It wouldn't be surprising in a few years that they'll charge by the streets you entered, or the calculated emissions produced by your vehicle.
(Note I have never visited NYC, on the bucket list)
The point is we don't want nor need private cars in central Manhattan. A simpler solution would be eliminating street-side parking, but that's a political hot potato.
We all have dreams. If only.
Living in the big city is not a frog boiling operation. These rules are pretty simple: cars are silly in dense environments. It's in the first paragraph.
"... charge private vehicles..."
Note: I am not a car freak. I'm a solarpunk guy, I'd rather have Futurama style tubes, or VTOL vehicles anytime!
But paying for horrendous traffic jams clearly shows to me that public transport isn't up to snuff.
The transit access/walkability of NYC gives it a LOT of leeway to squeeze some money out, especially with how expensive everything has gotten.
What’s getting worse and worse is rent …
Also note that this only effects poor people in any significant way.
How? There are discounts for the poor [1]. Those in the trades can add it to their bills. And there are precious few poor Manhattanites living within the congestion-charge zone who also have a car. (Parking a car in Manhattan is like renting another bedroom.)
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/05/09/mta-will-offer-conges...
Simply not true. The poor don’t drive into the city. They can’t afford cars, and even if they could, they can’t afford to park them.
This will most heavily affect taxi riders and city employees who park illegally and so don’t have to worry about paying, if they don’t just evade the rules by illegally obscuring or removing their license plates. Which they will—-secure in the fact that the NYPD will never do anything and even if they do OATH will have their backs.
I can buy that excuse in SF which has a lot of poor exurban car commuters by necessity, but NYC has a much bigger public transit network and parking is even more scarce and expensive in Manhattan than in SF (so unless you’re just taking a shortcut through Manhattan, which this is intentionally penalizing, you’re going to be paying a lot for parking anyway and are probably already wealthy).
However, the more pressing issue is whether the existing democracy is inherently designed to marginalize those below a certain economic threshold. I think it is.
BIG claim. Especially because, obviously, all poor people and only poor people drive in NYC. Citation needed.
Also, I think there’s some fallacious reasoning going on here as if congestion pricing by itself will not help unless timed to exactly coincide with other projects completing. It can as long there’s slack in the system (there is) and it doesn’t need those other projects to be done before it starts helping.
The MTA certainly overpays for projects but that is a much easier problem to point out than to fix. It ties into a huge and longstanding corruption/graft scheme, that has in practice a lot of public support, that you can’t just fix overnight.
He's not spelling out how he'd prefer they repurpose the new funding stream, but he's right that the new projects are expensive window dressing on a burning house.
I just don't buy this. The city could easily afford to just foot the bill with the economic traffic it drives. It's just a non-problem they trot out to work people up.
I felt like the core of the article was that NYC had ignored an established pattern (outlined in a report[1]) that suggests that, for this to work like they want, they would need to increase non-car ways of getting into and around the city. I also thought the article did a good job of talking about how the legally relevant metrics are focused on financial targets rather than transit targets.
I do think this kind of article is hard to write clearly, but I do not think what you said is in conversation with the content of the article. I can see why they are worried that congestion pricing must fund new capital projects (i.e. expansion) instead of the existing system. You didn't mention that in your critique and I'm curious because it feels like a central point of the article.
I also do not think this article was exactly criticizing the MTA for overpaying? More than it was noting that it HAD overpaid to situate the reader as to the MTA's current financial situation.
[1] https://rpa.org/work/reports/congestion-pricing-in-nyc#key-f...
NYC already has the most non-car ways of anywhere in the country by a long shot. Subways, trains, buses. Taxis, Ubers, CitiBike.
What on earth more improvements do they want?
How do you spend that much money and make things worse? The MTA isn’t just incompetent, it’s world-historically incompetent. Tens of millions of people’s lives would be significantly better if it was only as corrupt and incompetent as a typical metro system in Southern Europe
It’s probably because as another commenter said not worth their time.
Seems like NYC has been battling this for years.
https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=Fake+plates+new+y...
I vaguely remember some YouTube vlogger that would walk around and spot the fake/modified/obstructed plate. One obstruction was a leaf. That doesn’t even begin to include the probably illegal tinted covers.
Having been to Asia where you could get anywhere with public transport, it's wild to see the dichotomy in many western countries.
It’s ironic that many of the people most in favor of aggressively promoting transit (I.e. via aggressive measures like banning cars) are also the same that impede the safety and clean parts from happening. Instead they just handwave peoples’ concerns saying “oh that crazy psycho raving about murdering everyone in the subway car is really harmless. You should be worried about the thousands of people cars murder every day instead!”
Also, despite their amazing transit systems, many people in Asia still aspire to own a private car.
Nor the third!
Allow only delivery vans to operate between say 4am - 10am.
With rest of the time for cafes, bars, restaurants etc to open on the streets.
Any time an article compares government financing to your household finances, you can stop reading. The author is either misinformed, being disingenuous, or both.
