Fees vary by vehicle type, with trucks and buses paying higher rates.
I would have thought that single occupant cars should be paying the higher fees, and mass transportation like busses should pay lower fees.
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Fees vary by vehicle type, with trucks and buses paying higher rates.
I would have thought that single occupant cars should be paying the higher fees, and mass transportation like busses should pay lower fees.
I would bet per head/weight/size, they likely do. Like a single car $9 / 4 people vs. bus charge / bus population, I would wager the bus rate is better for them, but it’s just a guess.
I wonder how this will affect elections. I figure Governor Hochul "indefinitely" paused the program last summer to avoid hurting Democrats in the 2024 election. The next mayoral election in NYC is in November of this year and the next election of the governor is in November 2026. Right now both the mayor and the governor are not popular and congestion pricing has a lot of opponents. Maybe people will get used to it before the elections, which is what Hochul is betting on, but there will almost certainly be a new mayor (for reasons unrelated to congestion pricing) and Hochul's chances of being reelected aren't great either.
With all that and opposition from Trump, I think there's a good chance that congestion pricing won't last very long. (I can't say I would be sad.) The congestion pricing hardware cost over $500 million to build, and the expected income from the toll would take over a year to cover that. The MTA's budget will be in big trouble if congestion pricing ends up not even paying for itself.
I don't recall the name of the effect, but there's a characteristic curve that shows up on the graph of public support for these kinds of changes. The hysterical outrage peaks at the time of implementation, but falls off as time goes on. If it has visible benefits, and it lasts, a lot of people will claim that they supported it all along, by November 2026.
If you live in an RV or truck, you're screwed. But then if you drive a huge truck to deliver stuff, your company benefits more and destroys more than my driving my 1980 civic.
This is great. People complaining on social media aren’t New Yorkers. We have the best mass transit in the nation. Fuck cars. What we want are more bike and footpaths and less time at the crosswalk.
The amount of crying and screaming around this has been insane. On IG, you'd think from the comments that downtown Manhattan is a mecca of families and small businesses, and not the Financial District.
This is great work by the city leadership. It's taken decades to get this system in place and the city sorely needs it.
Congestion charges work. It's not a new thing nor an untried approach to mitigating extreme congestion from unfettered use of the city streets.
The weird part about all of this, to me anyway, is that tools and congestion charges are very much an economic and Libertarian style solution, but strangely conservatives often fight them tooth and nail. Isn't their whole schtick that the market driven solutions are best? The city owns the streets. The use of the streets are in high demand. So, the city puts a price on a resource. That's just econ basics.
Perhaps my memory is bad, but as far as I can recall, they jettisoned all ideology after the Tea Party (funded by Libertarian billionaires) fizzled. So, pretty much about the time Obama took office. It's mostly racism and tribal identity now.
I think they just whittled down their ideology into the most privileged and selfish extreme. They do believe the insane things they spout like "tax is theft."
I think you're right that the rank-and-file libertarians don't really think their ideology through or educate themselves on its flaws or alternatives, because it really is about identity. I'm pretty convinced that it always has been though. Conservative ideology is based on hierarchy, and they think the right outcomes result from having the proper social stratification— this is usually wealth-based.
I would not want to drive in New York.
Kansas City is nowhere near as dense as NYC, but I still get frustrated driving downtown around there, especially if there's construction.