Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

Not to settle on "It's bad" but their so called "results" seems completely obvious.

The congestion policy is disincentivizing/suppressing people's preferred method by making it unaffordable to some, and unappealing to some. We already know that we can use policy to push people away from their preferred to a less preferred method. The items listed in green are mostly obvious as people seek alternatives. It's like highlighting how many fewer chicken deaths would occur if we created an omnivore or meat tax.

IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas. How much fewer social interaction is happening across the distances that those car based trips used to occur. And how much harder is it to get goods into the areas. Is less economic activity happening.

In the long run, yes, maybe things will be net better for all, when the $45M per year has had a chance to make alternative transportation methods to be not just policy enforced, but truly _preferred_ option.

> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.

There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up.

If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users.

IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.

It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending.

I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.

I can understand why poor families might save enough money to make the trip across town to a nice restaurant or a high end shop in a wealthy neighborhood they could never afford to live in. I can't understand how making it prohibitively expensive for poor people to drive into those nice neighborhoods will result in them becoming rich enough to open fancy restaurants and shops in their own poor neighborhoods where no rich people will ever travel to. The people in the poor neighborhood can't afford to eat/shop in such places often enough to support them and rich people won't go into poor neighborhoods for them either.

Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.