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We've talked a few times about New York's congestion pricing program. On February 19, Secretary of Transportation Duffy revoked authorization for this program based on two defects. One, that cordon pricing where a toll-free route exists is allowed for Interstates, but no other roads -- and in any case no toll-free route exists under New York's program. Second, that the program in fact exists to fund the MTA (state run public transportation, including the subway), not to reduce congestion. By statute any congestion pricing program requires authorization from the Department of Transportation, so this is the end of the program, right?
Wrong. Governor Hochul refused to shut it down by a March 21 deadline, calling instead for "orderly resistance". The US DOT extended the deadline until tomorrow. Hochul still refuses to shut down the program.
Unsurprisingly, there has been nothing said about the flagrant disregard for rule of law by the executive of New York.
From the document, this came across as an argument rather than a statement of fact (Sec Transp argues that the 1991 exception for congestion pricing was vague so he he's going to interpret it as he sees fit )
Reading between the lines, it's pretty much a 'Biden let you do it. I wont. Fuck you' letter. It even acknowledges the positive reception among the public.
It comes across as another example of Trump pushing the power of the executive to its furthest limits (every executive outdoes their former on this, but Trump 2 is a whole another level)
Congestion pricing is popular. Its in a deep blue state and doesnt have a partisan bent. (Republicans take the subway too). Im not sure why Trump is so appaled by it other than simplistic 'highway good, transit bad' memes.
Executive overreach vs executive overreach. About damn time Democrats started playing politics rather than fumbling around like baboons.
What is the precedent around retroactive change to previous approvals, esp. when the capital expenditure is already done ?
Man, is it hard to get anything done in the US. No wonder the infrastructure is crumbling.
How did stuff ever get built in the US ? The system offers infinite tools for opposition to block every project. How did the interstate system get built ? Was there a clear before-after for when this kind of systemic obstruction became commonplace ?
I'm surprised that Trump fans didnt see the civic disobedience coming. Politics and the balance between the various pillars is a massive grey area, always has been. The boundaries around this area are primarily upheld by expectations of civility and perceptions of what gets you voted out of office. "X is illegal" is never that straightforward.
Trump won by throwing civility out the window, slaughtering every sacred cow and still got the popular vote. Dems are learning the obvious lessions. Trump is about to find out why certain pandoras boxes stay closed. (Assuming the dems are somewhat competent )
It's a conclusion, being made by the official in charge of making such conclusions.
"Biden let you do it even though it was unlawful. I won't. Fuck you."
It's popular in New York City, because many in New York City don't drive so it's a tax on other people. Not so popular outside NYC.
Exactly ! Why national outrage over a single bridge in a location where it makes sense ?
Single bridge? This is about most of the roads in Manhattan.
Yes, 1 borough of 1 city containing 1.6 million people. All this outrage over 0.5% of the nation's population ?
60% of commuters use public transport in NYC. 3 types of people drive into NYC : Rich people, Blue collar workers and suburbanites who would who have been forced back by RTO policies. Rich people can pay the toll. RTO suburbanites would be compensated by their companies. Hourly blue collar people would rather save time and make a few more dollars.
I don't know if you've driven into Manhattan before, but it is a total shit show. Tolls or not, I can't imagine anyone wanting to drive into the city by choice. Congestion pricing takes what is a universally miserable experience, and makes it tolerable for some while incentivizing the rest to take the less-painful path (transit). It is a as close to a universally good thing as you can get.
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I look forwards to the precedent being used by red states under Harris in 2029.
LOL, it doesn't work that way. Defy the feds from the left you get a shrug and you can resist until the feds change their minds. Defy them from the right you get the 101st airborne on your doorstep.
I think you could use this explanation to see the difference here.
The DOT can file for an injunction against the MTA (they have not yet done so) and so far at least Hochul and other leaders have said they would follow such an order if granted by the court. Of course we can't see into the future, it's possible that an order is made by the courts and the MTA still refuses but they at least say they won't defy it currently.
So everything currently happening is well within the legal process. The DOT believes it has the ability to terminate an approval in such a manner, and the MTA contests and claims they don't (the MTA believes there the order violates certain federal regulations) and as such they are seeking answers in a court of law.
If you don't understand how the American legal system works, that's fine. Most citizens don't, there's a reason why we have such high standards for practicing as an attorney or judge. It is a very complex system with a long history of various laws, regulations and court rulings. But you should probably accept you don't understand it.
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Have any examples of the latter? The closest I can think of is Eisenhower enforcing school integration.
I mean that is literally the canonical example, yes.
That strikes me much more as FAFO by those to the right of Eisenhower than victimization of those to the right of Eisenhower.
I hope you'll say likewise when leftists start disappearing to Guantanamo
It depends on the details of that hypothetical.
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Greg Abbott got away with it- after a disappointing midterm.
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Has the actions of New York been ruled against yet in a court of law, and have they continued to keep congestion pricing despite that ruling? That is how these conflicts get legally settled after all.
If so, then Hochul and others should be held in contempt of court. If not then the comparison I assume you're trying to make is not equivalent. From my understanding the relevant lawsuit is still in process
Edit: Better link, not directly to a PDF.
Edit 2: also to add this bit in
While it of course remains to be seen in the future, they do not state an intent to disobey the courts. This is par for the course when a legal conflict occurs, disagreements between parties are settled by the judicial branch.
As far as I am aware: The legal action for New York would be obedience to USDOT's termination until the court grants an injunction against that termination. In its lawsuit, New York requests a permanent injunction, which would go into effect after trial. But it does not appear that New York has bothered to seek a preliminary injunction, which would go into effect immediately, prior to trial. Trial obviously will not take place before USDOT's deadline. So it definitely looks like New York is planning to act illegally, though it has not yet actually done so.
This is a complicated procedural situation and while you're analysis is on the right track, it isn't quite correct and leads you to the wrong conclusion. New York didn't request an injunction in its lawsuit. For the court to issue an injunction, there has to be some kind of action involved (either for the opposing party to take or forbear from), and since the DOT has not engaged in any enforcement or threat of enforcement, such and action does not exist here. In other words, New York can't ask for an injunction, preliminary or permanent, because there isn't anything for the court to tell the Federal government to stop doing. New York is instead requesting declaratory judgment. In this case, New York has taken the position that the Secretary of Transportation does not have the authority to unilaterally rescind the approval, and is asking the court to confirm that position. If New York's position is correct, then they were never under any obligation to comply with the Secretary's request to begin with.
The strategic implications here are that, by filing suit in advance rather than waiting for the DOT to engage in some kind of enforcement action, New York gets is position on the record and throws the ball into the Federal government's court; the reason they went this route to begin with was specifically because it allows them to avoid compliance until a court has ruled on the matter. Strategically, New York's move here is so slick it makes me want to cry. Courts in general don't like to grand preliminary injunctions or TROs, and the standards for getting them are high: You have to demonstrate irreparable harm and a strong chance of prevailing on the merits. Suppose that New York waits until DOT begins enforcement, and also suppose that the case is a tossup on the merits. Now New York has to ask for a preliminary injunction while the case is pending, and they probably aren't going to get one. So now even if they prevail on the merits, they have to pause the program for the entire time the case is pending.
By asking for declaratory judgment in advance, the onus of getting preliminary injunctive relief is now on the Feds. Now that there's a live dispute over their authority, they can't just unilaterally assert it; they have to ask the court. And since the bar for getting this kind of relief is high, they aren't likely to get it. And if they simply don't seek the relief at all but instead try to penalize the state retroactively if they end up prevailing, it's going to be hard for them to do, since if the matter was so important why didn't they file for a preliminary injunction?
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While I don't know the specifics of this particular part of law, the MTA's entire argument maintains that the transport secretary does not have the legal authority to overturn it, and any injuction could in fact be requested by the department of transportation which they have not done. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/04/07/in-court-at-least-the-feds-are-not-trying-to-stop-congestion-pricing
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Considering how small potatoes this is compared to the endless scandals coming out of the White House, I’m not surprised this hasn’t become a big story.
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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.
I wouldn't object to calling it something else, for example the "fuck cars charge" (kidding!). But also, we do things all the time with names that aren't exactly literal -- and in politics especially. "Sin tax", "Right-to-work laws", the PATRIOT Act, for example. I think "congestion charge" is somewhat accurate, easy to remember, and rolls off the tongue. I'm not sure how you'd capture the full intent of the policy in a concise name... "Private vehicle harm reduction and congestion reduction tax for MTA funding"? People would end up using an abbreviated name anyway. And it's not like you can split this into multiple policies -- the single charge does all these things simultaneously.
Or another way to put it -- I think you need to look at all side benefits when evaluating a policy, just like you need include negative side effects. It doesn't matter if they're intended or not, effects are effects. The minimum wage is well known to cause unemployment--it's still popular with the political left because they ignore that part (or refuse to believe it) and only look at the intended effects.
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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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My understanding is that this is a federal matter because it involves interstate roads which were built with federal funds.
I think that a workaround would be to just charge tolls on non-federal roads. The people driving from and to Manhattan tend not to do so just to enjoy the view of the Hudson from a federal highway. They want to reach a destination in Manhattan, and they need to use local roads to get to it. So just charge them to use the local roads instead.
On the subject itself, I am a bit of two minds. On the one hand, I get that putting prices on things is probably the most efficient way to allocate rare resources. On the other hand, there is something delightfully egalitarian about public roads. It does not matter if your car is worth 500$ or 500k$, when it comes to traffic -- and especially traffic jams -- everyone is equal. Well, somewhat equal. Of course, sitting in a hot, cramped, terrible car waiting for the traffic to move is different than riding in a nice, air-conditioned car with some stop and go traffic assistance system, and that is different from riding in the back of a limousine drinking champagne with an escort and an 8k TV screen while occasionally berating your driver on the intercom. Still, unless you can afford to ride a helicopter to work you are stuck here with the rest of us.
The interstate commerce nexus is pretty strong here, as is the Federal funding. Manhattan gets all sorts of Federal funding for both transit and roads. Even without Wickard v. Fillburn, it isn't practical to avoid it.
Not when there's a monopoly provider.
The fact that there's a monopoly provider is one part of it, but there's also the part where the service being provided has substantial negative externalities. I don't know what price leads to maximum utility when that's taken into account, but I imagine it's closer to the price in a monopoly market than the price in a competitive market. Heck, it might even be higher than that. Depends on the demand curve, of course.
On the other hand, with something like the public transit system which has much less (though of course not zero) negative externalities, I think what you said applies a lot more. I think there's even an argument for pricing it somewhat below-market because it can pull commuters away from driving, if you don't have something like a congestion charge already.
I could own a car and go wherever I want, whenever I want. It'll take me 10 minutes to get there and another 10 to get back. I can buy heavy things or more than I can carry on my own. A lot of times public transit doesn't get me to where I want to go (especially if it's another city, and in that case I'd need to get a hotel and hope their own system takes me to where I need to go) and sometimes what I'm transporting is not allowed on public transit. I can open the windows, turn on the A/C, I control the music, and I'll always have a place to sit.
Or I could take public transit, where it'll take me an hour one way (transit + walking + transfers), I'm limited to my physical strength (so no Costco runs), I'm more or less limited to where public transit goes, not even guaranteed a place on the vehicle during rush hour, I can't take certain things with me, and I can't stay out later than the last bus or I'll be stuck walking for multiple hours. Or I could take a taxi, but the cost of doing that particularly often is comparable to car ownership in the first place.
The reason people like cars is that personal vehicles of this nature are Good, Actually. We can argue about the size (though because a great variety of Westerners are landlords compared to those in hyper-dense areas or Europe, we tend to prefer trucks large enough to lend to the land's maintenance) but there's a reason even in extremely poor areas the dominant mode of transportation is not public... it's a 50cc gasoline-powered scooter.
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Claims of externalities are usually a way of putting one's finger on the scale, and this is a perfect example. You've decided driving is bad and transit is good, so you handwave into existence negative externalities for driving which are much greater than those of transit, and set their value to whatever works for your argument.
What specifically about mass transit do you think makes it come anywhere close to private auto transport in terms of negative externalities?
It might have lesser externalities, but it also has much lesser utility. Choosing where I go, and when, is the whole point of having a car. Not being able to choose my destination and being forced to adhere to another's schedule aren't externalities, they're just providing an inferior product. That before you address the issue of sharing space with strangers, which might be acceptable if society were high trust, but becomes intolerable in low-trust cities.
I'd rather have the better option, thank you.
That's perfectly fine, and I totally get why some people choose to drive. What I object to is not some people choosing to drive, but the cost of that driving being borne by people who don't choose to drive -- and even by others who choose to drive. It's like a smoker complaining that not smoking is not as good as the law letting you smoke wherever you want.
I get that a lot of people don't like sharing space with strangers, when crime and harassment are factors. I do think it's something that also really needs addressing on its own, but especially to make non-car transportation more attractive.
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I think you don't get the benefit of the default.
Ok, I guess first it's worth establishing what we're comparing driving to. I think it's fair to say some mix of public transport like trains, buses, and subways, as well as walking and cycling. If you take public transport you have to typically walk a little bit, as it won't go directly to your destination.
Also, I'm not trying to argue that driving a car isn't desirable for the occupants. Of course it's convenient, private, and comfortable. And I don't disagree with Urquan that a lot of people choose cars because they prefer the risk of an accident to the risk of being a victim of crime.
So to start, let's compare the space requirements. Every bit of land in a city has a value -- if you use it for something transportation-related, you can't use it for something else. As a thought experiment, if you had to surround every building with a 50ft wide no-mans-land buffer, it would clearly make any city or town larger and therefore add time to every trip through it, without adding any value (with the exception perhaps reducing noise pollution if you live next to a club). Proximity creates value.
Walking often requires sidewalks -- one could imagine a city with no sidewalks, but typically we don't want roads inches away from front doors and storefronts anyway, so it doesn't really take up much extra space. That said, if your roads are narrow enough, you can leave these out (example of random residential Tokyo street).
Buses require depots to store them, as well as stops. Clicking around google maps for any major city with a good bus system shows that these take up minimal space, about as much as a Walmart + parking, if that.
Commuter trains probably require the biggest footprint of any public transport. 860,000 people commute into London on the train daily (2006 figure). If they all drove instead *and carpooled 2 people per car), assuming a 2.4m x 4.8m parking space (old, smaller standard), you'd need 4953600 m^2 of parking, or 2.2 km^2 of just parking spaces. And since a parking lot needs a substantial amount of space for the cars to drive around, it would probably be more like 3 or 4 km^2. For a train station footprint, let's take Waterloo station, (the biggest), which as far as I can estimate would be about 0.25 km across if it were compressed into a square, for 0.0625 km^2. There are 14 terminal train stations in London -- if they were all the same size, they would take up 0.875 km^2. But many are smaller, and a train station is not just bare warehouse for trains, it has shops and places to eat as well. There are also lots of smaller train stations which are just a blip on the train line that barely takes up more space than the train itself.
And finally, a subway takes up very little useful space, of course. For driving, the Big Dig in Boston would be comparable.
Now, when providing car parking, you can build up, or down! But since car parking takes up so much space per-user, parking structures often have to be paid in order for them to make economic sense, or they're subsidized by the city. I have little objection to car parking when the driver pays enough that it doesn't need subsidies. Often, though, planing laws just mandate that each business provides a certain number of parking spaces. We all pay for this both in the form of things being further apart, as discussed above, as well as businesses having to pay taxes on land area only used for cars, that they then pass on to us.
I want to emphasize -- I don't think cars are the devil. I do think that bending over backwards to accommodate driving at the expense of other forms of transportation, and the general livability of cities, is a problem.
Another externality is accident deaths. Cars kill more than other forms of transportation -- and not just the people in the car. If we take what the DOT estimated for the value of human life in 2023, $13.2 million, times 0.54 deaths per 100,000,000 million passenger miles for passenger vehicles from the previous link, that's $7.128 million per 100m passenger miles. We could cut that in half if we want to say that half the car deaths are due to the own fault of the driver and so shouldn't count as an externality. This is probably over-estimating because there are a lot of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, but under-estimating in cases where there is more than 1 occupant of the car. (It's easy to get into the weeds quickly) This is $3.064 million per 100m passenger miles, or $0.03 per passenger mile. Every 33 mile trip statistically does around $1 in economic damage solely from the possibility of causing an accident. Just looking at the graph of accidents, the externality from other types of transit is less than 1/10 of that. As for walking and cycling, I'm assuming that deaths caused to others is generally negligible -- it would be hard to kill someone with a bike crash even if you were trying.
Other externalities, such as noise, are messier to compare. Obviously walking and cycling are very quiet, subways are too if you're not actually down near them. Trains and buses can make more noise than cars, but there's the factor that they're not on literally every street, and they're not constantly passing by. Train horns can carry a long way though. Subjectively, I've found cities with lots of cars to be substantially louder than cities that don't prioritize them.
Pollution is similar. For trains and buses, I'm not sure. Trains do probably generate a lot of brake dust, and diesel trains pollute. It may depend on electrification, etc. Electric cars are apparently about as bad as gas ones due to tire wear and braking though, so I imagine buses and trains may be the same, though electric trains aren't heavier than diesel ones since they get their power from overhead lines. Biking and walking create negligible pollution, unless you count the visual pollution of lycra-clad cyclists.
Anyway, that's my impression of the externalities of different modes of transport, back of the envelope. It makes sense to drive everywhere, if you don't count what driving does to everyone else. Just like it makes sense to catch as many fish as you want without considering if the stock can support it.
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I mean, I guess if you only count people who can afford cars in the first place, then yes. And ignore the fact that because we dedicate so much tax money to roads and not public transit, people who kinda can’t afford cars have to buy them anyway, and it takes up a big chunk of their income compared to more well-off folks. And that poor people often have to live next to the noisy, polluting traffic where rents are cheap, shouldering the brunt of the negative externalities.
I get that you’re not trying to make a rigorous argument here, but I really see it from a different perspective.
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To clarify a little more: New York has sued the USDOT in federal court over this termination, claiming that it is arbitrary and capricious. As far as I can see, the lawsuit does not include a request for a preliminary injunction while proceedings are ongoing. Rather, as The_Nybbler states, New York will just refuse to obey it.
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