Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

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.

there should be a meat tax, btw. I eat a ton of steak but it's costing the ecosystem dearly

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.

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.

> people's preferred method

You have some evidence of this?

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.

How high would the tax have to be to get you to stop eating so much meat?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> $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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me 20 dollars a pound to push it into a treat territory.

I don't know know what would replace it though.

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.

Maybe 10 years, because $45M is per month.

> extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities.

It may also make running a business more expansive. It limits locations and pushes rent up.

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.

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.

> 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."

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.

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 would assume any increase in desirability would be due to an increase in traffic and cash inflow to those businesses/area.

It's sort of weird, because taken to its logical conclusion (nobody drives into lower Manhattan) they would be collecting nothing. They are disincentivizing the thing that they are counting on to provide revenue.

Of course, practically that will not happen, but it could be that they are overestimating the long term revenue stream. As more and more people get used to not driving into downtown, that will become the habit, and then their kids won't be used to it and they won't do it either.

Missing the point, which was that you're not going to convince people like me who ignore the vegan options just by having them be cheaper than meat, because I won't look.

The only thing that would make me look at the vegan options would be if I felt I couldn't afford the meat options.

The cool thing about pricing is you can make the pricing variable to achieve whatever ends you want… if you’re desperate for more cars for some reason you can just lower the cost and the ‘market’ will respond. You can have lower costs in the afternoon or at night, or no cost on weekends.

Vice taxes on tobacco have an incredibly strong direct effect.. especially on preventing youths from starting to smoke and on poor people continuing to smoke…. It’s something like a 7% reduction in the number of youth smokers for every 10% increase in price.

No, people always value convenience, all you need is those money to value the convenience of driving in more than the price of the toll.

>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'm in a suburban area. When I was a child, I got driven everywhere - until I was old enough to take public transit by myself.

I'm about to walk ~3km (2mi) each way to a grocery store, something I do regularly. I save thousands of dollars annually like this. I could feed myself several times over with that money.

It will never stop being strange to me that people actually get that car-dependent mindset ingrained into them.

> more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive.

If?

Getting protein from vegan sources can already be done much more cheaply than getting it from steak, though the quality of the amino acid profile may be lower.

Getting protein from "the vegan option to a steak" - i.e. something marketed to be a direct substitute for a steak, with its vegan nature as an explicit selling point - is a different story.

I presume that, generally, people eat steak because they subjectively enjoy the experience of eating steak, and perhaps because they don't enjoy a carefully planned out plate of legumes and whole grains in the same way. But some seem to be much more extreme about this than others.

I personally eat meat (and dairy) regularly - but probably overall less than the local average, and usually not beef.

Okay, but why is that?

1. Possibly reasons like this: https://archive.is/tjdZ2 ... to save you the click, the title/subtitle reads:

> When Getting Out of Jail Means a Deadly Walk Home > Nearly every day in Santa Fe, N.M., people released from jail trudge along a dangerous highway to get back to town. Jails often fail to offer safe transport options for prisoners.

2. You must have a preference for walking, since a bicycle would be at least 3x and as much as 10x faster than walking.

3. The thousands of dollar number seems misleading. If you bought a car solely for this purpose, yes, I believe you're right. But that seems unlikely. The actual marginal cost of using a car you already owned for this purpose is on the order of $3-500.

I commend and support what you do (though I prefer to use my bike when I can). But I don't think the financial benefits should be overstated. There are, of course, other benefits.

I can understand why poor families might save enough money to make the trip across town to a nice restaurant or a high end shop in a wealthy neighborhood they could never afford to live in. I can't understand how making it prohibitively expensive for poor people to drive into those nice neighborhoods will result in them becoming rich enough to open fancy restaurants and shops in their own poor neighborhoods where no rich people will ever travel to. The people in the poor neighborhood can't afford to eat/shop in such places often enough to support them and rich people won't go into poor neighborhoods for them either.

Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.

A consumption tax isn't going to make meat suppliers any more conscious of environmental effects from poor processes though, if any thing it will push them further away from it to try and lower prices more.

Also steak is a terrible example, cows eat alfalfa which is a nitrogen fixating crop and reduces artificial fertilizer usage that doesn't require pesticides and is basically free to grow anywhere it rains. And we don't grow alfalfa in arid places to feed US people meat, we grow it in arid places because it is near the ports and container ships need some sort of cheap bulk weight to send back to China as ballast.

yes my bad, I misread/mistook the period.

I don’t understand. This family saved to afford a fancy meal, parking, and possibly tolls, but can’t afford the congestion pricing?

It’s not about bringing fine dining to every neighborhood, but if it costs (money or time) more for the poor and rich alike to leave their neighborhood business owners could be incentivized to step up their game.

The average annual cost of owning a car in Canada is >$16000 CAD. In the US it's even higher at >$12000 USD.

Obviously owning a bike, taking public transit and taxis, and occasionally renting a car isn't free, but if you live in a walkable neighbourhood and can take public transit to work it's easy to keep your monthly transportation expenses under $200. The great part about not needing to own a car is that there's no sunk cost that incentivises you to choose one option over another.

1. I’m not trying to convince you or anyone. In fact people always convince themselves, you only can share facts and opinion with them and they do their own arbitrage. Eat what you want to eat.

2. Speak for yourself. "People like me" doesn’t mean much, you may share some thought but everyone have a whole life of different experiences. Your argument on price and affordability makes sense may be shared by others but is probably more complex and nuanced than only that sentence, and others sharing that thought with you today may have a slightly different one yesterday and tomorrow.

3. Not many admit it, but people do changes opinion sometime, framing it as a logical conclusion to thinks they discover, read etc… nobody wakes up and become vegan out of nowhere. They had experiences, process it and make they own arbitrage just like you’re doing. In that sense I know my message has been read by more that only you and hope it helps understanding that many vegans eat more that impossible-burger only.

4. Genuine questions : why do you eat meat ? I guess it’s more than the affordability only. otherwise you’ll smoke, fentanyl yourself and drink only sodas if you can. When I have long talk with someone it usually comes down to habits or tradition. I’d be happy to read your opinion on that question.

Because my experience is that I don't find the food tempting, and so it feels pointless to spend time considering it.

> I’m not trying to convince you or anyone.

Good for you. For those who are trying to convince, the cost increase on meat needs to be substantial, is my point. When I was a child, we didn't have much money. That didn't mean we chose to eat vegan. It meant there were smaller amounts of meat, or cheaper types of meat (such as whale; back then whale meat was a cheap beef substitute in Norway - you'd buy meat if you could afford because whale meat is a lot of effort and tough).

To your argument I should speak for myself: We have clear evidence on the basis of seeing that people rarely end up on a vegan, or even vegetarian diet even when meat is expensive - such as it was during my childhood - to suggest that this is the case for far more people than myself.

> Not many admit it, but people do changes opinion sometime

Yes, but my point is that if you want people to change opinion, it isn't going to cut it if the other options are cheap, as long as people so strongly prefer the more expensive option that they will buy it anyway.

> why do you eat meat ?

Because I enjoy it. I don't need any other reason. I love the taste. I love the texture.

> Genuine questions : why do you eat meat ?

I know not aimed at me, but honest answer: because I grew up eating it. Environmental/moral concerns have never been a prime concern as I don't consider them problems reasonably solved or helped by individual choices. Having sat don for a lengthy talk with an adherent, veganism itself comes off as smug self righteous delusion to me.

But that's my opinion, and opinions are much like assholes in general cleanliness and presentability in public.

"If you live in a walkable neighborhood" is doing a ton of work there. The increase in housing cost almost certainly eats at whatever savings you might see. And the opportunity costs of having fewer work options is not nothing.

> I don't find the food tempting

One thing I realized a number of years ago is that my childhood instilled biases in me.

A Few Examples:

Sushi/Raw Fish/ethnic/spicy food == Bad Apple Products == For Suckers Ford == Found On Road Dead (bowtie life) AMD >>> Evil Netburst Intel empire.

When I realized just how irrational I was on soo many subjects (I had never seen sushi or really any ethnic food until I was at my first SDE job as a 20somthing) - it made me re-evaluate.

> pointless to spend time considering it

Since then; Anytime I've ever considered something pointless to consider - it's been a trigger to consider it. Has honestly been kind of life changing revelation; has led to a much more varied and interesting life than I would have led otherwise based off my upbringing/predispositions. I'd even venture as far as to say it's made me inherently happier as a person as I no longer sneer at the apple user/sky diver/snow boarder/ebike rider/mountain climber/etc - now I look into it and possibly plan a trip.

I'm not saying "vegan > Meat" - I myself BBQ fairly often; but I'd also advise one to consider the vegan entree you sneered at prior; it may well just surprise you. And if it doesn't; the punishment is a deeper understanding! (.. and maybe paying for second lunch. but that's the risk)

> Anytime I've ever considered something pointless to consider - it's been a trigger to consider it.

This is a great motto, probably a root of self-actualisation path. It has been one of my value too but its too easy to forget, thanks for the reminder.

As you talk about barbecue and you like experiences, have you tried Tempeh [0] ? It's off the radar in some parts of the world but a daily staple in others. God for at marinade of your choice for the first time (not raw) or crumble it in a sauce you already know. That stuff is really surprising at first (like... cheese maybe?) but it's really an interesting ingredient. If you can't find it in your "health food store" you may google it for a almost-local seller that ship, for exemple [1] in UK.

[0] http://tempeh.info [1] https://www.temptmetempeh.co.uk/

My view of vegan food has been shaped by occasionally suffering it (ok, so I' exaggerating with the "suffering")

Heck, my breakfeast at the moment is vegan, because I'm on a diet and cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute. But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals.

It's not even that it's always bad. It's again that cost isn't going to get me to consider the vegan options unless the cost difference is absolutely brutal. Other factors might on occasion, such as diet.

My original point was that I'm a little perplexed at how high other people's standards seem to be for a neighbourhood to qualify as "walkable".

Poor families take public transit, they don’t drive. Reducing congestion makes public transit better. If you’re in a place where everyone drives, even the poor, then this thread is irrelevant.

> cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute.

Way off topic now, but: emphasis on few. Surely you don't use more than a couple ounces on a bowl of cereal? You might lose about 20 calories this way - but if you find it that unpleasant, you'll surely find them somewhere else.

> But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals.

Sure - perhaps an extra third of an ounce of steak.

> The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some.

Do you think people in medieval times also preferred commuting by car but had to suffer through using horses? There's no such thing as "preference" that's somehow not influenced by the environment you exist in.

A few here and there adds up. Once I've reached my target weight, I'll ease up gently, and that's certainly one of the things I'll ease up on. For now, it's finding savings everywhere that doesn't affect my sateity.

(Also, I realised I was wrong - I forgot my breakfast has plenty of whey produced from milk in it, so vegetarian but certainly not vegan)