I happened to be living in London when congestion pricing was brought in and the difference on day 1 in the West End was like night and day. I believe it's never gone back to the pre-congestion pricing levels. I fully expect similar in Manhattan.
The social media response has been particularly interesting. Predictably, there are a lot of non-NYCers who simply object to the slightest inconvenience to driving in any form. These can be ignored.
What's more interesting are how many native (or at least resident) New Yorkers who are against this. They tend to dress up the reasons for this (as people do) because it basically comes down to "I like to drive from Queens/Brooklyn into Manhattan". There's almost no reason for anyone to have to drive into Manhattan. It's almost all pure convenience.
The funniest argument against this is "safety", the idea that the Subway is particularly unsafe. You know what's unsafe? Driving.
Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere.
And if we're going to talk about subsidies, how about free street parking... in Manhattan. Each parking space is like $500k-$1M on real estate. In a just world, a street parking pass would cost $500/month.
The second interesting aspect is how long it takes to bring in something like this. In the modern form, it's been on the cards for what? A decade? Longer? Court challenges? A complicit governor blocking implementation? That resistance only ever goes in one direction.
My only complaint is that the MTA should be free. Replace the $20 billion (or whatever it is) in fares with $20 billion in taxes on those earning $100k+ and on airport taxes. Save the cost of ticketing and enforcement. Stop spending $100M on deploying the National Guard (to recover $100k in fares).
Public transit fares (that are going up to $3 this year) are a regressive tax on the people that the city cannot run without.
All studies show that free public transit is a bad idea. There is a reason no country provides it. People mis-treat free things. When you ask them to pay for it, it enforces civic contracts. With contactless terminals in place, a free MTA benefits no one. It's also difficult to get additional funding to improve something that's free.
An MTA monthly pass is 130$. That's the price of a single uber round-trip to JFK. NYC also allows employers to provide commuter benefits tax-free.
Several EU cities have experimented with making public transport free, and people seem to really enjoy it.
Also, as you so eloquently put it, it isn't clear that the cost for issuing and checking tickets is covered by the income from the tickets, and there are reasons why MTA tickets cannot be priced at the actual cost to cover the ticket compliance infrastructure -- with a nice analogy to the cost of parking vs value of parking real estate. What justifies the subsidy for on-street parking?
Some internet searching suggests fares account for between 25 and 33 percent of the MTA’s revenue. There’s no way the infrastructure for collecting fares costs that much.
This is one of the main criticisms of free fares: in reality the revenue stream from fares is never actually fully replaced, so it just results in the transit agency becoming underfunded. This makes transit worse for existing users who are already paying. The new users you get because of free fares are mostly casual users like tourists who have alternate options, so serving them isn’t that useful and not worth the negative impact on existing users.
>Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere.
I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, but this it needs to be noted that most road damage is done by weather and heavyweight vehicles like semis/trash/buses/delivery vehicles etc., not regular passenger vehicles.
Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.
This is true, but it's also changing in interesting ways: the rise of both light-truck SUVs and EVs as a whole means that passenger cars are, on average, heaver than they've ever been before.
This is still a small portion of overall road damage, but it matters in places like NYC. In particular it matters on our bridges and cantilevered highways, where passenger traffic can't be easily filtered away from weight-sensitive areas like commercial traffic can.
>Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.
I don't think there would be much point. At the end of the day we'd all pay it because we all consume the goods they deliver or transport during intermediary steps in the supply chain.
I guess you could argue that the status quo is somewhat of a tax incentive that favors local manufacturing (i.e they use the roads for every step of the chain vs imported goods which only use it for delivery). I don't take much issue with that.
Repairing road damage is only a part of road cost. We do not build expensive 2-16 lane roads and massive parking lots to support trucks and buses. We build them because everyone needs to drive their personal vehicle to work each day at 8am.
Then the space taken up by unnecessarily big roads and parking lots further stretches distances between destinations out, leading to... more roads required.
I agree that semis are subsidized to a ridiculous degree, but I don't agree that we necessarily _need_ them. What we need is a way to transport things, and in a non-subsidized world, we'd probably come up with a different way which could be just as good or better.
Note that diesel is taxed nearly 40% higher than gasoline per gallon in the US. And shipping trucks use a lot more gallons of gas (total and per mile).
Should the rate be higher? Perhaps. But it's already a bit slanted towards vehicle weight based on fuel type and consumption.
Electric vehicles, and especially electric shipping trucks, are going to require finding new taxation sources.
Why is the answer to offset MTA ticket revenue an additional tax on those making $100K+ or those traveling through the city (airport taxes) who don’t use the service? In a city with super high cost of living and almost no auditable way to connect taxes collected with service delivered, this sounds like a penalty to anyone making six figures or connecting through the airport.
There has to be another, more sustainable way for a rich city like NYC to make a service truly accessible and free without another tax. It’s like how the Bay Area bridge tolls have increased by $1 this year to fund the BART system => we still don’t know what was done with the last increase in tolls, yet we have to pony up the extra cash this year.
Smarter folks than me on HN might have an idea other than, “let’s tax folks who make more than an arbitrary dollar amount annually” that has worked in other large metropolitan areas.
The subway fare is _insanely_ cheap and it's also uniform, which is important because short intra-Manhattan riders like me subsidize outer borough commuters. What a bizarre thing to complain about.
What does free transit do? People need to earn some money and then use that money. It's a healthy psyche. $3 for a ride anywhere in the city is pretty cheap
Figuring out how, and how much, to pay, and then fumbling with cash and change or whatever, during the fairly stressful experience of boarding, is something of a barrier to using transit. So removing the fare payment entirely removes that barrier. But, that's gotten a lot easier with support for paying fares in apps, so I think it's a lot less of an issue now than it was ten years ago. I used to be in favor of free fares, mostly because it'd make using transit less intimidating for newbies. But I'm on the fence now.
As you say, it has gotten a lot easier, and nyc is the easiest out of the systems I've used recently. You tap your phone, any credit card or a card you get with cash (replacement for metrocard), and the gate opens while they take your money. 12 taps and you're not charged anymore for the week.
The social media response has been particularly interesting. Predictably, there are a lot of non-NYCers who simply object to the slightest inconvenience to driving in any form. These can be ignored.
What's more interesting are how many native (or at least resident) New Yorkers who are against this. They tend to dress up the reasons for this (as people do) because it basically comes down to "I like to drive from Queens/Brooklyn into Manhattan". There's almost no reason for anyone to have to drive into Manhattan. It's almost all pure convenience.
The funniest argument against this is "safety", the idea that the Subway is particularly unsafe. You know what's unsafe? Driving.
Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere.
And if we're going to talk about subsidies, how about free street parking... in Manhattan. Each parking space is like $500k-$1M on real estate. In a just world, a street parking pass would cost $500/month.
The second interesting aspect is how long it takes to bring in something like this. In the modern form, it's been on the cards for what? A decade? Longer? Court challenges? A complicit governor blocking implementation? That resistance only ever goes in one direction.
My only complaint is that the MTA should be free. Replace the $20 billion (or whatever it is) in fares with $20 billion in taxes on those earning $100k+ and on airport taxes. Save the cost of ticketing and enforcement. Stop spending $100M on deploying the National Guard (to recover $100k in fares).
Public transit fares (that are going up to $3 this year) are a regressive tax on the people that the city cannot run without.