Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

The best decision would be to completely forbid individual transport. Now the common space dedicated to streets is for who can pay extra. Forbid individual transport and create some parks and pedestrian streets.

Extremes rarely work out well. The people paying for the luxury are funding improvements for everyone.

Go one step further and ban mechanized transport all together. Streets will have very little congestion. We can just go back to footpaths.

It works really well in quite a few other cities, actually.

Car infrastructure takes up a huge amount of space and is incredibly hostile to any kind of mixed use. Having near-zero cars means there is suddenly space available for an order of magnitude more pedestrians. It's why reducing car traffic almost always results in a significant increase in revenue for local shops and restaurants - which means more taxes are being paid.

Converting all of NYC into a huge pedestrian-only zone obviously isn't going to work, but having a few pedestrianized superblocks could greatly improve the quality-of-life.

we still need roads for ambulances and deliveries and bikes and shared cars / busses, and there obviously would be enormous costs to peoples time for what already is one of the biggest cities in the world.

> Converting all of NYC into a huge pedestrian-only zone obviously isn't going to work

The dreamer in me immediately asks “why not?” and while I agree it will never happen, it felt good to imagine it.

this is worth thinking about. The idea that the small toll charge actually pays for the streets it covers is flat out untrue. The citizens of the US vastly subsidize the streets and roads of the country. Just purchasing the land used for roads in Manhattan would cost a massive fortune and the people paying taxes in the US have and are paying for it. Not to mention the cost of maintaining the roads (physical infra) and policing the roads. So if NY put the land to more productive use and didn't have to maintain the roads I think they could save a lot of money.

The obvious reason is goods and equipment movement. There are places that strike a much better balance than NYC though...

These threads tend to devolve into, "Americans are so unsophisticated everyone else in the world is banning cars and turning downtown into walkable utopia" but what they really mean by rest of the world is a few crowded European cities. If you look at all the new rich mega cities built in the Middle East and East Asia cars continue to exist alongside good public transit as aspirational status icons and the preferred means of transit for people who can afford them. Cars are never going away.

Interesting but feels Un-American as a concept.

If I live in a NYC like this how do I visit my friends in Philadelphia? What if they live in Towson MD? Now what if they live in the suburbs? How would I visit anybody in the country side anywhere? What if I want to buy in bulk at Costco? What if I just want to buy anything I can't carry on the subway?

I have spent over a decade without owning a car in multiple cities. It's definitely possible but I've been fortunate enough to have friends and family with personal vehicles I can use.

A few pedestrian streets or blocks might be worth doing, banning all private vehicles from the entire downtown probably not going to happen or be well received if tried.

There are plenty of cars in Paris and London. It just feels as though people walking are a priority more than they are in NYC. Cars feel compelled more often outside of NYC, where they also block intersections and park next to crosswalks and block visibility.

How do you get all the food in? Manhattan is an island. Without constant food deliveries by truck it will die. This food is delivered to countless restaurants and grocery stores, not to some central warehouse, so delivery by train doesn't work.

The only well-designed cities in the US are college towns (and even then, only some of them).

If you only need an occasional car then rental cars aren’t a bad deal. For somewhat more frequent needs there’s stuff like zipcar and turo

Except horses, mules, donkeys and huskies. These can stay.

These USian supremacist talking points are the prime reason minorities feel unwelcome on this site

Tokyo?

As an American who's fluent in Spanish, I got over this "debate" about what America means by acknowledging that the word America is a homonym.

This is crazy. Costco just exists because America is an auto addicted society. In sane places you can make multiple small errands. Maybe you could even get to know some neighbors

Other societies decide where they spend money. It can be public transportation, paid maternity leave or universal healthcare.

America addiction to cars is a human construction, so it can be changed.

You get a train or bus to the nearest stop to your friends and they come and pick you up. This is what city dwellers in countries with developed infrastructure are used to.

Alternatively, you rent a car from a car sharing service for the few times a year you want to do this.

More compelled not to stop (post-edit update)

While I wasn’t claiming it would work, that example is easily solved around the world already by allowing vehicles into pedestrian zones overnight.

Funnily enough there is a Costco in NYC, in Astoria (Queens) decently close to Manhattan. You can take the ferry there from Manhattan, or the subway, or busses, or bike there even, or heck just take an uber if you bought a lot of stuff.

Philadelphia is also an odd choice to bring up since there's a train from the center of Manhattan to Philly, and it's even a common commute for people to go back and forth.

Costco has many locations internationally. They're kind of nice in that the pizza is the same if you ever feel home sick in a country with terrible pizza.

Small errands also completely defeats the point of Costco. Running to a corner store to buy 4 rolls of toilet paper ends up being way more expensive than going to Costco and picking up 30+ at a time.