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Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

(www.nytimes.com)
437 points Vinnl | 1 comments | 13 May 25 10:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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jmclnx ◴[14 May 25 14:36 UTC] No.43985069[source]▶
Seems to be working fine, I know the large city about 60 miles from me looked at this, and I am all for it. But its mass transit is a awful mess, at times walking is faster that taking a subway.

I wish they would start this, but its politics is such a mess nothing really gets done there. New Ideas there gets implemented far slower than then ideas in Roman Catholic Church.

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mplanchard ◴[14 May 25 23:45 UTC] No.43990364[source]▶
Transit always seems to be kind of a chicken and egg problem. You can’t have good transit unless you have good ridership, and you can’t have good ridership if you don’t have good transit.

Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?

Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.

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1. scottbez1 ◴[15 May 25 01:30 UTC] No.43990952[source]▶
The other good reason to choose congestion pricing as the start to breaking the chicken/egg problem is that, outside of NYC and maybe Chicago, public transit in the US is primarily buses on streets shared with car traffic. It's hard to attract ridership and improve buses when they're always stuck in car traffic, so starting by reducing traffic via congestion pricing is particularly pragmatic.