Small correction, every ride that starts and/or ends in the zone incurs the fee so a taxi that enters, does 12 trips, then leaves pays the same amount as a private car even though they only entered the zone once.
There's still a per-ride citywide congestion fee baked into each Uber fare. So overall there are still more overall congestion taxes paid by the taxi/uber in your scenario.
It should be cheaper. No circling the block looking for parking, no space needed at all for that matter. That alone is worth giving taxis/ubers at least a different pricing structure.
I don’t know about cheaper - this is already on top of the $2.75 per-ride NY State congestion fee.
So now, if you take an Uber ride in NYC that’s even just a few blocks or few minutes long, it will be $2.75+$1.5 = $4.25 of just congestion fees for every ride.
Fewer cars "in the system" but same (or possibly more) cars on the road actively moving. Take a look at some of the dwell times for ride hail vehicles in NYC. Can easily approach 20-35%.
Plus the apps are kicking drivers out at various quiet periods of the day in order to avoid paying them minimum wage. So true empty time is higher.
Again I'm not arguing for better treatment for personal vehicles. I'm arguing all the fees are too low, and the ride hail fee egregiously so.
I don't know any of the science or research, but it still seems like it could possibly be a benefit. The increase in cars moving seems like it could be more than offset by the reduction in parking requirements. Those people taking private vehicles have to park them somewhere. More taxis means we can use some of that space for something useful instead.
> The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
The fee for cabs was actually set by dividing the regular fee for private cars by the average number of trips cabs make into the Congestion Relief Zone per day (because the fee is only paid once per day for private cars, but per trip for cabs)
And further, if I am already paying $50 fare to take an Uber, a $1.50 toll is not deterring me or reducing my usage at all. It is less than the rounding error on the tip I give the driver. I probably won't even notice it amongst the 5 line items of fees, taxes, surcharges, etc on the digital receipt.
This is where the dogma gets in the way of reality. Uber and cabs are the glue that fills the gaps that public transit has left unfilled for decades.
The policy goal is to reduce congestion by discouraging personal vehicles in the zone and generate revenue for transportation as a whole, not to turn the city into a pedestrian park. The state took an approach that does that without nuking the city.
Based on the fact that nobody seems to be giddy about this, I’d say they did a decent job at that. If the crazy transit nuts are happy and the angry Jersey people are happy, something went wrong.
Moreover, the parent misses the forest for the trees: yeah, the congestion fee is lower than the fare, but the fare is vastly more expensive than driving a car.
The current pricing model encourages resource sharing (this was true before congestion pricing as well), and the choice of whether or not you take a car or a cab is a function of the amortized cost of use per unit time. So yeah, just in terms of congestion fee it's a little bit cheaper to take an Uber for a single trip, but if you ride around in an Uber all day long, it's way, way less cost efficient than driving your own car.
The congestion relief zone is probably one of the single densest transit zones on the planet. Rideshares and cabs are definitely useful for filling in the gaps in the boroughs, but you basically never need one in downtown Manhattan.
I live in Manhattan and I am decidedly anti-car. If I had my way private vehicles would be banned (with exceptions for e.g. people with relevant disabilities).
But cabs are important! This past august, I bought a new desktop PC (I did not want to build it myself for various reasons). I took it home in an Uber. Trying to walk to the subway with that giant box would have been virtually impossible.
You're forgetting that the transit zones themselves are not only affected, the main BRIDGES are also affected. So even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances
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Manhattan's Congestion Relief Zone starts at 60th Street and heads south to include the Lincoln, Holland and Hugh L. Carey tunnels on the Hudson River side, and the Queensboro Bridge, Queens Midtown Tunnel, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge on the East Side.
Drivers will be charged when they enter the Congestion Relief Zone using the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro or Williamsburg Bridges, or the Holland, Hugh L. Carey, Lincoln or Queens-Midtown tunnels.
Drivers coming from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan will be charged once they reach 60th Street.
> even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances
Incorrect--if you take one of those bridges/tunnels below 60th street, then stay on FDR or West Side Highway to travel to a different part of NYC (i.e. you never enter the interior surface streets below 60th), then you don't pay the congestion fee.
"The Congestion Relief Zone includes local streets and avenues in Manhattan south of and including 60 Street, excluding the FDR Drive, West Side Highway/Route 9A, and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections to West Street."
It’s only the densest transit zone in the US. Many international locales are denser and measurably better.
This issue highlights that people take for granted that things are permanent and people will accept anything. This is great for me — I’ll happily pay the toll to move faster when I’m in the city. But my guess is my customers will start melting away faster and I’ll be spending quality time in Jersey. That was happening even before COVID and I think will accelerate.
They would have been smarter to hold out for a few years and add a surcharge to the road mileage tax that’s coming.
But without the profit motive and the need to turn a profit for a few layers of middlemen, the impact on GDP will be much smaller than in the US.
There's a reason why healthcare expenditure per capita in the US is multiple times higher than any other OECD country, and why health insurance companies are some of the biggest public ones.
I remember this article was extremely eye opening for me as a recent grad in 2013 Boston.
I think it's hard for people to understand today how much less the ideas like lean startups, Paul Graham essays, customer validation, etc had penetrated software engineering mindset in early 2010's, at least outside of SFBA.
And here we are 11 years later with people cargo-culting all those things. I once overheard someone seriously suggest building a MVP for a game in an established genre.
As an avid gamer, I can tell you that early access games that are too early don't do well unless they're made by someone famous. Early access works well with games that are released in a semi-polished state - Hades is probably the poster child for a well executed early access.
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