It's the tragedy of the commons. Driving is very convenient, however it is also VERY space inefficient and congested streets with drivers slows down busses and makes public transit worse. Furthermore, the price of driving is not born fully by drivers. The noise and particulate pollution, increased danger to the public, and space taken by cars is not paid for by drivers in any meaningful way.

Driving is honestly pretty inconvenient. You have to find a huge space to put your car every night (difficult when trying to rent in an urban area) possibly with electrical service, you have to pay for the car which is likely tens of thousands of dollars, you have to maintain the car with regular oil changes, new tires, etc that's at least 4-8 hours a year.

I think we feel the pain of waiting for a subway, and think boy it would be so much easier to drive, but few people think while they're working an extra <period of time> a week to pay for their car+parking+insurance+maintenance+... boy would it be nice to not have to own a car.

It does not help that on time performance, outages, and safety on subways have all gotten worse versus 5/10/15 years ago.

Got a lot better from 90s thru about 2010 or so and has been reverting since. Remember the "Summer of Hell" in 2017 which just sort of slowly faded into the COVID transit issues and now we are here with budget shortfalls. Hard to see it getting materially better before it gets worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017–2021_New_York_City_transi...

Isnt this just reiterating the idea the all the car owners are too stupid to properly assess that tradeoff?

That is what the top level post was objecting too. If the theory relies on everyone being consistently wrong, then perhaps it isnt properly accounting to the benefits of cars and inconvenience of public transportation as it exists today.

I dont think anyone is challenging the idea that cars are expensive, or people would prefer something else, provided it is actually better.

My assertion isn't one of stupidity, it's a question of when people evaluate their decisions.

A smart person may get frustrated when the subway is 5-10 minutes late every day and take a car instead. They have 5-10 minutes that they're dwelling almost exclusively on the lateness of the subway.

That same person may get frustrated when they work n+1 hours per week because they own a car, but will not associate that frustration + time loss with their mode of transportation because they're focusing on work for that hour instead of sitting at a subway station waiting for the train.

It's not that they're too stupid to address the trade off, they just aren't addressing the trade off because they're spending the time that they had been wasting waiting for the subway at work / driving, and don't have the time to reflect on the inconvenience compared to when waiting for the subway you're forced to dwell on the idea that you're waiting.

I think you are forgetting the commute isn't the only trip you take. outside commute hours transit schedules and coverage leave a lot to be desired. People would rather pay extra to have a car and be able to range all over the place on their own schedule, than wait 30 minutes for a Sunday frequency bus to show up at a grocery store assuming you can even land a grocery store on a single convenient bus line to your home without having to transfer and potentially wait another long headway. You are doing all of this exposed to the elements and limited to what you can physically schlep about. Clearly people are paid enough to afford this convenience as costly as it is. If they weren't paid enough to afford a car transit (and bike) use in nyc would probably be as high as somewhere in southeast asia where cars are out of reach for most people's wages.

>It's not that they're too stupid to address the trade off, they just aren't addressing the trade off because they're spending the time that they had been wasting waiting for the subway at work / driving, and don't have the time to reflect on the inconvenience compared to when waiting for the subway you're forced to dwell on the idea that you're waiting.

Seems pretty thin to me. I dont think people are so cognitively busy that they never have time to ponder things like the tradeoff.

My experience is people think about the tradeoff very often. When they are in traffic, when they paying for their car, changing those tires, ect.

This was always the original problem with NYC implementation of congestion pricing.

Collecting revenue and making driving worse is easy (the stick).

But the carrot of actually making timely, meaningful improvements in transit is hard (the carrot) and no one believes its really going to happen.

The canceled traffic congestion fees were going to pay for public transit improvements that would be used by millions every day.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. You need taxes to find multi billion dollar capital programs.

I do agree this particular program was a dumb idea that advocates tried to push through with the COVID nadir in traffic and office occupancy.

> I mean, take a look at a city like Tokyo. How many people drive there? Almost everyone takes public transit, putting NYC to shame.

I was curious so I looked this up.

Tokyo transit ridership is 3.46B / year

Tokyo population is ~39M (Urban figure on Wikipedia)

NYC transit ridership is 1.81B / year

NYC population is ~19.5M (Urban figure on Wikipedia)

In terms of ridership / population, NYC is actually higher (93.17 vs. 88.47)

Sorry, that's incorrect

40 million passengers (counted twice if transferring between operators) use the rail system daily (14.6 billion annually) with the subway representing 22% of that figure with 8.66 million using it daily. [1]

1. http://www.mlit.go.jp/kisha/kisha07/01/010330_3/01.pdf

Going off on a tangent here, but thanks for posting a reality check for the comment the gp made (that's no offense to gp; I get their thought process and why they would think Tokyo was more mass-transit friendly (it still could be more non-auto friendly on some other dimension (e.g., more pedestrians and therefore less auto-reliance but I'm not making that claim)).

Re the reality check, though, I wonder if this is going to be one of the no-questions-asked positives from AI. If, every time someone makes a claim that's not, but can be quantified, similar to what you just did with these ridership and population stats, an AI umpire would cite the stats behind the claim to better-educate the audience about the reality. Of course this assumes a non-biased "AI," but it seems like something that could become a reality sooner than later. I experience this multiple times per day, on HN a lot, where people make claims and I'm like "is that really true?" And I'm not being an ass; I'm always genuinely asking the question to make sure I'm getting properly educated.

P.s. I just typed "is Tokyo more transit friendly than New York City?" into 3.5 (yes, I'm still on 3.5. Some of us HN folks are actually tech laggards!). I won't paste the answer here since no one will read the comment given its absurd length, but your human answer is better, and more to the point, than 3.5 (+1 for humanity, I guess).

I genuinely enjoy fact checking. Not because I like calling people out – I'm not a jerk – but because I get satisfaction from doing the research to verify a claim. I end up learning a lot along the way too.

I fact check myself all the time too, often when I realize a "fact" in my brain isn't really a fact, it's just an intuition, or when I can't remember where I learned something and I question its validity. My wife and I both frequently pause conversations with "Hang on, let me fact check myself on that [because it might be BS and I don't want to spread misinformation]".

So I can't help but verify it when I read something that sounds true, intuitively, but I'm not certain.

> If driving is so bad, and public transit is so convenient, why are people still driving? [this comes from an assumption that] people are stupid; they don't know what's good for them, so let me enlighten them". It's this assumption that is stupid...make the public transit more convenient and cheaper than driving...look at a city like Tokyo

But that's exactly what they did in Tokyo: owning a car (and finding a place to park it!) is so expensive that few resort to it. I've probably been in a private car in Tokyo only once. Whereas in NYC car costs are socialized (Manhattan street parking is quite cheap when you can get it; you don't need to prove you have parking in order to own one, etc) while public transit is not.

Yes there's a phase transition issue (driving in suburbs is easier than driving in the city, but there's little incentive to transition from one to the other. Congestion charges do exactly what you suggest: make public transit cheaper than driving, and provide the funds to improve public transit.

From what I understand Tokyo and Japan in general have a lot of car owners (something like "one per house") or so, but they're rarely used for commuting purposes.

Exactly! If you only look at the commute, you get ridiculous things like commuter trains, that only run in the morning in one direction and in the afternoon in the other.

In the Netherlands for example, lots of people go by car to Work, because that’s relatively far away; but then they’ll use their bike or transport for everything else. Stuff like groceries, dentist visits, meeting friends, going to the gym, etc. because all those things are within (their district of) the city.

Case in point: I had to take my extended family visiting us to Manhattan for 2 days last week. Total 6 adults. The cost of taking the LIRR and Subway would have been upwards of $180 (LIRR $120 + Subway $60) per day! Driving was much more affordable (and convenient) even with the expensive parking charges of $50 for 12 hrs of parking in prime locations.

Public transportation needs to become more affordable first. I would have happily taken the train if it was comparable in cost.

But, I guess I am the minority case.

Nope, I had the same experience. Family of 5 trip to Manhattan and we looked at possibly taking the train into the city but it made no sense financially, even after accounting for the outrageous parking costs in lower Manhattan. For one or two people mass transit is a no-brainer, three was roughly break even, but once you have a bigger group you're pretty much stuck driving.

It's surprising how quickly small plane general aviation beats many forms of "pay by the person" travel.

You can fit four adults in a small plane that costs $150/hr to run and goes roughly 150 miles an hour - or a dollar a mile.

It doesn't take that much of a charge for four people on a train to equal that.

And cars are way, way cheaper.

If every car in a major city was filled to capacity, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. A major part of traffic congestion is that a significant portion of people are driving their vehicles with a single passenger, sometimes two.

This is why we have HOV lanes that lower or make tolls free.

Things change when you live in the boroughs. For one thing, no need for LIRR; which isn’t what most people refer to when they talk about “public transit in NYC.”

But also, if you take the subway regularly, there are multi-use and unlimited passes, students get free metrocards for weekdays, and so on.

Downtown areas in Tokyo have virtually zero public parking spaces.

They made it very, very inconvenient to drive.

> public transit is so convenient

Unless you live in New Jersey, a short hop across the river from Manhattan but might as well be on the moon as far as the subway is concerned. The NYC Subway is great where it has service, but has for years neglected to expand into areas where the people live. Queens is also terribly underserved. There are bus options, but they get stuck in the same traffic that makes driving so miserable.

This is a big issue for public transit - either it stays ahead of growth, or you end up with pockets that are underserved (and of course cheaper).

This starts compounding, because those pockets still need to get to work, etc, making it harder to get new transit in later.

Paradoxically you almost need to tax the locations that don't have access to public transit to pay for public transit, so the pricing inequality goes away.

Part of the issue is there's no good model to build transit fast short of privatization, and that even in nyc was dependent on temporary economic conditions that turned sour and bankrupted every operator. There's the japan model of financing this transit through ongoing real estate ownership vs just selling lots like old private american transit, but even then a lot of their build out was decades ago when labor and materials and land value was much cheaper, especially compared to present day american cities. Its something the federal government really ought to just spearhead like the interstate highway project, but with the current environment politically even if that did somehow have bipartisan support, there would be a ton of waste from corruption as the vultures smell out all the available flesh and probably help lawmakers write the proposals for these projects in such a way to favor themselves.

The fundamental piece you are missing with your logic is that the negative externalities of driving a car are massive and not borne by those making the choice to drive. This leads to people choosing to drive a car at a rate that is much higher than the optimal balance for society. The best way to control for these negative externalities (risks to pedestrians, noise, pollution, congestion) is with a tax. In the US, we subsidize car usage in an eye watering and incredibly unfair way, which results in overuse of cars. If public policy were to better reflect the actual costs of driving a car, few would be able to afford it or choose it over other options

How are these externalities not borne by drivers? People with cars in nyc presumably park them on their local street that is clogged up with other neighbors cars. They drive them on nearby roads like the various expressways that cut up their own boroughs. They are very much bearing these external costs and taking advantage of their affordances. Its not like bronx drivers are protesting the various expressways that cut up their bronx neighborhood, parking cars to block the ramps or cut off access, no, they use those expressways all the same as any other driver and do benefit from the convenience and job access they bring.

Any cost paid by the drivers is by definition not an externality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Even in the first few sentances of that article I don't understand the situation they build about who pays for what. They say auto exaust is an example of an externality since car users presumably aren't affected by its ills. Here I am thinking they certainly pay for it in terms of a tradeoff between worse local air quality and convenience. Maybe some people believe things must only be paid in cash and not through time or experience.

I mean, sounds like the first step according to that logic would be making the subway free, right?

Wouldn't be a bad idea. E.g., here in SF, the fares bring in $200M/year, and Muni's budget is $1.2B/year (approx numbers), which means, for every $2 charged by fare, the City has to put in another $10. Making it free would just cost an extra $200M/year, which is within the realm of possibility for a City with a budget of $14B/year.

> If you want them to use public transit, make the public transit more convenient and cheaper than driving!

So charge drivers for the actual value/cost of the land they park on, the lanes they drive on, the maintenance and infrastructure for the roads, the safety risk posed to those outside of cars, and the gaseous and noise pollution caused to others?

Sounds good to me. We can call it a "congestion charge" or something.

> Instead of trying to tax the people into complying with your desires, make them want to do so of their own free will!

… do you have any idea of the costs that are associated with owning and operating a vehicle in Tokyo?

You have it backwards. The reason people still drive is inertia. The reason Tokyo has more people using public transport is that it’s expensive to own a car there and they encourage and advertise public transport heavily.

It's very easy to get informed on these topics, yet people keep posting these high level extremely simplistic takes.

You can't summarize the world with "People want the most convenience in their lives" and use that to explain or justify the state of things.

A couple examples: Cars compete with public transit and are highly subsidized. "Roads" are a public transportation method that doesn't have to be profitable in people's minds. But "Public transit" does. There's so much more and the information is readily available.

Born and raised NYC so Ive been around since the Regan era. Growing up my parents drove everywhere - even to Manhattan.

> If you want them to use public transit, make the public transit more convenient and cheaper than driving!

Yup. I live in south Queens which is mostly suburban and a lot of people drive around. I'm two blocks from the A train so driving to Manhattan is pointless when I have a 30 min express subway ride. But if I wanted to go to the nearest Microcenter in Kew Gardens it's 20 minutes by car and an hour by bus, each way, with a transfer - guess what mode of transport I'm taking...

It is an apples to oranges comparison. You could just as easily say that if planes are so bad why do people use the subway. Different modes of transport are optimal for different things. The miracle of modern transport is that it allows you to drastically change the trade-off between different things in your life. You can live in a different neighborhood, take another job, visit family etc. But as usage grows the negative effects on individuals and community starts to grow and eventually effects the trade-off. The only solution is to invoke more magic transport. Build even more lanes, bike paths, rail roads etc. And hope that one day they will build the Colorado -> Tokyo starship link so you can finally commute between the ranch and the office. Great!

No, their position is that the commuters are exploiting a subsidized public good and pushing serious externalities onto the population that doesn’t commute every day.

Your position is that NYC should, at the cost of the average resident, make it easier for outsiders to drive into the core of Manhattan at a time when physical proximity for business is becoming less and less important.