I'm incredibly hopeful that NYC congestion pricing pays off in a big way - and that we start to see it in other cities across America. I really, really want congestion pricing in downtown SF. During rush hour, cars block the box and slow down busses, with cascading effects.
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.
In the last half decade we've seen the opening of the Salesforce transit center, the Chinatown subway station, the Van Ness BRT, the Caltrain Electrification Project, BART expansion to Berryessa, 800 new BART cars, and hundreds of smaller projects.
While I'm obviously exaggerating by saying "never", the list is much smaller than it needs to be, and you have some misleading things on that list.
Chinatown subway station is great. Better connects SF residents and it's exactly what I want to see more of in SF.
- Van Ness BRT? That project started in 2003. It took 20 years to complete. Not exactly the poster child of solid transit improvements in SF, except if you ignore how it got there.
- The Caltrain electrification project is great for the environment, but doesn't help SF much as far as improving transit availability. It's slightly faster, at least.
- BART expansion to Berryessa is a bit separate from SF transit improvements, which is what I'm talking about.
- Salesforce transit center is fine and has good vision, like expanding caltrain downtown. But doesn't add a massive amount of transit availability that wasn't already nearby (yet).
I provided a list of the biggest ticket items from the past few years. If you want to only look at projects that increase transit availability, reliability, or speed within SF County, check out the Muni Forward projects. Usually half a dozen lines are prioritized each year. https://www.sfmta.com/projects/muni-forward
I live in the Richmond, so I've been positively affected by the improvements to the 38/38R (although I still would strongly prefer a BRT system) and the new-ish-but-not-really 1X. In the next year I can expect transit improvements to the 1 and the 5/5R. Pretty much every bus I take on a weekly basis has seen transit improvements since I've first moved here.
Geary BRT is still not complete. 25 years in the making, and it is just a half assed solution. SF is very inefficient into completing mass transit infrastructure.
- Red painted lanes decrease private car use in bus lane, so bus can go faster
- Speeding fell by 80%, so fewer accidents mean transit is more reliable
There have been a few different projects on different sections of Geary over the years. The bus now runs 10-20% faster depending on direction and variability decreased by 25-40%.
Doesn’t the bus just stop before people board now? Seems to me the issue is the bus isn’t capable of preempting green lights not where it stops and hits the red light on its route. When the police want to get to lunch quicker they are allowed to preempt the lights with the tooling they are given.
How would you imagine one could make driving better, aside from making public transit better? The best thing you could hope for if you feel like you need to drive within SF is to have as few other people feeling the need to drive within SF.
But wait, I have to ask: why do you live in SF?
Practically anywhere else in the US is cheaper and better for people who want to drive.
Very few other US cities are better for people who want to get around by other means.
What do you mean by "the short window when the labor to do so was affordable"? Other cities in the world seem to be able to build underground railways just fine and they have similar labor costs as the US. See Paris or Sydney for cities that have created new underground railways recently.
But my comment was a bit tongue in cheek - it is mostly political dysfunction. Of course the US could find people willing to work for less than $400/hr or whatever, but there is an incentive disalignment.
Much of SF didn't even exist until the 1930s-50s. For example, most of Sunset and Richmond is tract housing built during that era - before then it was sand dunes and chicken farms.
People underestimate how new much of the Western US is. For example, Dallas only began expanding in 1891 after the railways were built, LA was a small town until the 1910s-30s era expansion, modern San Jose only formed in the 1960s-70s after absorbing dozens of farming towns like Alviso and Berryessa, Seattle was mostly sand dunes until they were leveled in the 1900s-30s).
Because of how new it was, most of the cities are planned primarily with cars in mind - especially after the 1930s era Dust Bowl Migration and the 1940s-60s era economic migration. Same thing in much of Canada and Australia as well, which saw a similar postwar expansion.
> before the NIMBYists stepped in
NIMBYism in SF only really began in the 1970s onwards.
While NIMBYism is now elitist, it initially started out as part of the civil rights movement ("urban redevelopment" was often a guise for razing historically Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods in that era - for example much of Japantown/Fillmore) as well as the early environmental movement (eg. Sierra Movement, Greenpeace), which was opposed to profit motive compared to modern YIMBY+Greentech model.
While that’s true of the outer communities (San Jose, etc) I took the OP’s message as referring to SF core/downtown which was already pretty developed by the 1950s. Unlike LA, SF was a major city far earlier.
Much of SF's core/downtown was rebuilt after the 1906 fire and earthquake, plus there was massive "urban redevelopment" that made the core much more car friendly.
People are forgetting about pasadena. That was the bigger socal city than la for a long time and maybe even bigger than sf (certainly is geographically).
Here in San Francisco? On my insured Stromers, with my family, that I bought for less than the cost of a year of auto insurance. Door to door, I am everywhere I want to be in about 10m. My longest typical journey is 45m across Golden Gate Bridge from the Mission, which is faster than any car, simply because I park my bike at the door of my destinations.
The better question is, have you ever seen a kid crying in the back of a bike?
Everyone I know who bikes in the city has been hit by a car at some point (see: my complaints about enforcement of traffic laws in this thread if you want my opinion on that).
I cringe when I see parents with their kids on the back of their bikes. Super dangerous.
It’s a bit like saying “sure, a cinema that refuses to sell more tickets than it has seats leads to a better cinema viewing experience, but only if you remove price from the equation!”
It boggles my mind (by which I mean "you should feel dirty for employing a dishonest rhetorical trick like that") that you can call his take dismissive when you simply ignored the area that is regressing (cost) in order to facilitate the tradeoff.
Cost is explicitly being traded away here to facilitate improvement in other areas. That's the whole point of implementing the toll/tax!!!!!
Phrases like “toll” and “congestion pricing” clearly imply that there will be a cost to driving, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say anyone in the conversation is ignoring cost.
But again, dismissing the improvements because costs go up is like dismissing the reduction of water pollution because “now only people who can afford chemical disposal can operate a tannery next to the river.”
There are two ways to not sell more tickets than you have seats. One is to jack up the price of seats, the other is to add more seats.
The latter in this context would be to e.g. build higher density housing so more people can feasibly take mass transit, as opposed to congestion pricing which is just a tax on people who can't afford the artificially scarce housing in the areas where mass transit use is feasible already.
Wouldn't the price of the car, fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc. dwarf the congestion tax? So the car itself is the worst part about the driving experience?
Maybe. Used vs new cars have vastly different costs. Generally tolls are far more than fuel cost where they exist. Insurance is - in the us - charged per year with unlimited use.
there are some who the charge would be significant (long paid off reliable used car) while others who it is a drop compared to the othes costs (new luxury car)
True, there’s a lot of room to optimize costs. For example the congestion tax costs can be reduced to 0 by avoiding areas it targets. And that’s not even tongue in cheek, one could commute to the edge of the city and take public transport for example.
That is the goal of course. The open question (though we will know in a year) is will they. Or will they just reduce something else from their budget to pay these tolls? If only a handful of people change their behavior this failed (though the extra money to transit may result in useful service expansions for someone else who isn't driving now). If thousands change their behavior it was a success.
Yeah that's the key. Not disincentivising cars but to make public transport the obvious answer by making it really good.
They do that really well here in Barcelona. 21€ a month and you can use all the transport you want in the city, all modes. Why would i want a car what's expensive to own, park and maintain and I can only just it when I've not been drinking?
Problem is, making transport good costs money and a lot of effort. Taxing cars is easy and brings money in.
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. At least NYC has a plenty good enough train system.
Except that SF public transit is actually pretty good. East-West transit works extremely well via buses and MUNI depending on whether you live in the northern or southern part of the city. Bay Wheels is extremely affordable and makes a lot of sense for short trips in a city of SF’s size. BART has its limitations but it also generally pretty good. Sure, SF public transit could be better, but I’d actually argue the problem is that driving in SF isn’t hard enough - many people have great public transit options but refuse to use them because we haven’t forced them to reprogram their car-brains.
> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.
Same happening here in my smallish (~300k peeople) capital of a small eu country...
Too many cars? More expensive parking! Less parking! More expensive parking! Less parking! More pedestrian-only streets, and even more cars around that...
And the buses? They suck. The city is roughly star-shaped.. want to go from one leg to another? Well, you have to cross the city center. Sunday? Half of the buses don't drive then. Something happening in the city center? Good luck with getting on the last bus after the event is over, and no extra buses added. Dog? Not during "rush hours" (6.30-9:30 and 13-17h). AC? Barely any. Two buses needed? No time sinchronization at all. Train-bus time sychronization? haha good luck. Need to go just a stop or two? It's expensive. Need to go across the whole town? It's slow, even with empty streets.
But hey, parking will be made even more expensive!
Sounds right. Here in SF, instead of police pulling over people who speed and run stop signs, we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections so people speeding and running stop signs can see if they're about to kill a pedestrian.
Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.
Because police can't physically be in every intersection at once, and there's research that shows that removing parking around intersections reduces pedestrian fatalities. They could add cameras, but I bet you that people would fight tooth and nail against that as well... not being able to park within 20ft of an intersection doesn't cause any privacy issues, or funnel money into the city councilman's cousin's company that just so happens to be in the business of installing red light and stop sign photo enforcement cameras, or need ongoing maintenance to keep working
> Because police can't physically be in every intersection at once
They don't have to be everywhere. They have to be at least _somewhere_ and start visible enforcing. People need to know that they might get away with running a red light a couple of times, but they WILL be caught eventually, and there WILL be consequences.
> and there's research that shows that removing parking around intersections reduces pedestrian fatalities.
I read a lot of the urbanist propaganda research, and most of it is pure crap. Bad statistical methods, poor significance, P-hacking, biased tests, you name it.
You must not be a pedestrian if you don’t like the red zones at intersections. You can’t see the oncoming traffic without stepping into the intersection.
> Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.
If you consistently enforce the law then the fine revenue falls below even its current level because consistent enforcement reduces violations, meanwhile costs go up because the additional enforcement has to be paid for.
The existing system is the one cultivated to maximize revenue by setting speed limits below the median traffic speed so that cops can "efficiently" issue citations one after another as long as there isn't enough enforcement to induce widespread compliance. This is, of course, dumb, but the alternatives generate less net profit for the government.
> we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections
This is called daylighting, and it’s a very good idea. The rest of your comment was just snark, and I assume you know that road improvements don’t have anything to do with law enforcement, but I just want to emphasize that daylighting is going to be a huge positive for the city.
SF put in 33 speed cameras in known locations, and are aiming to install 900 more by the end of this year. As a bonus to speeders, speeds in excess of 100 mph will incur a $500 speeding ticket, though that may have unintended consequences.
The real unintended consequence is that cities ultimately don’t like to run them. They’re effective, and thus the revenue the city is expecting disappears. In they end they become costs rather than revenue sources.
Speeding also carries point penalties. Get caught a few times and your license is suspended. You can’t just pay to speed indefinitely (unless you also buy something like a get out of jail free card from the police union).
Nothing special. Slight increases in minor accidents and near misses, some minority of which will involve pedestrians or road rage violence Basically the same downsides as anything else that changes the speed via rule or enforcement rather than changing the conditions of the road (e.g. "traffic calming").
Because it only affects some drivers leading to higher variance in speed leading to more friction among traffic. Same reason everyone with a brain suggests traffic calming over changing the numbers on the signs.
A normal person sees that $500 fine as a incentive to not go that fast. But there's a certain kind of person for whom $500 is nothing compared to being able to tell the story of that time the city sold them a picture of them, complete with certificate that says they broke 100mph somewhere in the city limits, a trophy to frame and display openly in the garage next to said vehicle.
Really gotta wonder if the people that downvoted disagree that people would do such a thing, don't want to give people ideas and thus buried it, or are people who would do such a thing. Or some other thing.
First off, false equivalence - there is no "instead of", what the police do or do not is unrelated to the reduction of parking spaces.
Second, implementing safety by modifying the physical environment is vastly superior to anything else because it scales. There's no longer a need to educate every single person who will use every intersection in the city every day on how to do it safely, nor a need to ensure x police officers are present. The physical design creates an environment that is safe by default.
The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people. Rich Democrats will claim it’s beneficial for the environment, while rich Republicans will call it capitalism at work. In the end, improving public transit isn’t really on their radar. And they rule the world.
buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other, but many more people can be moved with a bus.
trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.
almost not worth discussing honestly. this has become yet another factionalized holy war over the last decade.
One challenge with your 100% logical reasoning is that it assumes wealthy and powerful people share the same priorities you do. Unfortunately, this is rarely true, and it often takes time to realize just how different those priorities can be.
I’m all for public transit myself, but after 25 years in San Francisco, I’ve only seen it decline. That sentiment isn’t just mine—many longtime SF residents share this cynicism.
Oh, SF, the home of both some of the most powerful NIMBYs and the most outlandish "social justice" experiments. I feel for this once wonderful, poor city.
As a consolation, I must say that e.g. NYC was also handled miserably, say, in 1980s. Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine, even outright enjoyable here and there.
I think that SF will also shake off its current insanity, and will turn back into a flourishing, living, and thus changing city.
It takes time, thoughtful voting (of many, many people), and likely a bit of luck.
> Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine
Well, except for the people being pushing in front of subways to their death, or lit on fire in stations. The subways stations are getting dangerous enough, even in "not bad" areas, that people are avoiding them.
Out of about 3.5 million riders a day. Meanwhile, nobody pays any attention to the roughly 250 people who die in car crashes every single year in the NYC metro area. If you're so worried about safety, we should ban cars entirely instead of just taxing them a little.
Oh, ffs. I was replying the comment that the subways stays are "fine". They're not fine, they're more dangerous than they were 20 years ago; more dangerous than they should be. The subway system in NYC is of great benefit to the city and it's residents. But it could certainly stand a fair amount of improvement.
And banning cares from the city completely would be moronic, causing incredible harm to pretty much every aspect of it. I'm not "so worried about safety" that I would want to destroy the city, and your putting forth a strawman argument implying I am adds nothing to the discussion.
It was snarky and ridiculous, yes. But then, so is the implication that subways aren't sufficiently safe due to emotional appeals to incidents that happen a single-digit number of times a year versus the millions of riders every day.
Getting rid of cars entirely may not be practical, but it is objectively true that many more people are killed and injured in car accidents in the same area over any particular length of time you could name compared to subway crime. What is the objective reason why subways are "scary" but cars aren't?
For that matter, what is the objective source for such statements as that stations are "getting dangerous enough" or that "people are avoiding them"? Is any of that backed up by actual crime statistics or ridership numbers, or just sensationalized headlines?
If you look at basically any subway station now, and compare it to 1980, it's a huge improvement. If you want a reminder, visit Chambers St station (it's heavily affected by leaks from the buildings above it).
I don't live in SF, so could definitely be some local nuances I'm missing. in NYC, there is a pretty clear partisan split on the new congestion tax. the (relatively) red leaning areas are the loudest opponents. I guess having so many high earners already taking public transit might change the discussion.
> buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other
This is not true at all. Some ways of increasing throughput for both: Build higher density housing which allows more people to take the bus/train and reduces congestion even for the people who still have to drive, add more lanes that either can use (e.g. by building parking garages and then converting street parking to travel lanes), make streets one-way on alternating blocks (reduces congestion at intersections), build pedestrian catwalks above busy intersections to reduce pedestrian-induced congestion and keep pedestrians safer, etc.
> but many more people can be moved with a bus.
The "can" is really the problem. If you do the numbers for a full bus the bus seems very attractive, but then to run buses to everywhere that everyone travels in cars without an impractical amount of latency, many of the buses would end up having only one or two passengers -- and sometimes none -- while still requiring three times the space and fuel of a car and on top of that requiring a separate driver at significant expense.
So instead there is no bus that goes to those places at those times. And since you can't get those people on a bus, they're reasonably going to demand a solution that doesn't make their life miserable when they have to drive a car.
> trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.
Trains (especially subways) work great in the areas with the population density to justify them. But now you're back to needing higher density housing.
I wish we had more trains where it's still possible to route them in shallow tunnels that are cheap to build by excavations, say, in many parts of Brooklyn. (The 2nd Avenue extension had to pierce rock at rather serious depths.)
The problem is political not technical. People don'tewant thair streets block by construction for a couple years and so make up reasons against it. New york is easy as nothing archeolorical evists to worry about (north america generally lacks minerals to make things of interest from they used things that decayed long ago.
Suppose a non-rich person needs to use the highways for work and can make twice as many stops during the day because of congestion pricing.
Imagine a group of non-rich people who decide to carpool because of congestion pricing and end up spending half the time in traffic every day and as a result get more leisure time.
Considering that a parking spot in Mahnattan costs close to $1K per month, most of the cars are driven by people who are not poor.
It's difficult because I've never had Comcast (I pay my £10/month BBC fee that hasn't gone up in years with pleasure) but I'd probably start by saying that Comcast is not a scarce good.
If it wasn't scarce then it would be cheaper. The problem is that it is scarce, artificially, as a result of regulatory capture etc.
Which is the same reason housing in places like SF is so expensive. Artificial scarcity as a result of zoning rules that make construction prohibitively expensive or otherwise inhibit it from increasing the housing supply.
Houston metro has more people than SF metro, so why does housing cost more in SF? Because there is less of it.
It's not just more roads, although more roads are one of the things it is possible to create.
You can also create more housing, so people are closer to their jobs and have to travel fewer miles. Manhattan has higher density than most places, but it also has more people, and would you be surprised to learn that the zoning in most of NYC no longer allows the buildings that are currently in Manhattan to be built almost anywhere? So as a result you can't create more of them and people who might like to live in Manhattan instead live in the suburbs around the city and drive into the city in a car.
You can also create things that aren't roads, like subways, which then allow you to remove cars and buses (and bus lanes) from the roads when it becomes viable for more people to take the subway, which reduces road congestion.
While I agree with disliking the things you mentioned, could it be argued that adding barriers to entry for getting into the city will just increase WFH and hurt SF more? I can see a lot of people choosing to just stay home rather than take a bus – not everyone is close to MUNI or BART.
For a concrete example of carrot and stick - check out ridership numbers for the 49 after the Van Ness BRT project finished. 49 ridership is more than completely recovered at 140% of pre-pandemic numbers. In comparison, the 38 and 38R didn't get their dedicated bus lane out in the Richmond and ridership numbers are still nowhere near pre-pandemic. Make the bus fast and frequent and people will take it.
Fewer single-person-vehicles = more desirable ontime Bus/Tram throughput = more people who are close to MUNIBART taking MUNIBART.
Then use tolls to improve and expand the mass transit services instead of only ever catering to the single-person-car-commuters.
(ofc it takes more than ontime performance to sell people on mass transit, needs to be a safe environment at all hours of the day -- even if I can take BART into the city in the afternoon, if I don't feel safe taking it back at 10PM then I'm just going to drive both ways, to say nothing of the choice to stop running trains at midnight)
Most transit agencies have this problem of the "vicious transit cycle" - people don't take the bus because it's too infrequent/unreliable => more cars make the buses more unreliable => less money because so few people take it => back to start. It's amazing when you're sitting in a bus behind 20 cars backed up over 4 blocks, and you look back and there's 50 people on the bus. Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles
And if you look to places like Meixco City and Bogota, their bus rapid transit is very fast and efficient. But good luck taking away a single lane of traffic for dedicated bus services anywhere in the US.
This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.
According to Google street view, the road had 3 general car lanes per direction up to and including Nov 2016.
Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.
> Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles
They're building up more and more Bus-Only lanes here in the Twin Cities, and as a daily bus commuter, the change has been fantastic. Really makes a big difference in speed & reliable bus timings when the bus gets its own space to operate.
We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities".
Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives.
Speaking of "wasting life in buses", did you know that the average LA / Chicago / NYC driver spends 85 to 100 hours a year just sitting in traffic? Food for thought (https://inrix.com/scorecard/)
> No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time.
Even if that is true, average commute time is just a single factor. There's also health, cost, comfort, the environment, safety. Comparisons using a single metric are simply invalid.
> Go on, fact check me.
Ok.
Couldn't find any reliable data, could you cite your sources? What I have found is a few sources with wildly different data, e.g.:
- [1] puts Houston at 42 minutes, very different from your claim of 28 minutes.
- [2] claims the average time for the EU is 25 minutes.
Most of the sources I've found are based on self-reported data (surveys) so I do not put much weight on them. Do you have any sources that provide reliable data?
London average commute time is 38 minutes, quite comparable to 31 minute in Houston. I would argue you get much more spare time while using public transportation too, as well as so much needed walk time.
> London average commute time is 38 minutes, quite comparable to 31 minute in Houston.
Houston is 28 minutes. So an average Houston citizen gets 20 more minutes every day. In reality, it's even more because Houston is way better designed for daily chores: buying groceries, getting kids to chess clubs, etc.
It can work out to a whole _hour_ a day of extra time compared to London.
And they will live in FAR FAR FAR better conditions. In their own house, with plenty of space.
So yep, dense cities are a folly and need to be refactored (by demolishing).
Manhattan is such a strange place to live. People are locked into something far off the normal ways of living, and they forget those other ways of life and look down on them (smaller less dense cities, suburbs, rural areas). Living in closets in high rises and moving around underground isn’t life. Having room for living, being able to get around quickly with private owned vehicles, and walking on grass instead of concrete is a better way of life. Somehow masses of people, especially younger people, have convinced themselves that an unhealthy way of life is healthy.
None of that crap you mentioned has anything to do with the previous post. I live in as suburban of a neighborhood as you can imagine and within 10-15 minutes could walk to a Vietnamese restaurant, 2 sushi restaurants, Thai, NY style pizza, 2 bars, several shitty Mexican restaurants, and just about every fast food chain. I’ll trade this ease of living over “vibes” any day.
I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking'
For certain high frequency routes in Chicago, I never minded sitting on the bus to get across town. At least once I got off I didn't have to find a parking spot. Now wasting life waiting for a bus is another story.
The thing is, a transit trip's true cost is also around $20 in SF and Seattle. It's just that perverse incentives hide it from users.
Waymo taxis deserve the same level of subsidies. It won't be happening any time soon because it'll be a death knell for transit, and will leave thousands of city employees without work.
This isn’t true, unless you’re willing to consider the subsidies that cars get when it comes to putting in and maintaining roads and doing urban planning around half the city being car surfaces.
It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures).
And that’s leaving aside all the issues with our of control transit budgets or crime on public transit in many cities.
The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else. A single car line can transport about 2000 persons per hour. A single bus lane about 9000, a single bike lane 14000 - if you dedicate the space to pedestrians, we’re at 19000 and light rail goes beyond that at 22000 and more. (See page 3, https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002265/News/Pre..., German only)
This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.
(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)
The problem is utilization: you can't get 9000 persons per hour via busing in most places, weighting by area. Fixed routing scales poorly compared to cars (or bikes which have their own drawbacks) trying to match many-to-many riders-to-destinations.
What's "most places?" This is a traffic flow that's achieved routinely in about every medium size european city. And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
A medium US city has the commute time of 15 minutes. It's unachievable with transit in any scenario.
> And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
Yeah. And it sucks. The distributed nature of the US cities gave people far more economic opportunities than in Europe. This resulted in faster economic growth (and still does).
> The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else
Bullshit. You are a victim of propaganda.
In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people. So with 10 buses per hour, you get just 180 people per lane per hour. Even at peak loads (200 people per bus) and a bus every 2 minutes, you get 6000 people per lane per hour.
Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math. Transit slowly consumes lives and increases misery. All it's good for is to move people to "misery centrals" (downtowns) where pretty much nobody really wants/can live in comfort.
> In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
The average car occupancy in the US seems to be around 1.5. How would increasing that be easy? You would have to somehow convince the majority of the population to change their habits, that does not sound easy in any way.
> A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people.
In the US, a country that has invested heavily into car infrastructure at the expense of public transport. All you're saying is the underfunded public transport in the US sucks. We all know this, but it has no relevance to public transport in general.
> Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math.
The simple math here is the number of cars goes up linearly as population increases, which is unsustainable. Meanwhile, public transport only gets more and more efficient.
2000 people per hour is really not that much. And reducing density will not buy you much - density itself doesn't mean anything. If you have a suburb with 50 000 people living there and an office park with 25 000 people working there (both not particularly high numbers), you get a traffic flow of 25 000 people moving both ways, during rush hour. That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.
What would buy you much is mixed neighborhoods (aka: the 15 minute city - everything you need for your daily life is within 15 minutes walking distance), because this will eliminate many trips. But mixed neighborhoods work better with higher density - because a supermarket in a low density place cannot be within 15 minutes walking distance.
Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.
No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.
And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.
> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.
I almost got into an accident today when a car swerved 4 lanes to the right because an absentminded driver wanted to take the exit at the last second. Like most attentive drivers, I don't like driving on public roads — it brings out the worst in us.
This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Thankfully, robots will save us. I wouldn't be pushing for cars, if it were not for the existence of Waymo.
> This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Yeah. They are waaaaay too good at allowing people to move, so urbanists wage an all-out war on them.
Transit has this inherent problem: it HAS to suck. You can't realistically build a fast public transit network allowing easy arbitrary point-to-point trips. It's just mathematically impossible. So transit does what it can only kinda-sorta do well: move people to Downtowns from dense living residential areas.
I don't hate cars. I own and drive a car, though I mostly take transit into SF to avoid the stress.
By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space (both while moving and while parked) to be compatible with even a moderately dense environment. You need some kind of rationing or metering.
The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars. There are more parking lots, which means less density, which means fewer people can choose to live closer to work, which means more cars, and so on. (Transit does the same in its own favor, of course. Transportation is quite fundamental.)
It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out. But it works quite well with the levels of density in pre-war "streetcar suburbs", like those built around the Key System in Oakland. I think the most reasonable solution for post-war suburbs is transit most of the way, and cars (robotic or otherwise) for the last mile.
> By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space
And? Buses also take a lot of space. A road footprint of a bus is equivalent to about 15-20 cars (because it has to stop often). It pays off when the bus is fully occupied, but outside of rush hours, cars are a more _efficient_ way to use the road space.
Cars force city designers to build in a people-oriented way, rather than optimize for bike lanes.
> The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars
Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
> It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out
It works nowhere. And yes, I lived in very dense areas (Amsterdam, NYC, Moscow).
Well, rush hour is what matters. As those of us who have worked on large distributed systems are aware, you have to provision for peak load. Peak load for cars is much, much worse than peak load for buses. Roads and parking lots are also relatively inflexible, unlike buses and trains where you can run more in one direction depending on time of day.
> Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
I appreciate the value in being able to move freely, but cars also constrain in many ways. They force more building to happen at the wildland-urban interface, to devastating effect as seen in the Palisades fire.
More importantly, current zoning and parking regulations make modern America very far from a free market. Not as far away as the Soviets were, but definitely nowhere close to reflecting people's true preferences once all benefits and costs are factored in. I doubt cars would be nearly as central in a market where single-family zoning was abolished and the full externalities of driving were captured.
Yes and no.
Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them)
So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest.
However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput.
Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest.
Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other.
In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination.
This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)
The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists.
Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people.
The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)
> This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)
The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.
Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive. One good example to study is Germanys 50 EUR Ticket - now 58 EUR. It's a flat rate for all of Germanys public transport, including regional trains. You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car. Yet, while it has increased ridership, the majority of people drive.
The problem is that transportation system quality matters more for a lot of people. The problem ends up as people owning a car for the last mile - that is from the rapid transit to their porch. And once they own a car, the calculus changes - you already incure the cost for the car.
So what you need is a reliable way to get door to door - and that requires more than slapping down a few light rail tracks. It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable. In the end, building such a system requires the (political) will to regard public transport as a common good infrastructure like road that gets paid from taxes and is not considered an enterprise that (could potentially) make money. In the end, this could also be made free, but free alone will not make that happen.
> Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive.
This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math.
> You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car.
When most people have a car you have to compare it not to the amortized cost of owning a car but the marginal cost of driving one you already have.
The majority of trips might be suitable for public transport but then people have a car because it's such an inconvenience to go to Costco and carry back everything you buy there on a bus, or they occasionally go somewhere the bus doesn't. So they get a car and then the insurance, tax, depreciation, etc. are all sunk costs and to get them to take the bus instead of driving themselves it has to beat the cost of gas.
Which it can, if you make it zero. Which in turn increases ridership, allowing you to justify more routes, which reduces latency, which causes even more people to take mass transit. By making mass transit more attractive instead of making driving less attractive.
> It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable.
Or you can just handle 85% of the cases that would have a justifiable amount of ridership and then let people drive a car or get an Uber in the 15% that would be mostly disused, instead of leaving it how it is now where people drive the majority of the time.
But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners.
Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
"bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public. Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget. Meanwhile it would save the public money on net, because collecting the cost as taxes has lower overhead than operating a parallel fare collections infrastructure. And it benefits drivers by giving them exactly what they've always wanted -- an incentive for other people to use mass transit:
> Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it, so the amortized cost of the rail line becomes $30/trip because you have to pay for all the same fixed costs with fewer riders. But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Whereas if you set the price to zero, the actual cost per trip which is now being covered by taxes comes out to $4/trip, because at lower cost you get higher ridership and more usage to spread the fixed costs over. Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
> I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost? Subsidies are the thing where they're not paying the full cost.
Moreover, you want the same incentive for everyone -- if a free fare would get someone at the 70th percentile income to take the subway instead of a car, give it to them so they do that.
The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it. Means testing is effectively a scheme to impose high marginal tax rates on the poor.
> Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public.
Nope. A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).
> Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget.
So would be giving everyone a (cheap) car.
> Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it
Good, then don't build it! Easy peasy. Price is a GREAT signal. Subsidies, hidden fees, misplaced incentives and other crap lead to suboptimal outcomes.
You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
> But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit
Great, we need exactly that.
> which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Nope. People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
> Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
Nope. It just doesn't. Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit). Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
> You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost?
I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
Richer people should pay the full cost of rides. This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
> The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it.
That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
> A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).
If you have a city without any mass transit, there will be traffic congestion. Beating the "stuck in traffic" time for a car is not hard at all. Beating the car's time when there is no traffic is harder, but an express train can certainly match it, and anyway how do you intend on preventing traffic congestion in a city with no mass transit?
> Price is a GREAT signal.
Price is a great signal for incremental costs. If you're going to burn a gallon of gas, another gallon of gas has to be produced, so you only want it to happen if someone is willing to pay the incremental cost.
It works poorly for fixed costs, because the price then deters usage even though the fixed cost is fixed and deterring usage saves nothing. This is why you should charge for gas but not for roads or for occupying otherwise-empty space on a subway car.
> You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
The argument is that transit is good because it allows density and density is good because it makes more efficient use of a scarce resource (land).
> People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
The buildings in the downtowns are not going to cease to exist. Something is going to be in them.
> And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Houston Metro has a population around 8M. NYC metro is 20M, is the largest in the US, and the NYC government has been corrupt and incompetent for decades.
In particular, one of the things Houston does well is to have less restrictive zoning than most other cities, which allows for mixed-use construction that in turn lets people live closer to where they work. But that's something that helps regardless of what you're using for transit.
Moreover, the level of traffic in Houston is not good. In spite of their zoning advantage their average commute is worse than the national average.
> Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
There is nobody dictating how many people will live in a city nor should there be. You can tell from the geography of the continent that a city in the position of New York is going to be a massive port, and so it is. Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago are big cities for the same reason. Nevada is mostly desert so Nevada is mostly empty; Las Vegas metro was created from the combination of cheap power from Hoover Dam and proximity to California with legal gambling and it's three quarters of the state population. Inland states are disproportionately farmland.
You don't get to decide where the beachfront property is. The question is only, given that 38M people live in California, how are they supposed to get around?
> Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit).
That's where the traffic congestion is!
> Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
This is the BS "induced demand" theory. What it's really describing is that if you have an otherwise desirable area (e.g. it's within an hour of the ocean) but the local government is mismanaging the area so it's full of traffic congestion or crime or excessive bureaucracy or whatever else, and you do anything whatsoever to make it not suck as much, more people are going to move there.
Fixing the problem doesn't induce demand, the demand was there the whole time and was being suppressed by mismanagement. And you get the same result from anything that fixes the problem. The only way to prevent more people from moving in there is to keep the place a hellscape so people don't want to move in.
Compare this to building a subway in Wyoming where nobody lives and the presence of a subway is obviously not going to cause a population boom there, which is what would happen if "induced demand" was actually a thing.
> I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
The issue is that $20 is the amortized cost, not the incremental cost. The bus costs the same to run whether it has 5 people on it or 40, but if it has 40 then the cost per passenger is 8 times less. And if it currently has 10, the incremental cost of making it 11 -- or 30 -- is zero, so that's what you want the fare to be. Which would in turn cause more people to take the bus and lower the cost per passenger.
> Richer people should pay the full cost of rides.
The incremental cost is still zero regardless of your income level.
> This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
It does also apply to cars, but we usually get it right for cars -- the roads (i.e. the fixed cost) are free but you pay for your own gas.
> That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
The proposal is that you'd have free mass transit, paid for by taxes, which are predominantly paid by rich people. There is nothing prohibiting you from buying a car, which would cost the same as it does now, all it does is make one of your options less expensive than it is now.
Reducing your choices can only come from making one worse than it is now, so that it takes that option off the table. Making an alternative cheaper or more convenient can't do that -- you still have the option to do the other thing and then only reason you wouldn't is if the new option is going to make you better off than the status quo which is still available.
Oh hey, I actually agree! By all means, let's compare fairly and price in all costs and externalities of car ownership vs public transport. You may not like the result, but that's life.
San Francisco currently has ~54% of its eligible population having cars registered to them. There are a lot of one-car families as well as e-bike families who don't want a car.
If that increased to 100%, you wouldn't be able to park anywhere without paying a lot, and getting anywhere would be super slow.
It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
> It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
Safety and schedule. I've never had a safety issue with taking commuter rail into Boston but taking it home from an evening event is basically a non-starter given how seldom it runs and how much longer it will take relative to driving even if I catch my train.
I'm very hopeful that Boston commuter rail gets electrified with the associated speed and frequency improvements soonish. the inner half of the commuter rail network is absolutely dense enough to be worth running service every 15 minutes on peak and every 30 off peak
Why ask for 15/30? My schedule right next door for the Berlin subway is 3/10. During peak hours, you don’t even check when the next train runs. And they’re all full. I do believe Boston has more inhabitants than this small city.
the subway is at 5/10 or so (it would be very nice if we got it down to 3/10), the commuter rail, however is mostly hourly at peak and 2 hours to never of peak
Yeah. I'll usually take commuter rail in for the rare 9-5ish stuff because it's such a lousy drive. But catching one of the very few later trains, especially if I have to time it with the subway, just doesn't work and it's usually a <1 hour drive anyway at that time of night.
I'm also pretty far out and not all the trains run that far.
Top speed (mostly) comes from the tracks, not the method of motive power.
As it stands they're already maxing out and exceeding (when they're late) the max speed for the class of rail they have.
Some of the inner stops might get a few seconds faster with better acceleration but that's about it.
The grade crossings are also kinda f'd. At full speed you can be in the middle of the train and see the arms still be in the process of lowering at certain crossings. That ain't safe. Faster won't make that better.
Top speed, sure, but for typical commuter heavy-rail, a non-express train isn't running at top speed for all that long.
Diesel-electric trains take a LOT longer to accelerate compared to a modern EMU, so much so that Caltrain's electrification project shaved 23 minutes off the SF to San Jose local trip, from 100 to 77 minutes.
Videos [0] [1] make the acceleration improvement pretty clear.
The MBTA already runs top speed on most of its lines once you get outside of roughly I95 depending on the line. Getting there faster would help but I don't think it would shave as much time off the end to end trip as you think. And for the urban stops they already accelerate and brake at the limit of what is reasonable for standing passengers. They can't push it too much or an old lady is gonna bounce off a wall and get a nose bleed and that's a bad look. It's not like Acela where a ticket guarantees a seat.
There will definitely be some improvement from electrification but I don't think it will affect median travel times much and the affect on average will mostly be from reliability.
The Fitchburg line did do upgrades a few years ago. I think they double-tracked sections that weren't. It still take a while--hour+--from the outer reaches.
Not enough seats is mostly pretty close into the city in my experience. At least on the line that I sometimes take, it's mostly Waltham in which doesn't have a mass transit line.
Reducing the number of daily commuters isn't going to "hurt" the city. Quite the opposite in fact. Actual residents make the city what it is, and reducing traffic/congestion/honking/pollution is going to make it a much more attractive place to live.
NY is probably the only city where this could work because it’s the only proper American city that has a real metro system. Every other city will require major upgrades to have modern public transportation, and the density isn’t there in most American cities that were designed around the car.
I live in Boston and I could see it working here, now that the T is on a path to reliability.
While it would be great if money wasn’t a concern, you don’t need to plaster the city in a grid of metro lines. Careful usage of bus only lanes has really made a difference in some areas of Boston that I frequent.
Edit: The link above is only for heavy rail - Boston’s numbers are better if you also include light rail, which is a significant part of the system:
NYC Subway, Metro North, and LIRR have much broader and more frequent coverage to a lot more places outside the urban core than the bay area's network does. Iirc muni metro has passable coverage inside San Francisco, and Bart and Caltrain service a few linear corridors outside San Francisco pretty well, but a whole lot of the bay area is very far from transit. This means that bay area commuters could not as easily switch away from cars. Though SF is still probably the second best candidate for congestion pricing after NYC.
Taxies in general. I know medallions already limit their numbers but if you've ever been locked in traffic surrounded by yellow cabs, count the passengers. Each one —mostly empty IME— is 120sqft of road. Cars trolling around for patrons is a bad system.
The Subway, buses, trams, etc, etc are all way better for passenger density.
Like airports already do, the city could provide rideshare "waiting area" parking lots in different zones. That would retain rapid response to on-demand pickup, without random trolling on city streets as defacto parking lots. Rideshare averages only 50% utilization of taxis, despite having the advantage of automated scheduling.
Instead the city added a per-ride fee, which will be covered by Uber/Lyft, making it useless as an incentive for ride reduction, https://archive.is/MtRgo
> Riding in a taxi, green cab or black car will now cost passengers an extra 75 cents in the congestion zone... The surcharge for an Uber or Lyft will be $1.50 per trip... cars for services like Uber and Lyft make fewer trips and are more likely to idle in the zone. In 2023, taxis made an average of 12 daily trips, while ride-hail vehicles made an average of six.
Do you think that's what the average American pays for their sandwich? Including bringing lunch from home.
If you don't understand working poverty, you won't understand how devastating only $3kpa really looks like on a low wage. Lot's of people right now can't afford that, so cost-neutral alternatives have to exist or you price people out.
Arlington, VA has had this for years. The I-66 10-mile segment to DC is dynamic pricing with no limit. I've seen it over $40. And they can pick and choose who it applies to. That was in part due to a lawsuit. The federal and state governments made hollow promises to Arlington to get I-66 built, then did little about the resulting traffic mess and noise for decades.
"The issue arises from a 1977 agreement between then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman Jr. and the state of Virginia. In the so-called Coleman Decision, Arlington agreed to drop its opposition to the construction of I-66 in exchange for certain promises, including a four-lane limit, sound barriers, and truck and car-pool restrictions."
As with “plastic bag bans”, and any other progressive program like “congestion pricing” aimed at reducing our collective dependency on O&G, plastic junk, and general waste. The incoming administration, auto industry, and O&G industry are very likely to send their army of lawyers and paid off politicians to fight this from going nationwide.
Got to make sure the multibillion dollar oil companies, executives, and shareholders get their fucking nut.
There's an easy solution to this: have ticket writers waiting at intersections to paper all the cars who do it. It's not like they can drive away. NYC used to be really good about enforcement, and it worked extremely well.
It doesn't solve traffic, but it does help stave off gridlock and keep intersections free for bus lanes to operate normally.
Thats the thing with socal traffic especially. Absolutely zero enforcement by the police. What do they do with their resources instead? There was a man with a knife caught in a burglary last week and the police sent like 40 suvs some unmarked with the blue and red lights through the windscreen, a swat team, and a helicopter. Probably in the millions spent for that operation alone for this guy with a kitchen knife. I wonder how little you could get a man with a knife disarmed for in some midwestern suburb in comparison. Oh and keep in mind they didn’t actually go in after the guy they just did a standoff till 2am when he surrendered on his own.
Meanwhile everyone blocks the box and there are cars without even plates on them.
That's hardly a SoCal phenomenon, sadly. In all the places I've lived, "protect and serve" seems to be abbreviated - "protect and serve our desk jobs and pensions" would be more accurate. If the TSA is security theater, the police are a circus, and the occasional show of force is them coming to town.
It's like those pictures of Luigi Mangione being perp walked in Manhattan with 20 cops and FBI agents behind him. Imagine if those officers were on the beat or enforcing traffic laws instead. That would make more of a difference in our communities than a photo op ever will.
No in the midwest they actually police for traffic. The cops will have the highway DOT actually pave little asphault pads when they resurface where they like to sit and take radar. They will get you for out of date registration. They will get you for traffic violations and they do actually send out police to monitor intersections for bad behavior when its bad.
They just don't do anything like that in socal. I've not once seen a cop take radar in socal. Not once. I can't even remember the last time I've seen someone pulled over in socal but it happens probably three times in my view whenever I go elsewhere to visit.
What I'm curious about is if business in the Manhattan will be lessened as a result of less people there. I know the goal is less cars, rather than less people, but I want to see if that's actually what will happen.
As someone who doesn't live in Manhattan I wish there was a better way to go basically anywhere in New York without entering Manhattan. Every single road, bus, and subway goes through this super dense area.
Like why do I need to go through Manhattan to get from Newark Airport to Flatbush? (Unless I have a car, then I can go over the Verazzano, but in a bus/subway/train? It's all via Manhattan.
I've thought about the same thing and concluded this basically reduces to "why do economies organize around dense urban cores"? pretty much any business that can afford to will want to rent space in the barycenter of a metro area. that's what manhattan is to the NYC metro.
when the vast majority of daily trips are into and out of that dense core, that defines the most economic routes for building transit. beltways/bypasses exist to relieve the already saturated surface roads of the core. you don't see the same thing with trains because it's not necessary. it sucks for the passenger to transfer between three or four different trains to get from EWR to flatbush, but the rail infrastructure has plenty of capacity to accommodate a few extra pax on that route.
I think it would be a lot nicer to have urban life/transit built around many smaller cores with everyone living much closer to work. but in aggregate, businesses want the largest hiring base, and people want the best jobs they can get in the area.
The downside is it creates a conflict between the city and the rest. The city is like "we want transit, everyone else go away". The rest are like "we want to give you business but your policies drive us away", and "we want transit, but we are forced to get a car because transit is only in the center".
It's an unnecessary conflict - just add some transit that doesn't revolve around the city center. This reduces the number of people just passing through the center and creating unnecessary stress, and it make transit possible for more people.
Manhattan is like a black hole - it sucks in every single transit from as far away as Massachusetts. Try to travel by public transportation from virtually anywhere nearby without going through Manhattan. You can't and it's unnecessary traffic.
>I think it would be a lot nicer to have urban life/transit built around many smaller cores with everyone living much closer to work. but in aggregate, businesses want the largest hiring base, and people want the best jobs they can get in the area.
I think that this is prevented in large part by local capture of state politics by leading cities. NYC money basically owns NY politics so NY will never neglect let alone screw NYC to the benefit of Buffalo and Albany and whatnot. Repeat for other states that have one or two big urban economic wells that run everything.
I’m not even talking about that. I’m imagining something more like LA county but with more trains and fewer cars. you mostly live and work within a 30 minute travel radius, but still visit friends and specialty shops in other nearby cores without too much trouble.
investing more into cities like buffalo would also be great, but I don’t think they could realistically become a first choice for people who enjoy the benefits of a large metro area.
Car people did the same hand wringing when my nations capital outright banned cars in the city center. After a few years it turned out, that the business grew because the place became more pleasant for folks to go to.
The thing about congestion is that reducing the number of drivers slightly (e.g. 10-20%) could eliminate congestion by 100%! This is the same way it works for electrical congestion.
So you need pricing which will make a few people reconsider driving, who were on the edge of using public transit anyway.
Interesting point, I'd believe it. I suspect the demographic that is driving instead of using public transit is quite small.
Driving for a commute isn't really possible in Manhattan unless the company provides parking. And those parking spots are reserved for executives. This group of people are price insensitive.
Passing through Manhattan can frequently save an hour of time in traffic elsewhere, those commuters will just see the fee as a higher toll.
All three major airports never tied directly to a subway, opting instead for airtran systems which create complexity and cost time. I suspect this causes a base level of traffic.
ha, I drive / train into Manhattan from outside a lot so I'm by nature on the "edge", and this change if it reduces traffic makes me more likely to drive :)
Why can’t we have dedicated bus lanes. Seems like a more amicable solution.
Personally I find it weird that SF’s public transit is so under water it needs bail outs from car drivers. Yet it also doesn’t serve the car drivers with any compelling equivalent.
i got a fine in London for doing this by mistake. i didn’t even block traffic, i just went into the intersection without the cars in front moving. bam, fine. lesson learned.
What you did is the definition of blocking the box - stopping in the intersection (even if your light is green). Blocking traffic would be if your light was red.
It's better this way that the law penalizes what you can control (your own vehicle movement) as opposed to what you can't (the cars in front of you)
Look at the carpool lanes in the Bay Area. It’s as much as $9 for a couple of miles around the Palo Alto / Atherton area and there’s no lack of cars. Then there’s like another $5 or something between that area and Santa Clara.
Maybe it will work in NYC, but in the Bay Area I can’t help but feel like it’s a regressive tax because people who already have the money will continue their ways and pay but people who are on a budget now have to wait longer to get anywhere in the peninsula.
SF has a ton of folk coming from quite a ways away and it can easily take 2x the time if using public transit. Outside of rush hour Caltrain can take 1.5-2h, and Bart from Berryessa isn’t quick (plus contending with BART delays).
Anything that costs money is 'regressive' if you use your definition.
Sure, we could means test every toll and fee, but there's a different solution for that already - taxation.
There's a secret third option to congestion, which is you disallow some number of people at a time from using the facility, and people really don't like that one.
Dig deeper and you find it's a housing problem anyway. People can't afford to house themselves/their families in the cities they toil in. Build housing near jobs and there's less need to commute in from Tracy.
If you're looking for non-regressive ways to share scarce resources, you're going to struggle. In Tehran, for example, only license plates ending with an odd number can drive on Mondays, even numbers on Tuesdays.
> If you're looking for non-regressive ways to share scarce resources, you're going to struggle.
It's not actually that hard. You fund them through general taxes rather than fares. Then how much you pay is proportional to how much money you make -- even a flat tax does at least that -- as opposed to the largely fixed amount that corresponds to the amount the average person has to move around in order to live an ordinary life, which is approximately a head tax.
That's how to pay for it, sure. But I said share the resource. Not everyone who wants to drive at a given time can do so, there simply isn't enough space. How does your plan help _share_ the resource? Who gets to use the roads at 8am when everyone wants to?
> Not everyone who wants to drive at a given time can do so, there simply isn't enough space.
There isn't space in the current design. That's the thing you spend money to fix. Build subways in high traffic areas -- the ones where there is currently congestion -- and make them completely free to encourage people to use them (and eliminate the administrative cost of fare collection to both riders and government). Build more dense housing near the subway stops so people are traveling fewer miles, removing traffic from the roads -- this one doesn't even cost money, just stop prohibiting people from doing it with zoning. Build pedestrian catwalks or tunnels in high traffic areas to prevent crossings from congesting the roads and road traffic from killing the pedestrians. And yes, you can even add more travel lanes -- it's not always the thing you need but it sometimes is.
You don't have to rate limit the resource when you actually build enough of it to satisfy the demand. There exist roads that aren't congested, the demand for them isn't infinite.
> I can’t help but feel like it’s a regressive tax
That’s exactly what it is. The richer you are, the better it is. Now people on a budget will pay taxes to subsidize infrastructure that’s only accessible to the wealthy. It’s a massive scam perpetrated by the rich for the rich.
Why stop with roads? Why not have congestion pricing for schools or hospitals or access to water? That way we only have to build enough infrastructure to serve the wealthiest half of society.
In NYC it’s nothing new. A parking spot is already completely unaffordable for the average worker so they don’t drive in anyway. The vast majority of folks affected by the congestion charge are wealthy, or businesses the serve the wealthy (who will pass on the cost).
> Now people on a budget will pay taxes to subsidize infrastructure that’s only accessible to the wealthy. It’s a massive scam perpetrated by the rich for the rich.
Huh? The revenue from congestion pricing is used to pay for public transit. The rich people pay extra to subsidize transit for everyone else, which is exactly how things should work.
There’s a progressive aspect to drivers (higher income on average) subsidizing transit, but I worry that framing leads to drivers feeling they are paying for something that other people use.
I prefer the framing that drivers should fund transit because drivers do use transit: NYC would be complete gridlock if transit went into a death spiral and straphangers switched to cars. Even if they never set foot on the MTA, drivers see a lot of the benefit of it existing.
The drivers are paying for something they use: less-congested roads. In theory, if this is priced correctly, everyone is getting what they want: the drivers pay to not have to sit in traffic, everyone else benefits from that revenue to have better mass transit.
As a New Yorker, a few things made me a proponent of congestion pricing:
- watching people have to squeeze between stopped (mostly single-occupant) cars blocking sidewalks on Broome or Canal on their own pedestrian light at rush hour, and realizing that it would be impossible for someone with a stroller or mobility aid.
- seeing packed busses miss light cycles because the intersection is blocked
- seeing ambulances or fire trucks with sirens blaring stuck in gridlock
“Pays off” to me means that transit users and pedestrians are no longer regularly inconvenienced by the fact that more people choose to drive than there is frankly room for.
All these issues have better solutions than congestion pricing.
Cars blocking intersections and/or sidewalks can easily be solved with automated traffic fines - that's how Zurich and London does it (the former without any congestion pricing!)
Many cities also have special lanes only useable by some classes of vehicles - e.g. busses (or sometimes taxis as well) - I guess ambulances could also use those.
In fact, congestion pricing doesn't solve any of those problems, it's just an irrelevant (as in, it doesn't solve any specific problem directly) regressive tax to "drive less".
> Cars blocking intersections and/or sidewalks can easily be solved with automated traffic fines
Rush hour traffic is so gridlocked that cars often can’t know if they will clear a light cycle, so fining would effectively just reduce to a stochastic congestion tax.
NYC does have some dedicated bus lanes, but adding more means reallocating more space from cars which is a political no-go without reducing the number of cars first. That’s what congestion pricing aims to do.
Fining for blocking intersection isn't stochastic. You simply don't enter the intersection if you're not sure you'll be able to exit it. You wait at green light. Simple. That's how people in London and Zurich drive.
Congestion automatically reduces the number of cars (because they literally can't get into the city!), without congestion pricing. If you reduce 3 lanes to 2, then... 2 lanes will be blocked, instead of 3, so there will be complete gridlock & congestion - for cars. But not for busses! So public transport will work, even thought private is gridlocked. Combine this with (1) - empty intersections - and busses can drive very well!
It works well in NYC because it's hard to justify driving anyway. The transit system is just so extensive.
But somewhere like Atlanta, Dallas, etc.? Absolutely not. It's just a vice tax levied on poor people who are already not happy about having to commute long drives into the city center to find work. They have no alternative. They can't spend 3 hours each way on buses. They can't afford to live in the the handful of walkable blocks in the city with $3k+ rent that effectively serve as a little Disneyland for affluent residents who want to larp like they live in Brooklyn.
Build the public transit BEFORE you hit the poors with a giant stick. Because I guarantee you that hitting them with that stick is not going to effect change in any way, as these people have next to no influence on policymakers already.
SF public transportation is plenty usable. I hardly ever take my car to the city anymore; it's just not worth it. Sure, it's no NYC, but it's definitely the best public transit in California and probably top-quartile in the US.
SF is already half way there with its bridge tolls (which, funny enough, are higher than NYC's congestion charge, yet there is zero fuss about them). The rest of the city is too spread out and has no natural choke points, so I don't see how this kind of congestion charging will be possible.
I think it's highly unlikely to result in positive effects. I would be hoping that it only harms NYC economic condition "a little", as the best case outcome.
This falls solidly in the "it sounds good but causes significant negative unintended consequences" bucket of regulation, like the rest of NYC's many regulations that led up to this point.
The externality is already "priced in" to the traffic. People who can wait in traffic or can't afford not to wait in traffic do so, and people who want to skip out can as well.
Congestion pricing, like many fees and regulations, is a regressive tax, because the overhead seeps into all goods and services and it impacts the poor most of all and the rich not at all.
The median income of a household with a car in the city is more than double that of households without cars [1]. In a city where public transport is a viable and relatively cheap alternative, it doesn’t seem obvious that it disproportionately impacts the poor, unlike for instance a flat sales tax on essential goods.
If they only taxed passenger vehicles you'd have a point, but the cost for trucks is actually higher (up to more than double), which means that in the end it is a tax on essential goods, because those goods have to make it into the city somehow and businesses have to pass that cost on to customers. It's reasonable to be afraid that poor customers will see the largest change as a percent of their budget as prices go up to pay for the tax (though obviously we haven't had time to measure whether that to see for sure).
It disproportionately impacts the working lower classes. Poor in NYC likely means homeless. Dual income McDonalds working family is above the CarLess HHI median wage in the reports you linked. That same worker is heavily impacted by congestion pricing vs say a Quant trader
The dual income McDonalds worker was never driving into Manhattan. Though the fixation on “poor people” is fake. 100 studies could come out explaining that congestion pricing is better for poor people and the opponents aren’t going to change their view on it. It’s a fake argument used to launder more selfish opinions.
traffic is a crappy externality that harms everyone, drivers, non-drivers. non-drivers are harmed by pollution, slower buses and cabs, noise, slower emergency response times. drivers are harmed by all those things as well plus the stress and inconvenience of extreme traffic. the point of congestion pricing is to reduce the so-called "traffic tax" that everyone pays into one that is just a toll, that only drivers pay. reducing traffic is a direct goal of the toll.
There is only one singular goal written into the enabling law for this Congestion Tax, renenue for the NYC MTA transit system's capital plan. They have to raise one billion dollars per year. Any reducing congestion or any altering of pollution were only part of getting Federal approval. Now the only purpose is to raise money with 5 years of hikes already scheduled. This is going to uave drastic unintended consequences. I predict a theatre and retail recession. And more office divestment if this regressive tax isn't repealed or forced to focus on emissions or some non revenue goal.
Sure it is going to have consequences, but so does not doing anything as well.
Not to be that guy, but from a European standpoint the clear answer is: If you make driving cars into the big city expensive, if you still wanna get people there you need to give them other, cheap, more space-efficient ways of getting there. Public transport, bus lines, trains, stuff that Asian megacities do as well.
Or you can build even more lanes and parking lots, because that worked out great and was without any consequences so far /s
I am not saying I trust in the success of NY congestion pricing, but that has nothing to do with the measure (it is fine) and everything to do with how how half-assed it might be implemented. But elsewhere similar concepts work just fine. But hey, so does healthcare..
It has been highly successful in London. Less congestion, better air quality, incentivises the most disruptive things like heavy good vehicles to deliver out of rush hour reducing impact on other traffic etc.
On the wiki page for the London charge they suggest that ten years after the introduction of the congestion charge, traffic levels have been reduced by 10% (ten).
So yes technically less traffic, but not really enough to make any meaningful difference IMO. It is still noisy, it is still congested, it is still polluted, it is still hard to cross roads, it is still hard to get anywhere on a bus in a predictable time, it is still very frightening to be a cyclist (and indeed it is still common for cyclists to get killed or badly injured), and it is still better to get the tube.
I view it more as a toll now really, rather than an attempt to dissuade people from driving in. If they were really serious about trying to stop people driving in, the price would not be £15/day but it would be £500/day or more.
As it stands at the moment, even on the weekend (yes, it runs on the weekend even though there is not much congestion e.g. on a sunday afternoon) if I want to go to central London with the family I will drive. It costs £15, but the price of a return tube ticket is £6, so x2 for me and the wife and it is already £12, then add in £1.75 for the bus tickets to-and-from the tube station (so £3.50 per adult return = £7), and you are already at £19 to use public transport, vs £15 for the congestion charge.
So it is approx 20% cheaper to drive, AND it is more convenient, AND it is quicker, AND it is more comfortable.
Like I said, if they were serious about it being a deterrent they'd price it way, way higher than £15. But actually they want to make cheap enough so that people pay it, and they get money for me using my own private transport and fuel to travel around, and don't have to pay for the running costs of more tubes/buses etc.
My ancedotal experience of driving around London once or twice a year for the last ten years is there hasn't been a huge change. I don't trust TFL data on this as the authorities are incentivised to report figures to support the gathering of the additional revenue stream.
At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions).
In my opinion, we should primary focus on improving the standards of public transport. Safety, cleanliness, punctuality and price. I'm a car owner living 15mins drive from downtown of a European capital city, and I refuse to drive near the city because the parking is expensive, there's always roadworks but primarily the public transport is excellent and comfortable.
What are you talking about? It will have overwhelmingly strongly positive effects, while also raising revenue to fund stuff like more transit. Congestion charging is great and every city should do it!
