this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
654 points (98.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9879 readers
1062 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Outstanding move on NYC's part.
Prior to this going live there was a lot of talk about how congestion will simply move from one place to another. I don't know new york so can't name places but it was regarding commuters using a street or bridge that is now under congestion charge so they will flow an alternative route through roads that aren't designed for the additional traffic.
Is that now the case?
Some people may be inclined to go up and over Central Park to get to the other side without paying the $9. That likely only affects uptown residents. I can’t imagine anyone driving around the park from midtown to avoid the fee.
The only legitimate concerns I’ve read are from contractors with tools and small businesses who deliver. They should be offered exceptions if walking or mass transit are unrealistic options. You’re not riding the subway with acetylene tanks or delivering fresh meat on Metro North. Other than that, I love it.
No they shouldn’t. That’s how you let rich people skirt the law.
Tradespeople should just treat it like any other business expense. Eat it or raise your rates a little bit.
They never do
It's never a little, and we all bitch about inflation.
There's never a simple solution.
They sometimes do, at least temporarily. But yes on the whole I agree. I can almost guarantee that it’s a net benefit, that the time saved by traffic reduction makes up for the additional cost in congestion charges
The other concern I've heard, and has not been brought up in this thread yet, is the lobbying influence from rideshare companies to pass the congestion laws.
It's arguable that ride share vehicles are a better traffic density alternative to single rider personal vehicles, but there are pretty clear downsides to consider as well.
Source:
https://nypost.com/2025/01/04/us-news/uber-lyft-spent-millions-pushing-for-nyc-congestion-pricing-and-stand-to-make-killing/
You can be self interested and still accidentally be on the right side of an issue. It doesn't spark joy, but I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this. It's still a win, imo.
Construction firms make a ton of money in NYC, they can handle it, and I don't think I've ever seen someone delivering food from a car in the city, they all use bikes.
Commercial deliveries, not consumer. Every pizza joint needs flour, cheese, and tomatoes.
We'll see how it plays out. I could see less traffic meaning you can make more deliveries in a day, I figure one extra commercial delivery more than makes up for $10 extra.
Possibly. It may disproportionately impact eateries with more diverse menus or foods with shorter shelf life. Time will tell.
Eh, it's NYC food is already super diverse. There's fairly established infrastructure for niche food products. If that truck needs a single restaurant to eat that $10, they were probably already paying an arm and a leg for that delivery.
Maybe, but anecdotally the lighter traffic allows contractors to accomplish more jobs per day because they spend less time in traffic, which more than offsets the congestion charge.
Going from three hours per day in traffic down to even just two means there's an extra hour a contractor has available to make money each day.
sure, but you can also deliver those with lighter vehicles that don't cause traffic. Congestion is congestion.
I'm confused. How will I deliver 15 pounds of Trump skirt Steaks if I can't drive my lifted Ram 3500 Heavy Duty with the high-output Cummins Turbo Diesel engine in downtown Manhattan?
I've paid more just to go through the park lol
For real.
The other location would be the Subways and buses in this case. I went home at 5 yesterday, right in the heart of rush hour, and it seemed like a normally packed subway not an especially congested one.
Of all the things on Reddit, I miss remindmebot the most. They tried to kill it numerous times but it survived like a roach in radiation. On lemmy, I find an interesting question and have to set a timer for myself. This is the most first-world of problems, but I’m still moderately upset every time
@remindme@mstdn.social 10 days
@remindme@mstdn.social 10 minutes
@Gullible Here is your reminder!
@Gullible Ok, I will remind you on Friday Jan 10, 2025 at 1:05 PM PST.
It lives!
@bdonvr Ok, I will remind you on Monday Jan 20, 2025 at 12:08 PM PST.
@RemindMe@programming.dev 1 year pls
Good luck. The bot hasn't sent a message in almost a year.
Unsure, I don't live in NYC. However, I can say that this will encourage many more people to take transit, which is good. Plus, I don't doubt that the tolled routes will still see active use by millions as they're still the fastest way to and from work.