Taxis are getting the conversion tax. Take and busses are by definition a tiny fraction of the impact.
Have you not seen the busses? They're old and spewing tons of fumes
That does not compare well with e.g. London, which currently has 950 electric buses out of 8,600. London plans to have all zero-emission buses by 2034 or 2030, depending on funding.
Here in Copenhagen the aim is to have entirely electric buses in 2025, although that seems to be apply only to the inner city. Some routes in the suburbs will not change until 2030.
The buses are being replaced over the next few years in the MTA capital plan anyway.
I hear they deployed the national guard in the NYC subway. Should commuters also be forced to take mandatory self defense classes?
Same year, 238 people died and over 100,000 were injured on the road despite a similar share of commuters. So that would make driving at least 3X more dangerous by death toll, and 684X more dangerous by injury count.
Should everyone be forced to wrap themselves in bubble wrap and wear a football helmet when in or anywhere close to a car?
This reminds me of the old Schneier article about how despite flying being the single safest way to get between any two places, post-9/11 people were so afraid they started to drive longer distances and the death toll was staggering. It's called "our decreasing tolerance to risk" and it's a good read. [1, 2]
It's true that "your odds are much better." But you can't control them completely. You can't control whether the person who hits you is drunk, tired or looking through coke bottle glasses and going 100mph. You're part of the equation. But even the safest drivers are going to be just about as safe as everyone on the MTA.
There were 88 deaths per two billion rides on the MTA. That's 0.00036%. Car deaths are 1.6 per hundred thousand, or 0.0016%, so 4-5X higher. Injuries though, several orders of magnitude.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo...
[2] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...
There were 500 carjackings in 2021. 15,000 car thefts last year. Significantly more car break-ins than that.
I refer you to Brandolini's law, or the bullshit asymmetry principal. It takes much longer to debunk claims pulled out of thin air than it does to pull them out of thin air. So I'm not going to play that game. If you would like to cite a statistic, you must provide that statistic, otherwise it's as good as made up.
You're saying "I bet a lot of people died leaving subway stations" -- cool. Don't bet. Find it, share it. Then we can talk. Otherwise, I bet the opposite direction and your bet is exactly as valid as mine.
When you're doing that don't forget to compare the number of people who are killed or injured getting from the parking lot to their final destination. Unless you do I don't really think that's a fair comparison.
>I don't have to be concerned with being robbed, stabbed, beaten, abused, assaulted and pushed onto the train tracks in a car.
Which is true.
You're the one that brought in statistics and you know what they say about statistics.
For example, women are less likely to die driving than men, but more likely to suffer sexual assault than men.
Maybe you don't care, but I'd prefer my little sister drive than take the train at night.
As for safety...
> In mid-2022, there was about one violent crime per one million rides on the subway, according to a New York Times analysis. Since then, the overall crime rate has fallen and ridership has increased, making the likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime even more remote. Last year, overall crime in the transit system fell nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 as the number of daily riders rose 14 percent.
The actual data shows the stations and trains are no more or less safe than any other public area. It's really just perception. [1] So I guess, don't ever go out in public?
> Maybe you don't care, but I'd prefer my little sister drive than take the train at night.
Let's stick to facts and leave the emotions to the side for a minute.
Less than 2% of major crime in NYC happens on the subway. [2] And crime rates on the subway specifically are falling.
Here's the MTA crime report for 2022. Remember to divide these by two billion. [3] Then compare to the odds of getting hit by a car, or while in a car.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/nyregion/nyc-subway-crime...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00100/nypd-citywide-crim...
they use the train or bus, which is cheaper, faster, and more environmentally friendly
if you are wealthy enough to afford a car in NYC then you are wealthy enough to pay this toll
Arguments can be made in places like Denver that high tolls means that those who have control over politics (who tend to be rich) won't feel much need to invest in additional road infrastructure, because their experience is that "the travel times are fine!". But they're using an up-to-$15-each-way toll road (E-470).
Similar to how the TSA procedures would get reformed if everyone flying had to go through the same process (most importantly, including anyone taking private planes). But almost no one who has power to force changes actually goes through the TSA lines because they mostly take private chartered planes which don't have any TSA process.
For TSA something like "if you're in line an hour before your flight and you miss your flight, the TSA pays for your ticket unless they can prove you got through in less than 15 minutes" might do the trick. You'd have to work out the details.
yes, these rates might rise. but it's the wealthy who are consuming these services. costs will obviously pass through to the rider (not be borne by driver)
If you're referring to those who drive taxis or cars-for-hire in Manhattan, yes, the idea is the cost should be borne by riders who choose those services instead of transit.
It's everyone making deliveries to those businesses. It's every one doing manual labor jobs requiring tools. It's city workers on low salaries who have to live so far out in the boroughs where the MTA isn't even a good option to get to work anymore. The whole FDNY is losing their shit over this congestion pricing in particular because it hits them fairly hard.
But it's not half of the city. NYC is more than Manhattan.
By definition it's going to make people that notice +-$15 stop driving.
I think like many things in NYC there's a bimodality to it -- the only people who can drive are the people who can afford to drive, or the people who can't afford to not drive. This will price out the latter but not the former.
And all this does is move more traffic to the outer boroughs (city leadership even acknowledges this will be a side effect).
There are about 125K truck crossings into Manhattan per day. In a NYC pilot program with receiving companies, carriers, and truck drivers; some participants implementing the off-hour policy at a number of their locations and it went fairly well.
Suppose you drive that into NYC in a very small van, say a Ford Transit. A quick google tells me that has a cargo capacity of 10 cubic meters. The $15 toll amortized over 370 packages would add an additional cost of 4c per package.
This is the most extreme case I could think of off the top of my head. I believe most deliveries use vans with a much larger cargo capacity than a Transit.
Still very acceptable for cargo.
> Those tolls will be discounted by 75 percent at night,
which is when most truck deliveries are made
I would bet the value in time saved to a freight delivery business to be stuck in less traffic (composed primarily of passenger cars!) is well worth more than the toll paid
Wrong.
Source: I am a transport engineer. In London.
Also London's public transit infrastructure is lightyears better than NYC's and way better managed. This whole pricing scheme is just to shore up the MTA which is massively wasteful with money and never gets any of its projects done on time (by decades).
b) The INRIX scorecard is citywide. Assuming that they went with the conventional definition of "London", ie. whatever lies inside M25, this is an area of 1579 km2. The Congestion charge zone has an area of 21 km2, which is about 1.3% of the total.
That's simply not true.
Also congestion based pricing strategies have never reduced traffic anywhere they've been implemented. Go ask London.
this is so fragrantly incorrect I don't even know how to respond
they absolutely have, including in London
please engage with some of the published research instead of just guessing
really?
It's a USD$115.00 ticket for double parking and delivery trucks do so even when there's space for them to park legally, lest they get blocked in by another truck -- it's just the cost of doing business.
And it's disgusting. Streets which should have four lanes of traffic are reduced to one or two lanes with all the double-parked trucks. Those fines should be $1000+ and entering into Manhattan from anywhere in a car should be at least $100. Sadly, no one asked me. And more's the pity.
It's still not enough (and don't get me started on the incredibly cheap double-parking fines!)
Ride the bus, take the train. Don't make my city more smog filled, noisy and nasty.