The MTA has a history of corruption, mismanagement, & construction costs costing significantly more than at other transit agencies. By law it has to bring in $1billion a year. (Yeah, they must raise a certain amount & then backed into how much that’ll cost everyone. They’ve really made no exceptions for anyone & have stated that if they have to make exceptions for one group they’ll need to raise the toll for everyone else to cover that shortfall. There is no exemption / compensation for city employees who have to work in that zone over their coworkers who don’t, including FDNY/NYPD who may not have good transit options in the overnight hours when they’re working second or third shift; that’s in the neighborhood of a $5000 pay cut just to pay the toll. There’s an expectation of first responders not wanting to work there which may make the city less safe.
It’s estimated that they lost $690 million just due to turnstile jumpers last year alone. They attempted to roll out a new jump proof turnstile only to have the hack on how to beat in posted to social media within an hour or two of it being rolled out; the rollout ended immediately. Ummm, good work there guys, no one thought to put their arm around the door & waive their hand so that it opened as if someone was exiting?
You’re making an assumption that people driving into Manhattan have Manhattan as their terminus. Lots of people are driving thru Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, or Lawn Guyland.
There is an expectation that a lot of the traffic that gets displaced from Manhattan will end up in the outer boroughs & that congestion & pollution will only be moved from Manhattan to the outer boroughs. The GW is already a regular clusterf*** of delays now; can’t imagine with a lot more traffic from those that were displaced by Manhattan’s tolls. One of the lawsuits was that they did an impact study to see how Manhattan would improve but not to see how much worse the outer boroughs would become.
To get between Lawn Guyland & NJ you have to pay a toll to cross the Hudson but by going thru Manhattan, you avoid a second toll, either the ThrogsNeck/Whitestone pair in Queens or the Goethals / Outerbridge to go thru Staten Island & Brooklyn. Taking the Lincoln or Holland tunnels & going across Manhattan saves $18 (!) in tolls on those other bridges. The only way to avoid the extra tolling is to take surface streets thru Harlem up to the GW (which is almost always the worst backed up of the Hudson crossings); this would probably add at least 1-1½ hrs to the trip due to low speed on surface streets & traffic lights as opposed to the interstates/parkways for the other routes
Not everyone who lives in lower Manhattan can take public transit to their jobs in Jersey, depending upon job location.
I have seen that a number of contractors (painters, plumbers, etc) state that they will be passing the congestion fee on to residents in lower Manhattan so people who don’t even own a car will be paying it sometimes.
Lots of people won’t take the subway at anything other than prime hours or even at all due to safety concerns. The cost is a lot less than a car service but there are enough random knife attacks or unprovoked shoves from the platform to the tracks, sometimes in front of an incoming train that many people won’t go there.
FWIW, in our general election, the Tories are using such schemes as straws to clutch at in their current desperation. Whether they get any traction from it seems doubtful
ah, suddenly I understand the opposition. Because congestion pricing would mean nothing to folks living in Manhattan.
Meh, Manhattan has tons of buses and taxis and rideshare. No one needs to drive their own car, even if they don’t like (or are afraid of) the subway.
Naw, taxis and rideshare are an important part of the transportation solution. And they don’t spend a lot of time parked, nor driving around in circles looking for parking.
There’s really no reason to do this. I used to live on 120th street. Even there, I didn’t WANT the hassle of dealing with a car. I rented cars when I wanted to go someplace for the weekend. Renting a car every weekend would have been cheaper than the insurance on owning a car in the city, let alone parking the thing.
And the only people who own cars IN Manhattan are wealthy, and the extra tax would be insignificant.
I think all of those Ubers have really knotted things up. It was fine when it was just taxis, plenty of them in the city. Sure, in the outer boroughs, but if you can’t get around with the taxis and subways (and buses, I guess??), you’re not really trying.
IIRC most New York policemen don’t live in Manhattan, they live in suburbs, and the police union lost its mind over this. Said it would be a “public safety crisis” if cops were faced with a choice between taking the train or paying tolls.
It’s a recurring theme that plays out where I live as well. We try to reduce traffic by extending train line to where suburbanites live, and they block it because “crime and declining property values”. We try to congestion-price the their commuting routes to pay for the roads they’re wearing out, and they squeal like stuck pigs about the unfairness of it all.
So they stampede through our city every day, wearing out the roads and overloading the sewer & water system, spewing their exhaust into the air and throwing trash out the windows, refuse to help pay for any of it, and point and laugh and say “wow, cities sure are screwed up, I don’t want to throw any of my tax dollars into that mismanaged money pit.” That’s what this is.
Well, i lived up at 120th Street, and there certainly weren’t plenty of taxis in my neighborhood. Perhaps there were south of 60th Street.
There were plenty of buses. I took the subway whenever i wanted to go NS, but my MIL didn’t like taking the subway (having lived in Manhattan at a time when they were more crime-prone than when i was there) and she wasn’t wealthy enough to grab a cab everywhere, (and certainly not wealthy enough to own a car in the city) and she had no trouble getting around using the bus system.
I’m fascinated to read of people opposing new train lines as encouraging crime and lowering property values. Here it’s the exact opposite - certainly in London extending/creating train lines and improving commute times start local property booms, and people in other big cities are clamouring for funding for such schemes. Of course, that depends on getting the planning right and not ending up with a white elephant.
My daughter lives in Brooklyn and you don’t see any taxis there. In NYC you cannot call a taxi; you can only flag them on a street. When I need it I call a so-called car service. I guess if I had to go to the train station, it would have cost an extra $15.
Americans tend to view public transit as a state-granted luxury of poor and/or nonwhite people. Suburbanites’ ability to imagine the benefit to themselves is overwhelmed by their phobia of riding the train with people they see as lower class, as well as those same people moving into their neighborhoods now that the cost of car ownership is no barrier.
Plus a few of them actually believe that the poors from the city will use the train to come to their town and do crimes. Moreover the attitude is “I have a car, why should I pay taxes for a train too”.
These folks are quite sheltered and not very bright.
And yet, and yet… I’m just catching up with Mad Men, and even quite well off corporate types are shown commuting by train into the late 60s (I suppose I have to accept that that’s ancient history these days).
That does not reflect reality. The commuter rail lines around NYC are the domain of the upper middle class who can afford to live in the suburbs by working in the city.
That’s partly a pre-1970s thing, partly a New York thing. Many other US cities built their transit lines in the 70’s or thereafter, when mass transit became a different kind of social signal. New York’s was much earlier, and it’s harder to get anywhere if you don’t use transit.
As I mentioned above, a lot of New York cops commute in from whiter suburbs and don’t much care for sitting on the train where they have to interact with commoners in situations they don’t control. That’s where a lot of this opposition came from.
A year ago I took a shuttle bus from Newark airport to JFK. The trip always (and I checked several times) was listed as a 1 hour 20 minute drive.
It took me 3.5 hours. I only barely made my flight. The traffic in NY was insane.
(I forget which route the driver took but IIRC it went through southern Manhattan…most of it was Brookly though, not that it made anything better.)
I get that such tolls are regressive but the driving situation is nuts. In Chicago, where I live, the downtown business district is a ghost town compared to what it once was. Yet, the nearby expressways are more full than ever. I have no idea where people are going. Not to the city center to work but they are still on the road in droves.
FTR: I do have a car but I very much make use of mass transit at every opportunity. A taxi maybe and only drive as a last resort (and most drives I make are two miles or less.) I’m right on the line of being rid of it but, there are those few times where having it is great. I doubt I put 1,000 miles on it last year (and near half of that was one trip to Indianapolis.)
I think cities really need to sort this out and charging to drive downtown is not a bad start. Offer some coupons for taking mass transit or something.
Have you ever ridden a train into New York City? You seem to have the commuter rails confused with the subways which is local intra-city transportation, often not a pleasant experience, but much less expensive and often faster than the alternatives. Also irrelevant to cops commuting from Mahopac into the city.
Yes, I’ve taken the LIRR to NYC a number of times, which is why I know that those most of those commuters will transfer to subway unless their destination is near the LIRR terminals at Grand Central or Penn Station.
That’s true under certain circumstances. I’ve known multiple people who live in Manhattan below 60 st , park on the street for free at night and drive to work elsewhere, where they can park on the street for free. And for a lot of them, $15/day isn’t going to be chump change. The people causing the congestion aren’t the ones leaving Manhattan in the morning - it’s the ones coming to Manhattan in the morning.
I’m not against congestion pricing - but I think some changes need to be made. First, people living in the congestion zone should at least get a discount, if not exempted altogether. (not a tax credit) Second, there are some strange provisions :
Vehicles traveling between the FDR Drive and the Queensboro Bridge will also be charged a toll, except if they are traveling from Queens to the Upper East Side on the Upper Level because that ramp exits onto 62 Street.
This means that people will pay the toll depending on which ramp they take, even though they might be in the zone for only a block or two between the bridge and the FDR ( which is exempt from the toll, as long as you don’t leave the FDR within the zone)
My memory is that the well-off characters on Mad Men were commuting by MetroNorth/ Long Island Railroad etc, not the subway.
Not irrelevant - how does the cop get from Metronorth or the LIRR to the precinct/other location they work in? Which doesn’t mean I think cops ( or teachers or any other government workers) should be exempt but that’s part of the reason why so many drive. Because they don’t want to take a subway, bus or cab between the commuter rail station and their actual work location ( also because they are allowed to park their personal vehicles in ways that no one else would get away with).
Cops make up a huge proportion of automobile commuters in Manhattan, I think something like 40%. They’re also some of the worst scofflaws (funny enough) when it comes to parking violations, defaced license plates, fake plackards, etc.
And that’s still a very small number of people.
Only 12% to 14% of Manhattan workers commute by car. The first PDF is old, but it cites the 14% figure whereas the newer WNYC article cites 12%. The percentage of people driving south of 60th Street is even smaller than that.
Such a small number of people are causing a massively disproportionate amount of the congestion that the other 86% to 88% of people have to deal with when crossing streets, breathing the polluted air, listening to honking and revving engines, etc. This perfectly illustrates why cars are so terrible for cities. It takes only a tiny number of them to fuck everything up.
NYPD has 36,000 cops; the majority of them don’t work in Lower Manhattan
A. That’s only talking about NYC residents, 5 counties; elsewhere it talks about the 28 county metro area. That number changes greatly if you include the metro area as opposed to the city limits.
B. Transit service is good if you’re a 9-5er; not as much if you’re FDNY/NYPD working second or third shift. Live on the Island & get a late call on second & you’re not taking LIRR home until after sunrise tomorrow.
Some percentage of the people are going thru Manhattan, pushing them out of Manhattan will only serve to cause more delays/polluted air in the outer boroughs.
