Great comment from that video: "When cars were banned from Central Park drivers whined and now we can't imagine it any other way." Everything is impossible until it is done.
The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.
Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so.
I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.
That's not an A/B test because it has no way of controlling for broader economic trends over time. How do you figure out if what you're seeing is because of that one thing that changed, or the enormous list of other things that also changed around the same time?
A more valid design would be randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it. Obviously not feasible in practice, but that's at least the kind of thing to strive toward when designing these kinds of studies.
That would be a bad design for an A/B study (and NYC congestion pricing is not a “study” anyway), because cities are few and not alike and have an enormous list of other things that are different. What NYC equivalent would you pick?
In any case, not every policy change needs to be an academic exercise.
Yup, that is indeed a part of the problem. You'll notice I did say, "Obviously not feasible in practice."
I've got a textbook on field experiments that refers to these kinds of questions as FUQ - acronym for "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions". You can collect suggestive evidence, but firmly establishing cause and effect is something you've just got to let go of.
> Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so. I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.
Policies have different effects depending on how likely people judge them to be long-term changes. Construction along a route will cause people to temporarily use alternative forms of transportation, but not e.g. sell their car or buy a long-term bus pass.
Yes, the inability to know counterfactuals will make judging policies more subjective than we might like. The closest we get to A/B testing is when different jurisdictions adopt substantially similar policies at different times. For example, this was done to judge improvements from phasing out leaded-gasoline, since it was done at different times and rates in different areas.
The real world isn't A/B tests. No government is going to spend millions on equipment and infrastructure on a congestion zone because some engineers are like "Let's just test this out. I have done zero research on what could possibly happen, but it would be fun to see what the results are."
Unfortunately, the possibility exists that the moment of introducing the A/B test requirement will be strategically chosen to freeze the status quo in the way the chooser prefers.
“A/B in time” suffers from inability to control for other factors that might vary over time. In this case, that could be the economy or other transit policies.
"before" and "after" introduces a large axis of noise
The problem is that for A/B testing to really work you need independent groups outcomes. As soon as there is any bias in group selection or cross group effect it's very hard to unpick.
Generally, that's considered to introduce counfounding factors on the time axis ("did we see improvement because we changed something or because flu season hit and people stayed home") that you'd prefer to mitigate by running your A and B simultaneously.
But in the absence of the ability to run them simultaneously, "A is before and B is after" can be a fine proxy. Of course, if B is worse, it'd be nice if you could only subject, say, 5% of your population to it before you just slam the slider to 100% and hit everyone with it.
yes, but how the hell he proposes to make A/B testing of "whole Manhattan policy"?
build another Manhattan just for test? makes no sense. whole manhattan is important. not 5%. so no 5%. a/b test can be done only for things which affect one person, like for example GUI etc, big group under test but effect on individuals,
in such big scale a/b test is tool to deceive, not to get to right conclusion
It is, indeed, much easier to do A/B testing online in environments you control than IRL.
(Purely hypothetically: one could identify 10% of the island as operating under the new rules and compare outcomes. This is politically fraught on multiple levels and also gives messy spatial results.)
I was living in London when congestion pricing was introduced and went into the West End the day before and the first day of and the difference was night and day. The difference along Oxford Street, Regent's Street, Green Street, etc was astounding.
And in the 20+ years the evidence seems to back up how much of a net positive it has been.
NYC congestion pricing took way too long because the New York Democratic Party sucks and, as usual, legal efforts were made to block it, much as how well-intentioned laws like CEQA (designed to protect the environment) are actually just weaponized to block development of any kind.
What's so bizarre to me is how many people have strong opinions on NYC congestion pricing who have never been and will never go to NYC. Americans love the slippery slope argument. It's like "well, if they make driving cars slightly more expensive in Lower Manhattan then next the government is going to take away my gas-guzzling truck in Idaho".
What's also surprising is how many people who live in outer Queens and Brooklyn chose to drive into Manhattan and were complaining how this changed their behavior. Um, that was the point. I honestly didn't know how many people like that there were.
What really needs to happen but probably never will is to get rid of free street parking below about 96th street or 110th.
Also, either ban or simply charge more for combustion vehicles. Go and look at how quiet Chinese cities are where the vehicles are predominantly electric now.
The best decision would be to completely forbid individual transport. Now the common space dedicated to streets is for who can pay extra. Forbid individual transport and create some parks and pedestrian streets.
>The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case. The largest burden of this tax is falling on low income commuters who live off the train lines and have to drive into Manhattan, yet all of the money is going to... the train lines (MTA). Understandably they're not too happy.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
In other forums there are lots of complaints about the NYC crackdown on e-bikes. NYC has taken steps to discourage their use. Maybe not enough, but definitely more than in most other parts of the country.
> Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
It sounds like measures to limit the danger of electric bikes might be warranted, but that’s a separate issue. Even if electric bikes are a problem I’d be shocked if they came anywhere close to causing the pedestrian fatality rate of cars (even when controlled by frequency of use) in an urban environment, not to mentioni the additional impacts of things like emissions (including non-tailpipe), noise, space, etc. of cars. I don’t know much about motorcycle statistics. I can imagine the group that rides motorcycles might be less likely to hit pedestrians than those of e-bike riders, but I don’t know.
If we have to choose only one of these problems to tackle at a time—which we don’t!—I’d rather they tackle the one which is killing hundreds of people a year.
Seems to be working fine, I know the large city about 60 miles from me looked at this, and I am all for it. But its mass transit is a awful mess, at times walking is faster that taking a subway.
I wish they would start this, but its politics is such a mess nothing really gets done there. New Ideas there gets implemented far slower than then ideas in Roman Catholic Church.
Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious.
The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like highlighting how many fewer chicken deaths would occur if we created an omnivore or meat tax.
IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. How much fewer social interaction is happening across the distances that those car based trips used to occur. And how much harder is it to get goods into the areas. Is less economic activity happening.
In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up.
If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users.
IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.
Driving into NYC is one of those things that is most convenient at the beginning (driving in, stay in my car) but has a high cost at the end (looking/paying for parking, traffic, on a parking time limit, etc.) I do think if people grow ACCUSTOMED to taking the subway in, they will prefer that in most cases.
It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending.
I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
I don't think you can infer that people were using their preferred method just from the fact that they were using it - after all, the status quo was also the result of policy.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
I think the article mentions this?
> In March, just over 50 million people visited business districts inside the congestion zone, or 3.2 percent more than in the same period last year, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (its estimate tries to exclude people who work or live in the area).
See also the "Other business measures are doing OK so far" heading.
There were critics who predicted that it would not reduce traffic and congestion. They argued people had no choice but to drive and would just be forced to pay.
They are tracking that sort of thing. One of the line items is "vistors to the zone - up". Another two are restaurants and Broadway receipts which have no data yet.
> In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
The article highlights that was $45 million in the month of March alone:
"In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year."
To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?
Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.
If you would normally do one behavior because it is being heavily subsidized by other people and you are not bearing the cost of that behavior. Of course people have a preference to not bear the cost of their own externalities
Every time my mom comes to visit us in the city, at some point she says she could never live here because she couldn't imagine having to drive in city traffic every day. And every time she does that, I remind her that her car hasn't moved even once since she first arrived a week ago. Mostly we walk everywhere. And every time she responds, "Oh, you're right. You know, that's been really nice."
She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.
I don't think revealed preferences are the only reasonable way to define "preference."
To use an extreme example: Does the homeless alcoholic divorcé really prefer to be homeless and divorced?
For a more abstract example, consider games like the Prisoner's dilemma, where "both defect" is worse for both players than "both cooperate" but choosing to defect always improves the result for a player. Surely both players would prefer the "both cooperate" solution to the "both defect" but without some external force, they end up in a globally suboptimal result.
This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum.
If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.
> To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?
Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ).
Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that.
All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety.
I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.
I'm a little unsure how to read you. These results look, frankly, amazing. The benefits to schools and busses alone would have been good. That traffic is faster everywhere is a cherry on top of it all.
And you did see that they had a section on restaurants, right? Those are up. They polled stores and found only 25% that report a negative impact. That looks concerning, I agree. Would love more polling on it with quantification.
Could this still be a bad policy? Of course. Could it be a good policy today that trends to bad some day in the future? I'd think so. But we have tools to monitor this stuff that flat didn't exist before. We should be in a good place to try stuff like this. And, again, these results look amazing.
Getting business stats is fraught. If a business is struggling, the owners opinion on the cause is important, but is it accurate?
In Wellington, New Zealand, failing business love to blame cycle lanes for their woes. The government sacking a significant number of people and an economic downturn is apparently not the cause.
There are plenty of places where consumption taxes DON’T have a strong effect, like vice taxes on tobacco and alcohol. It’s absolutely worth actually testing it.
Think about it more; if the vegan and steak options were ~equivalently priced - more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive. The idea isn't to make it prohibitive; insofaras don't make the most environmentally-expensive choice also the cheapest.
To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.
As a committed meat-eater: I have no idea what vegan food costs, as the label almost immediate makes me skip over them. To make me look at them, you'd have to make the non-vegan options prohibitively expensive.
Well most raw vegan food is already way cheaper that raw meat:
Quality organic dry chickpeas, lentils, beans, soy etc… already are around 2€/kg where I live and when you add water they double/triple in weight so you end up at 1€/kg. You’ll probably eat a bit more weight than meat but still the price is nowhere comparable. Add some whole cereals instead of white bread for nutrition and better satiety: they’re more expensive but you got the price back on the quantity you eat (you won’t stuff yourself that much T165 bread or brown rice: the fibers will make you feel full super fast). And for the vegetable you usually can find stuff super nutritious for cheap : apples, leak, cabbages and alls sorts of oignons.
Even fancy organic quinoa is like 10€/kg but also double in weight and you only eat ~1.3 times the meat weight you’ll eat in meat-meal.
Industrial chicken is 5€/kg un the shop and "good" one 15€/kg. Quality beef is nowhere in that range.
I'll reword it. The idea isn't to make everyone skip meat; but to make the non-meat options more competitive. I say this as one with multiple briskets in my chest freezer waiting for some good weather.
Climate Town has an entertaining and informative video on this topic from last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEFBn0r53uQ
Great comment from that video: "When cars were banned from Central Park drivers whined and now we can't imagine it any other way." Everything is impossible until it is done.
Impressive how cars are harmful to society. This is just a small example. We should be more radical in preventing the use of individual automobiles.
If it works in a country where the auto is so ingrained in the culture and lifestyle, it can work anywhere.
The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.
> It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle
It does this by sweeping a lot of negative externalities under the carpet of society. There's no magic here.
https://archive.ph/NRCcg
Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so. I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.
We already had A/B testing of congestion pricing. The A test was without congestion pricing in NYC, and has been tested for decades.
That's not an A/B test because it has no way of controlling for broader economic trends over time. How do you figure out if what you're seeing is because of that one thing that changed, or the enormous list of other things that also changed around the same time?
A more valid design would be randomly assigning some cities to institute congestion pricing, and other cities to not have it. Obviously not feasible in practice, but that's at least the kind of thing to strive toward when designing these kinds of studies.
That would be a bad design for an A/B study (and NYC congestion pricing is not a “study” anyway), because cities are few and not alike and have an enormous list of other things that are different. What NYC equivalent would you pick?
In any case, not every policy change needs to be an academic exercise.
Yup, that is indeed a part of the problem. You'll notice I did say, "Obviously not feasible in practice."
I've got a textbook on field experiments that refers to these kinds of questions as FUQ - acronym for "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions". You can collect suggestive evidence, but firmly establishing cause and effect is something you've just got to let go of.
An important part of testing is establishing assessment criteria and collecting data.
I wish more laws would pre-state what their intended outcome and success would look like.
> Wouldn't it be nice if policy changes were accompanied by an A/B testing plan to evaluate their impact? I have always thought so. I have also seen a major pitfall of A/B testing that real humans can hand-pick and slice data to make it sound as positive or negative as wanted. Nonetheless, the more data the better.
Policies have different effects depending on how likely people judge them to be long-term changes. Construction along a route will cause people to temporarily use alternative forms of transportation, but not e.g. sell their car or buy a long-term bus pass.
Yes, the inability to know counterfactuals will make judging policies more subjective than we might like. The closest we get to A/B testing is when different jurisdictions adopt substantially similar policies at different times. For example, this was done to judge improvements from phasing out leaded-gasoline, since it was done at different times and rates in different areas.
please don't quote the entire comment you're replying to
The real world isn't A/B tests. No government is going to spend millions on equipment and infrastructure on a congestion zone because some engineers are like "Let's just test this out. I have done zero research on what could possibly happen, but it would be fun to see what the results are."
Yeah, let's do that for everything: safety belts, safety on gun triggers, melamine in milk, etc...
Do you A/B test your comments too?
Unfortunately, the possibility exists that the moment of introducing the A/B test requirement will be strategically chosen to freeze the status quo in the way the chooser prefers.
test A - before
test B - after
what are you talking about ?
“A/B in time” suffers from inability to control for other factors that might vary over time. In this case, that could be the economy or other transit policies.
But sometimes it’s the only possible approach.
"before" and "after" introduces a large axis of noise
The problem is that for A/B testing to really work you need independent groups outcomes. As soon as there is any bias in group selection or cross group effect it's very hard to unpick.
Generally, that's considered to introduce counfounding factors on the time axis ("did we see improvement because we changed something or because flu season hit and people stayed home") that you'd prefer to mitigate by running your A and B simultaneously.
But in the absence of the ability to run them simultaneously, "A is before and B is after" can be a fine proxy. Of course, if B is worse, it'd be nice if you could only subject, say, 5% of your population to it before you just slam the slider to 100% and hit everyone with it.
yes, but how the hell he proposes to make A/B testing of "whole Manhattan policy"? build another Manhattan just for test? makes no sense. whole manhattan is important. not 5%. so no 5%. a/b test can be done only for things which affect one person, like for example GUI etc, big group under test but effect on individuals,
in such big scale a/b test is tool to deceive, not to get to right conclusion
It is, indeed, much easier to do A/B testing online in environments you control than IRL.
(Purely hypothetically: one could identify 10% of the island as operating under the new rules and compare outcomes. This is politically fraught on multiple levels and also gives messy spatial results.)
I was living in London when congestion pricing was introduced and went into the West End the day before and the first day of and the difference was night and day. The difference along Oxford Street, Regent's Street, Green Street, etc was astounding.
And in the 20+ years the evidence seems to back up how much of a net positive it has been.
NYC congestion pricing took way too long because the New York Democratic Party sucks and, as usual, legal efforts were made to block it, much as how well-intentioned laws like CEQA (designed to protect the environment) are actually just weaponized to block development of any kind.
What's so bizarre to me is how many people have strong opinions on NYC congestion pricing who have never been and will never go to NYC. Americans love the slippery slope argument. It's like "well, if they make driving cars slightly more expensive in Lower Manhattan then next the government is going to take away my gas-guzzling truck in Idaho".
What's also surprising is how many people who live in outer Queens and Brooklyn chose to drive into Manhattan and were complaining how this changed their behavior. Um, that was the point. I honestly didn't know how many people like that there were.
What really needs to happen but probably never will is to get rid of free street parking below about 96th street or 110th.
Also, either ban or simply charge more for combustion vehicles. Go and look at how quiet Chinese cities are where the vehicles are predominantly electric now.
The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.
And the investments in public transit and bike paths are excellent for those who can't. Such unalloyed win-wins are hard to find.
I lived in Manhattan, and was very well paid. I did not own a car, and loved it. This would have been great for me as well.
Also for those who can't afford car ownership.
Also excellent for those public transport riders who can't afford car ownership.
The best decision would be to completely forbid individual transport. Now the common space dedicated to streets is for who can pay extra. Forbid individual transport and create some parks and pedestrian streets.
They also benefit any and all road-based public transit that crosses the zone.
It’s also excellent for people that take buses.
Source: me
>The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case. The largest burden of this tax is falling on low income commuters who live off the train lines and have to drive into Manhattan, yet all of the money is going to... the train lines (MTA). Understandably they're not too happy.
[dead]
wealthy people do not need to travel as much as pleb....
Let travel for royalty be unimpeded and force the peasants to bike in the rain...
they can choose to be wealthy ( joke sorry )
Not sure I'm happy with turning NYC into a playground for us rich folk.
You'll be glad to see in the article then how much better the city got for people can't afford car ownership.
Congestion isn't limited to cars.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
In other forums there are lots of complaints about the NYC crackdown on e-bikes. NYC has taken steps to discourage their use. Maybe not enough, but definitely more than in most other parts of the country.
Stand on a corner in NYC and count the moving violations the e-bikes commit. Running lights and stops. Going the wrong way. Etc.
These aren't subtle infractions of the law. Tell me why automated traffic enforcement cameras don't target them.
As a motorcyclist, e-bikes piss me off to no end.
> Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
It sounds like measures to limit the danger of electric bikes might be warranted, but that’s a separate issue. Even if electric bikes are a problem I’d be shocked if they came anywhere close to causing the pedestrian fatality rate of cars (even when controlled by frequency of use) in an urban environment, not to mentioni the additional impacts of things like emissions (including non-tailpipe), noise, space, etc. of cars. I don’t know much about motorcycle statistics. I can imagine the group that rides motorcycles might be less likely to hit pedestrians than those of e-bike riders, but I don’t know.
If we have to choose only one of these problems to tackle at a time—which we don’t!—I’d rather they tackle the one which is killing hundreds of people a year.
Seems to be working fine, I know the large city about 60 miles from me looked at this, and I am all for it. But its mass transit is a awful mess, at times walking is faster that taking a subway.
I wish they would start this, but its politics is such a mess nothing really gets done there. New Ideas there gets implemented far slower than then ideas in Roman Catholic Church.
Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious.
The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like highlighting how many fewer chicken deaths would occur if we created an omnivore or meat tax.
IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. How much fewer social interaction is happening across the distances that those car based trips used to occur. And how much harder is it to get goods into the areas. Is less economic activity happening.
In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up.
If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users.
IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.
Driving into NYC is one of those things that is most convenient at the beginning (driving in, stay in my car) but has a high cost at the end (looking/paying for parking, traffic, on a parking time limit, etc.) I do think if people grow ACCUSTOMED to taking the subway in, they will prefer that in most cases.
It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending.
I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
> extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities.
It may also make running a business more expansive. It limits locations and pushes rent up.
I don't think you can infer that people were using their preferred method just from the fact that they were using it - after all, the status quo was also the result of policy.
> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
I think the article mentions this?
> In March, just over 50 million people visited business districts inside the congestion zone, or 3.2 percent more than in the same period last year, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (its estimate tries to exclude people who work or live in the area).
See also the "Other business measures are doing OK so far" heading.
There were critics who predicted that it would not reduce traffic and congestion. They argued people had no choice but to drive and would just be forced to pay.
They are tracking that sort of thing. One of the line items is "vistors to the zone - up". Another two are restaurants and Broadway receipts which have no data yet.
> In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.
The article highlights that was $45 million in the month of March alone:
"In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year."
> people's preferred method
You have some evidence of this?
To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?
Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.
If you would normally do one behavior because it is being heavily subsidized by other people and you are not bearing the cost of that behavior. Of course people have a preference to not bear the cost of their own externalities
Status quo bias. The previous behaviour was also affected by government policies including taxation and infrastructure spending.
There is no objectively neutral baseline of preferences here as long as civilisation exists.
Example of the "force of habit" factor:
Every time my mom comes to visit us in the city, at some point she says she could never live here because she couldn't imagine having to drive in city traffic every day. And every time she does that, I remind her that her car hasn't moved even once since she first arrived a week ago. Mostly we walk everywhere. And every time she responds, "Oh, you're right. You know, that's been really nice."
She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.
I don't think revealed preferences are the only reasonable way to define "preference."
To use an extreme example: Does the homeless alcoholic divorcé really prefer to be homeless and divorced?
For a more abstract example, consider games like the Prisoner's dilemma, where "both defect" is worse for both players than "both cooperate" but choosing to defect always improves the result for a player. Surely both players would prefer the "both cooperate" solution to the "both defect" but without some external force, they end up in a globally suboptimal result.
This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum. If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.
> To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?
Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ).
Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that.
All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety.
I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.
> $45M per year
Well, in a hundred years they should be able to afford a couple of new subway stations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Maybe 10 years, because $45M is per month.
I'm a little unsure how to read you. These results look, frankly, amazing. The benefits to schools and busses alone would have been good. That traffic is faster everywhere is a cherry on top of it all.
And you did see that they had a section on restaurants, right? Those are up. They polled stores and found only 25% that report a negative impact. That looks concerning, I agree. Would love more polling on it with quantification.
Could this still be a bad policy? Of course. Could it be a good policy today that trends to bad some day in the future? I'd think so. But we have tools to monitor this stuff that flat didn't exist before. We should be in a good place to try stuff like this. And, again, these results look amazing.
Getting business stats is fraught. If a business is struggling, the owners opinion on the cause is important, but is it accurate?
In Wellington, New Zealand, failing business love to blame cycle lanes for their woes. The government sacking a significant number of people and an economic downturn is apparently not the cause.
Every study I've ever seen showed that people on foot and on bikes are _much_ more likely to stop and shop or eat during their journey.
There are plenty of places where consumption taxes DON’T have a strong effect, like vice taxes on tobacco and alcohol. It’s absolutely worth actually testing it.
there should be a meat tax, btw. I eat a ton of steak but it's costing the ecosystem dearly
How high would the tax have to be to get you to stop eating so much meat?
Think about it more; if the vegan and steak options were ~equivalently priced - more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive. The idea isn't to make it prohibitive; insofaras don't make the most environmentally-expensive choice also the cheapest.
To compare it to traffic; everyone is miserable sitting in traffic; so giving people an excuse for a bit more WFH is a WinWin.
As a committed meat-eater: I have no idea what vegan food costs, as the label almost immediate makes me skip over them. To make me look at them, you'd have to make the non-vegan options prohibitively expensive.
Well most raw vegan food is already way cheaper that raw meat:
Quality organic dry chickpeas, lentils, beans, soy etc… already are around 2€/kg where I live and when you add water they double/triple in weight so you end up at 1€/kg. You’ll probably eat a bit more weight than meat but still the price is nowhere comparable. Add some whole cereals instead of white bread for nutrition and better satiety: they’re more expensive but you got the price back on the quantity you eat (you won’t stuff yourself that much T165 bread or brown rice: the fibers will make you feel full super fast). And for the vegetable you usually can find stuff super nutritious for cheap : apples, leak, cabbages and alls sorts of oignons.
Even fancy organic quinoa is like 10€/kg but also double in weight and you only eat ~1.3 times the meat weight you’ll eat in meat-meal.
Industrial chicken is 5€/kg un the shop and "good" one 15€/kg. Quality beef is nowhere in that range.
I'll reword it. The idea isn't to make everyone skip meat; but to make the non-meat options more competitive. I say this as one with multiple briskets in my chest freezer waiting for some good weather.
For me 20 dollars a pound to push it into a treat territory.
I don't know know what would replace it though.