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Too late for that. If we're going to switch back to "states rights", it has to be for a Red issue or it doesn't look like "state's rights" but rather "who/whom".
As an aside, William F. Buckley Jr. ran a spoiler campaign against George Lindsey for NYC mayor. Post-Goldwater’s defeat, WFB was worried about the Conservative wing of the Republican Party not being seen as a contender to its Liberal wing, with Lindsey being of the latter. Most of Buckley’s support came from the outer boroughs. And among his positions were the construction of dedicated bike lanes, reduced public transit fares based on income, and congestion pricing.
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It is a red issue. If congestion pricing is so terrible, NYC will suffer and, as in California with Texas, red states will benefit from an influx of investment and tax revenue.
Spicy opinion in light of Californians desperately fleeing poor governance but then importing it with them.
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Obvious sophistry. It's a way to get people from outside the city to pay for NYC transit unions.
I don't understand why you're presenting this like a bad thing. NYC citizens pay taxes to create a city that people want to come to. What's wrong with them instituting an entrance fee for out-of-towners that would be freeloading otherwise?
There is this thing called the Constitution that does ban discrimination against citizens of another US state.
That's really not what the equal protection clause means. Being a resident of a state or city gets you cheaper or free access to public services like museums and universities. Why not roads?
Interstate commerce.
That would be a mechanism by which congress-- not the courts, not the executive (except as duly assigned by congress)-- could potentially intervene, yes... But do you honestly believe the interstate commerce clause grants the federal government the unlimited ability to interfere with how states delegate municipalities the power to decide how they're going to charge people for using vehicles on their roads? If this argument was about interstate highways I'd understand your point, but the congestion fee applies to municipal roads. NYC taxes pay for those, so NYC gets to decide what to do with them and who gets to use them.
New Deal jurisprudence allows for interstate commerce regulation of plants grown solely in a state solely for personal consumption with no commercial transaction intended or engaged in. Road policies that affect the ability of out of state residents to work or travel to or through NYC is far, far, far more proximal than that extreme.
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In this case, yes. The statutory authority for this program is Federal and is conditional on the approval of the Secretary of Transportation.
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This is equally applicable to folks from Islip.
Hell, it's applicable to people from Queens.
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This is leaves out its genuine major benefit. Most urban planning studies show that people will adapt to whatever transit conditions are present, and the impact of induced demand is quite real. Freeway lane expansion in the long term, counterintuitively, doesn’t much reduce congestion and usually slightly increases vehicle miles traveled. Congestion pricing could* be a wonderful tool to help steer more people to mass transit, which is more than sensible in the single-most population dense city in America.
*The problem with this in NYC (and other Democrat-run large cities) is that a number of liberal policies spanning decades, from the courts banning involuntary commitment in all but the most severe cases, to more-recently a pronounced aversion to policing quality of life violations in public spaces, has made public transit deeply unpleasant.
I suppose. But I also really don't want to be "steered" in this one manner. They almost entirely lack pull incentives to make me voluntarily want to use mass transit. So instead they use push incentives that are naked attacks on suburbanites by urban enthusiasts. I notice how disgusted they are by me and my lifestyle and wish to avoid the punishments they have in store for me.
If you like the suburbs so much then don't go to Manhattan, nobody is forcing you to do so.
Someone here recently criticized drivers for "selfishly trampling" on this shared infrastructure by driving their kids to school. You have the opinion that these roads are not for use by suburbanites.
A tiny portion of my taxes are spent on roads. Having paid my taxes, I feel entitled to use of public roads and entirely unsympathetic to people saying my use of public roads is actually bad.
Every now and then I get roped into visiting the nearest major city for some reason. No one can rightfully tell me to keep in the suburbs or block my use of public streets.
And I notice the contempt and sometimes hatred new urbanists have for suburbanites. I'll not pretend anti-suburban policy is neutral and just coincidentally harms me. They declare me prospering to be a negative externality and propose suitable Pigouvian taxes to correct the problem. They cannot make me want to live in an apartment downtown or ride a train to work. But they could possibly make me too poor to live any other way.
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What benefit? Less congestion? We won't see such a benefit.
What urban planners call "induced demand" is simply "pent-up demand"; the roads were so oversubscribed that when a new lane or road opens of course it is still at LOS F. The demand wasn't caused by the road; it was caused by the useful things along the road.
Why? It seems unlikely that car journeys are immune to price signals.
Elasticity of demand is very low.
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That is obviously false as seen by the actual massive drop in traffic after the congestion pricing scheme went on.
The major beneficiaries were the tradesmen that bill $150/hr and more than saved paying the fee and chopping 20-40minutes of driving off their day.
The drop doesn't look particularly massive to me at least looking at the NY/NJ MTA ezpass data for January for traffic through Lincoln and Holland tunnels. 2025 is about 7% lower 2024. Adjusting for the number of non-winter-break weekdays in Jan 2024 vs Jan 2025, I'd estimate that the actual drop in traffic is more like 10%. Still, not exactly a huge effect on traffic volume - but that 10% lower traffic volume leads to quite a bit more than a 10% drop in the time vehicles spend on Manhattan roads.
Side note: the ability to embed graphs would be super nice.
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Since they were declaring victory in the first week of the year (always lighter traffic than usual, and with a snowstorm, no less) based on comparing cherrypicked routes on those days to similar days during more normal commute periods, I know they will lie about this and claim a massive drop in traffic regardless of what actually happens.
Do you think the NJ port authority is falsifying the EZPass data they're sharing here?
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What evidence would convince you that traffic has reduced?
There would need to be an analysis by a disinterested observer. Unfortunately, there aren't any.
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Until they get sick of riding in urine soaked public transit with drug addicted homeless people. I mean there’s a reason why no one wants to ride public transit and it ain’t the cost. My city has voted on expanding it all the time no one wants it.. They don’t want the crime, the drugs, the smell.
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Mass transit is so much more efficient at moving people through dense areas. There is certainly demand for transit, but in a healthier society it does not have to be by car. The original plans for federal interstates accounted for this and were supposed to be bypass routes. You are correct about a potential lack of reduction in congestion, only because public transit in NYC is so off-putting an experience. There are no strangers having dissociative episodes in one’s car. Europe and Asia’s more successful mass transit systems absolutely have resulted in less urban congestion than our car culture.
Mass transit, which is typically ambiguously defined, is only better at moving people where the system operates in a hub and spoke system.
If everyone goes to a place for work and then goes home, mass transit is awesome if the place for work is all the same.
However, if there is slight divergence, mass transit loses spectacularly on time. It often even loses spectacularly on price when public subsidies are factored in.
Usually the target for mass transit is a 3-seat ride. Collector, trunk, distributor. This is already bad, but in fact there will be many destinations for which you can't even get that, and they're even worse. Manhattan has some advantages for mass transit; overall density (meaning the walking leg can get you a lot of places) and the linear layout of the island. The linear layout means a one or two seat ride is practical for lot more users than in a typical mass transit system. That there are express tracks helps too, though those could have been built elsewhere; they just weren't.
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Public subsidy is a funny charge. Typically after all fuel taxes from every level of government are accounted for, it adds up to a quarter of the budget for road construction and maintenance in America. Tolls, registration and other fees only provide another 10 percent. 65% of funding is unrelated to usage. Which, this is typically how subsidy is defined when applied to rail networks.
This probably isn't true; it probably fails to count fuel taxes diverted elsewhere (such as mass transit). But note that even if it were, 100% of the operating cost of the rolling stock is covered by users of automobiles. The mass transit target is typically 50%. 100% of the capital cost of the rolling stock is covered by users of automobiles; for mass transit that number is 0%. And even if the amount for road construction collected from drivers is 25%, that number for mass transit is, again, 0%.
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It's efficient at moving large numbers of people who are coming from the same place and going to the same place. It's pretty terrible at anything else.
"Large numbers of people can easily get themselves to an entrance to the transit network and have destinations close to one of the exits of the transit network" describes New York pretty well.
It describes Manhattan pretty well. The Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn badly, and Staten Island not at all.
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Good for getting lots of people through bottlenecks though. "Everyone commuting to downtown across the same bridge" is a pretty common situation in American cities, and one transit can solve well.
Of course, using congestion pricing just means that all the lawyer software devs working downtown pay the fee just like they all pay to park in the same downtown highrise parking lot. While a guy trying to get across the bridge to his McJob on the city outskirts can't afford it and has to spend 4 hours taking three transfers on the shit bus with all the hobos.
When there's so much economic surplus in jobs downtown (and thus inelastic demand for bridge crossing), congestion pricing doesn't do shit except harvest money for more graft. Which is probably why it's so popular for city governments.
The smart solution would be to find the densest destination zones and target them directly. Get 80 lawyers on a corporate bus because they're all going to the same building, and don't charge Poorfag McMcJob to use the bridge.
Even the lawyers probably end up happier because they were only paying hundreds of dollars a day for downtown parking as a negative-sum status competition, which congestion pricing only exacerbates.
Plus now you have a really funny joke setup if the lawyer bus ever goes off the bridge.
Except not really. You have to collect the people on one end of the bottleneck and distribute on the other, and that introduces more delays and bottlenecks.
Why would they drive, if transit works so well?
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“Same place” is one heck of a strawman. It really depends on the transit network. The rail lines that reach out into the suburbs around Munich, that lots of people in my wife’s extended family use to commute, as an example, are great. And Munich, with comparatively less of its streets dedicated to cars, is pretty great, too.
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It seems like a lot of the NYC stuff legitimately can’t be moved, though. Like the economy is based off banks that have to be located in NYC.
Why do they have to be in NYC?
How else are middle managers supposed to feel important if not by holding fancy conference calls where they get to say, “New York on the line”?
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Wherever the hub for an industry is, is the place to be, for networking, available talent pool, etc. JPMC has 300,000 employees and it’s absolutely fine that they don’t keep their mortgage division on the isle of Manhattan. But as long as NYC is America’s financial hub, they’ll miss out on talent and all sorts of other opportunities that are downstream of networking if they move their investment banking out of the city while Goldman, BoA ML, MS, etc. don’t. It doesn’t matter that it is NYC specifically, but it is NYC, practically.
Maybe TXSE takes off, maybe ICE moving some operations to Texas is part of that same migration. But it’s a huge risk to pull out of NYC too soon. If the financial industry ever actually picks a new hub, it’ll be a gradual shift.
There are all sorts of smaller businesses around the financial industry that have significant presences in NYC as well. How many of you are familiar with what Topan Merrill and RRD’s financial print divisions do? When Latham is working on a company’s IPO or merger they can set up shop in one of the former’s conference rooms, etc.
But see what you've described is an advantage as opposed to a requirement. A would like to or a should rather than a must.
It's one thing to say legally I must travel to this office and I cannot reach it by car.
It's another to say, NYC has advantages in terms of networking and disadvantages in terms of congestion pricing. NYC is already a stupid place to have a car unless you're rich or must have one for work, NYC already has disadvantages for having a car.
What’s the practical difference between a significant advantage and a requirement in a lucrative and competitive industry? Sure, we can go back up thread and parse “have to”. I fully concede there is no law mandating it.
To the degree there's a misunderstanding between us, it's because my initial question was aimed at clearing up any misconceptions that other posters may have had that banks have to be in NYC because the stock exchange is there or because of laws or whatever.
More broadly and theoretically, there's a moral difference to me between the two situations:
a) The government legally requires that I go to a location, and then creates policies that restrict how I can reach that location. Such as placing it out of town and away from transit somewhere that can only be reached by car so that poor people and drunks are out of luck or taking an expensive Uber; or placing it downtown somewhere without any available parking where I can't reach it by car.
b) There exists a Thing, government makes a decision which restricts which transit modes can most conveniently reach the Thing.
Scenario a) strikes me as inherently tyrannical in that they're double-dipping on government power, while b) strikes me as the kind of inevitable choice about whose ox will be gored today that is inherent in any government decision. It strikes me as fully within a government's core competency to make choices that will benefit one group or another. If the financial industry in NYC really, really didn't like it, it's unlikely it would have been implemented in the first place; Wall Street is hardly an oppressed minority.
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Cannot? That's a bit exaggerated eh?
Sorry, I skipped a step, that's a hypothetical.
I have told people that I'll still own my current truck when it is illegal to drive it in manhattan.
You skipped from "a couple bucks" and "illegal to drive it in". That's a lot of distance.
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Proximity to the NY Stock Exchange, among others, I'd venture.
Don't tell anyone but the stock exchanges are all in datacenters in NJ now. The trading floor on Wall Street is just for show.
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Options and futures markets are in Chicago.
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Not something you need thousands of employees for, at all. A small nominal office could do that while moving the rest of your staff to Wilmington or Greenwich or Trenton.
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