This doesn't make sense to me.
IME - the vast majority of time there is a single customer or group in a taxi or uber. Assuming this is in fact the case. Taxis and ubers increase the number of trips taken by vehicle, but let's pretend in their favor that they leave that number flat. While they have a passenger in them they are trading 1-1 for a private vehicle to a "public" vehicle. While they don't have a passenger in them they are trading 0-1 for private vehicles to "public" vehicles. That results in a net increase in vehicles.
I'm not sure this is actually a common pattern, though.
You can't transport by car and reduce both at the same time!
Some combination of these two factors could mean that there are fewer cars idle at any time ("storage") and more cars in service at any time. I'm not necessarily saying that's what is happening but it's definitely possible.
Looking into the future, a great outcome of driverless cars would be the commoditization of car transport. You essentially say where you're going and whether you are willing to share the ride. A driverless car pops off the queue to pick you up, or a multi-person car slightly diverts from its route to pick up up (a la Uber Pool).
- Each physical car sees much higher utilization, allowing fewer cars to exist overall and parking space needs are reduced.
- A large network of efficient driverless cars means it's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion from everyone's route. Ideally an improved shared ride experience would result in higher usage of shared rides, meaning that fewer cars need to be on the road at any given time = lower pollution and congestion.
Fewer cars, but more miles. Every moment that a car is going between one drop-off and the next pick-up adds to the total.
> Each physical car sees much higher utilization
Higher utilization is a mixed blessing. The more a car is driven per day, the fewer days it will be until replacement. There's not much difference between two cars each being driven half the time all year and two cars each being driven all the time half the year. At best you get some benefit from keeping the car warmed up, but that's outweighed by the passenger-less miles.
> t's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion
That would work a lot better if demand were uniformly distributed, but in fact it's highly cyclic - toward office areas in the morning, away from them in the evening. This asymmetry is even worse for things like sporting events. Once a driver has taken a commuter to work, going anywhere else means 2x distance because they'll have to come back for the matching commute home.
The only way to reduce ecological footprint is to reduce the number of vehicle miles per person. It doesn't matter who or what is driving the vehicle. Reducing commute distance works, even when people are still in cars but especially when people can walk/bike instead. Increasing per-vehicle occupancy helps, whether it's car pooling or mass transit. Replacing private cars with shared ones doesn't make a dent, and in some cases can make things worse.
The charge is levied on private transport and Ubers et cetera. It's unlikely to shift demand from Ubers to private vehicles.
On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect.
> The failings of the subway and train infrastructure is due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA
The MTA is a complicated problem. Part of it is high labor costs due to inefficient labor use. Part of it is conservatism with train speeds. Part of it is chronic under-funding.
The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
The congestion already does that. The issue is that it's a hard problem. You can't make deliveries to shops at 3AM because there is no one there to receive them. To the extent you can make deliveries at 6AM, they already do. But a delivery driver loads up the truck and then makes deliveries for eight hours. Telling them to work a de facto 14 hour shift because you're going to put two separate three hour blocks of "don't drive during peak hours" into the middle of their day is going to drive up costs.
And freight rail serves an entirely different market. That's used to transport bulk products in industrial quantities, not to deliver bread to the corner deli. Trucks sometimes are used in contexts where freight rail could be used but those aren't the ones driving through Manhattan during rush hour.
> The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
The problem is that the externalities are really just failures in the markets for alternatives that have dumped their natural demand onto the roads, because all of the externalities come from congestion, which could be absorbed by better alternatives if they existed.
If you make the subways better then fewer people drive. If you make them less expensive then fewer people drive. That means paying for them from taxes rather than fares -- just getting rid of the fares and using taxes instead would get a huge number of cars off the road and eliminate the overhead cost of all the fare collection infrastructure.
When you have things like minimum parking requirements or anti-density zoning rules, that makes it more expensive to build high density housing and subsidizes car ownership for people in urban areas. Then the people who live there drive more, because they have somewhere to park a car and therefore own one, meanwhile there is less housing there which means people need to live further away and then many of them will drive back in to their jobs.
Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives had already squeezed into congested roads. It makes driving worse when what we need is for alternatives to driving to be better.
Every other city's experience with congestion pricing shows decreased car use in favor of alternatives. Effects on local grocery prices were minimal. And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion.
Suppose the forest is on fire and instead of spending money to put the fire out, we just ignore it. Then a bunch of wolves come into the city to flee from the fire.
Someone suggests that we introduce bears to the city in order to drive out the wolves. Many people point out what a terrible idea that is, but some cities do it anyway. Then the proponents point out that some of the wolves have fled back to the forest.
But now your city is full of bears. And the surrounding forest is still on fire.
> Effects on local grocery prices were minimal.
This is cost disease in a nutshell. "We did this one thing that was a bad idea, but the net effect was small, so that makes it alright." What's the cumulative effect of using that logic as a general principle?
> And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion.
Compared to the untenable status quo, or compared to the better alternatives?
When the status quo is a dumpster fire, "this is better than a dumpster fire" is not a very high bar.
## Fix the subway (by which I mean make it more like Japan's rail):
* Make loitering illegal, enforce it
* A 'short loop' everything recorded space
This is anti-vandalism / for crimes within a day
* Since this is the US, safety barrier the train
* In-city Automated circuits, automated schedule.
## An interface between the subway and the rest of the world:
Large parking silos close enough to the city to be on the subway grid (with good service), BUT, far enough out to have good use of the land. These too should have somewhat short loop subservience for security (maybe a 7-day rotation here). Parking can be charged for, but it should be less than the cost of having an automated driver take you in to the city, drop you off, and pick you up later.
## Every-day Freight backhaul:
As a transportation utility, during the more downtime hours the subway could be used by semi-automated transport cars to route pallets (or a replacement transfer unit) of things classified in several storage classes: Frozen, Refrigerated, 'room temp', not conditioned, 'special'. (Special being an un-conditioned, but ventilated with normal air, room that provides power for local regulation.) The transfer pods would be ferried along normal subway lines between cars during the downtimes. The stops would probably mostly be off of the normal ones, but exceptions might be made. Nearby storage rooms would receive the contents and buffer them. Those rooms are a city owned public utility (somewhat like paid parking spaces are now). Again, subservience on short loop, with added restricted access via RFID fobs and needing to show faces. Automated logging of who's checking in and which pallets they're taking out. At this point they may be close enough to hand/forklift transport, or maybe form an airport luggage style electric powered tram delivery.
## Reducing friction of desired transport methods:
Probably the free# (for people; #paid for with taxes) transport, and keeping the costs of the last-mile backhaul minimal for commercial ideas would be the biggest reduction. The increased patrols, and automated subservience backup (to trace fault after humans identify issues) are also supposed to reduce friction. In the narrative I've setup the civil enforcers are only supposed to be providing help, not hassling random people asking for papers.
If someone says that managing programmers is like herding cats, retorting that programmers are not exactly the same as cats is not very helpful.
What is your actual counterargument? Why should we make driving worse instead of making alternatives to driving better?
You're already effectively paying a premium to account for the extra time the drivers have to spend in traffic. It's not clear whether the congestion charges will be more than the labor-time saved.
Also, a general point: typical market goods are, by default, "regressively priced", because most of them don't look at your income to determine the price. This is generally a good thing, because if every good's price scaled with income, there would be no material gain to earning an extra dollar.
Any time you recognize a real scarcity and ensure it's priced explicitly rather than allocated by an ever-choked queue, it's going to be regressive in this sense. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker by itself.
>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say.
[0]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-i... [1]http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
[0] https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partne...
According to this article [1], combined Uber and Lyft ridership in NYC was about 200,000/day in July 2016 (the most recent possible date for the original data). By July 2018, daily ridership was almost 600,000.
Is possible that Uber/Lyft lower congestion when first introduced, but worsen it over the long-run?
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-rid...
The major one being cost. IME uber most definitely increases the number of vehicles on the road.
As other comments have said, the effects on congestion are controversial [0][1].
> which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit
Not necessarily. If a trip would not have occurred otherwise, then there would be no decline in public transit utilization (subway lines seem to be closing with increased frequency recently, and people may have no other means of returning home). Of course, this would point to increased congestion.
> the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves
Would eliminating street parking further this policy? On many streets, it would allow for 1-2 additional lanes to be created.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
[1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
Not under any definition of public transit I've heard. Lyft and uber are private companies that exploit labor in unsustainable ways to compete with actually efficient forms of public transit. Taxis are much closer to being actual public transit as their cost reflects the inefficiency of having a devoted driver, but they are still not owned by the government and are disproportionately available to the rich.
Busses are public transit and actually reduce congestion. Uber and lyft are well-marketed and vc-funded luxury services. They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
From source [3], as provided above:
>> The taxi should not be viewed as antagonistic to public transport, people who use taxis are in general 'public transport users' not 'car users'. Any improvement in the taxi service should therefore be viewed as an important improvement in public transport provision. Any improvement in the provision of taxi services will be very valuable for people with mobility problems since they rely on the taxi for a significant amount of their travel due to the door to door nature of the taxi service.
> They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
As other comments have discussed, this is controversial.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
[1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
Taxis are absolutely antagonistic to public transit, as demonstrated by the ratio of human labor to humans transported. Cars are simply the most comfortable version of transit available to people who have the means. It is not available to those without the means. The idea that the taxi users are the same as bus users is simply being class-blind.
This smells very similar to "access to affordable" housing and healthcare. Sounds great, but at the end of the day, people are still without health care and housing, so they clearly DON'T have access. Ownership is the only way to guarantee material access.
buses, trains, subways, and other forms of transportation
that charge set fares, run on fixed routes, and are
available to the public.
However, in the current context of discussing congestion—i.e. who gets to use the thing we all pay for—and other externalities like pollution and use of fossil fuels, public ownership is the salient thing to discuss.
https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/31/inenglish/1548938901_32...
Taxis and Uber are most certainly NOT forms of public transportation. Both are owned and operated by third parties, not the public.
I read a study not too long ago (sorry couldn't find it), but it found the opposite - that ride sharing increased the amount of congestion.
At first it didn't make much sense to me, but the study did acknowledge car ownership decreased, but that there was more congestion. This was largely due to the time between trips for Lyft and Uber - driving from a dropoff to a pickup.
Arguably the problems are from systemic austerity:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Yes, they used to claim this, but studies show the opposite:
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-servic...
Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Simultaneously, they reduce the incidences of drunk driving, providing positive externalities.
Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone.
The failings of the subway and train infrastructure are due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA and untenable, collectively bargained contracts. At the same time that driving within the city will become more expensive, these forms of transport have been reducing service within the city and to the surrounding regions while simultaneously increasing fares.
[0] https://medium.com/@johnnyknocke/the-mta-loses-six-billion-d...
[1] https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Cuts-to-Metro...
[2] https://jalopnik.com/new-york-wont-shut-down-a-major-subway-...
[3] https://trid.trb.org/view/384171