later you seem to imply that the actual lie was about how bad emissions are for humans/environment?
pixl97•21m ago
What does that even mean?
Honestly whatever it means it sounds like you would be the kind of person that would fall for the firehose of falsehood rather than look for the truth behind the actual claims.
GuB-42•36m ago
The idea is that diesel is the "work" fuel, for shipping, construction, etc... While gasoline is the "consumer" fuel, for personal use, motorsports, etc... Make the former expensive and it will affect the entire economy, everything will become more expensive and less competitive. Making gasoline more expensive will not have the same impact.
So, put high taxes on gasoline. The result was an increase in popularity of diesel cars, that cost less to run because of taxes.
Now, the situation is changing. Diesel, at least the one that is legal to use on the road is taxed at a level closer to gasoline. Diesel cars are also becoming less and less welcome with regards to low emission zones and green taxes, so many people are going back to gasoline.
rdm_blackhole•27m ago
SoftTalker•31m ago
niemandhier•26m ago
Jon_Lowtek•46m ago
It is different in Africa, where catalytic converters are harvested for precious metals and cars are driven without them.
bryanlarsen•38m ago
It also assumes they're using the same tires. EV owners put on EV tires, which are formulated to have a lower rolling resistance, quieter and last longer. All 3 of those correlate with lower dust.
awongh•35m ago
bryanlarsen•30m ago
Also, cars designed as pure EV's are a lot lighter than EV's built on an ICE chassis.
A Telsa 3 is about 2% heavier than a BMW 3 whereas a Ford Lightning is 20% heavier than the comparable F-150.
Jon_Lowtek•1m ago
Table 2 in the paper lists which cars where compared, and that 24% numbers is an average from comparing models where manufacturers offer EV and ICE variants.
fullstop•10m ago
It's the same problem as giant phones. They make them this way in order to fit a bigger battery in.
ericbarrett•23m ago
bluGill•22m ago
bryanlarsen•44m ago
The order is:
1. brake dust 2. road dust 3. engine emissions 4. tire dust
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
somewhereoutth•22m ago
thmsths•11m ago
iambateman•5m ago
coryrc•3m ago
coryrc•9m ago
There was a "study" going around claiming otherwise, which sampled air captured by passing vehicles with a trash bag on a busy road, claiming EVs did not reduce brake dust, but even my brief summary here makes it extremely obvious how flawed this "measurement" is.