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Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

(www.nytimes.com)
437 points Vinnl | 2 comments | 13 May 25 10:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.461s | 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. throwaway2037 ◴[15 May 25 05:13 UTC] No.43992052[source]▶

    > Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Central Tokyo (inside Yamanote line) has almost no national railway lines (just one/two called Chuo between Shinjuku and Tokyo station). Most of its subways are inside central Tokyo. The second subway line didn't open until 1954. Tokyo is much later to build than London, Paris, or New York. I also think that Seoul started building trains very late.
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2. lazide ◴[15 May 25 11:46 UTC] No.43994003[source]▶
Tokyo was burned to the ground though just before that started. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo]

It also wasn’t really a major city historically over the types of timeframes as London, Paris, or even New York.

Modern Tokyo is more of a ‘new’ city, and the subways were constructed along with a lot of the new construction - that central Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in the war certainly removed the friction that would otherwise have made that hard, eh?