Unfortunately I'm not joking -- a lot of the protected bike lanes we've gotten recently have been along stretches where cyclists (sometimesore than one) have died. That's what it takes to override the nimbyists in the local Community Boards.

But for a less morbid suggestion, you should join Transportation Alternatives (and its mailing lists!) and go to the Community Board meetings they send notices about where bike lanes will be debated. Every voice in favor helps. I've spoken at a bunch of em.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bicycle_pedestrian/fund...

This explained a number of dumb bike lanes (which lead to nowhere) in my 'hood.

The "Greater London" is an abusive name to designate the whole region around London, with little relation to the actual city. It should not be used for any comparison.

For comparison, London and Paris are about the same size. Paris is 105 km2 while (The Greater) London is 1500 km2.

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Of course when they do hatch you'll wish you had twice as many eggs to start with. Boston sure wishes it has the inner belt along with all the various rail projects it's forgone over the years.

For alternative examples: BART is not 24/7, and possibly sucks even more than MTA. CTA's 2 main lines are 24/7, but it's nearly 100% a 2-track system, and its biggest problem (IMO, anyway) is that the arrangement of seats inside the cars is so very desperately bonehaded.

Uber and Lyft were largely operating illegally when they started in most cities. They ignored expensive licensing requirements. They ignored safety regulations. They ignored insurance requirements. They ignored price controls on fares. They ignored requirements to accommodate disabled people.

Taxi companies who were obeying all these rules (which all imposed costs on the taxi companies that Uber and Lyft did not have) had a reasonable expectation, perhaps even a right, to expect the city would force Uber and Lyft to follow those rules too, or would shut them down. But the cities didn't, so I think a good case can be made that the cities owe the taxi drivers a bailout.

[1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/pos...

Without that we can’t know if a person deserves to hold a position, or even if they are eligible.

Anyway quick googling for 2017 numbers: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/13/16468716/uber-yellow-cab-ny...

So we have 10k medallion holders and ~60k uber drivers giving the same number of rides per day. No, there's not enough there to give a rigorous analysis but that is a vast difference in the amount of rides offered per car.

Maybe most of those Uber rides are in the boroughs and that accounts for the difference in ratio, but I'd be very surprised if that was the whole story.

Should we charge $500 to get into national parks? Why not? Should we just charge people for the health care they consume a la carte or should we have a national system for that? Why?

As you can see you’re hitting on a general philosophy question here. My argument would be that trying to set shared government services at market rates tends to lead to deeply regressive outcomes.

There certainly are smart arguments on both sides with congestion pricing. Externalities matter. Are cars inefficient? And so on. But my intention is to illuminate the other side of the coin, which seems perpetually unrepresented.

A couple quick ones:

1. Registering the car in your grandparents name, who have no income, to avoid tolls. Or perhaps your stay at home spouse (assuming you file separately).

2. Make your next vehicle a light truck or van to avoid potentially hundreds in monthly congestion tolls. Luxury trucks are very much a thing.

I agree your plan would technically work, but it would be filled with exceptions, loopholes, and political handouts. That is rather fitting for NYC though.

Expensive parking on top of all the other costs is enough for most people who aren't pretty well off.

I think value is an individual metric. E.g., I value good chocolate highly, but chocolate gives my girlfriend migraines, so for her it has negative value. So I think the time of rich people is exactly as valuable to them as it is to poor people. Or maybe less so, in that the rich people I know are on average much more willing to waste time than the poor ones.

Given that, your other schemes are more plausible, but I don't know that they'd be better in practice; the nth-order effects are hard to calculate, but could easily be pathological. Given that the real problem in doing this is the way some people have orders of magnitude more money than people, the cleanest solution is just to tax heavily enough that the wealth difference isn't nearly as large. Which, given the sensitivity of US politicians to the desires of the wealthy, is entirely unlikely to happen.

You could say the same for the national railway network, it's a state company and it didn't prevent investments and improvements (high speed trains).

The City Council approved a package of bills that will halt new licenses for Uber and other ride-hail vehicles for a year while the city studies the booming industry. The legislation also allows the city to set a minimum pay rate for drivers.

So not quite the leap made in your comment.

So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones. And raise the price high enough so that there's always spots free close enough to where you're going so that vehicles have a place to park themselves for short periods of time that's outside of the travel and bike lanes.

Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.

In many places, parking at your destination is more restricted than road space along the way to your destination.

Also, having a car sit idle 95% of the time is not an efficient use of money. It's the same model as virtualization with servers (sharing unused capacity brings down the costs for everyone).

Also, there's the tremendous amount of time wasted and hassle to park, especially in big cities that have multi-story parking garages. Especially with their "compact" parking spots that even compact cars have trouble fitting into.

The thing Uber/Lyft do remove is the need for so much parking. On the flip side, do they need more places to idle and await new rides, if we don't want them to congest roadways while doing that.

EDIT: It makes sense to have the same fare for all bus lines in the same city.

EDIT: There has most certainly been a boom in air travel[0]! In Europe air travel is incredibly cheap, and much cheaper than comparable itineraries in the U.S. Now, air travel is generally harder to consume than, say, mobile phone service -- one needs no excuse to use mobile data, but to travel requires planning, time, and more money (especially for lodging), so it's not surprising to me if air travel has grown more slowly than telecoms (though I've not checked, but it's a fair assumption).

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR

Also, uber drivers don't work 5 days a week, for example some only work on the week end or on peak hours, it can be additional income rather than a full time job.

I guarantee you, after a few medallions get pulled, this problem will evaporate.

What you have is lack of will in enforcement.

Immigrants from Romania, the couple had bought their New York City taxi medallion nearly three decades ago. Lately, it had been difficult to find fares. Her husband worked 12-hour shifts, but brought home less money. He was worried about the plunging value of their once-lucrative medallion and frustrated about Uber’s takeover of the industry.

On a cold day in March, Mr. Ochisor hanged himself in his garage in Queens. His family blames the growing hopelessness he felt over his fortunes as a taxi driver.

I'm not understanding this. If you're using the app correctly then the driver knows the destination before they even accept the ride. If you're setting an address near an airport in an attempt to be duplicitous I would be equally discouraged as a driver.

I’ve lived in both downtown LA and Cambridge, and it’s really difficult to conduct life in LA relying primarily on local rail options. Whereas in metro Boston, it’s much easier to live car-free than to own a car. The subway and commuter rail are just a superior way to get around 99% of the time. I mean, it’s not the same degree of car-obsolescence as New York, but it’s much closer to New York in that regard than it is to the situation in LA.

There's expensive tolls, and limited & expensive parking, but excellent public transportation – the USA's most extensive and most-used subway system. NY state has the nation's highest (regressive!) gas taxes.

New York is far-and-away the US city with the lowest rate of car ownership:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...

Manhattan is the most likely place for congestion pricing. But, though rare in the USA, many Manhattanites never learn to drive! And only 8% of Manhattanite workers commute by car to work:

https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-their-cars

(I highly doubt that 8% is correlated with the poorest Manhattanites.)

Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households:

http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/

So, people who elect to drive in NYC (outside of driving-on-the-job) are richer than the New Yorkers who don't drive. Further, New Yorkers are richer than other Americans. Ergo, a fee that falls on people who choose to drive in NYC is unlikely to be "regressive", barring any actual evidence to the contrary.

That said if you want to limit Uber to always using Uber pool you are going to get strong objections.

That really depends on your neighborhood. In the outer burroughs, you can walk some ways before you reach a busy enough street to find cabs.

If you have bags, small children, or are disabled, that walk is basically a non-starter.

That said, people have voted quite a bit with their wallets and accepted surge pricing to solve the old problem of uncertainty. When I used to be a consultant and go to the airport every Monday morning, i'd have to leave 40+minutes earlier just in case the dial-a-cab randomly decided not to show up for 30min. That problem has mostly gone away.

Same thing for rainy weather -- cabs would disappear. That was legitimate because the cost of driving is indeed higher in rain (fewer rides per hour) and thus deserves more compensation. Instead...the old way was...dial-a-cabs would just stop answering their phone during storms, etc.

Sometimes people did nasty things like call 2 separate cab companies, go with the first arrival, and leave the other one hanging (another problem solved by ride-hailing services, who have the concept of identity and reputation scores.)

Your beef is with the taxi cartels and their click-hungry sympathizers in the media, not with me. They started it.

Thank you for the perspective on the voucher idea. Yeah, in a perfect world, it's equivalent with a congestion tax coupled with a tax deduction of equal amount, I've hinted to that. But you would need to dynamically change the amount of the tax to keep up with road supply and demand, and that will clearly be be an explosive political decision. Also, for cash in hand to be psychologically equivalent to public services, the voters have to have full trust in the public spending process, which seems unlikely. So in practice revenue generating vouchers could be much more palatable. The additional transaction costs and friction could be negligible compared to a traditional congestion tax: to drive more than your allotment, you load your driving wallet with cash that is deducted at prevailing market voucher prices; at the end of the year, if you generally drove less than the allotment, you will find a nice tax credit waiting for you inside the public tax internet gateway.

By the way, I'm a city councilor in my European town and that's why I might show a strong slant towards practical ways to achieve political consensus, as opposed to just going for the superior theoretical solution. Cities rarely move on theoretical optimum paths and recently, of all idiotic policies, I had to struggle for ending the public subsidy of free parking. No-brainer, but wait until a significant part of the public received if for decades and strongly believe it's some sort of natural right.

Uber spent four times as the taxi lobby spent on a single politician. I don't know what the taxi industry's total is. Given they shower tens of thousands of dollars on even state senators [1], I'd wager it's comparable to Uber's.

[1] https://nypost.com/2018/01/27/taxi-committee-head-got-thousa...

http://www.opencurb.nyc/

You see the sea of red lines? Those are all places you cannot park.

NYC has traditionally used that for the same purpose as Uber, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are underserved areas or racial discrimination by the dispatchers.

The biggest example of skewed information in PR (whether ads or official statements) is when they promote how much cheaper they are than the traditional alternatives. While it's often completely true, that's only the case because of their huge VC-funded warchest.

This is a major omission from many people's public policy opinion-forming: They're subsidizing rides and losing money in a way that local customer-funded competitors can't match, moving market share toward either a monopoly (as they'd prefer) or an oligopoly (including Lyft etc). Previously NYC taxi and car service companies were diverse small competitors.

Once they get enough of a collective stranglehold, or once VC funding gets sick of them waiting for self-driving cars to greatly reduce their cost of goods sold (drivers aren't cheap) in the rough and tumble real world, they'll raise prices and there will be either a captive audience or another rough societal readjustment period.

People might still think the speculative future pain is worth the tradeoff, but "cheaper" is a skewers truth without the context. The context lets them consider the full picture when forming their opinion.

But yeah, a frail elderly POC woman who needs a better way to go to the hospital has very different priorities than anyone thinking about long term economic and urban planning impacts, and I completely see why it's good for her. :) Glad her needs are better met now than they once were, even if through Uber.

I should note that most of my drivers for Uber/Lyft were not cost-driven but feature-driven. Cost is a factor, of course, and note that my mom almost always uses the pool option to save money -- something Yellow cabs dont/cannot offer.

Drivers:

- Dispatch services work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but not the other way. You'd have to know the local dispatch service, they would need to know your mobile phone number (they usually dont ask) to coordinate with you, etc. The only dispatch services that seem to work well in Manhattan are black car services, which is way out of the conversation here -- she needs a ride home, not a Lincoln Towncar :-)

- Dispatch services DO work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan give you a blanket "be ready in 5min" regardless of demand and you end up waiting and waiting -- sometimes at the worst times. I've known people to call 2 or 3 dispatch services, take the first car, and leave the other drivers hanging (unethical...but it happens.)

- Dispatch services are hard to get ahold of when you really need them, often in bad weather etc.

- Dispatch services do price in the dead-head ride back, so there is a legitimate cost issue there on both supply and demand side. Uber/Lyft mostly solve the dead-head ride back issue, so legitimately lower cost by better utilization.

A personal issue when i travel for business:

- Dispatch services mysteriously dont keep receipts or have broken credit card machines (not sure why? to hid tax revenue?) -- so I am left with a ride for work (e.g., to airport) with no receipt and thus i have to pay work expenses out of pocket and they wont be reimbursed without a receipt.

- Dispath services mysteriously "dont have change" so you're paying $80 for a $62 ride

- I'm arriving at Delta Terminal late night in LGA and all the yellow cabs are at the other terminals. You wait and wait. There isnt a good way to "hail" them. I understand the Arro app tries to solve this, but that came years too late.

The best way to make delivery drop-off points available is to get rid of all the free parking and make it all paid, and keep raising prices on a block-by-block basis until there's typically spots free on any given block. It'll be a minor marginal cost for someone making a delivery to pay, say, $5/30 minutes (this will probably actually be cheaper if it means they can find a nearby spot, thus saving time driving around and time shuttling things from a farther spot). But $5/30 minutes works out to $240/day, which will easily discourage long-term parkers who shouldn't be using the scarce resource of on-street parking in busy areas anyway.

In less busy (i.e. purely residential) areas, it might make sense to move to a permit model, with permits costing several hundred dollars per month. There'd of course be parking meters mixed in with all that for people who are driving to the area and don't have permits.