This is great. People complaining on social media aren’t New Yorkers. We have the best mass transit in the nation. Fuck cars. What we want are more bike and footpaths and less time at the crosswalk.
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The amount of crying and screaming around this has been insane. On IG, you'd think from the comments that downtown Manhattan is a mecca of families and small businesses, and not the Financial District.
I agree it's great but NYers are definitely complaining
Sure. This sucks for hedge fund managers from Scarsdale who can afford to pay to get into the financial district.
The rest of us take the subway, bus, or Metro North.
Best in the nation does not mean it is good. A great deal of NYC is not sufficiently covered
The fee is only for downtown Manhattan. Literally every subway line in Manhattan runs through downtown.
There is one downside that I don’t think people consider enough when discussing congestion pricing:
Trucks will now find alternate routes that will hurt poorer neighborhoods.
Example: In order to go between New Jersey and Long Island, some trucks traditionally take routes through Manhattan as it is geographically faster to go crosstown than to detour north or south.
In order to drive from New Jersey to Long Island, to avoid the new congestion pricing trucks will most likely take the George Washington Bridge, drive through the South Bronx, and come down into Queens via the Throggs Neck, Whitestone, or RFK Bridges.
The South Bronx is about to absorb a LOT more of that traffic. Anyone taking the Major Deegan or Bruckner during rush hour knows it’s already beyond fucked with traffic.
Now, the traditionally poorer residents of the South Bronx are about to experience more air pollution, more noise, more road repairs, and majorly slower travel time anywhere.
Congestion pricing doesn’t remove the traffic, it just re-routes it into poorer neighborhoods.
(NOTE: I am a NYC car owner and still for congestion pricing. NYC should be way more pedestrian and bike friendly and while this program has downsides, it is a step in the right direction.)
Counter point. If the congestion pricing extended all the way through The Bronx, Queens, and The Mt. Vernon or Mt. Hebron (I honestly forgot which one is just north of The Bronx, and which one is upstate. Didn't live there for very long.) area, this wouldn't be an issue for any of the boroughs.
Definitely agree. It needs to be implemented in a way that won’t punish the adjacent communities unfairly.
Unfortunately, I live in SD, CA. You'll have to organize to get this common sense legislation passed through all of The Boroughs
There are a few community organizations that are bringing attention to it. Everyone is waiting to see if the reality matches the predictions. It just went into effect today.
Apply it to areas you want fewer people driving. Don’t exclude poorer neighborhoods.
Economically, this is not an either or. It will both reduce AND divert traffic. Some will choose to pay, some will choose an alternate route, some will choose alternate forms of transport.
Agreed. The next phases should keep expanding the zone until there is an equilibrium across all the travel routes.
If other areas of NYC have too much congestion, maybe they should have congestion pricing too…
Lmao no way it's faster for more trucks to go over the GW bridge than go around NYC entirely they'll hit an equilibrium damn quick
How does one go around entirely when trying to reach long island, and vice versa?
I would not want to drive in New York.
Kansas City is nowhere near as dense as NYC, but I still get frustrated driving downtown around there, especially if there's construction.
Suburban cities like KC, Houston, Dallas, and Columbus were designed from the ground up to make driving as feasible as possible and it's still a nightmare to drive in them. I drove through the Bronx once on my way to Long Island and it was a nightmare between all the bridges, tolls, and traffic. And i didn't even try to find somewhere to park. We just took the LIRR into the city from for doing tourist stuff.
Houston was not designed with traffic in mind. Houston is a blob of vague zoning laws and and “add-a-lane” monstrous freeways that create 4 hours of crawling traffic.
My God Houston SUUUUUUUCKS
I drove through there for work and it was terrible. Just concrete jungles of interchanges and highways, flanked on either side by frontage roads that are all one way. Meaning you have to drive all the way down to the next light if you miss your stop or something.
Texas fucking sucks.
Fees vary by vehicle type, with trucks and buses paying higher rates.
I would have thought that single occupant cars should be paying the higher fees, and mass transportation like busses should pay lower fees.
School and commuter buses are exempt. But if your local church is trying to drive a shuttle bus into Manhattan, it is going to face a charge
Ok, but that’s still better than each of them coming in, in their own cars.
And cheaper than everyone driving their own cars
I would bet per head/weight/size, they likely do. Like a single car $9 / 4 people vs. bus charge / bus population, I would wager the bus rate is better for them, but it’s just a guess.
Personally I dont understand why they dont just remove all the street parking spots.
That and establish maximum parking spots per building. Building has legal occupancy for 2000 people? Max 1% parking spots means theyre not allowed to have more than 20 car parking spots for the entire building.
The point is to make cars the slowest, most expense, and most difficult mode of transport. Make it hell so that nobody would want to drive a car there because its miserable.
That would invovle upgrading the subway to actually handle capacity along with a circular route, but that is currently beyond the capability of any American public transport development lol.
There are a lot of two fare zones in the city limits. I understand the desire some people have to turn nyc into big amsterdam, but nyc is substantially larger than that city with substanitally less interconectedness. Hell, Holland is a country barely bigger than the NYC metropolitan area.
If people had good reliable transit available, they would use it. The reality is that they do not. People who think nyc does either are not from there, or live in the privilged part that has tons of transit options.
You cant force people, you have to offer better options. I agree, if cars were the slowest option people wouldnt use them. Guess what? They arent. Three bus transfers are. This is ignoring anyone who needs to travel outaide of the city limits as well.
I have to nitpick slightly; Holland is not a country. Amsterdam is in the North Holland province of the Netherlands.
Source: I'm on the train from Amsterdam to my home in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which is not a part of either Holland.
You've described the opposite of how the US likes to do things
Last year I lived in an apartment who had about 40 parking spaces, 2 for each of 20 units. This complex was in a highrise which had around 80 vacant units, but due to minimum parking availability laws in my area they had to leave most units vacant.
My city is (obviously) plagued with an unhousing epidemic as the artificial restrictions like this (the landlord problem too 🙄) continue to drive property prices up (my unit was a 400sqft studio for $1.2k after fees, that's $3 a square foot in a nation where $1/sqft is standard).
If you live in an RV or truck, you're screwed. But then if you drive a huge truck to deliver stuff, your company benefits more and destroys more than my driving my 1980 civic.
Who in their right mind is bringing an RV into this:
Where can you even put an RV in NYC, let alone downtown Manhattan?
More like who in their right mind would ever want to drive there at all...ever.