The average annual cost of car ownership is approximately $9000. Car owners are on average more affluent than car owners and that's especially true in Manhattan. I don't really accept your personal observation if car types as evidence to the contrary. It is also the least affluent that are burdened by car pollution, demonstrated clearly …
The average annual cost of car ownership is approximately $9000. Car owners are on average more affluent than car owners and that's especially true in Manhattan. I don't really accept your personal observation if car types as evidence to the contrary. It is also the least affluent that are burdened by car pollution, demonstrated clearly by New York's disadvantaged communities map. I am, however, interested in what other methods you'd suggest for dealing with congestion while continuing to subsidize driving.
We aren't talking about car owners in Manhattan - unless you mean upper Manhattan, where regular car users typically drive because they need them for transporting work materials, reverse commuting, or because they can't physically access transit in a way efficient enough to use it. Again, we aren't talking about lower Manhattan drivers - we're talking about people who drive into Manhattan from cheaper neighborhoods in the Bronx, Staten Island, or New Jersey, for whom $9,000 is likely nothing compared to the increase in rent they'd need to live close enough to transit to be able to use it - or to use it without spending all of their time commuting. Part of the logic for the lawsuit is that air pollution would potentially increase in those areas where cars drive into transit hubs, by the way. As for how I'd suggest dealing with it, I suggest reading another UFT blogger, Jonathan Halabi's, detailed article from a few years ago: https://jd2718.org/2021/07/20/feeling-congested-pricings-not-the-answer/
No question at all we should remove lanes. Strongly support that! Odd that you'd be OK with that given that it would have all the exact same impacts on your commute as you complained about but without the complementary subsidy for transit.
The Bronx, NJ and Staten Island are served by Manhattan bound transit. Staten Island has a free ferry, in fact. That's the reason such a small minority of commuters use cars as it is.
The 4000 page EA that that the MTA submitted found single digit increases in emissions in a few places, the most burdened of which the MTA is dedicating offsetting investments towards, and OVERALL reductions.
At the end of the day, your counterarguments here hard to stomach. You told us in detail what your problem is, and it was 100% personal inconvenience. It is beyond question that the benefits in aggregate far outweigh the costs (they do exist! That's the case for just about everything!). I think you knew this, which is why when you got called on it you aggressively back pedaled to pretend to care about working people driving into lower Manhattan, seemingly ignoring that MTA serves far far far far more working people than Lower Manhattan roads. Kinda interesting that as soon as you were called out for substituting private inconvenience for the public good, you immediately started pulling arguments from the UFT lawsuit.
I think you're misidentifying who is being aggressive, Vlad. You started by explaining your arguments, which was fair - though you never quite explained why you thought regressive taxation was the best way to go about this - but now you've moved on to ad hominem attacks. You're also misidentifying my personal inconvenience argument as entirely personal; I used it to illustrate through anecdote how both cyclists and subway users could also end up being inconvenienced by congestion pricing. (More riders on the subway and more cyclists/illegal motorcyclists on bikeways would be bad for most of those types of commuters, not just me, especially if improvements to the subway aren't immediate.) To my class argument that you suggest I'm only making now, you're wrong - look back at the article, I allude to the problem with regressive taxation in this line, "Needless to say, even without getting into the broader politics of congestion pricing, which generally penalizes the poor and middle class while rewarding a mismanaged transit system, I’m against it." So no, that argument didn't start in this comment thread, it was in the original blog piece. I would love to see more funding go into the MTA, and to see that funding used properly, but I simply don't think regressive taxation is the way. If congestion, post-covid, in which work-from-home policies have already greatly limited traffic into the city, really requires new policy solutions (I disagree, frankly, that they do, which you miss when you critique my proposed counter-solution), go with a solution like the one Halabi mentioned, which would limit the issues for cyclists and pedestrians, while allowing working class motorists who need to drive in out of necessity to do so without losing their dinner budgets. If we want money to go into the MTA, let's find a way to do it that isn't regressive.
The average annual cost of car ownership is approximately $9000. Car owners are on average more affluent than car owners and that's especially true in Manhattan. I don't really accept your personal observation if car types as evidence to the contrary. It is also the least affluent that are burdened by car pollution, demonstrated clearly by New York's disadvantaged communities map. I am, however, interested in what other methods you'd suggest for dealing with congestion while continuing to subsidize driving.
We aren't talking about car owners in Manhattan - unless you mean upper Manhattan, where regular car users typically drive because they need them for transporting work materials, reverse commuting, or because they can't physically access transit in a way efficient enough to use it. Again, we aren't talking about lower Manhattan drivers - we're talking about people who drive into Manhattan from cheaper neighborhoods in the Bronx, Staten Island, or New Jersey, for whom $9,000 is likely nothing compared to the increase in rent they'd need to live close enough to transit to be able to use it - or to use it without spending all of their time commuting. Part of the logic for the lawsuit is that air pollution would potentially increase in those areas where cars drive into transit hubs, by the way. As for how I'd suggest dealing with it, I suggest reading another UFT blogger, Jonathan Halabi's, detailed article from a few years ago: https://jd2718.org/2021/07/20/feeling-congested-pricings-not-the-answer/
No question at all we should remove lanes. Strongly support that! Odd that you'd be OK with that given that it would have all the exact same impacts on your commute as you complained about but without the complementary subsidy for transit.
The Bronx, NJ and Staten Island are served by Manhattan bound transit. Staten Island has a free ferry, in fact. That's the reason such a small minority of commuters use cars as it is.
The 4000 page EA that that the MTA submitted found single digit increases in emissions in a few places, the most burdened of which the MTA is dedicating offsetting investments towards, and OVERALL reductions.
At the end of the day, your counterarguments here hard to stomach. You told us in detail what your problem is, and it was 100% personal inconvenience. It is beyond question that the benefits in aggregate far outweigh the costs (they do exist! That's the case for just about everything!). I think you knew this, which is why when you got called on it you aggressively back pedaled to pretend to care about working people driving into lower Manhattan, seemingly ignoring that MTA serves far far far far more working people than Lower Manhattan roads. Kinda interesting that as soon as you were called out for substituting private inconvenience for the public good, you immediately started pulling arguments from the UFT lawsuit.
I think you're misidentifying who is being aggressive, Vlad. You started by explaining your arguments, which was fair - though you never quite explained why you thought regressive taxation was the best way to go about this - but now you've moved on to ad hominem attacks. You're also misidentifying my personal inconvenience argument as entirely personal; I used it to illustrate through anecdote how both cyclists and subway users could also end up being inconvenienced by congestion pricing. (More riders on the subway and more cyclists/illegal motorcyclists on bikeways would be bad for most of those types of commuters, not just me, especially if improvements to the subway aren't immediate.) To my class argument that you suggest I'm only making now, you're wrong - look back at the article, I allude to the problem with regressive taxation in this line, "Needless to say, even without getting into the broader politics of congestion pricing, which generally penalizes the poor and middle class while rewarding a mismanaged transit system, I’m against it." So no, that argument didn't start in this comment thread, it was in the original blog piece. I would love to see more funding go into the MTA, and to see that funding used properly, but I simply don't think regressive taxation is the way. If congestion, post-covid, in which work-from-home policies have already greatly limited traffic into the city, really requires new policy solutions (I disagree, frankly, that they do, which you miss when you critique my proposed counter-solution), go with a solution like the one Halabi mentioned, which would limit the issues for cyclists and pedestrians, while allowing working class motorists who need to drive in out of necessity to do so without losing their dinner budgets. If we want money to go into the MTA, let's find a way to do it that isn't regressive.