[jobigoud]

> a growing proportion of that traffic is delivery vehicles.

If instead of ordering online the people went out to get the stuff themselves it would be way way worse, since each delivery vehicle carries many parcels.

Discouraging online commerce by taxing it more than physical commerce seems completely counter productive if the goal is reducing traffic.

[shaftway]

That's unlikely, especially in Manhattan. Maybe the bill should be more targeted, but there are certainly areas of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx that would benefit from it, so targeting just Manhattan isn't a silver bullet.

Don't forget about the density in NYC. Not just population but also services. It's dense enough that most families don't even own a car [1]. So if people went out to get the stuff themselves they'd most likely do so using public transportation, which is far better equipped to handle the traffic than roads.

The other part is what kind of traffic you're reducing. The minority that would use their cars create rolling traffic. The delivery vehicles double parked create roadblocks and bottlenecks. The latter increases traffic problems by a significant factor compared to the former. Reducing the number of delivery vehicles and replacing it with an equivalent (or even higher) number of personal vehicles would likely be an improvement from a traffic perspective.

Like I said, maybe it could be more targeted. But I don't see any similar calls for people living in Rosedale or Staten Island to be exempt from the city tax.

Remember that nobody drives in NYC; there are too many cars.

[1] Only 45% of households in the five boroughs own a car, and in Manhattan the number is under 20%.

https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars