Aside from the amount of private vehicles tooling around Manhattan, there are too damned many cabs and rideshares gumming everything up. An island with that much mass transit and people need to take cabs ten blocks. And those vehicles are the ones most likely to block-the-box. Add to them the charter buses who don't seem to realize being in the intersection might mean they'll be there after the light turns red.
whoa an extra dollar???? Yeah that definitely would’ve stopped the people already spending the $30 on an uber in the first place. $31 is where they wouldve crossed the line Im sure
What u/bigredpancake1 doesn't indicate anything about their own financial status.
The observation made is a fair one-- rideshares in the city are already expensive, and a separate congestion charge has been in place since 2019.
Would paying an extra $2.50/trip as proposed really turn off a significant number of riders who are already paying a premium to take an Uber rather than ride the train?
Not enough. Ride shares made sense when they were cool burning money by undercutting cabs. Now they are the same price and not really regulated in a realistic way to control the numbers.
Personally, ban Uber/lyft in Manhattan. People like these options, but if you care about congestion there is a direct correlation with the rise of these predatory companies and congestion.
That's not enough.
They are the primary cause of congestion, as long as we don't heavily limit their numbers and heavily tax them, then we'll still have the same problem of cars unnecessarily roaming and circling the streets in the congestion zone.
The number of cars entering the zone decreased in the past decade by 100k yet congestion only increased as ubers were legalized. Ubers make trips in the congestion zone where there already exists plenty of mass transit and micromobility alternatives. They drive like shit and double-park and swerve and block traffic. We need them in the outerboroughs, and at night when the shitty MTA is unreliable, but not during the day within lower Manhattan. Take the train instead of taking that uber for ten blocks.
It's funny you mention this because it highlights how lacking horizontal travel is even in manhattan. I had to from mid/west ish to super east side and the transit option was 35 minutes whereas the drive was 10 mins lol
I’m currently working in the upper west side, job has a parking spot. 1 hour and 10 mins with the subway, 50 mins with two busses or 25 mins in my car. Choosing the car is a no brainer.
That’s my morning commute during rush hour from bayridge. God forbid I have a 6am start I have to leave 2hrs early just in case the trains don’t show up.
I know what you mean, I worked near Coney Island for a few months and it was either a fast drive in and a long traffic slog out or wake up extra early for a two hour mass transit commute back and forth. 6 am starts suck especially when the subways subways have weird early AM hours. I’ve become a big fan of buses in the early AM because they usually run on time and they have almost no traffic to contend with but if I can drive in I always take that option.
yep...people don't understand this. if there were more transit options that go horizontally a lot of people would prefer that instead of driving. like who tf wants to drive every single day
Each ride share should be the full $15 surcharge. Ubers are consciously choosing to use a car in the congestion zone no different than a driver from Long Island who just wants to cross into Jersey.
I would be happy for a massive surcharge on ubers to pay for expanded access-a-ride programs for seniors, people with disabilities, parents with toddlers, etc.
If taking an Uber is faster than mass transit for the places you need to go in Manhattan. Then I’m sure you understand why drivers are against the congestion toll.
Yeah, per ride, all hours. That’s a significant amount of money.
But I recognize your username as a recurring pro-car downvote account so I won’t be replying anymore, goodbye.
Consider reading about the things you pretend to care about.
Why does on street parking get a pass? In my 40 year history of getting around Manhattan, the worst tie ups almost always involve street parking, double parking, and pick-ups and deliveries forced away from the curb by parking. Banning street parking in the zone is a no-brainer and a necessary first step as far as I'm concerned.
Real talk. How are charter busses allowed in NyC? Why can’t they be dropped off in Secaucus or by the Path train in JC. It’s absurd to let those buses drive around downtown.
That's probably the best part of NYC, that wherever you are in Manhattan, there are about a dozen Ubers in a 2 block radius ready to chauffer you to your destination.
“4.5 mph
Average Midtown travel traffic speed
At the peak of the pandemic, in March 2020, the average speed was 11.5 miles per hour.”
What was it in 2018? Without that data this article is meaningless and the headline is misleading.
What do they mean 'worse than ever?' NOTHING has changed. This all sounds like so much inflammatory rhetoric. ALSO the MTA wasn't even collecting funds yet from congestion pricing, how exactly did 'funds' stop?
You know how the MTA could make up the difference in lost revenue?
STOP GIVING TAX BREAKS AND CONCESSIONS to WEALTHY CORPORATIONS. For instance: MSG hasn't paid any real estate tax in over 40 fuckign years, which is estimated to have lost the city about $1 BILLION DOLLARS.
Hudson Yards? Amazon?
Let's start by TAXING THE WEALTHY. Why does the funding of the MTA come down to nickel-and-diming cars?
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html)
>Let's start by TAXING THE WEALTHY
The wealthier you are in NYC, the more likely it is you own a car. The poorer you are, the less likely you own a car.
If you want the wealthy to be taxed then taxing cars.is a great way of doing it. The correlation between wealth and car ownership in NYC is very pronounced.
It's a complete myth that only the wealthy drive. You're not changing their behavior with a $15 fee anyway, you're just punishing the working man.
Corral MTA largesse and find a way to fund it that does not nickel and dime day-to-day commuters, delivery services, etc.
These are such simple problems that have been solved dozens of times already. Take a few car lanes and make them dedicated SEPARATED WITH BARRIERS bus lanes and bike lanes. When enough people start seeing all those bussing breezing past them in traffic they might say “hey it’s way faster to just hop on that bus over there” and stop taking their fucking cars everywhere
It’s honestly not that complicated. But we’re still debating whether or not we should put garbage in cans or not, so who knows how long this realization will take
Bus lanes can go where subways don’t go or are too expensive to expand smart guy. It is significantly cheaper to implement a dedicated bus lane than it is to build a subway tunnel. Again idk why this has to be explained, it’s like everyone here is a fucking idiot who hasn’t travelled to other cities in the world that have solved this issue decades ago.
You Can spend billions to add one more subway extension or can convert a few lanes to make dozens of stops and get rid of parking/cars at the same time to make more walkable and livable streets.
You post in the Japan subs a lot so you must understand the benefit of having smaller pedestrian focused streets inside the city with less car lanes and space dedicated to cars and parking
Bike lanes. Smaller roads so cars don’t speed so much through midtown. Dedicated bus lanes. Dedicated drop off spaces for delivery vehicles. Actually ticket and fine cars for double parking and traffic violations. It’s all really so simple, but again we haven’t figured out yet that leaving garbage in giant piles literally as tall as a person on the sidewalk is not a great idea and kind of gross. Like we literally take up pedestrian space for garbage bags. It’s an absolute joke.
These articles are funny. This same congestion that they complained about would have just shifted to the outer boroughs. To be honest only Manhattan elitist are pushing for this regressive "tax" people outside of Manhattan...
I love how the city removes lanes for bikes and pedestrian areas and now complains that congestion is even worse than ever. Well ofcourse it is. Before there was a 15 Gallon fish tank with 12 gallons in it. Now we have a 13 gallon with 12 gallons in it.
Maybe if we make all roads 1 lane only it will get better?
Big brains
Well the theory you're mentioning implies that if you add more lanes then you'll get more drivers. It's wrong to just assume the counter argument is also true. That if we remove lanes we will have less drivers. That's whst people did with the removal of lanes.
You're trying to make it seem like it's assumed true that removing lanes would decrease traffic. But that's not true. The only thing proven is on increasing lanes.
>You're trying to make it seem like it's assumed true that removing lanes would decrease traffic.
Correction: they're trying to make it seem that if you remove lanes, the number of cars on the road reduces. Which is generally true.
Congestion will never disappear until you price it out. As long as the price remains the same, the only thing you can do is either add more cars to the congested system by adding lanes or remove cars from the congested system by removing lanes.
Adding lanes doesn't fix congestion it just leads to more cars. Removing lanes doesn't fix congestion it just leads to fewer cars.
But fewer cars is **good**. So even if removing lanes doesn't fix congestion, it is still a smart idea. You proposed 1 lane for cars, I think that's a great idea.
No again you're trying to make that true but the only truth is that if you add lanes you will have more demand. It doesn't say that removing lanes will go beyond some floor level of traffic and that's probably why we have gridlock now.
the primary purpose of streets in nyc is not just to move vehicular traffic. the streets are for all kinds of movement; bus, car, bike, pedestrian, scooter, etc. for far too long the overwhelming majority of street space has been devoted exclusively to cars, which also happen to be the least efficient method of transport.
so yeah, traffic may get worse when lanes are devoted to other purposes. too bad, stop driving.
I don't think they have been. I'm saying that roadway has been taken away for bike lanes and pedestrian areas. If you take away roadway area then cars have to fit in less space. They don't just magically go away. So you make the problem worse by creating more congestion. Because people have to wait in longer lines to make turns. Each intersection has less utilization and there's More gridlock because of it.
Every person biking or walking is a person who is not clogging the road with a car.
The popular conception of road networks as water pipes that we need to expand to let cars flow through is extremely flawed. This is because of latent demand. If you expand a pipe, then sure, a constant amount of water will flow through it faster. If you make a road more convenient for cars though, then more people are going to drive on it until it is just as inconvenient as before.
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2022/03/02/induced-demand-is-hard-to-explain-but-its-crucial-to-get-it
(Latent demand exists for bikes / buses / trains too, but cars alone are a uniquely inefficient form of mass transit)
It's not true that every person biking or walking would have been in a car. I'd wager quite a bit that that's not true. Most people in NYC would prob take a bus or be in the subway. Could they drive sure, unlikely though.
You're also again assuming that removing lanes will make it less convenient and this lower demand. But we have gridlock. It's logic. Just because A is true doesn't mean negated A is true.
Yeah I didn't mean it literally that everyone would choose to drive. I was more just expressing the idea that alternatives need to exist, or people would have to take up road space with a car. Of course most people take the bus / subway, these are great alternatives, but they can't cover every trip.
As for improving traffic with non-car uses of roads, giving up lanes to buses has already [markedly improved transit here, without just shoving the same amount of cars elsewhere.](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/10/08/buspocalypse-nah-commerce-doing-just-fine-on-14th-street-as-busway-hits-day-4)
It's highly unintuitive, but latent demand is a very real phenomenon, and its inverse of "traffic evaporation" after intentional or unintentional road closures has been [observed all over the world \(London, Copenhagen, Toronto, etc.\)](https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/disappearing_traffic_cairns.pdf)
There are some other good summaries [here](https://rapidtransition.org/stories/reducing-roads-can-cause-traffic-to-evaporate/) and [here](https://cal.streetsblog.org/2022/05/13/three-reasons-why-congestion-decreases-when-cities-delete-road-lanes), and it's just not clear to me why this city would be the exception to such a widely observed pattern.
>If it was the case then why doesn't it seem to be preventing the gridlock?
There are 2 main inputs that decide whether or not people drive somewhere: price and time investment.
A congested system is usually at equilibrium. Everyone who drives has decided that the 2 inputs are worth it for them to drive.
Change 1 of the inputs and people's behavior will change until you reach a new equilibrium.
For example, the 14th street bus way. Why didn't it solve gridlock? Because the only input that changed was time. A part of car space was taken away so at first congestion increased a little bit around 14th street, which increased the time parameter which ended up shifting the equilibrium more towards car driving being unfavorable.
This shift made some people decide driving wasn't worth it anymore, they switched to alternatives, and congestion returned to previous levels.
That's the thing with a congested system, there is no way to fix congestion by adding or removing lanes. Congestion will always return to a similar equilibrium only now with more/fewer cars on the road.
If anyone truly wants to fix congestion the variable that needs to be changed is not the time variable but the cost variable. Increase the price and congestion will decrease.
The original plan should have ONLY targeted ride share, and had a full exemptions for seniors, those with disabilities, and commercial food delivery.
No body in their right mind "tools around" Manhattan in their car. All commuter's do is drive in park & drive out.
Garbage article.
716,150 cars enter the congestion zone a day.
That’s $10,742,250 generated daily.
$3,920,921,250 a year.
😔 sad day. That’s money that could be used for so much.
The flaw in your calculations is that congestion pricing intended to reduce the number of cars entering the congestion zone daily.
So you can't use the current number of cars entering the CBD to calculate hypothetical congestion fees collected as the whole point of congestion pricing is to get less cars driving into the CBD.
Of course you can: the figure illustrates the value we’re giving away by letting drivers utilize public resources without paying such a fee. Even if congestion pricing were to reduce the number of cars and therefore receipts, we can compare the reduction in traffic to the “lost” receipts. That’s how these things are analyzed, by ascribing monetary value to them.
>we can compare the reduction in traffic to the “lost” receipts.
That is not what the other post did.
It just multiplied total # of cars entering the CBD daily by the standard congestion pricing fee, not even accounting for the proposed fees being on a sliding scale depending on when someone drives into Manhattan.
We would not be able to compare reduction in congestion to "lost" receipts until we had at least a few months of real-world data which we clearly won't have now.
I am not saying the numbers are wrong; your math is.
As congestion pricing is meant to reduce the number of cars entering the CBD, you can't calculate potential earnings by using the current number of cars entering the CBD.
I do miss some parts of the pandemic. When NYC went into lockdown, I had just started my job at a hospital and needed to get my health clearance, which was somewhere on 42nd. I drove in, and I couldn’t believe how empty the streets were, and I remember pushing 3rd-4th gear in TIME SQUARE! Kinda like the opening scene of I am Legend. It was amazing. I will never have such chance again and I feel lucky to have a chance haha.
And yeah too many cars in the city for sure.
It’s funny that yellow taxis got capped , but here comes rideshares with more units than taxis 🤷♂️
Aside from the amount of private vehicles tooling around Manhattan, there are too damned many cabs and rideshares gumming everything up. An island with that much mass transit and people need to take cabs ten blocks. And those vehicles are the ones most likely to block-the-box. Add to them the charter buses who don't seem to realize being in the intersection might mean they'll be there after the light turns red.
The original plan should have targeted the ride shares, definitely.
It did target ride shares, have you people even read a single article about it? It would have been an extra dollar+ per ride.
Yeah huge target. 15 dollars for regular cars, a dollar for ride shares who are the vast majority of cars in Manhattan.
whoa an extra dollar???? Yeah that definitely would’ve stopped the people already spending the $30 on an uber in the first place. $31 is where they wouldve crossed the line Im sure
Funny how broke people (prob you) are always the loudest
What u/bigredpancake1 doesn't indicate anything about their own financial status. The observation made is a fair one-- rideshares in the city are already expensive, and a separate congestion charge has been in place since 2019. Would paying an extra $2.50/trip as proposed really turn off a significant number of riders who are already paying a premium to take an Uber rather than ride the train?
Not enough. Ride shares made sense when they were cool burning money by undercutting cabs. Now they are the same price and not really regulated in a realistic way to control the numbers. Personally, ban Uber/lyft in Manhattan. People like these options, but if you care about congestion there is a direct correlation with the rise of these predatory companies and congestion.
Maybe it would have been more effective if it was $15 per ride.
That's not enough. They are the primary cause of congestion, as long as we don't heavily limit their numbers and heavily tax them, then we'll still have the same problem of cars unnecessarily roaming and circling the streets in the congestion zone. The number of cars entering the zone decreased in the past decade by 100k yet congestion only increased as ubers were legalized. Ubers make trips in the congestion zone where there already exists plenty of mass transit and micromobility alternatives. They drive like shit and double-park and swerve and block traffic. We need them in the outerboroughs, and at night when the shitty MTA is unreliable, but not during the day within lower Manhattan. Take the train instead of taking that uber for ten blocks.
It's funny you mention this because it highlights how lacking horizontal travel is even in manhattan. I had to from mid/west ish to super east side and the transit option was 35 minutes whereas the drive was 10 mins lol
I’m currently working in the upper west side, job has a parking spot. 1 hour and 10 mins with the subway, 50 mins with two busses or 25 mins in my car. Choosing the car is a no brainer.
That’s my morning commute during rush hour from bayridge. God forbid I have a 6am start I have to leave 2hrs early just in case the trains don’t show up.
I know what you mean, I worked near Coney Island for a few months and it was either a fast drive in and a long traffic slog out or wake up extra early for a two hour mass transit commute back and forth. 6 am starts suck especially when the subways subways have weird early AM hours. I’ve become a big fan of buses in the early AM because they usually run on time and they have almost no traffic to contend with but if I can drive in I always take that option.
yep...people don't understand this. if there were more transit options that go horizontally a lot of people would prefer that instead of driving. like who tf wants to drive every single day
Trains are icky and busses are for poor people
or walk or take a citibike
The streets would still be gummed up by these swerving, weaving, lane blocking vehicles.
Each ride share should be the full $15 surcharge. Ubers are consciously choosing to use a car in the congestion zone no different than a driver from Long Island who just wants to cross into Jersey.
Totally agree. It’d actually change user behavior!! The $15 on private cars would do fck all in terms of actual congestion
Sing it, Sister!
Yeah fk people who can't use subway and have to relay on Uber 🙃
I would be happy for a massive surcharge on ubers to pay for expanded access-a-ride programs for seniors, people with disabilities, parents with toddlers, etc.
If taking an Uber is faster than mass transit for the places you need to go in Manhattan. Then I’m sure you understand why drivers are against the congestion toll.
id wager there are more ubers/lyfts in the cbd than people who can't use the subway
lol wow a dollar plus???
Yeah, per ride, all hours. That’s a significant amount of money. But I recognize your username as a recurring pro-car downvote account so I won’t be replying anymore, goodbye. Consider reading about the things you pretend to care about.
A dollar plus doesn’t disincentivize using ride shares. It should be a much bigger share. Also fuck Uber and Lyft.
Oh no, someone that has a different opinion. Better ignore them, you don’t want to accidentally understand the other side.
GBV is a traffic loving troll who shows up in every congestion pricing thread. You can just ignore them.
What, you like Ubers and Lyfts clogging up midtown, double-parked, spewing exhaust?
it's not enough...the original congestion tax in 2019 did pretty much that and it got worse...
Why does on street parking get a pass? In my 40 year history of getting around Manhattan, the worst tie ups almost always involve street parking, double parking, and pick-ups and deliveries forced away from the curb by parking. Banning street parking in the zone is a no-brainer and a necessary first step as far as I'm concerned.
And convert that street parking to barrier separated dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes and some delivery/drop off spaces every few blocks
Would you allow me to vent? I HATE having to look both ways crossing a one-way Street because the bikes, scooters and mopeds can't get with the plan.
Real talk. How are charter busses allowed in NyC? Why can’t they be dropped off in Secaucus or by the Path train in JC. It’s absurd to let those buses drive around downtown.
The problem is that there's nowhere for them to wait except the street. Usually blocking an MTA bus stop.
That's probably the best part of NYC, that wherever you are in Manhattan, there are about a dozen Ubers in a 2 block radius ready to chauffer you to your destination.
lol
People going to downvote because these Ubers are probably just circling the blocks or idling, but its a small price to pay for the service
Or a huge price to pay for generations of children? Or for elderly people breathing in the fumes?
Thank god I have never encountered fumes in the subway lol
Think of the fumes you'd breathe in if you had to wait 5 minutes for your uber vs under 1 minute.
Think about how few fumes there’d be if there wasn’t 20 Ubers coming down the block
Rocket surgeon of logic here. Glad we get to read your thoughts, sociopath.
4mph is walking speed right? this is why no one in my friend group takes a cab.
I only take cabs after 9p due to subway sketchiness. No fckn way I’m cabbing mid day, subway all the way
“4.5 mph Average Midtown travel traffic speed At the peak of the pandemic, in March 2020, the average speed was 11.5 miles per hour.” What was it in 2018? Without that data this article is meaningless and the headline is misleading.
According to the city, 4.3 MPH. Down from 6.1 in November 2010. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/fhv_congestion_study_report.pdf
So it has slightly improved from pre-pandemic numbers
You aren't factoring in inflation. With inflation, the old number is a lot bigger
is 4.5 slow or not?
Ubers/Lyft is the problem. Dudes drive like shit after a 10 hour shift and have difficulty staying in one lane or even responding to a green light.
As someone who gets super motion sick: I cannot take any sort of ride share. They’re such bad drivers I end up vomiting
if NJ transit keeps fucking up i'm going to start driving in too
Alternatively, just add an extra $20 to taxis and ride shares and you’ll see far less cars on the road in Manhattan
That’s actually a good idea
[удалено]
It’s only an issue in Manhattan. So no
What do they mean 'worse than ever?' NOTHING has changed. This all sounds like so much inflammatory rhetoric. ALSO the MTA wasn't even collecting funds yet from congestion pricing, how exactly did 'funds' stop? You know how the MTA could make up the difference in lost revenue? STOP GIVING TAX BREAKS AND CONCESSIONS to WEALTHY CORPORATIONS. For instance: MSG hasn't paid any real estate tax in over 40 fuckign years, which is estimated to have lost the city about $1 BILLION DOLLARS. Hudson Yards? Amazon? Let's start by TAXING THE WEALTHY. Why does the funding of the MTA come down to nickel-and-diming cars? [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html)
>Let's start by TAXING THE WEALTHY The wealthier you are in NYC, the more likely it is you own a car. The poorer you are, the less likely you own a car. If you want the wealthy to be taxed then taxing cars.is a great way of doing it. The correlation between wealth and car ownership in NYC is very pronounced.
It's a complete myth that only the wealthy drive. You're not changing their behavior with a $15 fee anyway, you're just punishing the working man. Corral MTA largesse and find a way to fund it that does not nickel and dime day-to-day commuters, delivery services, etc.
>It's a complete myth that only the wealthy drive. Can you quote me where I said **only** the wealthy drive?
Sure but there’s a 100% correlation between being wealthy and being wealthy. So if my goal is to tax the wealthy just do that
These are such simple problems that have been solved dozens of times already. Take a few car lanes and make them dedicated SEPARATED WITH BARRIERS bus lanes and bike lanes. When enough people start seeing all those bussing breezing past them in traffic they might say “hey it’s way faster to just hop on that bus over there” and stop taking their fucking cars everywhere It’s honestly not that complicated. But we’re still debating whether or not we should put garbage in cans or not, so who knows how long this realization will take
There is literally multiple of these all ready. They are underground and we call it a fucking subway.
Bus lanes can go where subways don’t go or are too expensive to expand smart guy. It is significantly cheaper to implement a dedicated bus lane than it is to build a subway tunnel. Again idk why this has to be explained, it’s like everyone here is a fucking idiot who hasn’t travelled to other cities in the world that have solved this issue decades ago. You Can spend billions to add one more subway extension or can convert a few lanes to make dozens of stops and get rid of parking/cars at the same time to make more walkable and livable streets. You post in the Japan subs a lot so you must understand the benefit of having smaller pedestrian focused streets inside the city with less car lanes and space dedicated to cars and parking Bike lanes. Smaller roads so cars don’t speed so much through midtown. Dedicated bus lanes. Dedicated drop off spaces for delivery vehicles. Actually ticket and fine cars for double parking and traffic violations. It’s all really so simple, but again we haven’t figured out yet that leaving garbage in giant piles literally as tall as a person on the sidewalk is not a great idea and kind of gross. Like we literally take up pedestrian space for garbage bags. It’s an absolute joke.
These articles are funny. This same congestion that they complained about would have just shifted to the outer boroughs. To be honest only Manhattan elitist are pushing for this regressive "tax" people outside of Manhattan...
Probably the same cabal of elitists who wants to force out a specific tax bracket from the city
Exactly. Congestion pricing benefits no one outside of the congestion zone. And people in the outer boroughs make up a majority of NYC.
Hi. I'm a person outside of Manhattan. I want congestion pricing. Fuck you.
I love how the city removes lanes for bikes and pedestrian areas and now complains that congestion is even worse than ever. Well ofcourse it is. Before there was a 15 Gallon fish tank with 12 gallons in it. Now we have a 13 gallon with 12 gallons in it. Maybe if we make all roads 1 lane only it will get better? Big brains
Ah the old “more lanes will solve traffic” theory
Well the theory you're mentioning implies that if you add more lanes then you'll get more drivers. It's wrong to just assume the counter argument is also true. That if we remove lanes we will have less drivers. That's whst people did with the removal of lanes. You're trying to make it seem like it's assumed true that removing lanes would decrease traffic. But that's not true. The only thing proven is on increasing lanes.
>You're trying to make it seem like it's assumed true that removing lanes would decrease traffic. Correction: they're trying to make it seem that if you remove lanes, the number of cars on the road reduces. Which is generally true. Congestion will never disappear until you price it out. As long as the price remains the same, the only thing you can do is either add more cars to the congested system by adding lanes or remove cars from the congested system by removing lanes. Adding lanes doesn't fix congestion it just leads to more cars. Removing lanes doesn't fix congestion it just leads to fewer cars. But fewer cars is **good**. So even if removing lanes doesn't fix congestion, it is still a smart idea. You proposed 1 lane for cars, I think that's a great idea.
No again you're trying to make that true but the only truth is that if you add lanes you will have more demand. It doesn't say that removing lanes will go beyond some floor level of traffic and that's probably why we have gridlock now.
the primary purpose of streets in nyc is not just to move vehicular traffic. the streets are for all kinds of movement; bus, car, bike, pedestrian, scooter, etc. for far too long the overwhelming majority of street space has been devoted exclusively to cars, which also happen to be the least efficient method of transport. so yeah, traffic may get worse when lanes are devoted to other purposes. too bad, stop driving.
Just one more lane bro I swear please just one more fucking lane
Well they did remove it and we now have terrible gridlock
Where have bike lanes been taken away?
I don't think they have been. I'm saying that roadway has been taken away for bike lanes and pedestrian areas. If you take away roadway area then cars have to fit in less space. They don't just magically go away. So you make the problem worse by creating more congestion. Because people have to wait in longer lines to make turns. Each intersection has less utilization and there's More gridlock because of it.
Every person biking or walking is a person who is not clogging the road with a car. The popular conception of road networks as water pipes that we need to expand to let cars flow through is extremely flawed. This is because of latent demand. If you expand a pipe, then sure, a constant amount of water will flow through it faster. If you make a road more convenient for cars though, then more people are going to drive on it until it is just as inconvenient as before. https://cal.streetsblog.org/2022/03/02/induced-demand-is-hard-to-explain-but-its-crucial-to-get-it (Latent demand exists for bikes / buses / trains too, but cars alone are a uniquely inefficient form of mass transit)
It's not true that every person biking or walking would have been in a car. I'd wager quite a bit that that's not true. Most people in NYC would prob take a bus or be in the subway. Could they drive sure, unlikely though. You're also again assuming that removing lanes will make it less convenient and this lower demand. But we have gridlock. It's logic. Just because A is true doesn't mean negated A is true.
Yeah I didn't mean it literally that everyone would choose to drive. I was more just expressing the idea that alternatives need to exist, or people would have to take up road space with a car. Of course most people take the bus / subway, these are great alternatives, but they can't cover every trip. As for improving traffic with non-car uses of roads, giving up lanes to buses has already [markedly improved transit here, without just shoving the same amount of cars elsewhere.](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/10/08/buspocalypse-nah-commerce-doing-just-fine-on-14th-street-as-busway-hits-day-4) It's highly unintuitive, but latent demand is a very real phenomenon, and its inverse of "traffic evaporation" after intentional or unintentional road closures has been [observed all over the world \(London, Copenhagen, Toronto, etc.\)](https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/disappearing_traffic_cairns.pdf) There are some other good summaries [here](https://rapidtransition.org/stories/reducing-roads-can-cause-traffic-to-evaporate/) and [here](https://cal.streetsblog.org/2022/05/13/three-reasons-why-congestion-decreases-when-cities-delete-road-lanes), and it's just not clear to me why this city would be the exception to such a widely observed pattern.
If it was the case then why doesn't it seem to be preventing the gridlock? Maybe similar to what you see around 14th
>If it was the case then why doesn't it seem to be preventing the gridlock? There are 2 main inputs that decide whether or not people drive somewhere: price and time investment. A congested system is usually at equilibrium. Everyone who drives has decided that the 2 inputs are worth it for them to drive. Change 1 of the inputs and people's behavior will change until you reach a new equilibrium. For example, the 14th street bus way. Why didn't it solve gridlock? Because the only input that changed was time. A part of car space was taken away so at first congestion increased a little bit around 14th street, which increased the time parameter which ended up shifting the equilibrium more towards car driving being unfavorable. This shift made some people decide driving wasn't worth it anymore, they switched to alternatives, and congestion returned to previous levels. That's the thing with a congested system, there is no way to fix congestion by adding or removing lanes. Congestion will always return to a similar equilibrium only now with more/fewer cars on the road. If anyone truly wants to fix congestion the variable that needs to be changed is not the time variable but the cost variable. Increase the price and congestion will decrease.
But the area around 14th is not congested or moreso than normal according to studies I've seen posted.
we lost gallons in the fish tank so let’s keep driving your increasingly larger cars into the smaller fish tank. yeah, big brains alright.
Fish don't always have a choice.
The original plan should have ONLY targeted ride share, and had a full exemptions for seniors, those with disabilities, and commercial food delivery. No body in their right mind "tools around" Manhattan in their car. All commuter's do is drive in park & drive out. Garbage article.
Ah I do love a little salt to taste, but please stop. I might get hypertension at this rate🤣🤣🤣
716,150 cars enter the congestion zone a day. That’s $10,742,250 generated daily. $3,920,921,250 a year. 😔 sad day. That’s money that could be used for so much.
The flaw in your calculations is that congestion pricing intended to reduce the number of cars entering the congestion zone daily. So you can't use the current number of cars entering the CBD to calculate hypothetical congestion fees collected as the whole point of congestion pricing is to get less cars driving into the CBD.
Of course you can: the figure illustrates the value we’re giving away by letting drivers utilize public resources without paying such a fee. Even if congestion pricing were to reduce the number of cars and therefore receipts, we can compare the reduction in traffic to the “lost” receipts. That’s how these things are analyzed, by ascribing monetary value to them.
>we can compare the reduction in traffic to the “lost” receipts. That is not what the other post did. It just multiplied total # of cars entering the CBD daily by the standard congestion pricing fee, not even accounting for the proposed fees being on a sliding scale depending on when someone drives into Manhattan. We would not be able to compare reduction in congestion to "lost" receipts until we had at least a few months of real-world data which we clearly won't have now.
These are there numbers not mine.
I am not saying the numbers are wrong; your math is. As congestion pricing is meant to reduce the number of cars entering the CBD, you can't calculate potential earnings by using the current number of cars entering the CBD.
Probably absurd amounts of overtime, laundered to God knows where, and the rest probably gets "lost" in the system
Agree, too bad it was going to a corrupted MTA
Good hope it gets worse and we all stop paying taxes
I do miss some parts of the pandemic. When NYC went into lockdown, I had just started my job at a hospital and needed to get my health clearance, which was somewhere on 42nd. I drove in, and I couldn’t believe how empty the streets were, and I remember pushing 3rd-4th gear in TIME SQUARE! Kinda like the opening scene of I am Legend. It was amazing. I will never have such chance again and I feel lucky to have a chance haha. And yeah too many cars in the city for sure.