The $15 charge will push people in your position to optimize their lifestyle for less driving in Manhattan, either by finding a new job, or moving closer to work, or more likely driving to a park and ride and using transit for the last bit.
How about the radical idea of train service on both sides of the river if we don’t want people to drive. There are a massive amount of commuters, rent is outrageously expensive and park and rides are far away and have all the fun unpredictability of regular old driving. And as the parent poster says it is already expensive to go into the city, $18 to cross the GWB, if anyone wants to do the quick math on how many people cross that a day and then come back and tell me why we can’t have better infrastructure.
I pay taxes on every purchase which are used to fund public transit, but I still pay per use. I don't see why it isn't fair to also charge a usage fee on cars so that drivers feel the more immediate costs of a choice to drive somewhere.
I don't think you've received a good reply to the congestion part of your comment.
The most poorly understood urban planning concept by the general public is the idea of induced demand. Usually this is applied to freeway expansion, which inevitably ends up being just as congested as pre expansion.
However, induced demand can just as easily be applied to parking lots. Especially in NYC area, very few people who drive and park don't have an alternative. Those people only have so much tolerance for looking for parking, so limiting parking will push people on the margin to transit.
For the individual, driving will almost always be the best choice if you build endless parking and highways. But, it's not necessarily better for the collective to allocate our land and resources like that. Parking lots aren't free. In fact, they require a huge amount of space. You can fit more people in an apartment building with that space!
In NYC and even other cities you really aren't forced to have a car, that's a huge generalization borne out of much more suburban areas. I live in Seattle and myself and many friends don't have cars, yet we get on just fine. In NYC, especially Manhattan, a car is a liability.
It says that Apple Pay protects your privacy by randomizing the number, but Clover based stores seem to have no trouble tracking my loyalty rewards once I linked my phone number to my virtual card.
Same for transit like OMNY in NYC. It tracks my virtual card enough to implement fare capping.
> Same for transit like OMNY in NYC. It tracks my virtual card enough to implement fare capping.
That's per DPAN, though. Capping doesn't work across devices (or people would just add their cards to friends' and family members' iPhones and split the capped fare).
There must be at least some truth to the fact that it makes the process more difficult. In Central Texas the most prominent grocery retailer by far is HEB, who has purposefully and intentionally not supported any sort of NFC payments, presumably because it somehow makes it easier to track people’s purchases over time by preventing NFC.
FWIW they are the only holdout. You can pay with NFC at Walmart, Costco, gas stations, regular retail outlets, etc almost anywhere else in Central Texas. HEB absolutely sticks out like a sore thumb in their lack of NFC support. And it’s not that they aren’t tech savvy - they own and maintain an Uber-Eats like app here called Favor that works pretty well. They clearly understand technology
I wouldn't be surprised they'd just completed an infrastructure upgrade that didn't support NFC prior to it's growth in popularity and now they're unwilling to pay that upgrade toll all over again. But that's just pure uninformed speculation on my part.
You're describing Barcelona to Madrid, which is now one of the busiest rail corridors in Europe and is eating demand for flights between the cities (previously the busiest flight corridor in Europe).
Not just China, which people often correctly point out is willing to do things with zero input or concern for individuals, but most of Europe is able to build stuff with much lower costs than we are while respecting property rights and the environment. We should just bring over some Spanish or French rail administrators and ask them how we can fix our bureaucracy.
I'm also in a city without a car (and am proud of it), and also struggle with this. One thing that helped me a lot is to buy a few ultra lightweight packable bags. Ones that can be packed into a pocket in themselves. Then I put these in every backpack I normally carry with me. It helps that I rarely leave the apartment without a backpack.
mine mostly is. It's a tight pack for carrying my laptop and similar paraphernalia. It's not really means for storing more than a few small pieces of groceries
(note: this is rendered null anyway because I do need to drive everywhere in my suburb).
