London's congestion charge is £15 (about $18) and has largely been a success. I suspect there's a difference in PPP though, so the Manhattan charge is potentially less impactful
Do you have a source for this? London is not known as a poor city. In addition, some people in both cities are wealthy but a lot more are not. I doubt someone living in the South Brox or Far Rockaway can afford a $15/day charge.
I'm talking about people who already have the means to drive into midtown manhattan as is, with all the tolls and gas and monthly parking bills they're already going to pay. For these people I'm saying I do not see an extra $15 1x/day being a difference maker.
Right, but it's exactly the same in London. The only people who are regularly driving into central London are either professional drivers (taxis, delivery vans, etc), for whom the charge is just an operating expense, or they're very wealthy. Just parking in central London is going to cost you a lot more than the £15/day congestion charge.
In addition to the central congestion charging zone, London also has an additional £12.50 low-emission zone (ULEZ) charge targeted at older, higher-polluting vehicles. The ULEZ has now expanded to cover all of Greater London.
You forget that America is a car culture outside of NYC so a typical tourist coming to NYC for the day will likely just eat the cost and drive anyway. The geography of NYC is also very challenging. A lot of the public transportation options don't even cover places like Staten Island properly so people drive instead. There won't be much of a difference in traffic imo. Taking the train is already pretty expensive.
I've lived in both rich(ish) and poor(ish) areas of London over the years. Clapham, Fulham/West Brompton, and Maida Vale in the "rich" west. Whitechapel, Poplar, and the Isle of Dogs in the "poor" east.
It is my general observation that the "rich" areas suffer more from traffic congestion and pollution, because more people own cars and more of those cars tend to be giant diesel Range Rovers and such. In the east it seems like while there are still a lot of parked cars everywhere, people don't actually drive them around as much, choosing the bus/train/bike/feet more often for everyday travel.
Also worth remembering that even the "poor" parts of London are still pretty rich by overall UK standards.
Median rent is also 2x London’s. Median pay is less than 3x. That’s not even counting the rest of cost of living changes
It’ll only affect working class people who commute by driving for whatever reason. As usual the actual rich won’t care. The majority of NYers don’t even own a car. So it’s mostly tourists and people from outside the city (plus ride share/taxis) who are driving.
Very, very small. Roughly similar to taxing driving below Wall Street or something.
There's no clean comparison of Manhattan to a portion of London, but just in terms of land area it's about 10% of NYC, and in terms of population it's around 20% (so maybe divide each by half to get the impact of this new rule). More importantly, almost every way to enter or exit the city by car is covered by this new toll. That's definitely not true in the case of the CoL congestion tax.
London is 600 square miles and has numerous routes into and out of the city. Manhattan is 23, and is an island with a handful of bridges and tunnels.
As a percentage of the whole, the City of London is trivial, whereas this "congestion district" is about half of Manhattan (even more if you account for central park).
Fair enough. I also think London doesn't really have a culture of driving into it. I could drive into London but with the sprawl; likely inability to find suitable parking; traffic and congestion charge, I never would. It's quicker for me to get the train (living about 50mi West of London). Though trains are becoming more expensive and less reliable by the day.
It’s Manhattan below 60th, not all of Manhattan, so maybe half the island, and it doesn’t include the FDR. Most of the ways to get to Queens, Brooklyn or Staten Island by car won’t be affected — same for the Bronx obviously.
> Most of the ways to get to Queens, Brooklyn or Staten Island by car won’t be affected — same for the Bronx obviously.
That's incorrect. All of the bridges and tunnels other than GW and Randall's Island (RFK) enter or exit from this new zone. With this new plan, literally all of the ways to get to Manhattan by vehicle will now have a toll. Some will have two.
I suppose if you're willing to take the tiny bridges from the Bronx into Harlem you can still get around tolls, but good luck with that.
Not sure why you’re fighting this so hard, but: GW, Triboro, Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Goethals, Outerbridge, Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel. Only the last two land in the toll zone. So yes, “most,” and it’s not especially close.
I’m not counting the Brooklyn Bridge, etc, because I was replying to your “ways to enter the city.” The topic as I understood it was “will you pay this toll if your final destination isn’t Manhattan,” and the answer is “Not unless you’re coming from certain parts of New Jersey, and even then you’ve got choices.”
You’re right. It’s lower and midtown Manhattan. That said, it doesn’t include most of Manhattan let alone New York City.
The core question is what someone who won’t pay $15 and refuses to not drive into the city during its most congested hours is bringing to the table. That is harsh. But it is a trade-off a city must make with its limited resources.
The "rich person driving into the city" is a scapegoat. Get rid of those people (whom I absolutely do not care about taxing; it's fine, whatever), and the streets will still be crammed with the traffic supporting all the people who live here. And under this plan, those trucks, buses, taxis, etc. will be taxed to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
As someone who hasn't owned a car in well over a decade, but lives in NYC and pays for things here -- and yes, even takes the occasional taxi when the MTA sucks -- this is what I resent. Setting aside the corruption and incompetence of the MTA (which we should absolutely not set aside), this is little more than a regressive tax on the people who live here, dressed up like anti-car activism.
I'm unclear on how that's supposed to work, though. There are a lot of avenues crossing 61st. Are they going to put tolls on all of them?
I guess that could work, since it's all EZ-Pass anyway. But it does imply that there are going to be some people who take the Queensboro Bridge (paying the Central Business District Toll), but head to the Upper East Side. Then when they leave, they'll have to pay the toll to enter the CBD again to take the bridge home.
You are correct. Most people haven't looked at a London map too closely, so there is a limited understanding of what the City of London is.
> The City of London, London's ancient core and financial centre − an area of just 1.12 square miles (2.9 km2) and colloquially known as the Square Mile − retains boundaries that closely follow its medieval limits.
Greater London, in total, is larger than Los Angeles.
The city of London is irrelevant to this discussion. The London congestion charge covers a much larger area, roughly the same size as the one proposed in New York.
timr is not correct, he is confidently wrong even if he makes the same claim several times in the discussion.
> The London congestion charge covers a much larger area, roughly the same size as the one proposed in New York. timr is not correct, he is confidently wrong even if he makes the same claim several times in the discussion.
And you keep forgetting to say that London is 600 square miles, and Manhattan is about 20. They're also vastly different in terms of their connectivity to the outside world. The "London congestion area" is a tiny section of the middle of London. This covers almost every major ingress/egress into the island of Manhattan.
I'm not sure what's being debated here, but I just want to point out Manhattan is less than 20% of NYC's land area. And as you point out this is only about half of Manhattan. So 10% of the total city?
The issue was comparing the City of London to half of Manhattan, for purposes of comparison. I felt like some clarity on the sizing would be helpful. I think you're correct in the 10%. Also, I should have compared Half of Manhattan to the City of London, but I couldn't find a good illustration of that. Hopefully, the links are found to be useful.
Again, the City of London (1 sq mile) is not London and the UK has a rather convoluted municipal system. The comparable region would be a borough, like Manhattan.
I used the term Greater London to try to make the distinction. I failed you.
Since the toll and comparative congestion pricing are municipal concepts, the arbitrary sizes matter for the purposes of figuring out consequence. The post was not very illustrative, since I compared LA to London, as opposed to NYC to London. The greater LA area just happens to share arbitrary terminology to my choice of description, rather than specific relevancy.