So I was previously comparing: $0 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $0 car toll + $50 Taxi/Uber fare
Now I am comparing: $9 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $1.50 Uber toll + $50 Uber fare
That is - the fee is being passed onto riders anyway, so why should I pay a lower toll sitting in the back of an Uber than when driving myself across the bridge?
This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?
It's one of those things about the way Americans think about transit that makes me insane, they try to assess the ROI of every single individual leg of a transit system rather than assess the system as a whole.
For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.
That's just one example. Here's another more suited to your example. What if you generally switch to taking transit into the city, and only take an uber when it's raining or you have something heavy to carry?
If I allow there to be a robust market for Ubers in the city then that's possible. If I aggressively charge Ubers then you can't do that, and you're back to driving every day.
There's plenty of examples. But in short it's clear that private cars are by a mile the worst and most inefficient thing occupying the roads. That's what we want to have the strongest incentives against.
That's a cute anecdote but is there any empirical evidence behind this? I'd imagine the people who commute downtown, stay late often enough that this is a concern, is willing to take the bus even though they have a car and can otherwise afford daily commute downtown (gas/parking), but at the same time can't pay for an uber on those late nights, is approximately zero.
I'm being somewhat argumentative on purpose but the concept I'm explaining actually is important. There's something similar to a phase change when a city/area becomes sufficiently well connected so that transit can basically solve every problem.
You go to somewhere like Switzerland and it just jumps out at you. There's a fundamental approach that everywhere someone wants to go should be accessible by transit in a way that's workable. There's also a fundamental decision that being able to bring a car somewhere isn't necessarily something that has to be supported.
It's just a different way of looking at things.
Can you envision an American town that literally does not allow cars anywhere near the actual town, like at all?
If that seems utterly impossible to visualize then you're starting to see what I mean. Now try to visualize a Swiss town that literally has no ability to connect to the broader transit system.
So what do you do? You drive to work every day and pay the parking costs, because it's preferable to ending up stuck downtown with everything closed for several hours while you're exhausted from working a double.
This problem with public transit is the single biggest reason people who work at restaurants have to always drive to work. It's exactly as the comment you're replying to put it.
I can see by your example how over the course of the day the taxi/uber collects a lot of CPZ fees for the city, I just don't see the fee reducing anyone at the margin from using taxi/uber.
At the end of the day I'd love to see transit improve, and if all this does is reduce traffic for the well heeled who already are taking taxi/ubers.. I mean I win there too, but it doesn't feel great.
For the record when I commute it's always by transit, the problem is weekend/night service has degraded to the point that I feel forced to take taxi/uber quite often. I've lived in NYC nearly 20 years and have found, if anything, night/weekend service to be less predictable and more perplexing. This again harms the less well off even more, as they are more likely to be doing shift work / non-traditional workdays than your M-F 9-5er.
Just this weekend, yet again, I was trying to get around midtown and Apple kept telling me what should be a 6min trip would take 30min by train even though I was 5 seconds from subway entrance. I couldn't understand why, and went to MTA website and saw no alerts for the 6th ave line. Then I went to the live train time page and realized the problem - the 6th Ave line was running at 15min headways, so Apple had me walking 2 blocks to 8th Ave then to wait 15min for the train (possibly 30min if its a B/D and I needed an F/M). This was Saturday around dinner time. Just awful service.
It's not obvious that Uber is exclusively the higher-class option. Someone could easily make the same calculation you just did and decide that for them even owning a car wouldn't be worth it, they'll just do Uber every time they need to. You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.
I don't have data to back it up, but I would actually be surprised if the average Uber customer in NYC owns a car at all.
This isn't really a different class.
The other class is the people who can't afford a car or Uber and can barely afford the MTA.
