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

One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes.

I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.

Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.

> when you decommission historical arteries

There are no highway arteries running through the congestion zone. Building one would require hundreds of billions of dollars of eminent domain.

Manhattan has a $1tn GDP [1], on par with Switzerlad [2]. Its economy is larger than all but 6 states (between Pennsylvaia and Ohio) [3]. More than all of New Jersey. If it crossed the pond it would be the fifth-largest member of the EU, between the Netherlands and Poland [4].

It's a tremendously productive jewel that towers–literally–over the economies of its neighbors. Sacrificing Manhattan to save a few bucks on a trucker who doesn't want to take a highway through the Bronx is absolutely mental from a social, economic and environmental perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City $939bn in 2023

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Didn't advocate for "more highways" -- I totally get it. More offering that maybe these problems shouldn't be viewed as a purely zero-sum game, where cities get all the benefit at the expense of the larger region due to a form of geographic tyranny. (Or at least, perhaps we shouldn't pretend that externalities don't exist through studies that largely look at quality-of-life factors in the hub.)

You can see some of these same dynamics playing out in SF with the decommissioning of the 'Great Highway' on the west side, which led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM?