Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

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.

Why does the slippery slope concept surprise you? It actually happens often - banning smoking indoors, for example - started in just one city, once they tweaked the model and overcame the legal challenges, it spread rather quickly. Legalized casinos, same thing. Uber, drinking age, pot legalization, more. Why would toll roads or congestion pricing be different? (Idaho's Sun Valley probably already implements something similar). And ICE vehicles are definitely in many politicians' crosshairs, if you don't already see that coming in the next decade, you aren't really looking.

These would be examples of normalization, not a slippery slope. The OP's example makes this clear (from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car," not "congestion pricing in NYC" to "congestion pricing elsewhere").

(Regardless, I think the answer is simple: congestion pricing is only economically viable when an area is simultaneously congested and has alternative transportation methods that would prevent the local economy from collapsing. NYC is one of a very small handful of cities in the US where this is true, although that's largely a function of 80 years of car-centric design. Maybe it will change.)

The argument that because a few things have spread, things in general are likely to spread is itself a slippery slope argument.

> Why would toll roads or congestion pricing be different?

The answer is actually quite simple: It won't be different. Prove to me it won't spread, because almost every new tax spreads.

When is the last time a tax has existed in one state, and not spread to other states within 5 years?

Numerous politicians and advocates have suggested exempting electric vehicles from the NYC congestion pricing. Such vehicles are exempt in London. It isnt unusual for governments to start a program with one goal or purpose, then expand it (or use as a launching point) to achieve further goals, such as banning ICE vehicles.

This is currently happening with cigarettes. Banning them at workplaces and other public places is one thing. But we live in a capitalist country that celebrates individual freedom. Or do we? Beverly Hills CA and Manhattan Beach CA have both banned the sale of cigarettes entirely. Massachusetts banned all flavored cigarettes and is trying to permanently ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone a born after a certain date.

These go beyond "normalization", it is exactly slippery slope... get a small foothold then keep expanding the position.

You and I are in agreement

I think the slippery slope has long happened and also gone away.

There are a ton of roads with "turnpike" or "pike" in their name. Some cost money [1] others are free. What's the big difference between NYC's congestion pricing and the Florida Pike?

I guess you can fight congestion pricing in order to slow the spread of toll roads but it's not the beginning of a slipper slope. Usage fees are a very old concept (price discrimination by time is pretty old as well).

[1]: https://floridasturnpike.com/system-maps/

Note that from 2026, electric vehicles will no longer be exempt from the London congestion charge.

I'm generally sympathetic to arguments that are "we will fall down the slippery slope." But as someone who has spent too much time stuck in traffic, I WANT congestion pricing to spread. It's just basic economics that people end up paying for a "free" resource with time - grossly inefficient.

I'm fundamentally against any measure that intentionally increases the cost at use of any form of transportation service whatsoever. Public transit? Free. Gas tax? Kill it.

I grew up on a goddamn island, I've seen what an inability for people to travel easily or when the cost of doing so has to be seriously weighed does to an economy and it's not good for anyone or anything except a very select lucky few who are well positioned to take advantage.

While the NY government can probably extract this rent from this area without damaging anything serious but it is not something that should be allowed to proliferate.

INB4 environment/pollution, the richer we all are the better custodians we will be of the environment. Nobody cares if their energy is clean when they can barely make ends meet.

Time is a cost though. You're looking only at monetary cost.

This is a curious form of fundamentalism. "All motion is good, and damn any effort to coordinate it."

Excessive car use lowers mobility for EVERYONE. Restrictions to car use, lower speeds via traffic calming, removing car lanes and adding bike and bus lanes, all of this IMPROVES transportation times including for cars!

This is precisely the reasoning I bring up. In essence traffic congestion is an externality not unlike pollution. What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time. We've made explicit a cost that was already there, and by doing so the system can respond to it and behave more intelligently.

I’m impressed. This is one of the strangest opinions I’ve ever seen. What is special about “at use”? Presumably because it lets you avoid the question of whether everyone should get a free car. Does a monthly car payment count as “at use”? Why not if a monthly transit pass does?

The other replies point out that different forms of transit compete with each other, so the more cars we have, the fewer bikes and trains.

Because once an investment has been made in a car and roads or in a train line or whatever there should be no artificial distinctive for people to use it as they deem appropriate.

Exactly. The janitor has every right to sit in gridlock beside the CEO. If either doesn't like it they can adjust things but realistically the CEO's got the most ability and incentive to do so.

These artificial price distortions wind up most benefiting the people who were in the best position to alter their behavior.

Gas taxes (partially) pay for the roads. Get rid of those and you've just decreased your tax base, which means you're going to have to pay for it from another tax. It's just shifting the tax burden. We can argue about what's a better tax policy, if a certain tax is progressive or regressive and so on but wherever the money comes, somebody needs to pay for the roads.

NYC is one of about 2 places in the US that actually has usable public transit, barring certain outer boroughs where car ownership dominates. It's largely a hub and spoke model though so it's good for going into and out of Manhattan but not so good for, say, getting from Red Hook to Flushing so driving will dominate that kind of travel.

But that's why congestion pricing is targeted at Lower Manhattan and can't really spread beyond it. Like see how far you get trying congestion pricing in Houston or Dallas, let alone Bakersfield, Boise or Lexington (KY).

Economic incentives work. They're probably most responsible for the drop in smoking. Congestion pricing consistently changes people's behavior and every metric shows it. Some bus lines in NYC now move nearly 30% faster.

I don't know what island you're talking about and what happened but will generally agree that people are struggling all over. It's well-known that real wages have largely been stagnant for 40-50 years.

But that's not a problem caused by gas taxes. It's caused by capitalism.

People suggest all kinds of things. Just about every special interest group in the city wanted a congestion exemption; most did not get it. I don’t think this itself makes for good evidence of a slippery slope.

"normalization, not a slippery slope"

Sounds like an arbitrary distinction, but in any event, it was the OP who used "slippery slope" to refer to going from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car."

I’m in the side of transit should be free, but as I understand it, the fare is often a pretense to more easily enforce problematic behavior on the train. Fare evasion and other antisocial behavior often come together.

California has quite the gas tax, but it seems to do little to change behavior. Likely because the alternatives to driving are generally not great, but rolling the taxes back shouldn’t be the solution.

The distinction is important: a change in a law isn’t always a slippery slope towards other things. Implementing congestion pricing isn’t a slippery slope towards seizing peoples’ cars, which was GP’s point (which I agree with).

To make it obvious: universal suffrage is a change that happened, but it wasn’t a slippery slope towards giving dogs the right to vote. Some changes result in new stases.

> What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time.

Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.

The trains and subway are right there...

But when there are multiple competing forms of transit, or high externalities caused by use (or overuse) artificial disincentives are optimal. As an example, if you have access to both a car and a train, and the car pollutes less than the train, some artificial incentive to only use the car when necessary and to use the train otherwise is actually optimal.

You're also, it seems assuming that investment is a one-time thing. Once an investment has been made in a train line or a car, you still need to afford maintenance over the thing over the lifetime of the thing. Including the opportunity costs of doing other things instead.

The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, if not lower, than being shot elsewhere.

As others have said, you are describing a totally imaginary world where money is the only cost. “Artificial” is doing all the work. But the very investments you’re describing are “artificial”, and more than that, they require constant spending to maintain. Why should cost at point of use be the only artificial incentive? What about the environment created by those investments? The quality of roads, the cleanliness of the train? Your distinction is contrived in service of your predetermined conclusion.

Yep, except for public holidays where I'm going by car I never spend time in traffic. In my small city I can e-bike everywhere on almost entirely separated bike paths and if the weather isn't good I can take the bus or subway. If all else fails there's still Uber and Bolt

Taking up space, degrading public infrastructure, polluting the air, and killing pedestrians are real ongoing costs of transportation. The cost does not magically end at vehicle purchase.

Driving your car incurs real externalities. Putting a price on it fixes the artificial extra incentive to drive, by making freeloaders pay up.

It's funny how the urban design forcing poor people to pay car insurance and auto loan, just to survive, is fine; yet charging a hundred or so to use the highly valuable space in the city is outrageous.

Concern about public order is fair. But instead of fighting for the privilege to avoid it cheaply, why not fight to actually fix it. Triple the prison population, or whatever your solution is.

Japan has a 99% conviction rate, and still has 56% of women reporting having been groped on transit.

This cannot be solved. To force women on transit is to flip a coin whether they will be assaulted. You’re not going to beat a car culture with that strategy.

I heavily doubt that New York City has the appetite for incarceration that would be necessary, for even a remote chance, to turn public transit into a merely neutral option versus a car.

What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease. Just like that, the dream was dead and I realized we will never escape car culture.

Cars are bad. The alternatives are too flawed and dangerous in their own ways, to have any serious chance at unseating the incumbent.

I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.

As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.

[1]: https://nypost.com/2025/04/03/us-news/nyc-subway-crime-drops...

3 hours ago:

https://nypost.com/2025/05/14/us-news/nyc-subway-musicians-f...

New York Times in March:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/nyregion/subway-crime-nyc...

This Post article doesn't provide a source. Mine claims the NYPD as a source but doesn't link it either, though. It seems like only one of these can be correct: there would have to be a very large spike in felony assaults in a single month for the number to go up by 9% YoY.

The Times article doesn't mention this year's stats. Last year's were definitely worse, so it's not surprising they mention that.

Japan is not NY and arguments based on sociatal/cultural behavior don't apply universally. Do you personally use these scary subway systems in the US that you have so many stats about?

Interesting; instead of trying to answer my statistical objection, you are now forcing me to provide anecdotal evidence; to then most likely reject it for being anecdotal evidence. Pass.

As for “it doesn’t apply universally,” that’s not an argument because almost nothing applies universally - not even a sunrise and sunset, if you’re at the North Pole. My point can still be valid in almost all metro areas.

Finally, let’s say I did use these systems (and, sometimes, I do use public transit). I’m a man, you are 90% likely here to be a man, we’re not the ones getting groped, therefore our personal opinions on the likelihood are obviously irrelevant. You should be asking your wife and your 15 year old daughter to ride for a year and rate their comfort level.

> Right, because you’re an elitist

Please stop this style of commenting. You've been here long enough to know it's against the guidelines.

Wow - there's free street parking in Lower Manhattan?! Yep, there's your problem!

Here in Sydney Australia, we don't have any congestion charge (there's been some talk about introducing one, but it's not really on the cards at this time). But it's pretty much impossible to find parking in the CBD (Mon-Fri 9-5) for less than around AUD$60 (USD$40) per day. There is literally no un-metered street parking anywhere in the CBD (also the parking inspectors are everywhere). Plus many of the routes in are tolled (although by no means all routes). Plus, things like the numerous one-way streets, bus-only lanes (with cameras), and ultra-low speed limits, makes it an extremely unpleasant driving experience (with a high risk of getting fines), for folks who are used to just driving in the suburbs. All of that effectively acts as a congestion charge - most people choose public transport over driving, when heading into the city centre, because in practice the cost of regularly doing the latter is prohibitive.

But nobody was claiming congestion pricing would absolutely lead to seizing cars. The OP was talking about the fear that more things may happen, which is perfectly logical. Today, nobody (including you) can say whether 10 or 20 years from now, ICE cars will be banned. But observing steps that appear to lead in that direction, and being concerned or fearful, is rational and logical.

New York's congestion pricing was just implemented. It's far too early to know whether it will, or to claim it won't, lead to further restrictions, such as banning some vehicles altogether.

New York State already has a major toll road (NY Thruway) and tolls to enter New York City. So do New Jersey and Connecticut, the other states you must drive through to enter New York City. The congestion pricing is a new charge on top of longstanding toll roads and bridge/tunnel tolls, so it feels like a new category and the start of something new, rather than being equated to "usage fees" as you state, at least in the minds of many drivers.

With regular toll roads, if you don't want to pay the toll, you can drive on a different road instead and still get to the same place at the same time.

Could you please expand on how that is murder?

Well, yes. Once you demonstrate that a good idea works and the doom doesn't come to pass, it gets copied. It's easy to claim that something doesn't work when nobody's doing it. Making the same claims when someone nearby is doing it and it works requires a higher level of reality-denial. Now, there's a lot of reality-denial to go round in politics these days, but occasionally a good policy slips through.

The EU ICE phaseout is set for 2035.

> I grew up on a goddamn island

Growing up on a remote island is basically the opposite of New York in all regards except that Manhattan is technically also an island.

> most people choose public transport over driving

Is that true? I was surprised when looking at the actual stats (most people in Sydney drive to work), but maybe there are many more people working in places other than the CBD skewing this.

When I was cycling in from Balmain, there were a huge number of cars stuck in traffic getting into the CBD every morning. Despite it only being an easy 15 minute cycle (or a 15 minute bus ride) from the peninsula.

> 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.

Because NYC is gonna be used as a case for selling congestion charges elsewhere. This may cause decline in more effective and equitable policies like car bans and restrictions that are working really well in many places.

Over 300 recreationally used molecules have been banned outright by UN conventions alone. Not saying this is good, but cigarettes are very much an exception to the norm.

The same time? Why does anyone use the toll road?

[flagged]

> 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.

All kinds of seemingly local issues are getting sucked into the vortex of the national political scene in order to stoke outrage against "the enemy." See also all the people who have never been to SF and will never go to SF who have very strong opinions about SF homelessness/street crime (or, on the other side, the various "library in a small town you never heard of banned some books" stories that were popular a couple of years ago).

IMO fuel taxes should be higher if it means more people and companies buy hybrids and EVs.

This is the same thing, except the different road is "the subway", or even the same road and "walking".

It's new yes, but the comment you are replying to asked how it is different. It's simply another toll.

> don’t mind imposing a $180 pay cut every month to the poor

LIRR monthly passes are anywhere from $180 to $400+. Are you advocating for making those free as well, or is that different somehow?

Abortion, it is literally killing a human. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bGulABsExMs

The people's intense response - from supporters to opponents - plus the media coverage and political posturing, demonstrates that it's not "simply another toll"

Dunno, but NH hasn’t had sales tax for much more than 5 years, despite all the states around it having it

With regular toll roads, you can choose to leave sooner and take a slower way to avoid the toll. With this, the toll is mandatory no matter which way you go.

Now think real carefully why you had to jump all the way over to Japan in order to be able to make your point at all. Cherry picking at its finest. Japan is very culturally different from the West and such issues are tightly tied to that culture.

> What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease.

You know you can trip, fall, hit your head and die on the spot anytime you walk anywhere right? A piano can randomly fall on your head too. Nothing is 100% safe; it's unfortunate you had an accident, but that's just anecdotal evidence, which is worthless.

Yes, there are a lot of people working in places in Sydney other than the CBD, and yes, a much higher proportion of those people drive to work.

And yes, there are still enough people who drive into the Sydney CBD in peak hour, to cause massive traffic (and to keep the carparks, aka parking lots, being very lucrative businesses!). Nevertheless, they're a minority - more than 75% of people commute to the Sydney CBD on public transport [1].

Also, re: traffic from Balmain in peak hour. Plenty of places you can be going to, eastbound on the Anzac Bridge, apart from the CBD! I'd say a significant number of those drivers would be heading north of the harbour to work (eg North Sydney, St Leonards / Crows Nest, maybe Chatswood, maybe Macquarie Park), and they'd be bypassing the CBD thanks to the Western Distributor (could also be connecting to Cross City Tunnel to eg Bondi Junction, also Eastern Distributor to Randwick / Waterloo).

[1] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/d...

This is all plainly false. Community members who are sincere about wanting to make HN better or just holding the moderators to account can easily do so. They can email us with URLs, or include URLs in their accusatory comments. Plenty of community members do that and we always take action or explain our thoughts on the matter.

Accusations like this one, without any evidence that would enable other community members to check for themselves, serve only to deflect from the accuser's own conduct, and achieve nothing but make the site worse.

If you're sincere in being concerned about the patterns you claim are so pervasive here, please cite the evidence so we can all understand what you're talking about and enable the moderators to take the appropriate action.

your reasoning falls apart because mass transit options are inherently faster due to the geometric-space efficiencies gained by their form factors. You just need to induce enough people to participate in it to cross a tipping point where it becomes financially viable to run regular service, e.g., in NYC taking a train is often the fastest.

I maintain that the claim inflammatory content is equally treated is plainly false. I would even say that your post above serves only to deflect from your own conduct.

Case in point, just today, of what I have seen hundreds of times in just the last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018355

This does not pass guidelines, this does not satisfy curiosity, I have rarely seen a warning for content like this. Sometimes it gets flagged, more often it doesn’t.