260
Now you need to try the XKCD tire spikes.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Fuck Cars
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Personally I think the traffic on the GWB has gotten a lot worse, which makes going to LaGuardia for instance quite a bit more difficult but I can’t deny everything else has gotten better. Wish public transport was better too but I’m hoping that’ll come with time.
Everything being better is incredible. Shame the idea took so long to cross the Atlantic BUT maybe it'll work its way across the states for big cities.
Not only is everything better it happened so fast. Hopefully it starts spreading elsewhere
It’s ridiculous how it has improved literally everything.
Like I’m a hardcore fuck cars person. I mean I used to mod that subreddit until the blackouts, I helped popularise the fuck cars movement, and even I didn’t expect this to be such a success.
Except for "visitors to the zone", they literally only measured the things that could be positive. There was no world where congestion pricing was going to increase number of cars. Actually yellow taxis are up, which they portrayed as "green" but I think most people would argue is actually "red" - i.e. we want to lower the number of taxis (and rideshare).
The controversial questions: restaurants/businesses, effect on low-income commuters, are all in the "Too soon to say" category. They're not even measuring the all-encompassing commute-time question which is "average commute time for all commuters", not "average commute time for X category". It's entirely possible that commute times for both cars and transit could go down while the commute time for an average person goes up because more people are being pushed to longer-time commutes.
I mean I used to mod that subreddit until the blackouts, I helped popularise the fuck cars movement
Neat! Got any tips?
Not sure this is helpful, but:
My main issue with the reddit fuckcars is that there was wayyy to much like low quality complaining posts that got big but no one was posting the statistics and academic side of things which I think is just as interesting and convincing. So I did a couple things to try and encourage more people to post that.
On the other hand, that doesn’t seem to be a problem on lemmy, since we’re all nerds…
In my political activism and messaging though, what I did realise was it was helpful to be more vocal about accessibility for disabled people. The disabled people I talked to kind of felt like pawns in the “car debate”. Like the pro-cars people woulf use disabled people as an argument to keep cars but offer no alternative to disabled people who can’t drive. While fuck-cars allies often use disabled people who can’t drive as an argument but fail to properly fight for accessibility in urbanism. (Like seem to idealise european planning which if often terrible for disabled people — lots of stairs without ramps, many trams/trains arent wheelchair accessible, disabled people who can only move by car fail to access things on pedestrianised streets because there is no disability exception/parking nearby.)
Anyways. I found I was able to get quite a bit of a following of people who typically don’t like the fuck cars movement on microblogging platforms by being fuck cars, without alienating an entire demographic of people by not considering their needs seriously.
Pretty much everything is better except public opinion.
Makes sense! Lol
It seems popular among the people I know. The only people complaining are rich folk coming in from NJ or the Hamptons
I had heard it was popular outside of car commuters from outside the city, have you seen reports otherwise?
It's extremely popular with literally every person except for the ones actually paying the toll.
And even half of those can recognize the net positives.
The article that we're commenting under said:
Public opinion: Not great, but improving
Yeah, most people in NYC dont have cars.
The problem isnt the majority opinion. The problem is that rich powerful people have more say in decisions than the majority
14% fewer injuries in the zone and 45% fewer noise complaints is kinda wild
Noise complains?
Like I get that people call in to complain about a neighbor who is playing loud music. Do people call in to complain about someone honking as they pass your apartment too? Why? How could that do any good?
You might have to live on a busy street in NYC to understand. Ride share drivers in particular will just LAY on the horn for many tens of seconds, even minutes straight.
When you're NYC and you haven't figured out that we should get rid of a lot of public (free!) parking spots for delivery and loading zones, you wind up with a lot of double and triple parking.
Combine those two things, you'll get noise complaints about honking. Seriously, you have no idea how bad it can be!
I lived in NYC and didn't experience that. I heard that hasn't been an issue since uber.
Dunno about NYC but I complain about traffic noise in the surveys that my city sends on occasion.
Ah, surveys make more sense than calling the cops to report noise. Thanks.
Maybe if they get enough complaints, they'll improve the streets?
Like sound dampening asphalt (for tyre noise).
Trams (aka Streetcars) are still better longterm solutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw
- I think the congestion pricing zone is a step towards making the core of manhattan a car-free zone.
- Jason (NJB) already says in that video that some trams are often a precursor for larger-capacity metros. Ridership volumes across the city are beyond what trams can effectively provide. Much of Manhattan already is crisscrossed with metros galore, but need funding to keep it in a good state-of-repair and maximize service capacity and uptime.
He also says that trams serve a different role than metros, and treating trams as immature subways is a bad thing. Trams can have incredibly high throughput if run frequently.
Everything needs funding, but as roads are incredibly expensive to maintain. Replacing cars with transit is less expensive for the city in the longterm.
Why would trams have higher throughput than subways?
They have significantly higher throughput than a car lane of the same size. That's the comparison that really matters.
Subways and trams fill different niches. That's kind of a core point of this. Trams compete with cars for space at street level, while subways do not.
What? Subways definitely compete with cars.
Surface roads should all just be converted to pedestrian paths or bicycle-only roads
I see no need for trams
Options are good. Your vision lacks wisdom.
Please read full sentences before responding.
Also watch the not just bikes video we were discussing. It explains all of this pretty well.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. The goal of congestion pricing is to get money flowing back into transit and at the same time allow transit to become more efficient (ie. stuck less behind cars)
With the increase in revenue this allows upgrades of existing infrastructure and transit routes, and with left over money for future expansion.
Ultimately like you said, maybe leading to potentially above ground streetcars at somepoint.
I really don't like how, whenever there is an article on something that works, people feel the need to post whatever solution they prefer and say it's better.
This project had 2 goals - reduce pollution and raise revenue for transit upgrades. It succeeded. Better than a tram would have on it's own, I might add.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, if you want to share that video so much, just post it, instead of linking it with that downer of a comment.
Also, this is new york city. They famously have a major subway. I hear it could use expanded, but trams are going to have to explain why it's better to have a third public transit option rather than just busses and subway expansion
You don't have to wait 30 minutes underground without signal in a train car with a BO problem, for one
However trams are a hell of a lot slower moving than a subway because they still have to deal with surface intersections etc. When there's a good subway system it makes transit really fast, much faster than trams
NY's subways are not a good system though. They're desperately in need of improvement, are perpetually broken/down, and make travel between boroughs nearly impossible. That said, I also have no doubts that street cars in NYC would be constantly stuck behind double parked cars, Amazon delivery trucks, busses, and spontaneous influencer photoshoots.
I spent two decades of my life in NY before moving to a different city that has street cars. The street cars here are a breath of fresh air compared to NYC's shitty transit system.
Indeed! One of the things this could even do is provide funding for trams if the transit authority funds that to be the correct use of the money.
I really don’t like how, whenever there is an article on something that works, people feel the need to post whatever solution they prefer and say it’s better.
Agreed. What a silly reply.
This is a wildly successful change in a city that really, really needs solutions to several problems related to cars. The peanut gallery needs to shut their pie hole and absorb the article.
We need both tbh. Congestion pricing directly leads to increased funding for the transit authority to build out new infrastructure like trams