"What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't!
"What about the delivery people who need to bring this into the city?" They should be able to get in and out much faster, and their cargo makes it easy to amortize the cost!
"What about people who need to drive due to mobility issues?" Look, now they can park near their destination too!
How are they going to do if there's no public transportation available for their commute?
edit: and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
is there any city anywhere that has implemented congestion pricing without having public transit available?
It didn’t go over well.
And even for a small city like Cambridge it is a huge lift to go from an already inadequate public transport infrastructure and set of services to infrastructure and services suitable for a city where cars have been largely eliminated.
The irony of course is that bus services, specifically the guided busway, will be cut again soon due to ongoing lack of use. But the lack of use has been caused by long-running and poorly managed maintenance on the busway disrupting services to the point of unusability, rather than because of any real lack of demand.
Some people didn’t trust that promises would be delivered on public transport when it came to the congestion charge. Obviously cuts like this add fuel to that fire.
On a more positive note we have, over the past 10 years or so, gained two new railway stations, and that’s good. But we haven’t gained new rail lines and rail routes so they haven’t done anything really to improve the transport and congestion situations around the city. It’s easier and more convenient to get to London though, depending on where you are.
This is literally addressed by the comment you are replying to:
"What about the delivery people who need to bring this into the city?" They should be able to get in and out much faster, and their cargo makes it easy to amortize the cost!
A productive way would be to say that congestion pricing should be used to expand bus service.
If you do that, it will turn out that buses (etc) are far superior methods of moving people around, but you really don't need to move money directly from one to the other.
Why shouldn't people care how the money flows and why are you the decider of what people should care about? If the money from congestion pricing was for a new stadium for the Yankees, or to build a new heliport for billionaires' row, or it just went into the pocket of the mayor I think that would be concerning for everyone involved.
You charge the customer for the congestion charge and use it to pay the fee, just like anything else. I bid construction work and would include congestion fees into my bid or T&M rates if needed.
How do you think construction vehicles pay for parking? They charge the customer for it and use the money to pay for parking.
I’m glad we all have great work situations, for many of us working from home whenever we want even. Most people are just a job loss away from having to commute to a job far away from the house near their kids’ school or their partner’s work. People don’t get jobs with a commute by choice to begin with, and this just punishes people for that.
Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?
> "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't!
... Look man, I'm in favor of the policy too, but this reads like straight satire. Please tell me you're trolling.
The entire point of the policy is to reduce the number of people driving into cities. "Well how am I going to drive into the city?!" is the position that's indistinguishable from satire.
Now work from home has essentially destroyed the downtown but also left it with very little traffic compared to 2019.
That being said the primary argument against it was that for residents who lived in S.F. it was an insanely bad proposal that had you paying to drop your kids at school, go to the grocery store and do average everyday things that had no public transit option.
The positivity of it varies dramatically based on the type of jurisdiction and what entity has what power. Manhattan and London have an existing chokepoint arrangement where you won't be able to really assess it's benefit/detraction for a long time. Proponents of the Manhattan congestion pricing tend to ignore where alot growth is happening - Hoboken and Jersey City are in some ways more vital. Most of the benefit could have been realized by tolling the free river crossings, as alot of the traffic reduction was eliminating toll-avoidance trips.
In other places, you can see part of the downside with speed cameras which are starting to pick up. My city adopted them and traffic dropped noticeably, immediately. We also saw a pretty immediate effect on retail and restaurants. My wife works for a restaurant group -- RFPs for large events basically say "not in <city>", because the city's brand is toxified by tolling.
River crossings into NYC were already not free. Not sure what you're referring to.
Speed cameras and stop cameras are also great and should be virtually everywhere.
What? Don't work? What else is there, the bus?
> Cities around the world, including London, Stockholm, Milan, and most recently, New York City (NYC), have adopted congestion pricing, charging drivers a fee to enter high-traffic zones.
which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society
"What about people who need to drive due to mobility issues?"
vs
"What about people on a fixed income who need to drive due to mobility issues?"
Regressive taxes are still regressive, even if you like what they do.
I'm also not quite sure how this is a winning argument either:
> "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't!
Huh?
The people who drive into a city to work should either pay for access to the city's economy and infrastructure that supports their job (and the entire surrounding region's suburbia), or they can get a job in their own community, or they can take a form of transit with fewer negative externalities on the city. Not that hard to understand.
It is a convoluted system of city and state tax credits, partial discounts, etc that you must do every year. Not only do you have to file additional forms as part of your tax return, you must also recertify your disability annually.
And if you are simply low income, you can apply and then you receive a 50% discount after your first 10 trips into the city each month. If you are going into the city 2-3 times a week, you receive no discount.
https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/tolls/congestion-relief-zon...
Low-income: Show your tax return <$50k/yr or show your enrollment in a public assistance program.
Disability: Get your disability assess annually or show enrollment in the already-existing disabled-people transit assistance programs.
Not sure what you think is non-trivial about either of these?
And then you must pay 50% of the price after that. Then, in April, you may get some tax relief.
This is a good system and trivial in your mind? Because the average low income or fixed income person can just float that money for a year and then maybe get some of it back?
And you can't even do it if you've moved recently. If all of your documents don't have the exact same address you are out of luck. If you've moved since you filed your taxes and your address on your car registration is your old address you're out of luck until you file your next taxes and update your registration.
And then you have to mail it all in and just wait until you get a response. And if it's denied you get to start the process again. And then next year you get to do it again.
This isn't "trivial". Trivial is submitting your social security number, VIN, drivers license, and address.
You'll know they're paying their fair share when the arbitrage actually stops, but taxing non-resident earnings so aggressively to stop it produces way more negative side effects and regressive taxation effects than congestion pricing does. That's why congestion pricing is a good idea and 90% taxes on non-resident incomes is not (not to mention the ease of enforcement).
It's not "arbitrage" to commute from a place you can afford to a place you can't. Being middle class isn't an arbitrage play.
People with families aren't often willing to accept the living conditions they'd need to in order to live in NYC while paying market prices. So they arb and get suburban living conditions with urban employment.
The cost of their decision to do that is mostly borne by the respective communities (home community loses economic productivity and then city community bears increased infrastructure consumption).
We would know there's zero arbitrage when zero people did this. Which again, I don't think is the goal to shoot for. But simply asserting you have some god-given right to make this arb indefinitely at zero cost is a losing argument.
If you're worried about poor people, the right move is to price things properly and then give assistance to those who need it, rather than giving away scarce resources to everyone for free.
Didn't the city already charge tolls on the bridges and tunnels in and out?
A road isn't a scarce resource. You can't deplete it.
Land is a scarce resource. Roads require land. Charging money for access to land is extremely common.
If you don't like density, there are plenty of un-dense places you can be, with no congestion pricing.
We have congestion everywhere and few transportation options. I cannot imagine the consequences of congestion pricing here. Sometimes it could take 30 minutes to get to the freeway 1.5 miles away during morning rush hour. I suspect congestion pricing here would motivate many people to simply abandon their employment if in a job where work from home is a disallowed viable possibility.
In my case I am currently unemployed and am turning down interview offers in locations I used to commute to just a few years back, because now the costs of commute are another form of wage depreciation that gets factored into the compensation rate.
I've only been to Jacksonville a handful of times but I'd rather walk along the side of road in August than ride a bus there. And they don't actually help congestion that much.
I guess there are made up reasons not to use public transport there too.
And then imagine if there was offsetting spending.
Has the added benefit of reducing gas prices (less demand) and less greenhouse gas emissions.