The financial & car industries have been immensely successful at making cars accessible to all consumers. Anyone with an income, a bit of credit history and a pulse can roll out of dealership with a car. Roads on the other hand are publicly funded and physical constrained. It's inevitable that car owning will have to become much more expensive via taxes in the decades ahead.
The mayors listed are not however making their cities particularly more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. They generally sandbag those improvements on the slightest complaints about loss of parking or access. DiBlasio drives to a gym in Brooklyn everyday and has the NYPD run a war on ebikes/bikes, Durkan just canceled a long-planned bike lane on an important arterial, Portland's doing a massive freeway expansion. Most of these cities are failing on Vision Zero efforts.
The reason congestion pricing is catching on is that the wealthy & politically connected older generations finally settled on it as the way to reclaim their privilege to drive straight into the downtown from their suburbs. Congestion pricing is now just another way to maintain a vehicular status quo.
I disagree. Pretty much any economist will tell you that the best way to reduce consumption of a good is to increase its price.
By implementing congestion charges only those with a good enough reason to drive will do so, and give an incentive to use alternatives.
Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.
If people still decide they want to burn more of their money driving, they are welcome to do so. No one is telling anyone how to spend their money. We are simply adjusting the price of a good to price in things that aren’t taken into account (traffic).
People arguing that congestion charges dispropropprtioanlly affect the poor often also support pricing in the true cost of other things, like carbon emissions and plastic bags. Are you saying you wouldn’t support a tax on plastic? Or emissions? Cap and trade? Those things also increase the prices of things we want to discourage the consumption of and also probably affect people with lower incomes disproportiaonately. You can’t have it both ways.
> They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.
As a cyclist, I'm interested in how much congestion pricing (and related ideas like eliminating free parking) would promote cycling.
For a while when I lived in the DC area, I would use a paid bike parking service. I parked in a parking garage that charged something like $10/day for car parking. If I recall correctly, I ended up paying $0.53/day, which seemed very fair to me. I wouldn't mind more paid bike parking if it were good quality like this was. I didn't have to worry about theft. I parked in a cage that took up roughly 5 car parking spots, yet could fit roughly an order of magnitude more bikes.
> Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.
This is all very well in the abstract, but what exactly are those people supposed to do in the meantime - you know, while the public transit that they demand actually gets built?
True enough. I think the point here is to reduce that marginal car. When the decision is to drive or not drive and there is a viable alternative (which in NY there is, unlike, say LA), then this takes that marginal car off the road when people say, ah screw it its not worth the extra couple bucks.
Congestion pricing is great, but I am pointing out the underlying politics, its just being used to prolong the car first status quo in these cities. theres not really an earnest follow through for road/parking diets, protected bike lanes and 2x, 3x public transit that are actually needed.
This is the point being made by many of us here in Portland when congestion pricing is brought up. It makes vastly less sense here without good public transit, and it will disproportionately affect the working classes. While the wealthy will continue as usual.
I think it's putting the cart before the horse. Improve the public transit first. I also have very little confidence that congestion pricing revenue would be spent wisely.
I ride buses. And the biggest reason the bus is late and slow is traffic. So yes, less congestion will help. Also the more riders, the more reason to add frequency.
The City of Portland is not doing a massive freeway expansion, the Feds are doing it. They deemed I5 going through Portland to be a bottleneck and required the expansion.
The majority want the bottleneck fixed. "massive freeway expansion" is absurd - it's less than a mile, and isn't adding more lanes than are already on points north and south of it.
Is optimizing for bikes worth the disruption to traffic? It seems like a handful of bicyclists hold up a lot of people in cars.
(Also, the anti-suburb sentiment is quite ... problematic. Hint: There is a reason most of the good ethnic food in New York is in actually in Westchester and Long Island.)
As a daily transportation cyclist, I doubt I add any measurable amount of time to the commutes of drivers I encounter on the road. In fact, it's not uncommon to see the same drivers at multiple stoplights because the effective speed (due to the stoplights) is sometimes a bit slower than I ride.
That of course leads to another problem: Impatient drivers giving me close "punishment passes" only to wait at the stoplight. This is a common experience for cyclists.
Add on top of this the fact that most cyclists usually take different routes than drivers would from point A to point B. (Routes with less cars.)
1) Gentrification has moved most of the lower-income folks in Queens away from the subway lines. And in the Bronx, there is not much subway access to begin with (the lines are spaced as far apart as the entire island of manhattan).
2) The NYC congestion pricing scheme would apply to folks entering Manhattan. That would seem to include folks coming in from the Bronx and Queens.
The overall point remains--the "bridge and tunnel crowd" aspersions always were classist, but the gentrification of manhattan has now made it quite racist as well.
"the plane should never have gotten the green light to fly."
this is an overstatement. airframe fuel efficiency is a undoubtable good thing vis a vis climate change, costs, etc. Obviously they've reached a point were the aerodynamic profile of a modern, efficient airframe is difficult to control via manual pilot input alone in some scenarios. This was the case for stealth technology with fighter/bomber designs.. the B2 for example has no vertical stabilizer and would not be controllable at all without fly-by-wire. Of course pilots will lament complexity and the loss of manual input. Regardless, the FAA wanted MCAS in the 737Max. Augmenting human input in the face of instrument failure and possible human failure is an extremely hard problem and uncharted territory for the industry. Doesn't at all mean its a not a worthy goal or that the designers or regulators had ill intent or negligence.
That's not really the problem with the B737 MAX though. It's not inherently unstable like e.g. a fighter. The issue is that they had to fit the engines in front of the wings, and this will create a significant pitch-up if thrust is added abruptly, e.g. in a go-around.
To counteract this they introduced the MCAS system. They would not have needed this if they hadn't "retrofitted" big engines on an old airplane design, but instead started from scratch. The B737 MAX is not really a modern aircraft, but a heavily modded old design.
The problem here isn't that a 737 MAX style design is inherently unstable. The issue is that the larger engines really needed longer landing gear and other significant airframe changes, but due to demands from Southwest that it remain within type-certification for the 737 (to avoid the costs of pilot retraining) some unfortunate compromises were made that affected the aircraft's behavior.
You can design an aircraft just like this that won't have those characteristics. You'll just need to pay to get it certified and then airlines will have to pay to train their pilots. Instead, Southwest wanted the band-aid fix, and Boeing obliged them.
An aerodynamically sound redesign to accommodate the high bypass engines would have been just as fuel efficient as the version with confusing software band-aids.
If it is cheaper to invent something like MCAS than to properly adapt the airframe, then maybe the processes that would be used for the latter are ripe for some efficiency optimization.
agree with most of the other comments in this thread, but would add
- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.
- Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.
- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.
This is hysteria. I have many coworkers who ride BART on a daily basis for 15+ years and not a single reported incident from any of them, other than stinky homeless people that very rarely ride during peak hours.
slightly depends on your entry/exit stations but I would regularly see crack/heroin use, defecation, deranged meth heads screaming and/or picking fights. I doubt I am alone in this.
Definitely not Hysteria. I have inhaled second-hand crack smoke walking up the stairs at Civic Center, watched a man defecate on a crowded train, and saw a person get stabbed in the past 5 years of riding BART. It's not this bad in NYC or LA and I couldn't even dream of seeing things like this in Europe or Asia.
Have you personally taken BART on a consistent enough basis? I took it two days a week for a significant length of time and calling it filthy is not hysteria at all.
Seconding a couple of other replies here: it is not hysteria. In the 20 years I've lived in the Bay Area, BART has gone from tolerable to completely revolting.
I don't ride it often and haven't seen any violent crimes, but I've seen police remove quite a few people. Last time we had to wait a while as the police asked the guy to pick up his own used needles.
I grew up in SF, now live in Toronto and spend a lot of time in NY. Pretending that Bart/MUNI arent on a completely different level than other major cities is ridiculous.
there's always been bad information but it was previously hard to disseminate NEW bad information quickly. It was incredibly expensive, slow and there were watchers, gatekeepers ... various religious authorities, newspaper editors etc. now the russian election manipulation cyber warfare division or your local anti-vax grifter can anonymously target a limitless number of impressionable rubes with the click of a mouse. often for free if the content's viral. thanks social media!
financial illiteracy is a real problem in journalism. You can't really judge how egregious/successful these guys were without knowing the annualized NET revenue of this business.
And we don't even know if those numbers have been released to the public yet. (they probably haven't since expenses take a while to compile, whereas deposits into a bank account are easy to count)
Eevenue is a useful measurement of how large the operation was.
There is some information about profit in the article:
>The rent for one apartment was $3,225, but it was on Airbnb for $250 a night. Hypothetically, Mr. Beckman could cover a month’s rent by filling it with tourists for about two weeks. In just a few months, Mr. Beckman had booked more than 500 guests and generated about $84,000 from the building at 78 East 119th Street, according to the city’s lawsuit.
another clickbait article from this organization. "${TechCo} paid X% in taxes but it should have paid Y% * Current Year Net Income".
What specifically is ITEP arguing for? GAAP profitability is not Taxable income is not Net Cash flow. The IRS has different multi-year schedules for various asset amortizations/depreciation than GAAP so of course the tax rates can be significantly different if the company is investing in growth.
how pointless that the state is spending decades and tens of billions on HSR from SF to LA for a hypothetical sub-3 hour journey, while it still takes 1.5 to 2.5 hours to get between various important locations in the Bay Area by public transit.
Caltrain electrification is a comparatively small project and seems will happen quickly regardless of HSR.
the Bay Area provides 40% of state tax revenue and, even worse, externalizes the costs of its awful development policy on a large chunk of Northern California population in form of increased housing and transportation costs.
Well, public transit in the rest of the state is in an even worse condition than public transit in the Bay Area. HSR duplicates the functionality now provided by planes. The umpteen billions being demanded for HSR hypothetically could provide decent bus service across the state. But given the current bureaucracy, the situation feels more like "how much money would like us to embezzle and what story would you like to hear while we're doing?"
Which isn't to say I'm pro-car or pro-private-instead-of-public. If anything, a spot light needs to be shown on the clot of public-private corruption apparently controlling US transit decisions.
You don't need to hypothesize what the alternative to HSR would be. It was well researched. The alternative, expanding highways and airports, was more than 2x the cost of HSR. Of course, the costs of HSR have grown, but so would the highway and airport costs.
The biggest cost to HSR is acquiring and developing property in developed areas. But this is significantly more costly for highways and airports.
The solution to the bloated HSR budget is to improve the process, not to switch to another alternative mid-stream that both theoretically and in practice would be at least as bloated and even more costly.
I'm unusual, but I think it might have been better to focus on better medium speed rail instead of HSR. I still support HSR, but honestly even if a train from SF to DTLA were 6 hours it would be superior to driving or flying, and if the extra funds made it available in 2020 instead of a million years from now, and that we could service Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, etc. (the Coast Starlight route) that would be a pretty huge plus.
Long-term, we need to switch from planes to HSR for trips of 400 miles or less, unless someone can come up with a carbon-free alternative to jet fuel. Americans tend to have a warped perspective because our trains are so crappy compared to what is standard in Western Europe or east Asia.
If the option was one versus another, then the question may be valid on why that one is chosen (I don't know, I don't have the full background). If you are suggesting that both could be done with the same money, that's a completely different story. What is your point?
too bad the SJC airport runway axis runs straight across downtown. They could otherwise go much much higher/denser in the urban core.
Capitol Corridor really could use an investment from the state (instead of HSR boondoogle). Huge chunk of the north-bay could be shifted to proper public transit connections to SF/East Bay economic centers.
2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with spiraling costs increases and population growth
3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit ( ~$750/month) in the early 2010s
The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too much)
The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming "chronically homeless".
The mayors listed are not however making their cities particularly more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. They generally sandbag those improvements on the slightest complaints about loss of parking or access. DiBlasio drives to a gym in Brooklyn everyday and has the NYPD run a war on ebikes/bikes, Durkan just canceled a long-planned bike lane on an important arterial, Portland's doing a massive freeway expansion. Most of these cities are failing on Vision Zero efforts.
The reason congestion pricing is catching on is that the wealthy & politically connected older generations finally settled on it as the way to reclaim their privilege to drive straight into the downtown from their suburbs. Congestion pricing is now just another way to maintain a vehicular status quo.