I think it would be interesting to include the George Washington and Verrazano Bridges as they would be alternative routes.

1. The graph doesn't work on desktop. It keeps endlessly animating in the data values flyover at a given point.

2. Congestion pricing, more generally, is ivory tower social engineering (economic discrimination like toll lanes) and a disproportionate tax on the working poor. It would be fairer if it were progressively taxed based on income.

I'm incredibly hopeful that NYC congestion pricing pays off in a big way - and that we start to see it in other cities across America. I really, really want congestion pricing in downtown SF. During rush hour, cars block the box and slow down busses, with cascading effects.

Whether it's the government or corporations, big organizations are the problem.

We need a small business revolution in this country.

Side note: An economy made up of small businesses was Adam Smith's original vision (the godfather of capitalism). He also hated the idea of a corporation. What we have today really is very far from Adam Smith capitalism.

Someone gets shot outside a hotel, but damn it if we won’t figure out how to charge people more money.

I like congestion pricing because it keeps poor people off the road so the middle can commute faster

/sarcasm

congestion pricing doesn't work. its simply a shrug for the wealthy, and reduces money for lower income.

in a short amount of time , commute times will recover to baselines, or worse, the city will waste the additional revenue , the residents will be poorer , and leaders will pat themselves on be back.

Expresslanes made commute times worse . Little of the revenue went to the roads . Few of the roads were fixed .

This doesn't show the number of cars and traffic within the area. The real test will be the amount of traffic within the zone

I just love how everyone suddenly becomes transportation experts in this thread and pour out their opinions that are purely based on their anecdotes and beliefs but nothing else.

Will companies compensate workers for having to pay congestion pricing just to get to work??

This seems to be selling use of the public roads to rich people (who can more easily afford the tolls).

Isn't this a step backwards for social justice?

If NYC subways weren’t freezing/boiling, filthy, moldy, infested with rats and mice, and dangerous, maybe you wouldn’t have to brow beat people into using them.

There's a lot of interest in forcing people to use public transit but relatively little interest in making transit something people want to use. If people think they're going to be stabbed or assaulted they're not going to want to use it. Other countries don't have this problem and until the transit types realize this normal people are going to reject transit alltogether.

Although marginally better traffic might be a side effect of congestion pricing, its primary effect is a wealth transfer from lower- and middle-class residents of Manhattan, who must buy goods locally at higher prices, to MTA contractors and their labor unions, who already make construction on the New York subway far and away the most expensive in the world.

Where is the congestion pricing tracker that measures the higher cost of groceries to working-class lower Manhattan residents?

Well, if you make the road a luxury, less people will be /able/ to use it. It's nice to see someone is measuring just how much luxury is being created here although I don't think these metrics are particularly useful outside of that goal.

Congestion charging started in London in 2003. I'm skeptical about the justification that it's intended to disincentivize unnecessary driving because people who drive frequently get a bulk discount rather than a surcharge as one might expect if that were the actual intention. A bulk discount is more indicative of a policy intended to maximize revenue. I'm also skeptical about the justification that it's intended to reduce pollution because the discount for electric cars is ending this year. I have a moral issue with it as well because the roads are financed by everyone's taxes. Around the time the charge was starting it was easy to find supporters for it on tv chat shows but I never met one in real life. I assume there are some but that they support it in a naive attempt to keep anyone poorer than them off the road. Otherwise, the supporter's problem of too much congestion would be easily solved by not driving. The charge has tripled since its introduction so maybe there's an element of poetic justice in it for some of them.

It has been highly successful in London. Less congestion, better air quality, incentivises the most disruptive things like heavy good vehicles to deliver out of rush hour reducing impact on other traffic etc.

What are you talking about? It will have overwhelmingly strongly positive effects, while also raising revenue to fund stuff like more transit. Congestion charging is great and every city should do it!

Not at all, since those who aren't rich primarily use public transit to get around this area, which benefits massively from reduced car traffic.

Poor people don't drive, they're on the bus. This makes transit better for people who don't drive.

Their religion is punishing to middle class.

Hear hear! Though I admit my own kid has cried once or twice in the front of an urban arrow, toddler rage is a powerful thing….

Everyone I know who bikes in the city has been hit by a car at some point (see: my complaints about enforcement of traffic laws in this thread if you want my opinion on that).

I cringe when I see parents with their kids on the back of their bikes. Super dangerous.

By the way, the head of SFMTA resigned this week, and there are rumors of a full audit on the horizon.

NYC Subway, Metro North, and LIRR have much broader and more frequent coverage to a lot more places outside the urban core than the bay area's network does. Iirc muni metro has passable coverage inside San Francisco, and Bart and Caltrain service a few linear corridors outside San Francisco pretty well, but a whole lot of the bay area is very far from transit. This means that bay area commuters could not as easily switch away from cars. Though SF is still probably the second best candidate for congestion pricing after NYC.

You buy a $9 sandwich for lunch everyday then you probably aren’t in the middle class

Do you think that's what the average American pays for their sandwich? Including bringing lunch from home.

If you don't understand working poverty, you won't understand how devastating only $3kpa really looks like on a low wage. Lot's of people right now can't afford that, so cost-neutral alternatives have to exist or you price people out.

The issue is that Manhattan is not just a destination, it's also a transit - people often just want to go through Manhattan, and not into it.

If you removed all the through traffic, leaving just people who want to stop there, that change alone, would improve things dramatically.

Interesting point, I'd believe it. I suspect the demographic that is driving instead of using public transit is quite small.

Driving for a commute isn't really possible in Manhattan unless the company provides parking. And those parking spots are reserved for executives. This group of people are price insensitive.

Passing through Manhattan can frequently save an hour of time in traffic elsewhere, those commuters will just see the fee as a higher toll.

All three major airports never tied directly to a subway, opting instead for airtran systems which create complexity and cost time. I suspect this causes a base level of traffic.

ha, I drive / train into Manhattan from outside a lot so I'm by nature on the "edge", and this change if it reduces traffic makes me more likely to drive :)

yup, agree. the fine was just. the point is there are solutions to blocking intersections. namely cameras and fines.

New Yorkers, and Manhattanites in particular, live longer than most of the world. This is due to mass transit, public healthcare and being phenomenally rich.

Would also note that the shooter you’re referring to crossed into Manhattan with a gun purchased in another jurisdiction. This is a problem of other areas’ lawlessness crossing into New York as much as it’s a fantasy about cops being expected to thwart an active shooter on the spot.

A particular unknown person getting assassinated is not a safety issue. The only reason it happened in NY is because business happens in NY. Nobody's going to assassinate you, in NY or anywhere else.

It feels like you're being dense on purpose.

I don't even understand the scenario you're talking about now -- are you referring to a delivery driver that would be driving their personal vehicle to work in the congestion zone? And then getting on a delivery truck, which would then need to exit the congestion zone and re-enter in order to itself be charged a fee?

How many people do you think the scenario above applies to, in the real world?

It likely would be, just like any other business expense.

It's not literally zero poor people, but it's very few: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1d9sj6p/data_on_the_sh...

The "anything I don't know doesn't exist" crowd is very strong when it comes to congestion pricing arguments. It's weird specifically that many of it's loudest proponents come from transit thinktanks from out west, etc. Very little actual support amongst New Yorkers for obvious reasons.

> In a way, yes since a local employee will get higher salary than a remote worker.

But you're asking for the local employees to have their entirely variable commute costs covered. That's very different. If I want to helicopter to work for $2k a day, should work cover it? If not, why is wanting to drive in a city with robust public transit options any different?

People leaving work early is a fixable discipline issue.

You're both just asserting your positions as facts without even providing an argument, much less evidence.

The storyline as I remember it, was that startups can uniquely disrupt the big organizations (private or governmental) and unlock growth that was otherwise unavailable, and that's what attracted VC money in the first place. Innovator's Dilemma and all that. Seems like an eon ago.

>I have less of a problem with tickets that are paying for something like running a train, or for that matter a bridge toll paying off the bonds that enabled the bridge to be built.

What about on-street parking or municipal parking lots? Given how cheap they are to construct it's questionable to claim that the fees collected are needed to fund their construction.

>I have more of a problem with someone demanding money for nothing. [...] To my knowledge the main justification has always been that the charge funds the payer's behavior modification. Is it for the payer's own good? Is it for the greater good? You may well differ, but something about that doesn't sit right with me however noble, especially when it pertains to law abiding citizens acting within their rights.

How do you think most other taxes (eg. income tax, VAT, corporation tax) work? If you argument is that congestion charge is bad because "demanding money for nothing" and "something about that doesn't sit right with me however noble", then you should be rallying even harder against those sort of taxes. At least with congestion charge you can argue it's in exchange for the ability to drive, and unlike income tax, most can agree congestion is a bad thing, unlike people getting a salary (income) or businesses making/selling stuff (VAT). What is the government providing in exchange you paying income tax? Not getting a visit from the tax collectors? If it's something vague like "roads and schools", why can't the same justification be used for congestion charge?

That's hardly a SoCal phenomenon, sadly. In all the places I've lived, "protect and serve" seems to be abbreviated - "protect and serve our desk jobs and pensions" would be more accurate. If the TSA is security theater, the police are a circus, and the occasional show of force is them coming to town.

It's like those pictures of Luigi Mangione being perp walked in Manhattan with 20 cops and FBI agents behind him. Imagine if those officers were on the beat or enforcing traffic laws instead. That would make more of a difference in our communities than a photo op ever will.

Taxies in general. I know medallions already limit their numbers but if you've ever been locked in traffic surrounded by yellow cabs, count the passengers. Each one —mostly empty IME— is 120sqft of road. Cars trolling around for patrons is a bad system.

The Subway, buses, trams, etc, etc are all way better for passenger density.

The downside is it creates a conflict between the city and the rest. The city is like "we want transit, everyone else go away". The rest are like "we want to give you business but your policies drive us away", and "we want transit, but we are forced to get a car because transit is only in the center".

It's an unnecessary conflict - just add some transit that doesn't revolve around the city center. This reduces the number of people just passing through the center and creating unnecessary stress, and it make transit possible for more people.

Manhattan is like a black hole - it sucks in every single transit from as far away as Massachusetts. Try to travel by public transportation from virtually anywhere nearby without going through Manhattan. You can't and it's unnecessary traffic.

>I think it would be a lot nicer to have urban life/transit built around many smaller cores with everyone living much closer to work. but in aggregate, businesses want the largest hiring base, and people want the best jobs they can get in the area.

I think that this is prevented in large part by local capture of state politics by leading cities. NYC money basically owns NY politics so NY will never neglect let alone screw NYC to the benefit of Buffalo and Albany and whatnot. Repeat for other states that have one or two big urban economic wells that run everything.

Yes, obviously every city has public transport. It is not a usable system like NYC. The recent central subway debacle stands as a testament to that.

If it was so crap, it wouldn't be overpriced.

In NYC it’s nothing new. A parking spot is already completely unaffordable for the average worker so they don’t drive in anyway. The vast majority of folks affected by the congestion charge are wealthy, or businesses the serve the wealthy (who will pass on the cost).

> Now people on a budget will pay taxes to subsidize infrastructure that’s only accessible to the wealthy. It’s a massive scam perpetrated by the rich for the rich.

Huh? The revenue from congestion pricing is used to pay for public transit. The rich people pay extra to subsidize transit for everyone else, which is exactly how things should work.

All these issues have better solutions than congestion pricing.

Cars blocking intersections and/or sidewalks can easily be solved with automated traffic fines - that's how Zurich and London does it (the former without any congestion pricing!)

Many cities also have special lanes only useable by some classes of vehicles - e.g. busses (or sometimes taxis as well) - I guess ambulances could also use those.

In fact, congestion pricing doesn't solve any of those problems, it's just an irrelevant (as in, it doesn't solve any specific problem directly) regressive tax to "drive less".

Correct. You're acting like your statement refutes the point, though. Charging for things which are publicly shared is regressive.

Of course it does, if you remove price from the equation!

On the wiki page for the London charge they suggest that ten years after the introduction of the congestion charge, traffic levels have been reduced by 10% (ten).

So yes technically less traffic, but not really enough to make any meaningful difference IMO. It is still noisy, it is still congested, it is still polluted, it is still hard to cross roads, it is still hard to get anywhere on a bus in a predictable time, it is still very frightening to be a cyclist (and indeed it is still common for cyclists to get killed or badly injured), and it is still better to get the tube.

I view it more as a toll now really, rather than an attempt to dissuade people from driving in. If they were really serious about trying to stop people driving in, the price would not be £15/day but it would be £500/day or more.

As it stands at the moment, even on the weekend (yes, it runs on the weekend even though there is not much congestion e.g. on a sunday afternoon) if I want to go to central London with the family I will drive. It costs £15, but the price of a return tube ticket is £6, so x2 for me and the wife and it is already £12, then add in £1.75 for the bus tickets to-and-from the tube station (so £3.50 per adult return = £7), and you are already at £19 to use public transport, vs £15 for the congestion charge.

So it is approx 20% cheaper to drive, AND it is more convenient, AND it is quicker, AND it is more comfortable.

Like I said, if they were serious about it being a deterrent they'd price it way, way higher than £15. But actually they want to make cheap enough so that people pay it, and they get money for me using my own private transport and fuel to travel around, and don't have to pay for the running costs of more tubes/buses etc.

My ancedotal experience of driving around London once or twice a year for the last ten years is there hasn't been a huge change. I don't trust TFL data on this as the authorities are incentivised to report figures to support the gathering of the additional revenue stream.

At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions).

In my opinion, we should primary focus on improving the standards of public transport. Safety, cleanliness, punctuality and price. I'm a car owner living 15mins drive from downtown of a European capital city, and I refuse to drive near the city because the parking is expensive, there's always roadworks but primarily the public transport is excellent and comfortable.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...

My point with adding bus lanes is that it’s a political no go, not that it wouldn’t work to speed up buses.

Phrases like “toll” and “congestion pricing” clearly imply that there will be a cost to driving, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say anyone in the conversation is ignoring cost.

But again, dismissing the improvements because costs go up is like dismissing the reduction of water pollution because “now only people who can afford chemical disposal can operate a tannery next to the river.”

The externality is already "priced in" to the traffic. People who can wait in traffic or can't afford not to wait in traffic do so, and people who want to skip out can as well.

Congestion pricing, like many fees and regulations, is a regressive tax, because the overhead seeps into all goods and services and it impacts the poor most of all and the rich not at all.

There is only one singular goal written into the enabling law for this Congestion Tax, renenue for the NYC MTA transit system's capital plan. They have to raise one billion dollars per year. Any reducing congestion or any altering of pollution were only part of getting Federal approval. Now the only purpose is to raise money with 5 years of hikes already scheduled. This is going to uave drastic unintended consequences. I predict a theatre and retail recession. And more office divestment if this regressive tax isn't repealed or forced to focus on emissions or some non revenue goal.

Okay now let's similarly post about every single one of the hundreds of people who were killed in traffic accidents last year in the city (including plenty who burned to death in their cars). That should be enough to convince you that no one should drive here right? Or is safety suddenly not a concern anymore?

100% off all home invasions occur in peoples residences and can be a terrifying and often deadly experience. It is recommended that if you want to avoid these crimes you stay away from homes.

The GP is incorrect, but using the absolute number of housing developments in NYC is also misleading (since NYC has lots of middle-income housing developments too).

On average, personal drivers on NYC roads skew towards wealthier and suburban, whereas city dwellers of all demographics broadly ride the subway and other mass transit. Congestion pricing will certainly represent a cost for poorer New Yorkers, but it will disproportionately be shouldered by wealthier demographics that are often on the road by choice (e.g. choosing to commute by car from Long Island because the city has inadvertently subsidized doing so with free parking.)

> 400 housing developments in NYC for lower income folks. Saying that lower income folks don't drive in NYC is bananas

The only people in the projects who have a car work in the trades. They’re largely not paying this charge and/or adding it as a line item to their customers’ bills. A car in Manhattan is an absolute luxury.

NYC != Manhattan congestion zone. Plenty of people in lower income groups (literally over a million) live and drive in NYC. A negligible number of them drive into Manhattan for work every day.

> There are like 400 housing developments in NYC for lower income folks. Saying that lower income folks don't drive in NYC is bananas.

They’re not paying this.

How does "housing" relate to "cars"? They seem like completely separate things?

Giving NYCHA residents free parking spots was bananas

Yes, living in NYC = driving in NYC

Sounds right. Here in SF, instead of police pulling over people who speed and run stop signs, we're getting rid of parking spots within 20ft of intersections so people speeding and running stop signs can see if they're about to kill a pedestrian.

Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.

While I'm obviously exaggerating by saying "never", the list is much smaller than it needs to be, and you have some misleading things on that list.

Chinatown subway station is great. Better connects SF residents and it's exactly what I want to see more of in SF.

- Van Ness BRT? That project started in 2003. It took 20 years to complete. Not exactly the poster child of solid transit improvements in SF, except if you ignore how it got there.

- The Caltrain electrification project is great for the environment, but doesn't help SF much as far as improving transit availability. It's slightly faster, at least.

- BART expansion to Berryessa is a bit separate from SF transit improvements, which is what I'm talking about.

- Salesforce transit center is fine and has good vision, like expanding caltrain downtown. But doesn't add a massive amount of transit availability that wasn't already nearby (yet).

And before that: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8df1z7/after_...

How would you imagine one could make driving better, aside from making public transit better? The best thing you could hope for if you feel like you need to drive within SF is to have as few other people feeling the need to drive within SF.

But wait, I have to ask: why do you live in SF?

Practically anywhere else in the US is cheaper and better for people who want to drive.

Very few other US cities are better for people who want to get around by other means.

That affects pollution, but very few vehicles were not compliant so it would have minimal effect on congestion.

That's how to pay for it, sure. But I said share the resource. Not everyone who wants to drive at a given time can do so, there simply isn't enough space. How does your plan help _share_ the resource? Who gets to use the roads at 8am when everyone wants to?

it's too bad SF did not build an underground railway system covering the city in the short window when the labor to do so was affordable

True, there’s a lot of room to optimize costs. For example the congestion tax costs can be reduced to 0 by avoiding areas it targets. And that’s not even tongue in cheek, one could commute to the edge of the city and take public transport for example.

The dual income McDonalds worker was never driving into Manhattan. Though the fixation on “poor people” is fake. 100 studies could come out explaining that congestion pricing is better for poor people and the opponents aren’t going to change their view on it. It’s a fake argument used to launder more selfish opinions.

Apologies. I revised my comment after you replied. I did not notice the reply.

They are eligible for discounts after their 10th trip each month.

I think people misinterpreted the point. Saying 'there are no poor people driving and parking in NYC' in an asinine statement when the data clear show that 30% of the drivers into congestion zone are lower income. Whether or not they should, are shouldering more or less of burden, and all of this other nonsense is extraneous.

Most transit agencies have this problem of the "vicious transit cycle" - people don't take the bus because it's too infrequent/unreliable => more cars make the buses more unreliable => less money because so few people take it => back to start. It's amazing when you're sitting in a bus behind 20 cars backed up over 4 blocks, and you look back and there's 50 people on the bus. Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles

Safety and schedule. I've never had a safety issue with taking commuter rail into Boston but taking it home from an evening event is basically a non-starter given how seldom it runs and how much longer it will take relative to driving even if I catch my train.

buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other, but many more people can be moved with a bus.

trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.

almost not worth discussing honestly. this has become yet another factionalized holy war over the last decade.

Suppose a non-rich person needs to use the highways for work and can make twice as many stops during the day because of congestion pricing.

Imagine a group of non-rich people who decide to carpool because of congestion pricing and end up spending half the time in traffic every day and as a result get more leisure time.

Considering that a parking spot in Mahnattan costs close to $1K per month, most of the cars are driven by people who are not poor.

> The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people.

And spy on everyone, all the time, because now it “““has to””” track every vehicle's every move — Total Information Awareness

If it wasn't scarce then it would be cheaper. The problem is that it is scarce, artificially, as a result of regulatory capture etc.

Which is the same reason housing in places like SF is so expensive. Artificial scarcity as a result of zoning rules that make construction prohibitively expensive or otherwise inhibit it from increasing the housing supply.

Houston metro has more people than SF metro, so why does housing cost more in SF? Because there is less of it.

- Stops moved to be after the light, so bus isn't stuck waiting after people board

- Stops moving after the light mean Transit Signal Priority works better. GPS on the bus can "hold" the green light for longer - https://www.sfmta.com/blog/green-lights-muni

- Red painted lanes decrease private car use in bus lane, so bus can go faster

- Speeding fell by 80%, so fewer accidents mean transit is more reliable

There have been a few different projects on different sections of Geary over the years. The bus now runs 10-20% faster depending on direction and variability decreased by 25-40%.

Check out pages 15-19 of https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

According to Google street view, the road had 3 general car lanes per direction up to and including Nov 2016.

Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.

Yet there’s now 6 lanes? So they didn’t take out two lanes for bus traffic?

Those areas are the poor areas. The rich areas in NYC are the most democratic.

Still though, an inch or two around here is not a big deal. I only really start complaining when I have to break out the snow blower.

I have some agency. I can drive faster or slower, more or less aggressively, choose a vehicle based on safety, not drive in bad weather or when the bars let out, drive more or less frequently.

I can't control if some batshit crazy tries to set me on fire, aside from riding the subway less.

I do ride the subway, BTW. But I definitely do not habitually walk as close to the platform edge as I used to given how public safety has slide the last handful of years. I blame, of course, de Blasio.

> Are you implying everyone who gets in a traffic accident has full agency over the situation? Because that is laughably far from reality. It is infinitely easier to consciously avoid danger on the subway than in a car.

I would note that people can falsely believe things about how much agency they really have, and that this seems to be the case with cars vs. public transit.

Situational awareness shouldn't be discounted.

It has not. Traffic levels are down 15-20% while number of visitors to the inside of the congestion zone has increased. Traffic speed inside the zone has also increased slightly.

Overall, London's example shows that congestion pricing works as advertised.

Singapore is probably the better model to look at? We had congestion pricing before London.

As you say, it has gotten a lot easier, and nyc is the easiest out of the systems I've used recently. You tap your phone, any credit card or a card you get with cash (replacement for metrocard), and the gate opens while they take your money. 12 taps and you're not charged anymore for the week.

You are exaggerating that number greatly. The number is 8% of the budget for retired employees.

PDF Source, page 9: https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-17-2025...

It should be noted that the MTA has made at least some pension reforms so that current and future employees won't be as costly. Employee contributions are increased as well as the retirement age.

If you had a friend or SO, one could drop off the other, then circle around a while and pick them up later. But that further reinforces my point that there's little to gain from "cheating" this way.

Much of SF didn't even exist until the 1930s-50s. For example, most of Sunset and Richmond is tract housing built during that era - before then it was sand dunes and chicken farms.

People underestimate how new much of the Western US is. For example, Dallas only began expanding in 1891 after the railways were built, LA was a small town until the 1910s-30s era expansion, modern San Jose only formed in the 1960s-70s after absorbing dozens of farming towns like Alviso and Berryessa, Seattle was mostly sand dunes until they were leveled in the 1900s-30s).

Because of how new it was, most of the cities are planned primarily with cars in mind - especially after the 1930s era Dust Bowl Migration and the 1940s-60s era economic migration. Same thing in much of Canada and Australia as well, which saw a similar postwar expansion.

> before the NIMBYists stepped in

NIMBYism in SF only really began in the 1970s onwards.

While NIMBYism is now elitist, it initially started out as part of the civil rights movement ("urban redevelopment" was often a guise for razing historically Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods in that era - for example much of Japantown/Fillmore) as well as the early environmental movement (eg. Sierra Movement, Greenpeace), which was opposed to profit motive compared to modern YIMBY+Greentech model.

the subway is at 5/10 or so (it would be very nice if we got it down to 3/10), the commuter rail, however is mostly hourly at peak and 2 hours to never of peak

The Boston commuter rail network would be equivalent to Berlin's S-Bahn network, which is 10/20 minutes, and 30 on Friday and Saturday nights.

I do wonder how google handles edge cases, passengers, busses, etc. I've been in rideshares where the driver is using 4 phones - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/business/apps-uber-lyft-d...

Are you sure? Compare before/after for the main affected regions (Holland Tunnel, Queensboro) versus the unaffected regions. We definitely need more data, but I think there's an immediate reduction in the obvious places.

Google maps traffic data is live

Nope, it's been great for poorer people who take transit at higher rates than others, and congestion pricing funds useful transit expansions for them.

This thread is about transportation, not office or resi space.

Edit - I see you've changed your message. How does a bridge over water add road capacity to a peninsula?

The fact that its a recurring revenue scheme allows them to get bonds based on that income. I think I saw that they were planning to secure $18B for a project when it was $15 for the toll.

Any examples of cities that have done a good job on this?

> Nobody belongs to them all.

Why not?

IMO, ideally:

- Some people work from home or drive elsewhere

- Others take transit instead of driving

- The remainder pay a fee that they didn't previously, which can fund more transit

> I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking'

Yup. Wide roads, plenty of parking, distributed industry and office space, low density.

Top speed, sure, but for typical commuter heavy-rail, a non-express train isn't running at top speed for all that long.

Diesel-electric trains take a LOT longer to accelerate compared to a modern EMU, so much so that Caltrain's electrification project shaved 23 minutes off the SF to San Jose local trip, from 100 to 77 minutes.

Videos [0] [1] make the acceleration improvement pretty clear.

[0] https://x.com/Caltrain/status/1804278237486588179

[1] https://x.com/eiioth/status/1822814729079009516

I agree NYC is not wisely spending its $100 billion per year, but I think the congestion tax makes sense as a way of pricing in externalities. As a non-car-owner in lower Manhattan I dislike passenger cars -- they make it much less safe for me to bike around, and less pleasant for me to walk around. I think most people here benefit if we have way fewer large vehicles in the city, so the limited spots should be reserved for people who get immense economic value from them, like truckers or movers, not random people from the suburbs who want to have dinner in the city.

> as far as I can tell got very little for my money

You literally lived in the greatest city in the history of world civilization.

Sorry it didn't work out for you.

> Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine

Well, except for the people being pushing in front of subways to their death, or lit on fire in stations. The subways stations are getting dangerous enough, even in "not bad" areas, that people are avoiding them.

In Manhattan ebike access is excellent -- there are tons of bike lanes and bikeshare stations. They are typically as fast as Ubers for getting around the city since traffic is so bad here, and much cheaper. The main issue is that it's not very safe. Probably this does not generalize to most other US cities.

I've driven electric motorbike for 7 years and it's absolutely great for everyday commute. Lighter ones tend to have removable batteries so they work even when you don't have a garage with electric outlet. Some heavier ones you can even take on an occasional long trip, though that's not super convenient – it's commuting (combined with joy of riding) that makes them useful.

One does need to know where one is going to service it, though, because they can sometimes have stupid electrical issues which are objectively easy to fix but hard for you to fix on your own cause you don't know which wire goes where.

> however I still have yet to feel as threatened with a personal vehicle.

There's an old saying that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker.

If you've never felt threatened while driving a personal vehicle by all the road-raging, speeding, tailgating assholes--

> I just wonder why they choose not to enforce this aspect of it when it can be a significant population (in a statistical sense) of the car traffic as well as revenue.

It's not. 85% of Manhattan households don't own a car at all. The number is even higher inside the Congestion and Relief Zone. Almost all car traffic within the zone is from people who do not live within the zone.

I wager they did a study to weigh the costs and came up with the inevitable answer that chasing down the tenth of a percent (a wild guess but I think it's at worst an order of magnitude off from the actual number) of cars that exist only within the congestion zone and never leave would cost more than you'd gain both in fees and second order effects. Especially the population of cars most likely to never or rarely leave are being charged on a per ride basis, cabs and rideshare vehicles like Uber etc.

It's like all the efforts to drug test people on welfare, they cost vastly more than they save/recover.

It's not just more roads, although more roads are one of the things it is possible to create.

You can also create more housing, so people are closer to their jobs and have to travel fewer miles. Manhattan has higher density than most places, but it also has more people, and would you be surprised to learn that the zoning in most of NYC no longer allows the buildings that are currently in Manhattan to be built almost anywhere? So as a result you can't create more of them and people who might like to live in Manhattan instead live in the suburbs around the city and drive into the city in a car.

You can also create things that aren't roads, like subways, which then allow you to remove cars and buses (and bus lanes) from the roads when it becomes viable for more people to take the subway, which reduces road congestion.

> We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities".

No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me.

> This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars.

Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).

Driving in New York has been terrible for a century. The only way to make it better is to disincentivize people from doing it by making it more costly and making public transit better. Urban planners have known this is the case since at least the 40s.

Congestion pricing isn't some kind of new punishment. It's a bill, long overdue, finally getting paid (and only partially).

And will the drivers be prepared to fund this via another channel?

Or you get voted out of office and your charges reversed down to zero - or perhaps negative as the people are so mad they take it out on the transit this was supposed to fund.

Politics is tricky, don't take so much you make people affected mad enough to undo what you wanted.

Not enough seats is mostly pretty close into the city in my experience. At least on the line that I sometimes take, it's mostly Waltham in which doesn't have a mass transit line.

I truly feels safe on the NYC subway.

You know what's more dangerous than riding the subway? Driving in a car.

It was snarky and ridiculous, yes. But then, so is the implication that subways aren't sufficiently safe due to emotional appeals to incidents that happen a single-digit number of times a year versus the millions of riders every day.

Getting rid of cars entirely may not be practical, but it is objectively true that many more people are killed and injured in car accidents in the same area over any particular length of time you could name compared to subway crime. What is the objective reason why subways are "scary" but cars aren't?

For that matter, what is the objective source for such statements as that stations are "getting dangerous enough" or that "people are avoiding them"? Is any of that backed up by actual crime statistics or ridership numbers, or just sensationalized headlines?

The real unintended consequence is that cities ultimately don’t like to run them. They’re effective, and thus the revenue the city is expecting disappears. In they end they become costs rather than revenue sources.

$500 is just dinner for some people in SF.

Or maybe people will drive at 99 mph to get the best value.

Nothing special. Slight increases in minor accidents and near misses, some minority of which will involve pedestrians or road rage violence Basically the same downsides as anything else that changes the speed via rule or enforcement rather than changing the conditions of the road (e.g. "traffic calming").

A normal person sees that $500 fine as a incentive to not go that fast. But there's a certain kind of person for whom $500 is nothing compared to being able to tell the story of that time the city sold them a picture of them, complete with certificate that says they broke 100mph somewhere in the city limits, a trophy to frame and display openly in the garage next to said vehicle.

The car takes up space in the city the entire time it's there, even if the congestion impact is less while it's parked.

And further, if I am already paying $50 fare to take an Uber, a $1.50 toll is not deterring me or reducing my usage at all. It is less than the rounding error on the tip I give the driver. I probably won't even notice it amongst the 5 line items of fees, taxes, surcharges, etc on the digital receipt.

You are wealthy if you are using private car services like that.

Most normal New Yorkers use the subway

None of that crap you mentioned has anything to do with the previous post. I live in as suburban of a neighborhood as you can imagine and within 10-15 minutes could walk to a Vietnamese restaurant, 2 sushi restaurants, Thai, NY style pizza, 2 bars, several shitty Mexican restaurants, and just about every fast food chain. I’ll trade this ease of living over “vibes” any day.

Small correction, every ride that starts and/or ends in the zone incurs the fee so a taxi that enters, does 12 trips, then leaves pays the same amount as a private car even though they only entered the zone once.

> Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured?

It isn't. It's vastly more expensive to ride in a taxi when you include the fare.

It should be cheaper. No circling the block looking for parking, no space needed at all for that matter. That alone is worth giving taxis/ubers at least a different pricing structure.

I don’t know about cheaper - this is already on top of the $2.75 per-ride NY State congestion fee. So now, if you take an Uber ride in NYC that’s even just a few blocks or few minutes long, it will be $2.75+$1.5 = $4.25 of just congestion fees for every ride.

Because there are fewer cars in the system for each chauffeured ride vs private vehicle.

> Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider.

Only partially right? Tax incidence depends on the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply.

Oh, no, he knew.

Unless you’re one of those people who can’t drive?

That's because they turned it down[1]. New Jersey has decided that their strategy is going to be to dig their heels in and hope for a supportive administration, rather than plan for the next century of growth in the economic region that powers their state.

[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/12/18/nj-refusing-generous-...

NYS offered, NJ sued NYS, NJ lost

It would be a completely ok thing for NYS to tell NJ $0 get bent, NJ coulda spent turnpike widening money on transit instead of begging from NYS

NJ needs to stop its commuter residents paying NY income tax, particularly those doing WFH more than half the year. They can boost NJT with that pile of money.

I take the bus in to work every day even though I have a car and the ability to WFH. I love the bus. I get to spend some time outside, walking to and from stops. Most days I just read a book or browse my phone for 40 minutes, and then magically I'm at work. Sometimes I get to chat with people on the bus or at the bus stop, though that's pretty rare, most people keep to themselves. I never have road rage. I never worry about parking. I never worry about people damaging my $XX,000 object. I almost never have to care about road construction, the bus just handles it for me. It's pretty neat!

> being in a pod with a hundred people you don't know and who have not been screened for insanity, excessive odor, sickness and general obnoxiousness.

These events do happen, but they're pretty rare. For the most part, people on the bus are just people, who happen to be on a bus. Just like there are crazy drivers, there are sometimes crazy bus passengers. At least the crazy bus passengers aren't piloting 4000 lbs of steel :)

Hi, nice to meet you! I prefer public transit because when I ride it I don't have to drive or find a parking spot! And I believe it to be safer on balance.

I prefer public transit! No parking, I dont feel nearly the same frustration, I dont have to make decisions, and at the end of the day I can be a little high on the train. Its bliss.

Chiming in to say I also prefer public transit. Why focus on the ride at all when I can just read a book and teleport?

And the real danger of motorcycles is to yourself. You could end up living with a feeding tube slipping in a shower let alone a minor scuff at 25mph.

I drove for years and was very happy to rid myself of my car and rely solely on SF's public transit and Uber/Lyft for when I need to go somewhere that isn't as readily accessible. Scooters and EBikes can't get me across the bay bridge anyway.

And SF's public transit is worse (both less useful and less comfortable) compared to NYC, many European cities, and any Japanese or Chinese megacity. I still find it perfectly fine, and preferable to dealing with a car.

Sounds like you don't live in New York, then? Most people here don't own a car and don't want to.

Well yea, two major advantages of public transit over driving is that it is safer and less expensive. So if you are going to discount people with those opinions, of course the people remaining are more likely to align with you.

Motorcyclists generally have some compassion for cyclists in that both share trouble with cars, and both have problems with staying upright. Multiple car drivers have tried to kill me in America; no such thing happened in 10 years in Pakistan, and I've had zero direct problems from motorcycles anywhere. Collision dangers aside—there's probably stats for that somewhere, probably poorly trained, drunk, or road raging folks sitting in cars are by far the main risk—the main problem of motorcycles would be the noise and air pollution from the engines, especially when there are too many of them in too small an area, versus having somewhere you can actually walk, think, and play (these differ not) without all that horrid noise and stench. In America, this is mostly limited to a few tourist island towns where there is only an ambulance and a service truck or two, and the cyclists on vacation are all like "wow, this is so nice! I don't get the Threat Of Death™ I usually do from the American stroad".

"Stroad" is a term invented, I believe, by those crazy folks over at "Strong Towns", who probably also have things to say about congestion pricing, and why it's taken so very bloody long to implement it in a supposedly modern and advanced nation.

I favor public transit, or ideally walking (problematic) or bicycling (even more problematic). Bicycling can be very problematic in America, to the point that a tourist from Florida in downtown Seattle once remarked "wow, the cars here aren't trying to kill me!" as we sat at some stinky car-strewn intersection. Basically you're a second class citizen if you walk or bicycle. Folks in cars will yell at you or throw things sometimes, and I have the correct skin color and sex, so it's strictly worse for others.

Buses? Sure, you can find the spicy runs with all the homeless (why are there so many homeless in America? Money out the ass and yet a nation so poor …), but I've had a lot more and a lot worse direct problems with folks who sit in cars, not counting indirect problems such as the noise, air, and real estate pollution (sometimes called "the high cost of free parking"). Usually the bus crazy will do something evil like offer you a joint, or wacky conversation, and will not do something upstanding like to change into the lane that you are bicycling in, forcing you off the road.

I wish my city had better public transit, so I could drive less. Driving sucks!

Have you even been to NYC?

Once the Uber drops you off, it's available to take someone else somewhere they need to go. Car services are an essential part of a total system that enables people not to have to drive. Personal cars are the opposite of that.

It's one of those things about the way Americans think about transit that makes me insane, they try to assess the ROI of every single individual leg of a transit system rather than assess the system as a whole.

For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.

That's just one example. Here's another more suited to your example. What if you generally switch to taking transit into the city, and only take an uber when it's raining or you have something heavy to carry?

If I allow there to be a robust market for Ubers in the city then that's possible. If I aggressively charge Ubers then you can't do that, and you're back to driving every day.

There's plenty of examples. But in short it's clear that private cars are by a mile the worst and most inefficient thing occupying the roads. That's what we want to have the strongest incentives against.

> This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?

It's not obvious that Uber is exclusively the higher-class option. Someone could easily make the same calculation you just did and decide that for them even owning a car wouldn't be worth it, they'll just do Uber every time they need to. You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.

I don't have data to back it up, but I would actually be surprised if the average Uber customer in NYC owns a car at all.

Think of the congestion charge as a charge on the vehicle, rather than on the person, as the stated policy goal is to reduce the number of vehicles in the CBD, not the number of people overall. The Uber is very likely going to continue to be used to service other passengers after dropping you off within the same calendar day, so one potential "fair" solution is to split the congestion charge among the many passengers using that one vehicle. That is your reduced Uber toll charge. But even in this case, it's not really an even split, taxis are going to generate a much higher congestion charge revenue than a single passenger car.

Alternatively, day parking rates drop enough (due to market forces) to compensate for the cost of the toll.

The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else. A single car line can transport about 2000 persons per hour. A single bus lane about 9000, a single bike lane 14000 - if you dedicate the space to pedestrians, we’re at 19000 and light rail goes beyond that at 22000 and more. (See page 3, https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002265/News/Pre..., German only)

This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.

(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)

Yes and no. Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them)

So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest.

However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput.

Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination.

This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)

The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)

San Francisco currently has ~54% of its eligible population having cars registered to them. There are a lot of one-car families as well as e-bike families who don't want a car.

If that increased to 100%, you wouldn't be able to park anywhere without paying a lot, and getting anywhere would be super slow.

It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.

> absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures)

I think they're intended to be anti-"getting killed by a car" measures. Traffic fatality statistics speak for themselves.

Unless you happen to ask the large fraction of people who knowingly moved there to make big bucks for some number of years before getting out. They will all tell you it sucks, the government sucks, you suck for not realizing that and that they're masterminding their exit to the suburbs of Phoenix or Miami or whatever. These people make up a sizable minority of the NYC population at any given time.

Where else have you lived?

I live in nyc today and whenever I hear people say that , it turns out they mean “New York City is the greatest city in the world of New York City and Waterloo, Wisconsin.”

And even then , I’ve seen photos of Waterloo… looks like the air is nice and breathable there. And apparently you can afford to rent a place on a normal salary.

You don’t have to agree but at least try and get out of your bubble. You don’t even know enough different people in New York City itself to support that claim, apparently.

The thing is, a transit trip's true cost is also around $20 in SF and Seattle. It's just that perverse incentives hide it from users.

Waymo taxis deserve the same level of subsidies. It won't be happening any time soon because it'll be a death knell for transit, and will leave thousands of city employees without work.

I live in Manhattan and I am decidedly anti-car. If I had my way private vehicles would be banned (with exceptions for e.g. people with relevant disabilities).

But cabs are important! This past august, I bought a new desktop PC (I did not want to build it myself for various reasons). I took it home in an Uber. Trying to walk to the subway with that giant box would have been virtually impossible.

You're forgetting that the transit zones themselves are not only affected, the main BRIDGES are also affected. So even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances

```

Manhattan's Congestion Relief Zone starts at 60th Street and heads south to include the Lincoln, Holland and Hugh L. Carey tunnels on the Hudson River side, and the Queensboro Bridge, Queens Midtown Tunnel, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge on the East Side.

Drivers will be charged when they enter the Congestion Relief Zone using the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro or Williamsburg Bridges, or the Holland, Hugh L. Carey, Lincoln or Queens-Midtown tunnels.

Drivers coming from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan will be charged once they reach 60th Street.

```

You don’t. Yet they are popular.

It’s only the densest transit zone in the US. Many international locales are denser and measurably better.

This issue highlights that people take for granted that things are permanent and people will accept anything. This is great for me — I’ll happily pay the toll to move faster when I’m in the city. But my guess is my customers will start melting away faster and I’ll be spending quality time in Jersey. That was happening even before COVID and I think will accelerate.

They would have been smarter to hold out for a few years and add a surcharge to the road mileage tax that’s coming.

One of the gaps is accessibility, rideshares are useful for people who have trouble getting around.

A medium US city has the commute time of 15 minutes. It's unachievable with transit in any scenario.

> And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.

Yeah. And it sucks. The distributed nature of the US cities gave people far more economic opportunities than in Europe. This resulted in faster economic growth (and still does).

> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.

No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.

And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.

> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?

Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.

I've literally been to 80+ countries and have spent time in every U.S. city of significant size. If you can't look at the world and figure out the obvious fact that New York is the greatest and most significant city that has existed since we climbed down out of the trees I'm not sure what's going to convince you.

> Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive.

This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math.

> You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car.

When most people have a car you have to compare it not to the amortized cost of owning a car but the marginal cost of driving one you already have.

The majority of trips might be suitable for public transport but then people have a car because it's such an inconvenience to go to Costco and carry back everything you buy there on a bus, or they occasionally go somewhere the bus doesn't. So they get a car and then the insurance, tax, depreciation, etc. are all sunk costs and to get them to take the bus instead of driving themselves it has to beat the cost of gas.

Which it can, if you make it zero. Which in turn increases ridership, allowing you to justify more routes, which reduces latency, which causes even more people to take mass transit. By making mass transit more attractive instead of making driving less attractive.

> It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable.

Or you can just handle 85% of the cases that would have a justifiable amount of ridership and then let people drive a car or get an Uber in the 15% that would be mostly disused, instead of leaving it how it is now where people drive the majority of the time.

Is there a song called "Cleveland, Cleveland" that says if you can make it in Cleveland you can make it anywhere?

It surely was in 1945, no doubt about it.

> Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public.

Nope. A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).

> Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget.

So would be giving everyone a (cheap) car.

> Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it

Good, then don't build it! Easy peasy. Price is a GREAT signal. Subsidies, hidden fees, misplaced incentives and other crap lead to suboptimal outcomes.

You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.

> But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit

Great, we need exactly that.

> which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.

Nope. People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.

And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.

Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.

> Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.

Nope. It just doesn't. Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit). Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.

> You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost?

I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).

Richer people should pay the full cost of rides. This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).

> The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it.

That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.

I don't hate cars. I own and drive a car, though I mostly take transit into SF to avoid the stress.

By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space (both while moving and while parked) to be compatible with even a moderately dense environment. You need some kind of rationing or metering.

The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars. There are more parking lots, which means less density, which means fewer people can choose to live closer to work, which means more cars, and so on. (Transit does the same in its own favor, of course. Transportation is quite fundamental.)

It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out. But it works quite well with the levels of density in pre-war "streetcar suburbs", like those built around the Key System in Oakland. I think the most reasonable solution for post-war suburbs is transit most of the way, and cars (robotic or otherwise) for the last mile.