NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months

> sheer number of disingenuous objections

This is unfair. Nobody wants to pay more for anything. And many of the objections resulted in policy adjustments that made the programme better.

Please don't fulminate or engage in ideological battle here. The topic is fine to discuss and disagree about, but HN is for curious conversation not indignation, and the guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. You've posted several ragey comments in a short space of time, and that's not the way HN is meant to be used. Please have a read of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them when participating here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Remember kids: congestion pricing is nothing but a tariff on transportation.

On driving. And it actually makes driving more appealing, there’s much less traffic so you can get where you’re going much quicker.

> Instead of making public transport more appealing through competition

Like having multiple subway systems? NYC did that already.

Buses got significantly more reliable as a result of reduced traffic, more ridership on subways allowed for more police presence at stations, reducing crime.

Public transit got better.

"There is no such thing as a free lunch" is a very strong argument for tolls, I hope you realize.

> everyone paying the tolls who now needs to engage in additional pollution-causing economic activity merely to offset the costs of government-mandated congestion pricing

I don't think that's how economics work. People are already doing their best to generate money. Also even if that did happen, the thing you're describing as "pollution-causing" is GDP growth, which is overall desirable.

> tariffs

Whether a tariff is good depends on what the goal is (and whether it works toward that goal).

Pigouvian taxes are genuinely one of the few policies that really are nearly a free lunch in economics.

It’s a tariff on DRIVING in Manhattan, the place in America you least need to drive.

its not a tariff because tariffs are taxes on imports. you arent paying a tax related to the value of the goods being brought over, and to the extent that new car buyers are importing cars, its neglible compared to what youre trying to draw equivalence to, trump's 30% or so tariffs.

instead, its a toll or a usage tax.

but also, you want the economic activity of having people in the city, not the cost of supporting their light trucks. people coming from outside of new york are very costly in terms of pollution, road maintenance, and losing real estate to parking spaces.

> why isn't congestion pricing a tariff?

Because tariffs are imposed on trade between countries. That was easy!

Ironic that with a headline measuring a negative externality of driving that wasn't being priced in and you think transit got the artificial leg up.

A tariff is a tax on imports. Driving is not an import.

In American English, tariff always means a fee that applies to international imports and exports. It doesn't apply here.

The quality is not suspect. It is one of the world’s few 24/7 systems, and there are many capital improvements happening constantly. For example, making more stations accessible and improving switching equipment to improve reliability and volume.

This comment is typical HN “government bad can do no right” fodder. The MTA is truly a marvel in the service it provides. The only advantage it has is age, which is why it is so expansive.

Even if the govt lights the money on fire we still get the benefit of fewer cars in lower manhattan.

What in particular about the MTA would you change?

Poor people are forced by circumstance to live in the busiest areas so they will get the biggest health benefits and many do not own cars and often do not even own a car space, so I would beg to differ.

You can also offset the regressive nature of this taxation (if any) by putting the revenue into subsidizing public infrastructure like rail and bus.

Not in NYC where less than half the population has access to a car.

It hurts homeless more, that's a fact (although most,big cold city homeless couchsurf rather than sleep in their car in my experience, but it might be different in the US). But if you take 'poor people' as in the bottom 20% of earners, they probably don't drive, because car are expensive.

Well, Mamdani wants to make transit free. Car taxes can probably help a lot to pay for that.

Many things hurt the poor more, because there are many things that the poor do that have negative externalities that cannot be compensated for by the productivity of the poor. Strict enforcement against violent crime is pretty regressive in that more poor people are incarcerated when this is done. Others are that strict enforcement of traffic laws is pretty regressive; paid parking is regressive; as are fares for buses and trains. Requiring a minimum number of signatures for a ballot proposition is regressive. Allowing more expensive cars to incorporate more advanced safety features is regressive. Requiring grant applications to be carefully written is regressive. As are minimum flying requirements for pilots. DoD medical standards for soldiers are regressive. Officer ASVAB score requirements are regressive. Surgical requirements. Drug approval requirements.

In fact, anything that requires a standard of performance will be regressive. We don't have to subordinate all goals to regression avoidance. In fact, no functioning society does that.

I actually doubt it's very regressive in NYC. Also, you're still only counting the price and not the cost. The benefits are likely tilted towards the poorest residents who absorb the most costs of congestion in terms of both pollution and road safety. That's just an educated guess but it's very plausible.

Poorer people disproportionately take public transit.

EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"

EVs are just going to further escalate the race to the bottom with traffic that we’re already seeing with services like DoorDash.

Driving down the marginal cost per hour to operate a vehicle on the road and removing humans who are averse to sitting in endless traffic is not going to result in the utopia people think it will.

EV human-driven shuttles can do the same. Why do we need a robot for that?

Or, how about this, connect them together and put them on rails to reduce friction.

You could even run them separate from the street with raised platforms for accessibility and sometimes even run them underground.

We could call this something like “underway” or “steel beam connect-o-cars”

> NYC has a better subway system than most Euro cities. Probably because NYC has the advantage of being old before cars became affordable.

Nah, it's just because it's very, very big, nearly 9 million people. Very big European cities have comparable transport, but most European cities are smaller than this.

NYC's subway system is a little smaller than London's (though its commuter rail system is much smaller), and both cities have similar populations. And a little bigger than Paris's.

(Comparing metro system sizes can get messy, because there are things that are called metros but aren't really (eg SF muni metro, which shares space with cars) and things which aren't usually called metros but are metro-like (some S-bahn type things, in particular))

> NYC has the advantage of being old before cars became affordable.

Aren't Euro cities generally much older than those in the New World?

That's the strictest "policy" I've seen and I was asking about any specific health data not WHO guidelines

"In NYC, around 1 in 20 deaths is linked to air pollution."

A difference between 8 and 12 PM 2.5 levels won't change that

Is this an AI assisted answer?

I'm not sure GDP is a good guide there since whether you drop dead at 60 or 80 doesn't effect the GDP much. Though obviously there's a value to the individual there.

They don't begin to cover road construction costs (not even mentioning fair market rent for the amount of area they take up)

Roads are very expensive. Those taxes are never high enough to pay for the roads.

are you familiar with how negligible a fraction of the costs that car-dependent infrastructure imposes on society those two taxes represent

Neither of which is required to use the road in all cases.

If you're only paying for a couple of those yards, does it matter if the others are literally free or if you distribute that payment to all of them while paying a couple percent each?

It's a distinction without a difference.

Kinda irrelevant, since 12 isn't really a round number (like 10 would be).

Further, the article is essentially saying that there is far less difference between 11 and 13 than might be assumed by a categorical model that says one level is inside the "safe" level and one is outside of it. But that isn't the issue here - 9 was already quite safe, the risk is very close to zero, so going lower doesn't reduce risk much - because the existing risk can't get much lower.

> Smaller doses of a poison are better than less small doses

Since 1996, the EPA has mandated that unleaded gasoline must be below 0.05 grams of lead per gallon. While the elimination of lead up to this point was a massive benefit to public health, is there any significant health benefit to reducing this further below 0.05? If so, who's claiming that and why haven't the standards changed in 30 years?

$1.50 toll on rideshare drivers/users and/or people getting dropped off at work.

Most people driving into the city aren’t parking in Manhattan. When I was living in west Chester county, I would drive in into midtown and always find street parking near Columbia, free. I was surprised how easy it was to drive into the city because I heard lots of stories that it wasn’t. No tolls either.

The European mind quivers at the thought of a state with a bigger area than most EU countries

I like walking around new cities, but a lot of people are car life types

We did perfect their mass production, and it propelled us to the world's largest economy. The only country with better GDP growth over the last 100 years is Japan, and that's in large part because they perfected the manufacture of cars themselves.