Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

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.

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.

Vancouver. The first section of SkyTrain was built in 1985 (40 years ago) well after cars had dominated the city. I couldn't find historical figures for transit mode share, but today more than 50% of all trips are made by public or active transportation, and 90% of residents live within 10 minutes of a frequent transit line.

For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.

This is really interesting, thanks! I haven’t found a good summary of the history in a couple of minutes of searching. Do you know if it was just huge government investment that drove the increase? And what drove the public sentiment to want transit vs more highways or whatever?

Another fact you may find interesting because it's unique, I think, for a North American city of its size: Vancouver has no freeways.

Within city limits, there are no roads with speed limits over 50 km/h (30 mi/h), lots of traffic lights, lots of bus/bike lanes, and lots of congestion. The Trans Canada highway skirts along the side of the city but does not enter it. Things get slow, very quickly.

There are complex historic reasons behind this. Politics, activism, lack of federal funding, etc.

This is a decent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/09/story-cities-...