Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

Impressive how cars are harmful to society. This is just a small example. We should be more radical in preventing the use of individual automobiles.

If it works in a country where the auto is so ingrained in the culture and lifestyle, it can work anywhere.

The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.

The dispute isn't between walking and cars, or between stone age and modernity. Just that individual cars have a terrible externalities.

Impressive how public transport does not enter the mind of Americans.

If public transit even remotely resembled anything in China or Japan, Americans would ditch their cars in a heartbeat. But every train ride I've been on to Manhattan is like commuting through an open sewer while being harassed by strangers doing an obnoxious dance with a bluetooth speaker in my face, dodging puddles of urine, and wondering if today's the day I'll be thrown off the platform.

Of course people would rather commute in a gas guzzling SUV. I don't even know how it's controversial. It must be a form of Stockholm syndrome to think that this would be attractive to any normally adjusted human being.

I’ve taken the train a lot in and around NYC, including a ton of subway trips. While the experience you’re describing is certainly not so rare as to be nonexistent, it’s also far from the norm. The large, large majority of subway rides I’ve taken (99% at least) were complete non-events. Perhaps you’re unlucky?

A few points.

1. A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train), is unacceptable to bear, when there exist alternatives.

1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly or wrongly, people feel more in control when they're driving compared to when they're using public transit (or similarly, taking a commercial flight), which makes them feel better about it. And there is some element of sense here: accidents do not occur evenly among the population, because some drivers are better and more alert than others.

2. If you're traveling with small children, the various (however rare it may be) unpleasantries of NYC public transit become an order of magnitude more unpleasant.

3. There certainly is an element of Stockholm syndrome among NYC transit users, in that other very large cities around the world with ridership comparable to NYC have very little antisocial dysfunction, but in NYC it often gets waved away as "part and parcel of living in a big city".

> A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train),

how common is it for people to be thrown off the platform into an oncoming train in NY?

Not common. From what I've read, each year, 50-80 people are killed on the tracks (either by hitting trains or touching the third rail), with only a handful being caused by somebody else pushing them onto the tracks.

ok so very uncommon. why are you even bringing it up?