From Wikipedia
3.7 million people were employed in New York City; Manhattan is the main employment center with 56% of all jobs.[19] Of those working in Manhattan, 30% commute from within Manhattan.
And:
The primary mode of transportation in New York City is rail. Only 6% of shopping trips in Manhattan involve the use of a car.
NYC, and specifically Manhattan, is pretty much the only US city where you can get by pretty easily without owning a car but there's no cultural expectation with respect to friends and recreational options that you have one.
You don't need a car in San Francisco. It's a tiny city that's easily traversable by bike, metro and bus - or just walking. I haven't had a car in the city in over 10 years and it's really never impacted me - except for saving me boatloads of money, I guess, probably well over $100K.
SF is an awful place to own a car if you don't have a parking garage; however, you lose out on regional mobility. Marin, Sonoma, Tahoe - so many monumental vistas are an easy drive from SF, but nearly impossible without a motor. (Bicycling gets you some of the way there, but it's still life at a different scale.)
The ultimate SF cheat code is to get a Vespa - the regional mobility of a car, but the ease of travel and parking of a bicycle. Traffic doesn't exist on a Vespa.
My point was slightly different. If you want to go skiing for the weekend, you either have to carpool or rent a car of course. But in NYC (or at least Manhattan/parts of Brooklyn), there's just a general assumption among your local friends, organizations putting together activities, etc. that neither you nor a lot of other people have cars.
By contrast, with a group of paddling friends, some of which live in Cambridge, everyone has a car and while we'll carpool where appropriate the (correct) assumption is everyone has a car for gatherings and activities.
I wouldn't be so sure. A number of my friends tried living without a car and they quickly bought one when they could afford it. There are so many places that the car unlocks.
For instance, taking a bus to Golden Gate park from downtown isn't that fast. If you like to go to the park, it helps to have a car.
> For instance, taking a bus to Golden Gate park from downtown isn't that fast. If you like to go to the park, it helps to have a car.
From personal experience, yes, it's strictly "faster" to take a car to the park from downtown unless you include going to the parking lot, picking up your car, finding a parking spot and then walking to where you're actually trying to go. From Powell it's 16 minutes by the N train every 10 minutes, followed by a 3 minute walk. I guess driving is technically 16, but you know, parking on either side. Or 23 minutes by bike.
Honestly, the fastest way between any two points in the city is a bike (or an e-bike, or scooter) at least 2/3 of the day.
Then you have the spiky "oops all traffic" and your drive gets exponentially longer while your bike commute (or metro, or bus ride with protected lanes) remains exactly the same length.
The kind of places a car actually unlocks (going out of town on weekends) are like $100 for a car rental vs depreciation, financing, tolls, registration, insurance, parking, fines, gas/charging, etc. That gives you a huge car rental and Uber budget. And rental cars are usually available at the same parking lots you'd normally be putting your car.
> From personal experience, yes, it's strictly "faster" to take a car to the park from downtown unless you include going to the parking lot, picking up your car, finding a parking spot and then walking to where you're actually trying to go. From Powell it's 16 minutes by the N train every 10 minutes, followed by a 3 minute walk. I guess driving is technically 16, but you know, parking on either side. Or 23 minutes by bike.
Don't forget about the time to actually get to the station either.
> Then you have the spiky "oops all traffic" and your drive gets exponentially longer while your bike commute (or bus ride with protected lanes) remains exactly the same length.
A cramped bus or train ride gets pretty miserable too. There's nothing fundamentally preventing bike congestion either, aside from bikes being miserable enough that they have a fraction of the usage.
> The kind of places a car actually unlocks (going out of town on weekends) are like $100 for a car rental vs depreciation, financing, tolls, registration, insurance, parking, fines, gas/charging, etc. That gives you a huge car rental and Uber budget. And rental cars are usually available at the same parking lots you'd normally be putting your car.
This must be somewhere between regional and bullshit. Looking it up, it seems like you'd expect to pay around $65/day + gas here for a rental. But then you need to consider availability (hope you didn't plan on going during holiday/vacation season!) and the practicalities of the rental process itself (picking up and delivering the car becomes its own full trip on its own, not to mention all the paperwork involved).
> A cramped bus or train ride gets pretty miserable too.
It's unpleasant but the bus/train will get there at about the same time it would with fewer riders, which is not the case for car congestion.
> There's nothing fundamentally preventing bike congestion either, aside from bikes being miserable enough that they have a fraction of the usage.
Because bikes are smaller and more nimble, it takes substantially more of them to have congestion in the same amount of space as it does with cars. A single stopped car in an 11-foot-wide lane will back up that lane; given the same amount of space cyclists will just go around.
I've been traveling in the Netherlands/Belgium the last few weeks and it's made the space taken up by cars extremely clear. On the streets where cars are restricted, there's a ton of space for pedestrians and cyclists - until a single car shows up, at which point it dominates the available space.
> ... the practicalities of the rental process itself (picking up and delivering the car becomes its own full trip on its own, not to mention all the paperwork involved).
Check out Getaround or Turo. In major cities there's zero paperwork, the keys are in the car, and the car is parked in a parking lot a short walk from where you already are. They're very cheap and you can rent by the hour. There's a getaround parked in the white zone in front of my apartment building that's $53 per day.
Both seem to be very US-focused, and CA specifically.
> In major cities there's zero paperwork,
For a very narrow definition of major, perhaps.
> They're very cheap and you can rent by the hour. There's a getaround parked in the white zone in front of my apartment building that's $53 per day.
For a very broad definition of cheap, perhaps.
And is it going to be available when you actually need it? Even the most congested highways are practically empty a pretty large portion of the day, but that doesn't help you for shit during rush hour.
> and the car is parked in a parking lot a short walk from where you already are.
I assume "huge parking lots everywhere with lots of space" is another US-ism.
Everything I said pertained specifically to San Francisco. You were replying to a sub-thread about San Francisco. Top of thread I said "You don't need a car in San Francisco." Were you expecting me to provide international options? I'm honestly not sure what the availability of Turo or Getaround is even in the US outside of SF.
Further, I said a car rental was $100 for the weekend, and yeah, I guess it was $106. The average American spends $800-1000 per month on their car in excess of the base price according to the AAA, so yeah, $53 per day seems pretty cheap within the context of this conversation.
No way, dude. We have a car parked in a garage, and we take the Lyft ebikes to go to GGP. It's faster from SOMA to take the bikes than the cars. Primarily because you can park at the other end really easily. Same with the Mission. If you add parking time, almost every SF location is better by Lyft ebike.
Have lived here over a decade, with car, motorcycle, bike, and ridden Muni+Bart. I'd never use the buses (way too slow) but ebikes are pure gold in the city.
> they quickly bought one when they could afford it
Anybody can afford a car, and yet we’d be much better off if we didn’t spend 10 grand a year on something we don’t really need. With compounding interest, that 1k a month becomes 500k in 20 years
Average monthly car payment for a new car in California is $738 ($532 used). A record share of Americans are payment $1000 or more on monthly car payments. [1]
Average monthly parking in SF is $340 according to SpotHero, if you have your own place and spot, that added $80-100,000 to the price of your home, so you can decide how you'd like to value that. Today 7.5% APR mortgage, that would add $7500 per year in interest, $625/month. Less if your mortgage is lower-interest.
Bankrate says the average annual insurance cost in SF is $2692 ($224 per month).
AAA says the average price of routine maintenance is 10c/mile. Average distance traveled is 14000mi/yr, so that's $1400/yr ($116 per month).
Add in gas, tolls, fines, registration, collision damage, etc.
Should be $800-1000 per month on top of your car payment.
Which is incidentally what AAA found. US average is $894 per month on top of the purchase price, or just shy of $11,000 per year. And one has to imagine it's a lot more than that in San Francisco. [2]
The GGP's $1K per month estimate is actually probably about half of what people pay all-in amortized over the ownership period of a car. 6.6% return is below the S&P average. I dunno man, the numbers check out, and may even be quite conservative.
That applies to a number of cities but that's the caveat. Especially if you're a bit older, it's common for friends to live outside the city, many jobs aren't in the city, there are activities you might like to do outside the city etc. Yes, there are rental cars but that's the type of thing I was getting at with my comment about cultural expectations.
Everyone in my circle who lives in Boston/Cambridge owns a car.
> You can get by without a car in Boston as I do as well, if you work and live in the city.
FWIW, I lived in the city and worked in a suburb, and also was able to live car-free without issue. This was in the days before ride-hailing apps, so I imagine it'd be even easier now. (Not technically car-free, I know)
I’ve always worked out by 495 not adjacent to commuter rail. So living in town without a car would have been impossible. Indeed would have been too long a commute for me with a car.
I was working off 128 in Waltham and the time I worked overlapped perfectly with a city-sponsored local bus route that took people from the train station to the business areas. There were about 15-20 regulars doing the train-to-bus the morning Since the bus basically existed for commuters, the driver would always wait when the train was late.
The most amazing part of that commute was that most of the commuters actually did a cross-platform transfer at North Station from the Newburyport/Rockport line to the Fitchburg line. Again, one reason it worked is that the conductors on the outbound train would hold a few minutes of the Newburyport train was late.
I live in the area. You can get by, as long as you're willing to risk your life every few minutes. Some parts of Boston are walkable/bikeable, but most of it is not.
I don't really bike and certainly wouldn't in Boston. But most of the urban core (essentially Bay Bay plus the original pre-landfill Boston) plus Cambridge in general are absolutely walkable.
The board of the transit system is currently falling apart and probably facing an impending FBI investigation so all the statements that were made about it being right as rain again within a year when they made the latest service cuts are now laughable.
I would love if (_consistently available_) $15/day street parking was a thing in Manhattan, it'd be a good deal cheaper than garages and obviously a lot more convenient than keeping your car elsewhere. There isn't much benefit to having a car in Manhattan for day-to-day life, but it would be nice to have for things like day trips. Right now I park my car about 45 minutes away in another borough (at my family's house) so when I do need to drive I have a +90min fixed cost added to my commute time.
FWIW, Manhattan commercial real estate goes for about $80/ft²/yr. A parking space therefore costs about $40/day in real estate rent, so $15/day is well below costs.
Is that $80/ft^2/yr raw land value? Indoor space cannot be directly compared against a spot in a garage that’s not climate controlled and is more vulnerable to vandalism.
None of those numbers address the question at issue, which is,
"What percentage of vehicles used in Manattan on a given day are from outside Manhattan?"
>Of those working in Manhattan, 30% commute from within Manhattan.
Most commuters terminating in Manhattan are on mass transit so this stat doesn't really speak to the car question. Also a lot of vehicular traffic in Manhattan is not to do with commuting.
(I suspect the person you are replying to is incorrect, incidentally; I take no position in this argument. Your comment is a bit of a non sequitur is all.)
> Census data show that more city residents than suburbanites drive to work in Manhattan every day, according to Mr. Schaller. He estimated that 263,000 people in 19 counties in and around New York City drive regularly to jobs in Manhattan below 60th Street. Of those, 53 percent, or 141,000, live in the five boroughs, Mr. Schaller said. The greatest numbers are from Queens, with 51,300, and Brooklyn, with 33,400. About 23,900 auto commuters live in Manhattan, while 17,400 are from the Bronx and 15,200 from Staten Island. The suburban area with the most auto commuters to Manhattan is Nassau County, with 22,091 people driving to work in the borough, followed by Bergen County, with 19,975.
So 53% from NYC, 10% from Manhattan, 47% from outside the city. Only counting commuting as you note.
The primary mode of transportation is rail, but even ignoring taxis and Ubers (which we all use sometimes) we depend on things delivered by cars. They don't bring groceries or Amazon deliveries on the subway.
This stuff adds up, and is a big reason why it's expensive to live here.
I guess so, but a $15 toll vs whatever it is now isn't going to impact the price of goods materially unless all those trucks are mostly empty, in which case, good?
It's $24 for small trucks, and $36 for large trucks. Plus the $1.25/$2.50 for taxis and Ubers, of course.
I grant you that it's relatively small when amortized over a truck full of packages, but it's stupid to include trucks at all. They haven't thought it through beyond a superficial level (or worse: they have, and this was intentional).
Regardless, Manhattan is not City of London. City of London is one tiny little corner of London. This tax is closer to the equivalent of putting congestion pricing on all of London inside of M25.
A good chunk of southeastern Manhattan is dramatically underserved by public transit, despite what the MTA's map would have you believe.
I'm talking about from the Seaport all the way up to Alphabet City. I hope you've got strong legs.
Tangentially, this is one of the reasons that nearly-invisible corners of Manhattan like the eastern end of Cherry St and Water St still have serious crime problems today.
Honestly that whole stretch between Smith Houses and Vladeck Houses is pretty fucked.
22% of households in Manhattan own a car. There are about half a million households below 60th St. So there are about 100,000 cars in lower Manhattan that belong to residents. Of those, about 25,000 are used to get to work each day. The rest sit in garages.
So no, residents will not mostly be the ones paying the costs.
But suppose they were. So what? Sounds fair to me. We don't make the subway free for residents. Why should it be free to drive and store your vehicle just because you're a resident?
I think you went the wrong way with that argument. Why don't we make the subway free for residents? All the infrastructure for cars is at least as expensive, but it's still free. (To be fair, there's a gas tax and tolls, but it's still massively subsidized.)
For how progressive HN seems to be I'm surprised at all the support this is getting here. At the end of the day this about as regressive a tax as you can make.
And the whole point of this tax is to fund the most mismanaged organization in NYC -- the MTA.
Think about what it means to be rich. It isn't simply having more money. What it really means is having more options.
Because the rich have more options, they are the ones who can fly on a private jet, or first class, or sail on a yacht, or have a full-time car chauffeur.
America has essentially made it a societal goal to allow 100% of the adult population to drive. What a disaster this has been. Maybe cars should revert to being toys of the rich once again.
If you think that automobiles represent unbridled freedom, you're mistaken.
Cars take away freedom from people who don't drive. Ask about how the car-centric environment degrades the experience of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.
Having been to less-carbrained countries like Japan, I really enjoyed the freedom to take trains everywhere instead of the American so-called freedom to drive everywhere.
I'm all for freedom, but we need to be careful when analyzing how one person's freedom (e.g. to smoke) diminishes another person's freedom (e.g. clean air).
I feel like generally speaking, particularly in Urban areas, being progressive also comes with advocating for public transit over cars for most situations.
I find it hard to care about it being a regressive tax when there are numerous options for making your way into Manhattan - 24 hour subway, ferries, amtrak, PATH, etc.
Almost no one with a low paying job is driving into Manhattan for work.
The level of fearmongering about transit from car drivers is laughable when taking into account how extremely lethal their preferred mode of transportation is relative to transit.
I'm not sure why you're surprised. This site is populated by people who view people and society as nothing more than a complicated Excel spreadsheet and jump at the chance to call things "negative externalities" if it aligns with their belief system despite it having a potentially large negative effect on those that they claim to care about.
I concur. The amount, like certain Scandinavian speeding tickets, should go up with income. A billionaire living in CT shouldn’t pay the same as a plumber living in an outer borough. Also, why not have a different cost between EV and ICE vehicle, as the externalities in terms of air quality differ markedly.
If you provide a low cost for poorer people to drive in, then more poorer people might start driving in since traffic will be better, which negates the purpose of the congestion zone.
That's an interesting angle. And then poorer people will host taxi services for richer people. Oops, cars are fungible, which means charging based on the user's income will not work.
Right, the best you could do would be to base it off of the car model associated with the license plate. But then you might just get people driving their old beaters into the city, which would have worse emissions than their newer cars and be worse for everyone who is near them on the street.
This would be incredibly hard to enforce, though. How would you properly tax a billionaire being driven by a minimum-wage earning driver, for example? How would the MTA get salary data for people commuting in from out of state, etc.
Like asking people for their W-2 in the Holland tunnel? And who do you ask – the driver, the car's owner, the entity paying for the lease, the passenger, or all of them?
I agree, but I think this one would create incredible administrative overhead and still not even get close to 100%.
How about to use the congestion zone you need a transponder which you register for, and annually you update your information in the registration portal?
Incursion and Invasion have military links, Incursion would be brief and limited in scope, invasion is more full on long term. Both terms imply a subtle but a conscious choice in the crossing of the barrier, while intrusion is more neutral in attributing agency to the action.
Runway incursion is a technical term defined by the ICAO:
> Runway incursion. Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving
the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on
the protected area of a surface designated for the landing
and take-off of aircraft.
OP only quoted "Invasion", he did not reference it as "Runway Invasion" perhaps he meant the ICAO term, perhaps he took issue with the term invasion. I assumed he meant the latter, How would we know for sure?
Ambiguity while correcting someone else is not ideal.
I love how there's a perfect counter to every single point you posted. It seems like some people just want to hate.
> - I can't upload random video to the netflix, and I have a certain expectation regarding content there
That's a bug, not a feature. You're basically restricted to the tastes of Netflix's buyers.
> - 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading
Then you're watching the wrong videos. Most of the videos that I and my friends watch are high quality, entertaining, and informative. Their creators usually have Patreons making five figures monthly.
> - I can pay for youtube subscription and would still get a lot of advertisement, because I dared to turn SponsorBlock off. Creators have a very good reason to use this type of ads, and youtube have all responsibility of not providing solutions for this.
You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
> - I can pay for HBO max and watch Sopranos. On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second
Guessing you started streaming only recently, since Netflix/Hulu/HBO all change their inventory frequently due to licensing. It wasn't long ago that you could watch Sopranos on Amazon.
> - I have no idea if my favourite creator was demonetised for DMCA spam by youtube, but I certainly know they are not treated as equal partners in this business in many ways.
This isn't a problem with YouTube, it's a problem with the US legal system.
> - Ultimately I pay for content, and subscription guarantees some kind of investment from the platform in acquiring or producing it. Not true for youtube.
This is your best one, YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries. Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
Re-read the sentence you're replying to. "99% of videos on youtube", not "99% of videos I watch".
>You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
You can also ad-block. The issue is that even paying for YouTube isn't enough to not see any ads on YouTube.
>Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
YouTube merely provides the logistical support. It's not a production company. That is, it doesn't seek out talent to produce content for it. This is the difference the GP is highlighting.
> "99% of videos on youtube", not "99% of videos I watch".
And in the context, this is even less sensible. 99% of content on Netflix is what "you" don't watch. So there's literally no difference on that point for YT and Netflix.
> The issue is that even paying for YouTube isn't enough to not see any ads on YouTube.
Native ads are skippable and are already providing revenue for the creator - skipping them doesn't affect creator's income. Ad-block screws over the creators. There's a difference...
> YouTube merely provides the logistical support.
Have you ever worked at a production company? Because providing legal, logistical and marketing support is also what production companies do - that is what YouTube provides to creators. If you apply the same logic, then Universal Media Group isn't a production company - because they also primarily provide those functions.
Not to mention that YouTube has produced, may even still produce, original content.
>99% of content on Netflix is what "you" don't watch.
"I don't watch this" and "I would never watch this under any circumstance" are different.
>Have you ever worked at a production company? Because providing legal, logistical and marketing support is also what production companies do - that is what YouTube provides to creators. If you apply the same logic, then Universal Media Group isn't a production company - because they also primarily provide those functions.
What you're saying is that production companies provide logistics, and YouTube provides logistics, therefore YouTube is a production company. Socrates is a man, and I am a man, therefore I am Socrates.
>Not to mention that YouTube has produced, may even still produce, original content.
Sure. But the vast majority of the content that drives traffic to YouTube is not produced by them.
> "I don't watch this" and "I would never watch this under any circumstance" are different.
OK. How is this even relevant. Both YouTube and Netflix have easily over 90% of content that "I would never watch under any circumstance"(which is already a false statement on your part).
> What you're saying is that production companies provide logistics
Way to ignore literally everything else I wrote.
> But the vast majority of the content that drives traffic to YouTube is not produced by them.
Same goes for Netflix
When you move the goalpost, make sure that where you move it supports your argument.
No hate, I simply can understand why paying for youtube feels different from paying for netflix. These are not some bulletprof arguments why nobody should pay money, it's just why I personally can feel it's different than paid content provider/producer.
>You're basically restricted to the tastes of Netflix's buyers.
Same as going to the cinema. I don't expect to see 5 minutes of figuring out camera settings and 2 hours of black screen. I completely miss how it's not a feature. At the same time I support variety and experiments with a content of any kind, it's just not that.
>You can easily skip these, not sure what the issue is here.
No issue. I use sponsorblock as I mentioned, so no manual intervention required. Why do I have to do it though.
>all change their inventory frequently due to licensing. It wasn't long ago that you could watch Sopranos on Amazon.
Did you know they announced removal of Sopranos beforehand? You could make an informed decision given a warning.
>it's a problem with the US legal system.
No it's not. But thank you for a perfect counter.
>YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries.
Fair enough, there is some service being provided by youtube. They basically made all the content on platform possible.
>Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
You can feel whatever you want, your rationalizations are wrong though.
And if someone uses false rationalizations to use ad-blockers, while claiming to support the content creators - I can only sense hypocrisy and entitlement.
It's a repeat of the long ago years when piracy and torrents were more popular. And people pretended that stealing movies was somehow ethical.
People will always justify a way to steal, when they can get away with it.
- they could simply not watch YouTube if the content is "99% not worth watching"
- they could pay to watch the content
- they could pay the creator on their patreons, and watch there
Be comfortable stealing and saying that it's stealing. Or pay with your ads / money. The hypocrisy is stealing and claiming that YouTube should somehow provide a service for free.
I think the DMCA issue is a problem with both the US legal system and YouTube. A big part of it is the fact that YouTube makes it way too easy for supposed rightsholders to automatically DMCA any videos they want, and don't provide a reasonable process for clearing false claims. Their own system for detecting things like copyrighted music also makes no attempt to account for fair use, treating even a 5 second snippet of a popular song as if it was the whole thing.
> This is your best one, YouTube has created tons of wealth for creators and has cut out tons of the usual Hollywood intermediaries. Additionally, there has never been a greater investment made on storing and distributing video like the one Google made on YouTube.
Patently not true. Most of the big YT channels these days have sponsors or controlling orgs. Often own wholely or partly by the big dogs.
Plenty of others like that, e.g. Take 5 Media Group , Wake Up , and INNOCEAN, etc.
There are certainly individual contributors, but if you think most of the big channels aren't 100% owned and operated you're being played.
And in their defense, there is just a lot of dross on YT; allowing anyone to upload anything means 90% of it is crap. Netflix's buyers may have a specific set of tastes, but I don't have to sort through reams of poorly edited memes & reaction videos.
On the off chance you were not aware, bs4 also supports[0] getting parse events from html5lib[1] which (as its name implies) is far more likely to parse the text the same way the browser would
Looks like lxml w/ xpath is still the fastest with Python 3.10.4 from "Pyquery, lxml, BeautifulSoup comparison" https://gist.github.com/MercuryRising/4061368 ; which is fine for parsing (X)HTML(5) that validates<
(EDIT: Is xml/html5 a good format for data serialization?
defusedxml ... Simdjson, Apache arrow.js)
I was curious, so I tried that performance test you linked to on my machine with the various parsers:
==== Total trials: 100000 =====
bs4 lxml total time: 110.9
bs4 html.parser total time: 87.6
bs4 lxml-xml total time: 0.5
bs4 xml total time: 0.5
bs4 html5lib total time: 103.6
pq total time: 8.7
lxml (cssselect) total time: 8.8
lxml (xpath) total time: 5.6
regex total time: 13.8 (doesn't find all p)
Same here, I am unable to properly quantify it but there was something about the soup api I did not really like.
It may have been because I learned on the python xml.etree library in base(I moved to lxml because it has the same api but is faster and knows about parent nodes) and had a hard time with the soup api.
But I think it was the way it overloaded the selectors. I did not like the way you could magically find elements. I may have to revisit it and try and figure out why and if I still do not like it.
Tech only gets you so far. Japan had a gigantic oil problem, even if they had developed supersonic jets at the end of the war they wouldn't have had the fuel to use them. Nice thing about kamikazes is that they use half the the fuel, since they don't need to return.
"Gitmo" didn't open until 2002