Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

As a long time NYC resident who moved out during Covid but commute to work in the city. I definitely noticed less traffic on the streets and less noise.

I see a lot of talk of other cities that don't have good public transportation. For example, between Flushing in Queens to 8th Ave in Brooklyn, there are privately run buses at affordable rate and get you there at half the time of trains. There are buses from a lot of residential areas in NJ that are closer to NYC that go to port authority (west side, 42nd st) very quickly. In fact, those buses are getting there faster and more comfortable than ever due to congestion pricing.

I'm curious, do other larger cities where commercial is concentrated into one area not have a private mini-bus(es)? I know public transportation would be great, but having a competitive environment for privately own bus services might be the answer to a lot of cities.

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is the working answer one can find in many places around the world.

When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is.

The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling.

IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars.

I live in Berlin center. The only reason for me to own a car is prestige. So I don't.

During rush hour any destination I go to, even outer city, would take me the same time by public transport as by car. At least.

During non-peak hours going by car can be from 25-40% faster than by public transport if you trust Google Maps & co.

But these estimates only consider travel time. When you add finding a place to park at the destination (and walking to the destination as the place may not be right in front) this shrinks to either negative numbers or max. savings of maybe 25%.

My average travel time is around 30mins by public transport. This includes walking to and from the station.

Why would I own a car to save maybe, on a lucky day, 5mins?

At the same time bike infrastructure is being improved. Lots of side streets have been declared bike streets, cars may only enter if they have business there (you live there or deliver something).

The city has enforced this with blocking off intersections on such streets with permanent structures that let only bicycles pass.

Big streets have bike lanes that are often separated by a curb or bollards from car traffic.

This makes it also less nice to drive a car. You can't use Waze any more to guide you through side streets to avoid congestion because these streets can't be passed through any more by car, only on foot or by bike.

Which means the chance of being stuck in traffic increases. When at the same time you have options to be there just as fast with public transport and almost as fast but more healthy and with less likeliness of being ran over by a car, by bike.

These ideas are not new. And there are many more things other cities do to reduce car traffic/need for cars.

If you think of private mini busses, the best examples IMHO is actually ridepooling, e.g. Volkswagen's Moia in Hamburg and Hannover.

I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store. No trains, no uber, no bus. The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.

I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.

Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.

And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.

That's why we "love our cars"

Most of the US population lives in metro areas of large cities. You are an outlier, that’s fine for rural areas.

I would not call ~20% of the US population an outlier. It's a very different situation from urban areas, but just as valid

And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.

Furthermore, the 80% urban stat from the US census gets routinely misinterpreted. Just going through some property line details with a couple neighbors on collectively about 75 acres plus adjacent conservation land. The census considers this urban.

And, as you say, Urban != dense city downtown.

yes, the cutoff for "urban" to not is 2000 housing units in an area. I don't consider that urban, 2000 homes is a decent "town". This is just "othering" of people who live more than 25 minutes from a metro which is what i consider "urban". i am 25 minutes from my nearest metro, and the metro population is smaller than the city i grew up in in california, population-wise.

my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains.

and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.

Without looking it up, I think it's also related to adjacency to a significant metro. But, yeah, the US census uses a binary classification that makes a lot of people assume "urban" means a big walkable city when, in reality, it often includes very dispersed exurbs (including places many would consider basically rural) that are never going to be serviced by public transit among other things.

So a lot of people tend to translate 80% urban into 80% cities which is manifestly not true, and even less dense cities.