Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

You’re kind of proving the point here. NYC has fewer car owners and yet NYC doesn’t have a single pedestrian street or street closed to through traffic. Sounds like a city that can’t imagine itself without cars even though it’s completely realistic.

There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one.

Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square.

Its a slow process but its getting there.

You’re either exaggerating or don’t spend much time in NYC. Half of Broadway is closed to cars now, same with Wall Street. We have summer streets where they close many on weekends. Lots of dedicated bike lanes and a few isolated paths throughout the city. Could there be more? Sure. Are they completely absent? No.

I think we just have a different idea of what it means to be closed to cars. I live right by the stretch of Broadway you mention, so I’m very familiar. This is what it looks like: https://flatironnomad.nyc/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/4.2-Pla...

There is no restriction of through traffic. Effectively pedestrians are still confined to tiny and overcrowded sidewalks.

By comparison, here’s what a pedestrian street looks like in the non-US city I grew up in: https://sana.ae/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Corso-Italia-Stre...

Keep in mind that cars are still allowed for emergency services and (night time) deliveries. But the difference is night and day.

This is exactly what “the US can't imagine itself without cars” means to me.

Which one? Berry is semiclosed, but people routinely remove the wooden barriers so they can drive on it and delivery app e-bikes/motor bikes routinely blast down it at speeds that make it uncomfortable to walk.

Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.

Also, many of the cars we see in the city are bound to be from outside the city (like New Jersey). Just look at the traffic in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels at rush hour.

A less abrasive approach than congestion pricing might just be pedestrian streets or narrower streets/wider sidewalks. If you make the city unattractive for cars, there will be fewer of them, and I am willing to bet that programs like these are less likely to trigger the outrage congestion pricing has, because it doesn't target car owners directly and en masse. You can sort of pick away at it, street by street. There will be less of a show of solidarity, because, hey, it's not my street.

The only thing that seems silly is penalizing delivery trucks. This only raises the costs of goods and services. This is one reason I would favor narrower, one-way streets over pedestrian streets. You still want vehicles. The issue is that many if not most vehicles in NYC are a luxury item and do nothing but negatively impact the common good. They don't even make transportation easier for their owners, on the whole. Of course, this should be combined with other policies that improve public transportation and improve availability of good and services in the city to reduce the burdens that cars alleviate.

I don't think they were trying to disprove the point. They admit that the US is largely car centric EXCEPT NYC, which is why congestion pricing has worked well. Also, car ownership rates are probably extremely correlated with density/efficiency of public transportation.

There is probably no other city in the US where you can truly eschew car ownership (this includes metro "dense" regions like San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston). Maybe you could include Chicago where there is a heavy amount of density/walkability in most of central Chicago neighborhoods.

The entire country of Italy is only twice the size of the state of New York.

And they can manage it, why can't New York?

Not true. E25st by Baruch college has turned into a plaza. There are some more, that I can think off. (8th/St Marks by A Ave, is a park) etc.

This used to be a regular street at some point https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6

There are plenty of other examples, just now they look more like plazas, and not streets.

Man, there are street that are closed to traffic, and you just are either lying or being dumb.

They just don't look like streets anymore, as they are turned into plazzas or parks.

EG: E25st at Lex, Baruch College is truned into a plazza/walkaway. No cars. 8th/st Saint Marks, by A Ave, is off cars, (It is part of the Tompkins park). Irvin Avenue is part of a park (gets interrupted by Grammercy Park)

etc...

There are plenty of places like that, but over time they turn into plazzas or parks, and you think they were not streets at some point.

Ps https://maps.app.goo.gl/Df6U3DkPpUxirG5B9

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6

You can see throw time that it used to be a street at some point.

Anyways, there are plenty of examples like that. Just stop exaggerating.

Those photos say it all. The NYC reduced street still manages to park a Chevy Silverado smack in the middle of it all, and all those planters aren't there for the sake of having plants, but rather as crash barriers protecting the patios from traffic.

I feel like that’s the path San Francisco has been on. Over the last decade they’ve made it more and more painful to drive anywhere in the general downtown area. Market street and a few others are closed to cars, more and more streets don’t let you turn, many of the traffic lights have been replaced by insanely inefficient pedestrian-favoring traffic lights that seem hell-bent on making the traffic worse.

That being said, it takes me nearly an hour to take public transit between my home near Forest Hill and my office in the dogpatch whereas it takes 20-25 minutes to drive (plus an extra five minutes to park and walk from the parking lot to the office). This is not a long distance, on a map it looks like it should take me 10 minutes but San Francisco is so incredibly inefficient.

I would love to not own a car but it’s just not realistic. Also when going to Costco or when the weather is bad, public transit becomes a lot less of a fit as well. I got a bike, only to find out that you’re not allowed to bring bikes on the Muni train which is frustrating, and in the end means my commute isn’t any faster than not involving biking at all. I tried a scooter, and I got in an accident because apparently the brakes don’t work well in the rain, especially when there’s an intersection at the bottom of a hill, so I’m not doing that anymore. I guess they’re trying to make driving as bad as all of the other bad options. I wish instead we could make some good options.

New York City has more people in it than the 4 most populated metro areas in Italy. Italy has ~3x the population of the state of New York, half the population of the state lives in NYC area.

So they need it more than Italy. You can handle wayyy more traffic without cars on the road than you can with.

in context, i am specifically talking to “the US can't imagine itself without cars” point here and in my other reply upthread. I live ~36 hours from Los Angeles, driving at legal highway speeds, assuming no stops or delays. It's all about perspective. California is larger than germany. New York isn't a small state by any stretch of the imagination, unless you're comparing it to texas, alaska, or california. The car/public transportation stuff in the US is partly because of the ruralness of the country in general, plus culture. A lot of people have the idea that public transit is for the poors.

I don't know about elsewhere, but here in Ireland pedestrianised streets are usually open to deliveries in the early hours of the morning. I think they open to one-way traffic some time after the pubs and clubs close, and late-night foot traffic is reduced. Then the bollards go up at the entrance end at around 7am, and go up at the exit a little later.

Certainly I've seen delivery vehicles on Grafton Street in Dublin and Shop Street in Galway in the early hours.

I live in Canada, a bigger country with less people and better public transport. A bunch of provinces are bigger than Texas, doesn't stop the public transport from being decent inside the cities.

The obvious answer is more public transport infrastructure & bike lanes.

If you think population density is an excuse for public transport infrastructure not coping or need for more people owning cars I suggest taking a long hard look at e.g. Japan to have that hypothesis reality-checked.

I'm btw. not saying you did, just reading between the lines.

As I wrote in an earlier reply to parent, NYC hasn't managed to even build ring Metro lines around its city center – since a century!

And that is for one reason and one reason only: not nearly enough (political) pressure from the public to improve public transport infrastructure.

And that in term gets us to the root cause again: the US can't imagine itself without cars.

This is not a critique. It's just an observation that is very plain to see if you grew up in Europe (and possibly many other places, too).

When/if that changes, ever, the above things will just happen naturally.

> There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one.

One street in a city the size of NY?

I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;)

On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.

You could eschew car ownership in NYC because the public transport network is better than in the rest of the country but it's still shite compared to what is considered 'barely ok' outside the US.

E.g. I. Berlin metro timing is about 5mins between trains and that is long compared to Tokyo metro timing.

But when it comes to density/how direct a public public transport connection exists between two arbitrary points in the city, Tokyo and Berlin are very close (and far ahead of NYC btw.).

What I'm saying is that the feasibility public will be seen as a real alternative or even improvement over using a car only if both topological as well as temporal improvements are blatantly obvious to commuters.

What would a ring metro look like in NYC? Manhattan is an island. Directly west of it is a body of water, then land that is not NYC, in fact is not NY.

It doesn't have to be a closed ring. Or resemble a ring.

Many metro systems in other big cities with comparable topological constraints have metro lines that are orthogonal to those going out in roughly a star pattern from the center.

But NYC almost only has the latter.

Underwater sections are not an issue, really. There are many cities that have metro lines going under bodies of water.

And even the length or depth required is not an issue if you want to build it.

That's why you can go from England to France, by train, in roughly half an hour, under the English Channel.

GP's premise was there "Are none" -- I shared the progress I'm aware of.

NYC needs more, but I think the tide is turning the right way.

That is a seriously hand-wavy response to a complex task.