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Aside from any legal issues, it drives me kinda nuts that they're trying to shut this program down, because I think our over-dependence on cars and excessive catering to drivers is a horrible thing that ruins our cities. The congestion pricing program in NYC has been a great success story, with the city getting less polluted, quieter, and even easier for drivers if you pay the charge. It's even safer on the subways, because of safety in numbers -- more riders means fewer situations where criminals and predators can find isolated victims. Consider the lives that will be saved due to better air quality for the 8 million people who live in NYC.
So I wish the FHWA would be bending over backwards to find a way to let this program continue and encourage it in more cities, instead of being dicks like this.
As for the legal objections, I'm not a lawyer, so of course take this as you will. But what does Duffy mean by "...the imposition of tolls under the CBDTP pilot project appears to be driven primarily by the need to raise revenue for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) System as opposed to the need to reduce congestion."? The letter is very vague about why they've concluded that, and I don't see how you couldn't conclude that of ANY congestion pricing program, if you were so inclined. Do they have to avoid talking about how much money it would raise when they're planning? Or would a congestion charge only be allowed if you planned to put all the money in a big pit and burn it?
The "cordon pricing" thing... I read an argument made that all the bridges from New Jersey into New York have tolls. Does that mean that NYC is legally required to build a toll-free bridge, or drop tolls on one of those bridges, as it's effectively cordoned?
I mean, sure, I imagine Trump/the FHWA has the authority to shut this down, if they want to. I don't see what actually requires them to pull this particular interpretation, though, and the whole thing seems like a petty "fuck you" to New York (as well as advanced car-brain virus), for a program that is very effective and pretty darn popular in NYC. It seems like the people who like it least are those who drive in from New Jersey, and even then, a lot of people are more frustrated that there isn't a good public transit option.
I apologize for my irritated tone, I just hate when there are such beneficial policies that have been tried and tested in lots of other places, that get shot down for stupid reasons in the US because they threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you.
I think you're inflating congestion with all the other problems caused by there being too many cars. If the goal is to reduce traffic, then it shouldn't be called congestion pricing. Congestion pricing is for reducing congestion, which increases traffic because it unclogs the roads.
Reducing traffic beyond the point needed to eliminate congestion because you also want to reduce pollution and noise should be called something else.
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For context. All revenues collected under this program are earmarked for MTA projects.
If it is the primary goal of the program is up to interpretation. And as you said, the state could always throw it into a pile and use it for MTA projects anyways. Earmarked or not.
I'm with you on everything else. For once, I'm a shameless partisan on the issue. I like to think I can empathize with the stance of my ideological opposite. But car brained Americans have to be operating under advanced stupidy or extreme malice. I see no sympathetic position for them.
Even the smallest inconvenience to cars thousands of miles away makes them go into a frenzy. No one is coming for cars in rural America or the suburbs or even godforsaken cities like Atlanta. We're talkimg about vanilla-ass transportation policy in world cities like LA, NYC, SF, Boston, Philly, Miami and DC.
Not even a red vs blue thing. Californian opposition is so comically evil in their demands for an acceptable subway line that I cant help but think there is something I'm missing.
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I agree with you that, in a vaccum, limited cars in cities would be fantastic. I love the way European villages work. I think, as an ideal, cities with strong public transportation and limited congestion are a great place to live. In theory, I'm rah-rah urbanism.
But no discussion of transportation and suburbanization in the US can happen without a co-equal discussion about crime and safety.
The reason Americans cling to their cars and their commutes is simple: the cities are not safe. I personally know people who lived the urbanist dream, living downtown in a city, and then fled to the suburbs because they watched a man die from a gunshot out their window. I've ridden the train and had to make decisions about how to deal with a clearly psychotic man with no understanding of reality, and thus posed a real danger to himself and the people around him. I've seen and walked by the tent cities. I've seen, with my own eyes, the fentanyl zombies whose presence in our greatest cities can be described only as seriously-discomfiting, as human urban blight, as the broken windows of man that reveals and invites immense public disorder and ugliness. I've read the crime stats.
The right perceives this danger profoundly and seriously, and it shapes many of their political priorities, from gun rights to car rights. They want the ability to live without fear, while still being able to have access to the centers of economic activity that are our cities. Having a car means having a physical, metal, lockable bubble that separates you from exterior threats, while being able to easily and autonomously navigate yourself out of the urban center without having to share a means of transportation with people who may mean you harm.
Your post seems to reveal that your concerns about cars are the mirror image of conservative concerns about crime: you see them as dangerous to public safety, and ugly. And you're not wrong! I have serious and real concerns about the size of our vehicles and the number and behavior of them in cities.
But the American right has judged that the danger to them from automobiles -- which indeed is massive, grave, and serious -- is less important to them than the massive, grave, and serious risk posed to them by urban crime and disorder. They would rather be hurt accidentially by a driver than intentionally by a robber. You can find this wrong, or seriously misguided, or silly, but nevertheless it means that their political views on the issue are shaped by actual concerns about the world rather than "advanced car-brain virus." It means that you might have to engage with their concerns realistically, and maybe make concessions, rather than accusing them of harboring a mental parasite. It's much easier to just handwave them away, just as it's much easier for the right to say that anyone with concerns about the Trump administration has a terminal case of TDS.
The urban problems in the US are mostly US-specific, shaped by US concerns. For that reason, your opponents reject that these are beneficial policies based on being tried and tested in other places. The US is not other places, and has unique problems. The US is not Europe, as my liberal friends delight in reminding me.
Left-wingers want to get the cars out of the city, and right-wingers want to get the crime out of the cities. Both have their ebb and flow, as one side of the argument gains more power, but the Democratic strongholds in most US cities ensures that things flow mostly in one direction.
For that reason, Republicans will cling to their cars as a fundamental part of their identity, because it's the only thing that secures them the ability to participate in the economic activity of society while permitting them and their families to live in the suburbs, where they can have greater security for their possessions and families. And where they can offer to their children a chance at an education in a school where bullies and criminals are disciplined, and children aren't smoking weed in the bathrooms -- a real set of concerns expressed by a family who left Oregon to move to the rural, delapidated town in flyover country where my girlfriend grew up. We're actually at the point where it's safer and better for your children to live in bumfuck nowhere than in our most prominent states.
If liberals want conservatives to be hands-off and support restrictions on car culture, the first thing to do is to clean up the cities and make them temples of safety, security, and prosperity. What is needed is to support policies that arrest, convict, and incarcerate (for long periods) drug addicts, criminals, and other beacons of public disorder. In other words, to stop opposing policies that "threaten our precious, innocent, angelic
carscriminals that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you." Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them.But until that day: "haha car go vroom vroom."
The things with european villages is that they are... villages. Not cities. I live in what I would consider a mid-sized city, which may still be a village for you, and Ive always been confused by these american urbanists - what do you think you need a car for that I dont? I guess the supermarket, but the local supermarket doesnt have that much, so usually I drive anyway. The only public transport that remotely works is the metro, the busses have 15min wait times on the low end even with them running them basically empty. The metro at least is usually 10% full, but still none of this would survive if it wasnt subsidised into the stratosphere. The conflict over cars exists here as well, and the "no cars at all" faction is if anything bigger than is america.
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"Urban crime" is a scoped to make all cities look bad, when the issue is of some neighborhoods in some cities.
Oakland or Baltimore are generally violent. Downtown Seattle or SOMA SF have homelessness and nonviolent property crime associated with it. I dont recommend living in these neighborhoods and I am in complete agreement on the dire need for possibly non-compassionate methods for resolving these issues. But these cities/neighborhoods are rarely the subjects of discussion.
Statistically, transit focused American cities are exceedingly safe. NYC & Boston are the nations 2 big transit cities. Both the cities and their transit corridors are quite safe. Hell, you can fall asleep late at night on the subway and wake up in East NY (murdertown).... and it's still safe inside the subway complex. As mentioned before, bad neighborhoods are ofc crime ridden. But connecting them to a common transit doesnt bring crime to your doorstep.
That being said, I'm glad that the YIMBY/Transit crowd has decoupled from the compassionate/pro-homeless crowd.
Strict enforcement of public safety is essential to getting people to use transit. The caltrain (well run) vs Bart (total mess) are great examples while being within a few miles from eachnother.
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As someone who grew up in the exurbs, they aren't safe either. Our basement was broken into by the neighbor's kids. Our family dog was killed in the backyard & its eyes plucked out. I was shot at by BB guns. My dad was unable or unwilling to protect.
And the worst part? The only way to physically escape was to drive somewhere else. Which meant middle-school me was stuck in a neighborhood of low-key abusers. Cable TV, console gaming, & pulp sci-fi books were the only viable escape. So I used them.
I'm in a city now. There are still problems, much like you describe. But now there's different places my children can go to escape problem families and problem people if they have to - and they don't have to drive to get there.
I don't believe the car is worth killing. But I don't believe it should be depended on as an escape hatch. Too much happens in the years between 6 and 16, before one can more easily flee.
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I think you've posted this before. I've probably posted a similar answer.
America's love affair with the car started before the cities became wretched hives of scum and villainy and (despite the best efforts of New Urbanists) continued when most of them recovered. Having a car means you can go anywhere the road network can take you, when you want, the way you want. You can change your plans. You can bring your stuff with you. You can listen to your radio/music, converse with your passengers, or go in silence. It's your space, it goes where you want to go. It's also generally faster -- typically much faster -- than public transit, and cheaper per trip given that you need a car for any trip,
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Yeah, you're absolutely right -- I think this is the one reasonable objection to getting cars out of cities, and it's a doozy. I wish that liberals were more on the ball with this (though to be fair, a lot of liberals are perfectly happy with the damage cars do as long as they can virtue signal by buying the right kind of electric car or whatever).
Policing and crime is the other side of the coin.
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Right, we should go back to horses. Except, you know, the whole problem of being buried in manure, which is why NYC originally enthusiastically adopted the automobile.
The proponents of this program, including Hochul, have been quite clear about this.
No, because tolls for bridges have separate statutory authority.
Congestion pricing is a big "fuck you" to drivers in the first place. And if it's a "fuck you in particular" to drivers from New Jersey... well, that's actually a legitimate interstate commerce nexus. Neither side's motives are pure here, but the Trump administration has the better statutory justification.
This isn't like eliminating cars in Dallas Texas.
NYC has robust subway, railroad, and bike infrastructure. Busses would also be a lot more useful if they weren't stuck behind cars all of the time.
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