In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution

To head off the almost inevitable recapitulation of yesterday's parade of misinformed complaints by teenage libertarians, please actually read the paper before commenting. The paper shows there was no significant reduction in entries to the congestion charge zone by cars, vans, and light trucks. And you can confirm this conclusion is consistent with their source data using their github repo. The reduction in pollution is coming from the significant decline in heavy truck traffic. Truckers were using lower manhattan as a cut-through route to other places and they are now doing that less, exactly as congestion pricing planners long argued.

> Truckers were using lower manhattan as a cut-through route to other places

Popular truck route from Queens->Bronx was 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd then immediate left onto 59th, and another left onto 1st and take 1st all the way to Willis Ave bridge to beat the RFK bridge (formerly the Triborough) tolls.

It's good to point this out but I don't think the snarkiness at the beginning is necessary to get your point across.

the snark made me read the comment, I'll admit it

This is a totally normal and sane response.

Saving money and cutting corners is business as usual so I hope you have drug and beaten quite a few CEOs as they drive this behavior.

You have to be terminally poisoned by capitalism to not understand that giving kids asthma in order to save a few dollars is itself violence.

Please. Truckers aren't intentionally giving kids asthma. Go after the capitalists who incentivized the behavior. Otherwise you're just harming more innocent people. (edit: grammar)

Plenty of beatings to go around, but yeah, I agree, you have to follow the incentives here.

Violence is when OpenAI's investors have a bad quarter. :(

> Truckers aren't intentionally giving kids asthma

The number of trucks I see that are either horribly maintained or purposefully modified to defeat emissions devices spewing massive clouds of black smoke every time they step on the accelerator pedal speaks otherwise to me.

Rolling Coal is absolutely a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Even those people don't deserve to be "dragged from their cabs and beaten by angry mobs"

You really don't see that here in NYC. Enforcement for big rigs and even pickups curbed a lot of that. Used to be common to see a big truck or especially a city bus belch black smoke but nowadays with enforcement and emissions systems it's much less common. Ironically, the worst offenders are the obviously poorly maintained school busses.

> Truckers aren't intentionally giving kids asthma

This was the claim I was addressing. Truckers (a group that applies to more than just people in NYC) are intentionally giving kids asthma through their choices to defeat or not maintain emissions equipment, I see it every day. Maybe NYC is enforcing their emissions standards enough to no longer make it worth it to truckers there, but don't doubt they'd go back to belching toxic fumes to save a penny if given the chance there. They do it practically everywhere else.