> Particulates issued from tailpipes can aggravate asthma and heart disease and increase the risk of lung cancer and heart attack. Globally, they are a leading risk factor for premature death.
Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
It's true that brake dust is the primary PM2.5 emission from vehicles in an urban environment. However the PM2.5 component from tail pipes are still very significant, higher than the contribution from tires.
Absolutely. Nearly eliminates. Even non-plugin hybrids have greatly reduced.
There was a "study" going around claiming otherwise, which sampled air captured by passing vehicles with a trash bag on a busy road, claiming EVs did not reduce brake dust, but even my brief summary here makes it extremely obvious how flawed this "measurement" is.
For those of us unclear why collecting air from passing cars to measure particulates is obviously flawed, could you elaborate?
EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, as well. Fairly significantly. It's not obvious to me that the decrease in brake dust isn't made up by the increase in tire dust.
The removal of the tailpipe emissions is really where EVs shine from a pollution standpoint. If you turn on your car in your garage, you don't die anymore.
EV brake pads don't hardly wear down, so they obviously can't have nearly the same amount of brake dust, yet the "study" showed they did. I'm guessing there's brake dust on the ground being kicked up.
> EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, Fairly significantly
In the USA, mass of EV is not significantly different than the alternative choice. EVs do not have increased tire particulate. If in Europe extremely lightweight tiny cars are actually a likely substitution for nicer, heavier EVs, then it seems reasonable that tire wear will increase proportionally. There's a lot riding on that "if" though.
It's not just the fact that EVs are heavier than the non-EV version of the same car, it's also that the regenerative braking means that the tires are dissapating energy that otherwise would have gone to the brake pads or to air resistance. Tires wear way faster on an EV, their lifespan in miles is generally much shorter.
> it's also that the regenerative braking means that the tires are dissapating energy that otherwise would have gone to the brake pads or to air resistance
This does not seem correct...
- Air resistance slows the car without putting anything extra through the tyres (the friction is between car and air rather than between tyre and road)
- Regenerative braking channels energy into the battery, and also heat, that would otherwise be dissipated by heating and ablating the brake pads and discs, but regardless or whether it's brakes or the the motor acting as a dynamo that puts resistance on the rolling of the wheels, for a given amount of braking you will have the same forces between the tyres and the road and the same tyre wear.
So I'd expect it's only any additional weight that contributes to increase tyre particulates from electric care. Perhaps a tiny contribution from lower air resistance (on average at least) for electric cars, as there's often quite an effort to reduce the drag coefficient for range reasons, but I wouldn't expect this to be substantial as air resistance is not huge part of braking.
Regenerative braking needs something to act against in order to slow the car down. Whether the thing on the car side is an electric motor generating voltage or a brake caliper generating heat, the effect of both is to create resistance to the axle turning. This slows the car via tire-road friction.
EVs tend to use regenerative braking, thus applying road-tire friction, much more often than an ICE vehicle uses brakes. In an EV if you are going tobfast and let off the accelerator, the regen braking slows you. With tires. In an ICE car, you will coast along and slowly slow down, mainly due to air resistance, unless you actively press the brake.
If regen braking only happened when then EV driver pushes the brake pedal with their foot, your expectations would be correct and weight would be the only differentiator. But the single pedal driving design decision means the tires wear more.
But if the car decelerates harder when you let off the gas than you expect (compared to an ICE), maybe you'll give it a bit more "gas", so that, in the end, your deceleration is roughly the same in both types of cars?
I haven't noticed EVs oscillating between full acceleration and hard braking when out and about. They seem to be driven pretty much the same as any other car.
If I'm not mistaken, this means that tyre wear should be roughly equivalent (for an equivalent vehichle weight). So EVs still have the benefit of reducing brake pad wear.
The oscillation you mention does exist, it's just small enough that it's tough to pick out visually watching the car. But it can be felt within the vehicle, and the small oscillations are certainly enough to wear tires more than the ICE alternative.
If you have any friends with motion sickness, ask them if it feels different to be a passenger in an EV.
Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.
All this isn't to say EVs aren't better than ICE vehicles. They are, in many ways. It's just that tire wear isn't one of them.
> Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.
I'm convinced they do, many people noted this. But I always thought it was mainly because the cars are heavier than what most people are used to, and they also have much better acceleration.
Firstly, the motors absorb half the energy. The other half goes to the tires. It would be great and efficient if the motors could.absorb it all but unfortunately physics doesn't work that way.
Secondly, if you've ridden in an EV, you would know that the drivers/cruise control often apply regent braking in situations where an ICE vehicle would have simply coasted to a stop. Hence more wear.
With the ICE car, if you want to go 55, you might accelerate to 57 and then coast down to 55 without using brakes.
With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
Tire wear is a function of how often you use your tires to slow down the car. With an ICE car that's every time you hit your brakes. With an EV that's both brakes and regen. An EV's time spent braking or regenning is more than the time an ICE car spends braking.
Someone could design an EV that behaves the way you describe, but aggressive regen sells better, so no one does.
> With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
No one with more than a few miles of one-pedal driving would do this; it’d be highly unpleasant.
What actually happens is you remap your pedal inputs: all the way off is braking, somewhere in the middle is coasting. Your brain will do it automatically and OPD is far more pleasant than two-pedal driving after a trivial learning curve.
I agree that OPD is better. I disagree that it's easy to coast with OPD.
What actually happens is you wind up decelerating for curves, accelerating on straights more, and otherwise having better control of the car. Holding the pedal in a location where power is neither going to or coming from the motor is very difficult; usually you want power going to the motor anyway to overcome air resistance.
Also, consider that most EVs will automatically regeneratively brake when going downhill with cruise control on. The last ICE car I owned just coasted and would speed up on large downhills with cruise on.
Of the three EVs, all different manufacturers, that we've owned in the last decade, zero have coasting as an easy option. You have to either switch off OPD entirely, or else literally shift the car into neutral.
And yes, you are right, if you do that you can coast and then your tire wear will be no worse than an ICE vehicle.
Yeah, you're not shifting into neutral on your ICE car to coast from 57 to 55 either, you're just releasing the accelerator. You've still got the motor engaged, so you're doing mild engine braking on the ICE even if it's vernacularly called coasting.
If you lack the middle-school-level understanding of physics to understand why, I'm not going to be able to give it to you in an internet comment.
Think hard about why braking and coasting would wear the tires differently. Here's a hint. Where does the energy go? What is doing the work to stop the car in each scenario?
I recall a discussion on HN explaining that while true, this might be offset by the higher average weight of EVs, leading to more dust from the tires and the road. Again, no easy solution unfortunately, just trade offs.
And to add info, an F-150 will change brake pads 3-7 times over 200k miles, while a Model Y will still be on the original set with nearly no sign of wear.
but compare the wear of the tires, and weigh tires vs brakes by the amount of "total pollution delivered to the environment", i.e. 20% more wear of something that is 2x as polluting is 40% more pollution. I don't know the numbers or the answer, I'm just saying it's not as simple as your statement makes it out to be.
Why are you just making up numbers then saying "it's not as simple"? Try educating yourself a little first instead of just jumping to conclusions which reinforce your existing biases.
> 20% more wear of something that is 2x as polluting is 40% more pollution
If an equivalent car wore down its tires 20% slower, and those tire particles contributed 2x the intensity of pollution than other types of wear-based pollution, than the increase in produced pollution from that source seems like it would be ~16%, not 40%.
If one car drives 100 km and produces 2 units of pollution per km, that would be 200 units. Another car wearing 20% more would produce 240 units, or roughly ~16% more.
IME they only wear out maybe 15-20% faster than you'd think. On the other hand, over the span of 40,000 miles, a tire loses a LOT more rubber by weight/volume than a brake pad loses pad material. No idea what the PM2.5 breakdown is though.
The difference is that only about 1% of the worn rubber ends up in the air whereas most of the brake pad ends up in the air. Most of the worn rubber stays on the road. Where it will get washed away by the rain to end up as microplastics in the water.
Specialized EV tires are also optimized for drag and noise, wear is just a factor. Anecdotally speaking I'm at over 80k km on a set of EV tires with at least 20k more to go. The issue has more to do with driving style and engine power than any other factors.
100%. Tire technology is a real thing. Tires have advanced a ton in the last 10 years. But driving style is the biggest thing. Some people can only get 10k miles out of a set of tires, while others with the same car and tires get over 40k.
But they do care about tire wear a lot, they know the acceptable wear life for the class. A couple years ago I bought a set of Pirelli tires that were ~50% off because they were an older version; hoping I’d get some benefit. Unfortunately they had half the life and were a bit worse in every way than the newer tires I had before and after.
Some tires are going to wear fast no matter what. I had some Pirelli PZero summer tires that I could never get more than 15k out of regardless of how I drove. The tire compound was very soft and sticky.
If you have something like really high performance tires, I recommend just using them. The grip is always there and you are always paying for it. As long as you aren't losing traction constantly, the difference is negligible in my experience.
Additional weight (which is minor; of best-selling vehicles, F-150 curb weight is 4000-5600 lbs, Tesla Model Y is 4400-4600 lbs) does not meaningfully increase brake wear because the brakes don't get used.
I’m guessing not as much as standard transmissions, which largely eliminate the need for breaking while also reducing fuel usage. Yet there are almost no new cars with standard transmission. If only people cared a bit more.
An electric car can use its engines to bring a vehicle to a complete stop. It can also use the motor to hold the car in place, even on a fairly steep incline. You can't do either with a standard transmission ICE vehicle.
There are people with electric cars that have their brakes rust out because they're never used. A standard piece of advice to EV owners is "make sure to use your brakes at least once a month".
the engine cannot brake to a complete stop, so break pads are always in use. At low RPMs, the engine is going to stall (manual) or switch to neutral (automatic).
> though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles.
The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
PM2.5 is also a broad category of particulates that come from many sources. The PM2.5 levels in the air depend on many sources, with wind being a major factor in changing PM2.5 levels. It’s hard to draw conclusions when a number depends on the weather and a lot of other inputs.
Not only that, in France for example the liter of Diesel fuel was always 10 to 15 euro cents cheaper at the petrol station due to how regular gasoline and diesel fuel was taxed.
That's why before EVs started to show up on the market en masse if you walked into a dealership they would always recommend that you pick the diesel engine if you wanted to save money of fuel costs.
That was actually the reason why the Yellow vest protests started in 2018 when the French government announced that the taxation gap between diesel and regular gasoline was going to disappear gradually.
Small edit to add to the context:
By that point, when the protests started in 2018, the governments(right and left) of France and the many French automakers had been pushing diesel engines as THE solution to alleviate rising fuel costs and so justifiably, the protesters thought that someone had just pulled the rug from underneath them.
Also this measure was in direct contradiction to Macron's campaign promise which was that he was going to reduce the tax burden or at least not increase it on the middle class, especially the rural middle-class that basically cannot get a job without having a car as public transport is almost non-existent in rural France.
That and many other things which I won't get into since it is not relevant for this discussion really riled people up.
In Canada, diesel fuel is priced around mid-grade gasoline (89). So it's slightly more expensive than regular, but slightly cheaper than premium (91/93).
Based on this, I've always thought of diesel as "more expensive", like you better get 15% more power/miles out of it if it's going to cost more! However, I suspect that most people purchasing diesel vehicles have as their other choice a car that would slurp premium, so for those buyers perhaps diesel is still a discount, even in Canada.
Can you source that? Diesel is only 13% more energy dense than gasoline [1] so the difference between the two fuels isn't huge.
I suspect that modern (last five years) turbocharged gasoline engines are probably approaching diesel thermal efficiency, but I don't think that it's correct to say that they generally surpass it. The gasoline Ford EcoBoost is 33% thermally efficient while a BMW N47 turbo-diesel is 42% thermally efficient, as an example [2].
Yes, but measuring miles per volume of fuel and setting increasing targets was a big focus of reducing petroleum dependency since the 70s.
The focus has more recently shifted to reducing overall emissions of CO2 and other harmful gases and particulates, which makes diesel much less appealing.
Modern diesel engines with DPF and DEF are pretty clean from a particulate and NOx standpoint. Of course there are still older diesels on the road, mainly buses and trucks. In the USA, diesel is so unpopular as a passenger car engine that it's not even worth worrying about.
I don't think you can just say diesel is less popular in the US without bringing up the emissions scandals. It genuinely seems to me like companies can't deliver clean emissions and efficiency gains at the same time for it.
The scandals don't matter. The number of people in the USA who buy diesel passenger cars rounds off to "nobody." There's just no point in even bothering. Supposing you could make an ultra-low emission diesel (without cheating), you'd still sell almost none.
To add to what others said: diesels always had a reputation of reliability. The cast-iron TDI 1.9 is legendary but even Italian cars fitted with the JTD line would just work and not require maintenance. I recall making light of a friend who was driving an Alfa Romeo until he mentioned that actually it's been more reliable than anything else he's driven - at least in terms of powertrain issues.
The love for diesel came from a catastrophic misunderstanding and the resulting belief that CO2 must be reduced at all costs. Diesel engines of the past produced slightly less CO2 per km than petrol engines in exchange for much worse overall emissions. The fact that they were slightly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption helped with the sales pitch, too.
Nobody was even thinking about CO2 when the policies that got Europe where they are were enacted.
Europe began embracing diesels 40yr ago when they were noisy and stinky and they did it because they taxed the crap out of fuel so people rightfully prioritized buying vehicles that got better fuel economy.
I don't know about mainland Europe, but in the UK it really was exclusively about CO2 emissions per distance travelled, to the extent that Vehicle Excise Duty (the annual tax you pay on a car) was defined in terms of g/km of CO2 emitted. This happened in 2001 and wasn't changed until the wake of the emissions cheating scandals [1].
Interesting. If not to reduce CO2 emissions, what was the rationale presented to the voters for having high taxes on fuel 40 yr ago?
In the US, Federal lawmakers would be voted out of office (even now after the science of climate change has settled) if they imposed taxes on fuels anywhere near as high as European lawmakers do.
>Interesting. If not to reduce CO2 emissions, what was the rationale presented to the voters for having high taxes on fuel 40 yr ago?
Energy security. They didn't have north sea oil back then. Buying from Russia or the ME was fraught with political peril. And of course the .gov is never gonna pass up a chance to increase revenue.
It's unfortunate that so much rhetoric around environmentalism is based on faulty claims. It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.
The latest one is AI data center water use- the extreme numbers like 5 liters of water per ChatGPT image just makes me feel sad that we can't have a civil discussion based on the facts. Everything is so polarized.
My point was that misinformation makes it impossible or nearly impossible to evaluate "is this environmental or not".
Best effort is not enough to guarantee a good outcome- for example, this car is diesel and has lower emissions, therefore I will buy it and I will be reducing my own emissions turns out to not be true all the time.
Just like congestion pricing might or might not actually affect pollution in the way that it's claimed. The obvious point being that the city loves the new revenue, no matter what the level of impact it actually has.
I'm actually in favor of congestion pricing in principle (whether or not pm2.5 is reduced or not). I'm just sad that often times it's impossible to figure out what's true.
>It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.
What does that even mean?
Honestly whatever it means it sounds like you would be the kind of person that would fall for the firehose of falsehood rather than look for the truth behind the actual claims.
For 99.9% of issues, we rely on trust to make up our minds. We assume people are mostly not lying. If a group of people are found to lie, then yes, maybe “look for the truth behind the actual claims” is worth it, but more likely shooting them out of the discourse and into the metaphorical sun is the right response. If you walk around lying, you don’t get to complain that people aren’t doing research on your claims.
Sure, but how does that relate to environmentalists? The people lying were the car industry, but somehow the OP questions environmentalism. Why are they not questioning the car industry?
This is something I see a lot in science skepticism.
Someone incorrectly conveys a simple science concept, and people blame the scientist, not the communicator.
Like, News says "New revolutionary battery" and people roll their eyes and say "Oh but this will never make it to prod" and decide that scientists are liars and conveniently ignore that lithium battery density has like doubled over the past 20 years or so.
The person who was wrong was the unaware journalist taking a PR person's claims at face value, and having no context to smell test such a claim, and having no time or interest to treat the claim with skepticism anyway because "Batteries slightly improve" never sold newspapers.
Why? There are massive incentives for people to lie in a great many cases, especially where profits exist. Car manufactures, as we know, gladly lie and fake evidence. Even when there are massive fines involved, the fines are generally less than what they make in profit from the lies.
What's even better is you can play both sides to confuse the issue. Create 3rd party groups on the other side of your claims and have them make up the stupidest claims "Just looking at a car will give you cancer". Flood the zone with false information, bullshit asymmetry. Lobby the shit out of politicians so they don't care about the issues, only the money it brings in.
The confused regulars in the middle are so propagandized to they no longer know up from down and billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.
>The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
It's expressly incentivized by their tax system.
Imagine the year is 1988 and you're some snooty jerk in Europe about to buy a Mercedes. Why on earth would you go with the noisy, smelly diesel option if not to save A TON of money over the life of the vehicle?
When I was at the military they told us that in case of war the government would start appropriating diesel cars, since those are compatible with the fuel the military uses and that there were ancient incentives to buy this type of car to make sure there were enough of them.
I believe the popularity of diesel car in Europe is actually a tax-related hack.
The idea is that diesel is the "work" fuel, for shipping, construction, etc... While gasoline is the "consumer" fuel, for personal use, motorsports, etc... Make the former expensive and it will affect the entire economy, everything will become more expensive and less competitive. Making gasoline more expensive will not have the same impact.
So, put high taxes on gasoline. The result was an increase in popularity of diesel cars, that cost less to run because of taxes.
Now, the situation is changing. Diesel, at least the one that is legal to use on the road is taxed at a level closer to gasoline. Diesel cars are also becoming less and less welcome with regards to low emission zones and green taxes, so many people are going back to gasoline.
Yes, in France as I pointed out in my other comment, the diesel fuel was always cheaper than regular gasoline. The re-alignment of the tax was (amongst other things) what sparked the massive yellow vest protests in France in 2018.
"relatively clean" means 85% of PM2.5 is from non-exhaust sources, and 15% is from exhaust after catalytic conversion. In New York EV and ICE are pretty much on par when it comes to this category of pollution, as the additional weight increases non exhaust sources.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
It is different in Africa, where catalytic converters are harvested for precious metals and cars are driven without them.
That source is Europe, not New York. It claims EV's are 24% heavier than ICE vehicles. That might be true in Europe but definitely not the case in the US where the average ICE vehicle is a 6000 pound truck and the average EV is a 4000 pound Tesla.
It also assumes they're using the same tires. EV owners put on EV tires, which are formulated to have a lower rolling resistance, quieter and last longer. All 3 of those correlate with lower dust.
New York City has a more European balance of cars versus light trucks than most of the USA. Not easy to park a modern American pickup in any bourough except maybe Staten Island. Source: lived there
The subject here is New York City where I would expect people are less like to drive the heavy ICE vehicles (unless they are doing some that needs such a large vehicle).
But a 6000 pound truck doesn't get replaced with an EV sedan. Or vice versa. As things move to EV I don't know why the proportion of car body types (whatever you call this) wouldn't stay the same.
Yes, but that 24% increase in Europe is partly due to increase in vehicle size. Vehicle size is increasing over time in Europe, and the average EV is newer.
Also, cars designed as pure EV's are a lot lighter than EV's built on an ICE chassis.
A Telsa 3 is about 2% heavier than a BMW 3 whereas a Ford Lightning is 20% heavier than the comparable F-150.
the 24% increase has nothing to do with car size over time in europa.
Table 2 in the paper lists which cars where compared, and that 24% numbers is an average from comparing models where manufacturers offer EV and ICE variants.
Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.
My only experience is BMW EV, but my i4 aggressively prioritizes regeneration over using the brakes. It even has an energy meter that shows negative/positive energy flow. The positive flow is blue until the actual brakes engage where it changes to black. And this is in two pedal mode, one pedal driving is even more aggressive about regen.
I would not doubt I use my breaks 1/20th of the amount that our X5 or Silverado use theirs.
I have an Equinox EV and the brakes do not get used often. They did a great job with blending kinetic regeneration with friction activation, but you can still feel the difference when it kicks in.
They are active in reverse, to ensure that they are used and so that any rust gets cleared from the rotors. They also activate if you slam on the brakes or if the battery is at 100% charge and the kinetic energy can not be used.
I have about 12,000 miles on the car over the last year and the rotors and pads look the same as when I got them. The first annual inspection showed no measurable wear.
I've rented a Chevy Bolt before and in the normal drive mode (D) the brakes almost always get used in addition to light regen. In the single-peddle mode (P) regen is prioritized a lot more but passengers complained about not liking the feel versus standard braking.
But the tires are individually controlled - less slippage - and the brakes are regenerative. As a bonus, NYC is pretty much best-case scenario for the latter.
Not all tire wear is when skidding out. A car tire's contact patch is several inches wide (especially on trucks/SUVs where extra-wide tires are often used to give a more premium look), so any time that wheel is turning a corner, there's a portion of it at the outside and inside that's rotating at a different speed than the pavement beneath it is moving.
There's also the regular deformation of wheel just in the course of regular rotation, which is where the majority of highway wear dust comes from.
With extea weight and tire size, evs will have more slippage. It isnt about the entire tire slipping against the ground. It is about tread patterns slipping as the tire rolls at any speed, especially in corners where car tires cannot ever avoid slipping.
The instant torque also comes with better control over it, though. I don't doubt it's a thing, but I do doubt it outweighs all the other environmental benefits.
It’s the forces that accelerate the wear. Significant wheel speed is a rare occurrence in normal driving, but acceleration, cornering, and braking forces are ever present.
My Polestar 2 (shared design from Volvo's EVs) only uses brakes once it's hit its regen limit, this changes based on battery capacity and temperature but in the real world it means coming to a near complete stop from 50-60mph. The constant rust on the brakes are evident to that.
And you gotta have soft tires to harness that EV torque people expect. Not like the old days where they put hard stiff tires on Priuses to wring out every MPG.
TLDR regenerative braking reduces this significantly, nut getting the raw numbers is always fraught with today's horrific AI-addled search engines.
Also seems like a wonderful opportunity for the materials science people to print money coming up with better brake materials here. And if anyone here who can say "clean coal" with a straight face disagrees, point and laugh at them.
Folks in the comments will say "not really" for EVs because of better control and lower speeds, but if you've ever driven in Manhattan, you'd know it's often light-to-light drag racing at times which with an EV and a heavy foot will undo a lot of the regen braking via stress on the tires.
Why does everyone immediately pivot to EVs on this subject, instead of (looks around) gargantuan SUVs and trucks everywhere, due to peculiarities of US policies regulating SUVs more leniently than cars on fuel efficiency?
I say this as someone who owns an electric scooter and whose next car will be an EV—the sales pitch for EVs right now is basically pay more (especially now that the tax credit is gone) to have a worse time and maybe eventually claw some of it back over the lifetime of the car in fuel savings. The environmental impact is the pro in the pro con list. So if that doesn't pan out, or doesn't pan out enough it's going to be a tough sell.
Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
What do you mean by a worse time? The advantages are substantial- No oil changes ever again, performance that is on par with high end sports cars, less moving parts which should lead to higher reliability, in my state you don't even need to do an annual inspection. Those types of unexpected appointments are what really aggravate me when they are unexpectedly needed and eat up weekend time.
Depending on your commute length, you may be able to just use your regular plug to top up over night. Infra upgrades to support the future are unfortunate, but it should be a one and done kind of thing. It was probably time to update the panel and get 200 Amp service- you will recoup a portion of that if you ever sell the house.
The best part is batteries get signficantly (for some values of signficant) cheaper and better each year. Gen 1 Nissan Leaf owners can now actually replace their batteries for about 1/5th the initial pack cost and increase their range.
When operating beyond your comfortable range you have to strategically plan charging the way shitbox owners have to stop and top up fluids. If it's your only car it's absolutely a degradation in the ~monthly ownership experience though you (in my opinion) make it back not doing oil changes and the like.
Even without the tax credit I still think that EVs are a great buy for most though. Charging shenanigans is simple and a "known known" whereas ICE maintenance is far more unclear at the time of purchase
So I was actually looking at it yesterday, and the top end ranges of todays EVs are actually the same range as my 2007 Honda Accord. Maybe I am unique, but I have never taken a road trip so long that I needed to get gas midway going one way, maybe this is more common out west. I have done some round trips for sure though that would require a top up on more than a charge.
I was surprised though that ranges, at least on the top end and very expensive EVs, are now comparable to ICE cars. This will continue to improve and hopefully alleviate any form of range anxiety in the future, especially as chargers just become more ubiquitous. I feel people really fail to realize they can just essentially top up each night and start out with a full "tank." I don't know, it all just feels very overblown with today's EVs.
It's not the overall range that gets you. It's when all the chargers in the work parking lot are taken and you need to go somewhere that doesn't have chargers after work and it's also winter that results in an inconvenient stop or cutting it uncomfortably close. It's absolutely surmountable but it requires planning you didn't have to do before.
IMO what you save by not going to the gas station is a wash if you have to habitually charge more than just at home. You're replacing one habit with another.
I still think they're worth it since you basically never get hit with an exorbitant repair bill for the engine/trans.
> Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
You likely don't need to replace the panel, as load management options exist. Wallbox, in particular, has an option where you can add a modbus doo-dad (carlo gavazzi energy management module) to your panel and it will monitor the overall usage and drop the EVSE current to keep it at a safe level.
It's more expensive than if you had a modern panel, but less expensive than replacing the panel itself.
Another option is just stick to a smaller circuit.
80% of 15A x 120V = 1.4 kW
80% of 20A x 240V = 3.8 kW
Just going from a standard 15A outlet to a 20A/240V nearly triples the amount of power, and many homes that would need a new panel for a 50A charger have room for one more 20A circuit. Cars typically spend 8-16 hrs per day stationary in their own driveway, so 3.8 kW translates into tons of range.
While 40A or 50A is nice to have, it's far from necessary.
How many amps is your current service? I have 200A service where I live, but the house is 100% electric -- water heater, range, heat pump, washer, dryer, etc. All electric. There's even a little medallion on the front of the house about it: https://i.imgur.com/BrHj1XQ.jpeg The 70s were weird.
And when you say that your panel is old, just how old are we talking?
You likely don't need to install a special charger or breaker panel. A regular 120V wall outlet will give probably give you 30+ miles of range just charging overnight. If your commute is longer, you might want a better charger, but don't let someone upsell you on a high-speed charger if your average daily travel is under 30mi and 90%ile under 100mi.
Watch out for electricians who try to rip off new EV owners. Make sure you get a few estimates. When we added a charger, bids were $2000, $2000, and $500.
My EV is the best most fun car I've ever owned. I had a V8 Mercedes E430 and my EV is faster and more fun to drive. You have it backwards. Having and ICE car is accepting a worse time in exchange for government subsidies on Oil.
Says the person who has never owned an EV. Fifteen years of EV ownership, I’m never going back. Environmental factors aside, an EV is the overall better vehicle. You can keep your rattling ICE vehicles that need special fluid from specific vendors.
I guess I should have said "a more inconvenient time" where owning an EV kinda revolves around your charging setup/schedule in a way that you don't have to think about with ICE cars. I know some people swear by them being more fun to drive but that's the last thing on my list of requirements for a car. I will say I think you're giving ICE cars a bad rap, my little Honda Fit that will be replaced by the EV is at 150k miles with nothing other than like three oil changes (yes i know) and a new set of tires.
I guess I should have said "a more inconvenient time" where owning an EV kinda revolves around your charging setup/schedule in a way that you don't have to think about with ICE cars.
I plug it in when I get home, and when I get in it again the "tank" is always full. I think about the EV a lot less than I do our ICE car, which seems to need gas at the most inconvenient times. You might have an argument for road trips, but even that's almost a no-brainer these days. Sure, I can't just get off at some random exit in the Utah desert and expect to find a charger, but my experience says this whole "charging on a road trip" is way overblown, as if even the slightest bit of look-ahead planning is just too much for people to handle.
“Full” meaning 80%. With a 300 mile range, that’s plenty for day-to-day.
But to your question: I don’t know, does it still? Seems BMS has gotten a lot better from the early Nissan Leaf days, so I don’t if it yet time to retire that along with “discharge batteries all the way so they don’t get ‘memory’”.
One of the biggest bonuses for me is never needing to go to a gas station. So much more pleasant to charge at home overnight, or at charge stations if I’m on a road trip. I can’t imagine buying an ICE car ever again.
I see this argument almost exclusively from the fuckcars crowd, because their existing environmental arguments against ICE vehicles don't apply to EVs.
If you're claiming that the oil and gas lobby is facilitating their criticism of any automobile, I hope you're right because that would be hilarious.
> Friends of the Earth U.S. was founded in California in 1969 by environmentalist David Brower after he left the Sierra Club. The organization was launched with the help of Donald Aitken, Jerry Mander and a $200,000 donation from the personal funds of Robert O. Anderson. One of its first major campaigns was the protest of nuclear power, particularly in California.
> Robert Orville Anderson (April 12, 1917 – December 2, 2007) was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist who founded [the United States' sixth-largest oil company] Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).
Consumers like SUVs. They are convenient, easy to get in and out of, flexible for hauling large items, many can pull trailers, offer good visibility for the driver, and do well in the snow.
They are also heavily subsidized by the US government in the form of relaxed regulations. The profit margins are higher which is why car companies push them. In their current ICE form they also benefit from massive government subsidies of the Oil companies. If you took those away it is unlikely that the convenience would be worth the additional cost.
>They are also heavily subsidized by the US government in the form of relaxed regulations. The profit margins are higher which...
Look in the mirror, that's who's responsible for this.
You people levied regulations. You levied them in half baked ways that resulted in the demise of sedans and station wagons. And now you complain that SUVs are "subsidized". Get out of here with that nonsense and take your stupid regulations with you so the rest of us can have diversity of vehicle choice back.
None of this stuff is a subsidy, construing "exempt from the screwing some other product category gets" is just a lie.
I take a less libertarian view on this. It because trucks and truck-like vehicles are under-regulated. The result being excess pollution and pedestrian fatalities. We need to remove the loop hole.
They can, the main difference being they ride lower (like a sedan) and tend to have less headroom in the cargo area so might not be quite as good at transporting "stuff."
I had a Ford Focus wagon for quite some time, loved it. Cheap to buy, cheap to own, nothing exciting but very dependable and useful. With a small 4-cylinder engine it could not tow (at least not much) and rust eventually claimed it. Still ran like new with over 200K miles.
Because when you're talking about particulates in the air, one of the main local environmental harms from cars, EVs aren't the 100% clean people expect them to be.
EVs are heavier than equivalent-sized ICE vehicles, but they do enjoy regenerative braking. The answer is to make smaller-sized cars but the auto industry has been pushing the farmer cosplay for decades because the profit margins are a lot higher on a $75k truck or SUV than $30k sedan.
It's a tough area, honestly, and will be until public charging is better. You need a bigger battery to get the range that people need (want?) to be able to reach the next charging station. Realistically, though, most people don't really venture far from home but they don't like the idea that they can't venture far from home without finding a place to charge.
EV charging availability has drastically improved over the last few years, so maybe there is hope for smaller EVs.
The Chevy Suburban has been one of the largest vehicles on the market since 1934. [1]
If you wanted an EV to match the Suburban it would probably be that Cadillac Escalade IQ in terms of size, comfort, and towing capacity -- that's got a curb weight of 9,100 pounds which is 1.5x heavier than the Suburban.
I'd think the BMW 3 Series has a similar vibe to the Model 3 and that has a base curb weight of 3536 which is about 10% less than the Model 3.
[1] it's the oldest nameplate that's been made continuously
Tires yes, brakes no. Friction brakes are barely used on EVs outside of specific scenarios. Mine will engage in three situations:
1. The brake pedal is pressed hard
2. The battery is 100% charged and the energy from braking can not be used
3. I am backing up
For #3, the only reason why the brakes are used when backing up is to ensure that they are used even the tiniest amount and to clear any rust from the rotors.
Tire wear is probably a thing - although I suspect the per-wheel control allows them to better respond to slips and sudden acceleration. I've noticed test driving a Tesla that it accelerates rapidly much more smoothly with no tire slippage than a combustion car.
Brake wear is likely nulled out by regenerative braking. And you're probably not driving highway speeds through Manhattan, either.
Tire, yes. But not brakes. With an EV most of the kinetic energy is converted back to electricity thanks to regenerative braking instead of being turned into heat through friction.
Overall the EV emit fewer airborne particles even without counting the exhaust.
Why does everyone immediately pivot to SUVs on this subject, instead of (looks around) gargantuan Tesla Model Ys that weigh as much as a Ford Bronco and EV trucks everywhere, due to peculiarities of US consumer habits and the demand for huge vehicles to pick up groceries?
huh well TIL, thank you. My definitions of Sports Utility Vehicle are outdated. They have almost no clearance, and the suspension is not tuned for anything more than small washboards.
non-exhaust emissions on an ICE vehicle are roughly 1/3 brake dust, 1/3 tire dust and 1/3 road dust. EV's have almost no impact on road dust, 83% lest brake dust and 20% more tire dust.
Tire wear on EVs has more to do with the weight of your right foot than the curb weight of the vehicle.
The high torque of EVs results in frequent wheel slippage for those eager to pull away from traffic lights quickly. Just like with high BHP ICE vehincles, smooth and gentle acceleration/deceleration will result in long tire life.
>Fewer cars in general is the win from congestion pricing, though.
And lower VMTs (vehicle miles traveled) is also a win for the planet, it's probably the best weapon the average person has access to in the fight against climate change. Transit usage begets transit usage; more fares paid to the agency enables better frequencies and more routes, leading to more people opting to take transit instead of driving... In a well-run system, it's a positive feedback loop (and the inverse, where people stop taking transit, can also lead to a death spiral, as happened across America in the mid-20th century).
If you substitute with “don’t travel far [or at all]”, it’s a big savings. If you substitute flying 1000 miles on an airliner with “drive 1000 miles instead”, or flying US to Europe with a cruise ship trip to Europe, you’ve probably made it worse; in that regards, it’s less the mode of travel and more the total distance in these trades.
The observation that stuck with me is how much of my county's total carbon emissions are due to air travel which begins/ends at our regional airports (~3%), vs what percentage of the population flies in a given year.
The distribution of air-travel emissions, to me, seem pretty gross when juxtaposed with the number of people who are doing this travel. The incentives for business travel, in particular, seem misaligned.
I don't think you can just look at the "number of people who are doing this travel", as those same planes are also carrying air cargo and US mail. Not everyone flies, but almost everyone in the county receives mail, cargo, or benefits from same. (It would be easier to replace cargo than passenger transport with a more efficient and comparable total trip time mode of transport if such was available.)
The reason you get asked whether your USPS parcel contains hazardous substances X, Y, and Z and why the fines for violations are so stiff is partly because of passenger airline safety concerns.
Rail transit in the north east is the best in the US. But it is terrible in many ways. As someone who lives in an area that would be marginal for rail even in the great rail countries of Europe of Asia I really need the north east to develop great rail - only by bringing great rail to places where it is easy can we possibly get it good enough that it would be worth bringing to me. Instead I just get examples of why we shouldn't bother with transit at all here: when all we can see is the stupid things New York is constantly doing to transit (where the density is so high they can get by with it) there isn't an example I can point to of that would be worth doing here.
A bit worse on tires because they are heavier (for comparable vehicle size, but obviously not if you compare a small EV with a ICE truck), and much better on brakes because of regenerative braking. Overall they are better.
>Yes, they're banned, but nobody is checking aftermarket brake pads..
On one hand you've got the people who insisted on regulating all of our manufacturing out of the country on environmental and safety grounds. On the other hand you've got the people who want to band asbestos and lead and all manner of other dangerous chemicals in consumer products. Both these people are dressed like Spiderman and they're pointing at each other. <facepalm>
There's quite a bit of materials science work in that direction.
For example, I have Michelin's CrossClimate tires, which are all-weather tires that do better in snow but don't break down as fast as dedicated winter tires do in warm weather.
What material is strong, malleable, dirt fucking cheap, has a high coefficient of friction, easy to work with, amenable to additives, meets all the suspension properties we expect out of a tire, etc, and isn't bad to breathe a lot of the dust of?
Modern tires are works of material science miracle, working with dirt cheap inputs.
Even iron dust from steel on steel friction like with trains is bad for your health.
Because a hard long wearing tire is a low grip tire and the direct tradeoff between safety and the environment is not something either crowd wants to deal with because there's so much overlap.
“Additional weight”? What additional weight? In comparison to America’s best-selling vehicle, the Ford F-150? Where was all this hand-wringing about weight and brake and tire dust ten years ago?
I guess those narratives aren’t going to support themselves.
It always surprises me when people want stop signs in their neighborhood for traffic calming. The last thing I want is all of the noise and pollution of vehicles stopping and starting over and over again; surely various piece of road furniture like bulb-outs, roundabouts, etc, do a better job with fewer drawbacks. Other than cost, of course.
My assumption is that stop signs act somewhat as a way to enforce the lower speed limits in residential areas. There's several stretches without stops in my suburb where I've seen drivers whizzing by very obviously above the 25mph speed limit, which is bad enough on its own but becomes a serious hazard when combined with the massive blind spots that come from curbs on both directions being filled to the brim with parked cars.
A better solution would probably be radar-based speed signs with printed threats of fines, though.
Probably true, but all of those are significantly more involved installations or modifications.
To be clear, I'm all in favor of reworking neighborhood roads to be more friendly to pedestrians, but I think things like signs have a significantly better chance of actually being implemented in most circumstances.
They put one in front of my friend's house. It's a big plastic one almost as big as a speed table. The complainer Karens drive .03mph over it and get honked at or driven around. The trucks and vans, anything driven by an employee or a teenager just speeds right over and a small number of people go for air time. 11/10. Highly entertaining. And this is all in addition to having to listen to every vehicle accelerate after it of course.
There are some early tyre and brake dust collection systems which might help, but that won't do much for the road dust.
I've been wondering whether, theoretically, if self driving cars become widely usable and deployed in cities, will they be able to safely operate with harder tyre compounds and harder road surfaces that shed less but don't grip as well?
If nothing else, less aggressive driving should lead to less shedding.
I am a little confused, why would sloppiness in the media release (the article that uses the word tailpipe), have anything to do with sloppiness in the study, which the above comment clearly highlights is about PM2.5, not specifically tailpipe emissions?
Are Yale's media releases typically done by the people who do the study?
The study doesn't mention tailpipes (afiact). This press release/article does. Don't dismiss scientists because journalists reporting their findings incorrectly.
I won't change my mind about emissions in NYC. NYC is full of modern, western cars.
Two-stroke engines are terrible, classic automobiles are terrible, cars with no emission regulations will tend to be terrible. Cars in NYC will have catalytic converters and other technologies to reduce tailpipe emissions.
The notable source of bad tailpipe emissions in NYC are heavy diesel trucks, which, to my understanding, produce a large proportion of tailpipe particulates (and NOx) in the US, despite being a small fraction of overall vehicles on the road. There are strong correlations with heavy truck traffic and asthma rates.
Unlike many other places in the United States, NYC area’s railroads are almost exclusively passenger rail and there is comparatively very little freight railroad traffic serving NYC and therefore there are way more trucks in NYC. They emit way dirtier emissions. The problem is never the cars; it’s always the trucks.
And oh also the small engines powering street food carts.
Pretty much any new car sold in the US, Canada, Mexico, and most of Europe. "Western" typically refers to "countries rich/developed enough to [in this case] add emissions regulations". It's a luxury that many countries haven't gotten to yet, but is widespread in North America and Europe.
The good news is that I believe Ho Chi Minh City is about to start, so hopefully they'll have much cleaner air in a couple years.
They have different ICE engines. Many two stroke scooters. Emissions are way different from those tailpipes. You’re doing apples to oranges comparisons.
And besides, even if lung cancer and heart attack may be the most common means of premature death, it does not entail that air pollution is the primary cause of them. I thought that smoking and bad dietary/exercise habits were the main factors. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd like to know.
I see from your sources that lung cancer in non-smokers is still one of the top causes of death, and of course air-pollution is a primary cause of that. Good to know.
Quiet zones require crossings to be up to a certain standard. If the people opposed to train noise were serious, they could pressure their local/regional gov to upgrade crossings and establish a quiet zone. This tends to be more successful than trying to prevent the train entirely.
In the house I lived it was not debunked. It was fact. The caltrain blasted it's horn hourly (or more) 24/7 within earshot of my house. I could not sleep with my window open and often slept with ear plugs even with the window closed. I get you might be tempted to spout generic statistics, but I can tell you without a doubt it was ear blistering loud up close, and sleep disturbing even 2 blocks away.
Also for what it's worth you have no idea if it's good or bad faith.
I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
It’s a national issue because as soon as one city tries it out and it turns out to be pretty good and none of the doom scenarios ensue, congestion-charge opponents all over America lose most of their talking points.
Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York.”
> Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York"
But that's a real argument. They're not a $1.3tn economy ($1tn of which is Manhattan alone) [1] with fewer than one car per household (0.26 in Manhattan) [2].
I dunno, I think there's a hard stop at "having a functioning public transit system". I could imagine DC implementing a congestion charge. Nashville less so.
I'd argue there is, you just need good locations to board.
One problem that faces my city, as an example, is that we have a community that is being built out in a mountain area. There is a 2 lane highway going up there and, as you can imagine, it gets absolutely jam packed. On a clear day you can do the trip in 10 minutes, during rush-hour it can take over and hour.
This is the perfect place for something like a toll and a park and ride location within the community.
But instead we are maybe going to spend 10s (or maybe hundreds) of millions of dollars expanding the road.
This concept works great for airport's economy lots. It's a bit crazy that it doesn't seem to work for anywhere but the top 6 largest cities in the US.
DC doesn't have a congestion charge that restricts all access to the city but it has dynamic toll road pricing that can hit rates that are far more expensive than NYC's congestion charge. It would be interesting to see an analysis comparing these 2 programs in terms of their effect on transit and air quality as well as the economics and public perception of each.
Attention economy, the algorithm, rage-bait, maximizing engagement, doomscrolling - pick your buzzword. Individual people care about all sorts of weird things, but on average, this and no other reason is why a person in Idaho suddenly finds themselves caring about Manhattan congestion pricing. It's easy to point a finger and laugh/marvel when it's something so obviously absurd to you, but of course you and I both have entirely different blind spots where our attention is marshalled and our opinion is formed by the rage-bait engine. Ours must seem preposterous to those on the outside looking in, too.
It's because everything is a culture war issue now, and anything remotely seen as helpful or benefitting society or taking even an inch from cars is "bad" for the people who live in places like Idaho (and Staten Island).
Probably very clear-cut, right? "No parking, no business" never made sense, but it makes even less sense in a city where cars are involved in less than a third of all trips
Especially considering that
* Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers, as they spend the most amount of time actually driving in congested roads
* Congestion pricing forces trips to self-select on cost/benefits in actual dollars, instead of time, so you optimize for wealthier trip takers, short stays or high value trips, where before you would favor long stays (which make looking for parking forever not so bad), and people who don't value their time very much
* Car use remains heavily subsidized, as motorists do not come close to paying the full costs associated with their road usage
> The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
There are reliable ways to transform American rhetoric to collectivist vs. individualist.
"We should toll roads". This will reliably produce "we should all contribute through tax to the maintenance of roads and they should be considered a public good".
"We should have land value taxes". This will reliably produce "we should not have to pay rent to the government for something that we own".
A simple self-interest model will capture all participants in this discussion. This is why economically optimal policies have such opposition. People don't want to pay the price for their actions. They're ideally hoping to have someone else pay it. It is just as common for a position like funding for SF's Muni.
Propositions J and K made it clear. One said "let's raise Muni spending". The other said "if we raise sales tax, that will go to Muni spending. If we don't, the Muni spending proposition dies". People voted for the first and against the second. Pretty straightforward position: "We should spend more money but from a place that is not me".
The way welfare is organized in the US also shows this. Welfare is the largest sector of the US federal budget, and the ideal is to tax all productive capacity to pay for the aged. This aligns with the increased vote share from the aged. The classic two wolves and a sheep at dinner.
Feels like this is the curse of modern US politics. I'm convinced the majority of people that "want high speed rail in CA" don't live in CA. Further away they live, the stronger they will argue for why we should have it.
You run in very different social circles than I do. The only complaint I have ever heard about California's high speed rail plan (as a life-long Bay Area resident) is how damn long it's taking because of the yokels claiming it'll annoy their cows and almonds.
My assertion is most people arguing online about this do not live near the impacted areas. Happy to be proven wrong on this. I just have a lot of sour taste to the whole thing with how many people constantly harp on public transit, but then want me to see their brand new car.
The SF-LA transit project isn't a replacement for driving, it's a replacement for flying. Cars are replaced by local transit, the CA high speed rail line goes through a whole lot of nothing (read: the worst farmland they could route through) between SF and LA. Are you sure you live around here if you're this off-base with the basic premise?
This is completely the wrong way of thinking about it. Long distance and short distance transport form a symbiotic relationship.
And in most countries we wouldn't call multiple cities of 100k+ population 'nothing'.
HSR is the spine of the transportation network, that local and regional traffic docks to making a greater whole. It increases the reach and power of public transport as a whole.
For HSR to be successful, you need people using the in-between station for regional trips, not just end to end airplane like trips.
It might speed up the commutes of people coming into the bay from Gilroy, and it might make Madera a somewhat-viable commuter town (if you don't mind 2 hour commutes), but I can't imagine many people using it for daily travel who aren't already well-served by Amtrak/Caltrain
Of course because more people live outside of CA then inside. And lots of people talk about transport policy. Lots of countries talk about high speed rail and California is known globally.
It isn't necessarily a problem one way or the other, I should add. The observation, though, is that people are far far more forceful and opinionated on the situation the further from the area that they are.
I'm not sure how you measured how far away everybody talking about it is. If seen more passion form Americans then from Europeans about HSR in California. And I don't think most people in China are hot on it.
I guess there are some very passionate rail fan liberals in the Eastern united states that hope for true HSR on the East coast that really root for HSR.
But then again I have heard plenty of Californians passionately denounce/advocate for the project.
It's a chicken and egg issue. We don't build dense, mixed-use housing and commercial, we don't build transit. There's no way to live a Tokyo-like lifestyle in 95% of California. And the places where you can are often exorbitantly expensive.
Just to defend myself (similar to what I said in a different thread): I live in an area that would be marginal for high speed rail, but I still want it. If the US can get a great high speed rail network it would make sense to bring that to me, but as one of the last lines built! If CA can't build a good HSR where it should obviously work out there is no way it is worth trying here. They have to make the mistakes and then learn from them (this is the harder part!) in order to bring something to me where there can be no mistakes.
Don't get me wrong. I used transit for the majority of my career. Biked for as much of it. Love the ideas.
The VAST majority of people I would see have conversations about this seem to want others to take transit so that traffic is better for them in their car.
The vast majority of people I know have never lived where there was a transit system that would be useful for them. So of course they want other people to use it without planning on using it themselves. Give them a system that is worth using and they will use it (there will be a multi-year delay before they try/start using it though).
Workable is not a great endorsement. If things are not fast and frequent people will prefer to drive even if transit could work. Also both have workable transit only for some destinations - I don't live in either city, but I'd guess without looking getting downtown is easy but if your destination is one suburb over it is technically possible but you could baby crawl faster.
Yup, it's something I think people need to experience.
I lived in the UK for 2 years without a car and it ultimately did not negatively impact me (other than needing to memorize local bus routes). I lived in towns as small as 10000 people (Newtown, Wales) and they had both a connected rail system and a couple of bus routes serving the town and connecting it to other towns.
Buses absolutely can work in even quiet rural locations, they just need to be properly funded and prioritized. They also need to be subsidized. The American notion that public transit needs to either run net zero or turn a profit is backwards and fundamentally stopping it from working well.
Seattle LRT has about the same usage as some german systems trams that are like 20x smaller. For a whole lot of the population that life around Atlanta and Seattle the public transport isn't workable.
It is workable for far more people than will make it work. Particularly in tech jobs.
The underlying issue remains that it is seen as a poor person option. As soon as people can afford a car, they get one.
Back when I didn't have a car, my future wife and I saw a comedian that literally had a joke about being above the poverty line of "do you take the bus?"
The thing is, people are not ideological. If the car is 5x faster and nicer, then people will use it. People use what is convenient, most people don't pick public transport when it is 'workable' they pick it when it is actually good.
And the reason it seen as 'for poor' people is because you only use it when you can't get a car.
So the underlying issue is the overall quality of the service (frequency, reliability, comfort and so on).
Ish. If the car costs 10x, then they will stick to not having one. See Tokyo.
Again, I lived for over a decade with a tech job and no car. In Atlanta. It is easily doable. Especially for younger people that don't have a family. When I got married and we started having kids, I never had "my" car. Stayed on transit and cycling to get to work.
It is frustrating, because I would be surrounded by progressive people at work that would go on about why transit doesn't work. But... it did. Just fine. You just can't also have a 4k square foot house at the same time. (I feel like I'm exaggerating, but that is literally the size of average home in some areas just around Seattle. My shared living in Atlanta was almost 1000 square feet. I remember dreaming of a 650 square foot "luxury apartment" someday.)
If a car cost 10x but public transport is 20x worse then people will still buy cars unless they can't afford it.
Look it might be easily doable for you, but the data shows pretty clearly that if one thing is easier and faster then another, most people, not all people will pick what is easier and faster. There are always 10-20% of people who will just prefer one thing, no matter what. See people who ride bikes in horrible dangerous conditions threw traffic. You might be willing to, but most people are not.
But what you need is a system with enough quality that enough people use it so they can demand continued increases in quality.
The data clearly shows that if you keep cars cheap, people use them. That is literally the point of this entire article. When they started making driving into the city more costly, more people started taking transit. Is literally the data.
Even in places like Tokyo, you will find that the wealthy neighborhoods have cars. The catch is in Tokyo, this is enforced by law. If you can't show that you have a legal parking spot, you aren't allowed to register a car. That is a very steep hurdle that makes the vehicle far more than just 10x. And is a large part of why even the largely confusing mess of major transit offerings that will require different tickets works, there.
In spite of that, commute times in Tokyo are, on average, still HIGHER than SF and NYC commute times. My commute time even on public transit in Atlanta was better than the average commute in Tokyo. I don't know how you want to start quantifying "worse" or "better." Are they "workable?" Yes. Absolutely. Will people use if they can afford to get and operate a car? No.
You're curious how an issue where government listening to experts results in obvious good outcomes and no serious failures became a national culture war issue?
Cars are en extension of some Americans' identity and driving is something they feel utterly entitled to.
I've lived all over the world and in NYC for decades so it seems silly to me. Bust most Americans have never seen or ridden an effective form of public transport. So they view congestion pricing as an infringement on their rights and quality of life.
I agree, and would add that there are others who are decidedly "anti-car" and you could say that this is part of their identity. This particular policy may be a strictly positive (no strong opinion here), but when viewed as part of the broader disagreement it drives some of the reflexive pushback.
> Cars are en extension of some Americans' identity
i hear this a lot and i also feel like this population is declining very significantly for a lot of reasons (cars that people care about are unaffordable, most cars on the road tend to fit into one of a very small number of categories, people find other ways to navigate depending on where they live, people don't do as many activities out of the home that require a vehicle, etc). at what point does the real population of car enthusiasts become small enough to be irrelevant in public policy and infrastructure decisions?
To be fair cars have always been an extension of their drivers identities in the US, or at least as far back as their being competing brands available.
New York has long been an influential city. It was the Robert Mosses deputies that spread all over the US to drive highways threw every city center. If New York can do something, it might be copied everywhere.
That and right-wing politics where anything that harms the car as a religious symbol is seen as a 'values' based attack.
Why would they? There is virtually no congestion pricing in the US outside of a few major metros and a huge portion of the population live in areas where the lack of density makes the entire idea moot.
I think it's because it disproportionately impacts the people who can least afford it. It allows the wealthy to continue to enjoy the convenience (relative to alternatives) of driving into the city while polluting and causing traffic at a price that has zero impact on their lives while it punishes those who already have much less and whose lives will be impacted by the fines and the often significant amounts of time they'll have to spend arranging and taking alternative modes of transportation.
That's a very hard sell when people all around the country are feeling continuous downward pressure on their lifestyle and financial security while billionaires are seen getting massive tax breaks and pillaging everything they want while escaping accountability for the harms they cause everyone else. Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work, and punishing them for it while once again giving the wealthy a pass was certain to upset people. in fact, by forcing more of the peasant class off the roads it makes driving into the city much more pleasant for the people with enough money to not care about the extra expense. Taking from the poor to improve things for the wealthy resonates with a lot of people.
It also doesn't help that in other contexts, congestion pricing has already hit people's wallets and is seen as an exploitative business model designed to extract as much money from the public as possible. The last thing most people want is seeing congestion pricing and other price-fuckery infesting another aspect of their daily lives, which is why the pushback against wendy's implementing it was so swift and severe that the company had to backpedal even after spending a small fortune on the digital menu boards they needed to enable it.
I think this comment is a great example of what the OP is talking about. Your comment is completely divorced from the context of congestion pricing in New York City. For example:
> Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work
That is simply not the case in NYC. Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work. It was already unaffordable to do so anyway because parking is incredibly expensive. People take the subway. Car ownership is already disproportionately preserved for the rich.
NYC is different from much of the country. I'm not going to make an argument that it's any better or any worse, but it is different. NYC congestion pricing as a national debate is missing the forest for the trees.
> Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work.
I assure you that Manhattan is filled with many employees and service workers.
> It was already unaffordable to do so anyway
Yes, it was a massive strain on the budgets of many people, and it's the people who managed to sacrifice enough to show up for work or get where they needed to go anyway even though it was difficult for them who were most impacted by congestion pricing.
> People take the subway.
Many do. When it's an option for them and at the expense of time/convenience. If this were an acceptable excuse we might as well just shut the roads into Manhattan down entirely.
This article proves that people have been being priced out of driving into the city and I promise you that isn't the millionaires who are suddenly navigating the subway system and waiting for the trains in filthy stations.
It's also important to note that nationally, nobody knows or cares about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities. The vast majority of the people outside of NYC complaining about it have never even been to the state. They just know that once again, it's the small guy who is getting screwed over and that they don't want the success of congestion pricing in New York (however that is measured) to cause it to appear where they drive, and who can blame them for that?
>I assure you that Manhattan is filled with many employees and service workers.
That is not a meaningful response to "Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work.", the two statements do not contradict each other. Those employees and service workers take the subway.
> When it's an option for them and at the expense of time/convince
The subway is both faster and cheaper than driving in NYC at peak hours. Traffic has historically been awful, hence the congestion charge! Trading money to gain time/convenience is what the rich do. The "small guy" didn't have the money for the bridges, tunnels and parking before the congestion charge even arrived.
> It's also important to note that nationally, nobody knows or cares about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities.
Yes, that is literally my point about why conversations like this one are fruitless.
> They just know that the small guy is getting screwed over
Right but that isn't true. They are mistaken in what they "know" because, as you said, they don't know or care about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities.
> Those employees and service workers take the subway.
Not the ones who need to bring service vehicles with them. Not anyone who has to enter or return with heavy items or any number of the other many many reasons people choose to drive and not take the subway. The fact of the matter is that the subway has always been an option for many people, but not all people and it comes with costs of its own. The people driving into the city, as obnoxious as that trip is, were making the decision to put up with the traffic and parking for a reason. Now many of those people, enough to make measurable differences in pollution levels, have been priced out of that choice. "It's only a few poors, why are people bitching about it?" isn't going to make people across the country worry any less about it spreading to them.
> The subway is both faster and cheaper than driving in NYC at peak hours.
And also not an option at all for many and a less attractive option for many, as noted by the number of people who were driving. It's not as if the subway is a well kept secret.
> Right but that isn't true.
Just because you say it isn't doesn't make it true. Show me that millionaires are taking the subway because of the increased fines at the same rate as the hourly workers and I'll concede that the impact is being equally felt.
Again, this conversation would be so much more rewarding if you had read the paper and established a minimal level of factual basis for your statements. The number of light vehicles (cars, vans, pickups) entering the zone has not declined! At all!
> Again, this conversation would be so much more rewarding if you had read the paper and established a minimal level of factual basis for your statements. The number of light vehicles (cars, vans, pickups) entering the zone has not declined! At all!
The question was "How has congestion pricing become a national issue" and the answer isn't "the nation hasn't read this one study". For what it's worth though the study linked in the article does show a reduction in cars entering the zone. (ctrl-F "car" to find that)
This debate has been done to death. And it's always, always a vague group of people who are apparently affected. Never specific examples. And, as we see here, there's always an appeal to class warfare: "it's hurting the poors". And it's always by someone who wishes to speak on behalf of those poor people, never actually the people themselves.
Only 2% of lower income outer borough residents (around 5,000 people) drive a car into the city:
When the congestion pricing rollout was paused, only 32% of lower income voters supported the move, compared to 55% of those earning more than $100,000:
(AFAIK there isn't direct polling on a yes/no support question by income, this was as close as I could find)
The overwhelming majority of poor people in New York City take transit and stand to benefit from the funding congestion pricing brings. Highlighting that 2% of the population and ignoring the 98% is a fundamentally dishonest position to take, especially when you're not even in the group yourself.
> And it's always, always a vague group of people who are apparently affected. Never specific examples.
Someone on the other side of the country is only going to see the way this will impact the lives of people like them. They aren't going to say "Clearly this policy has impacted the household budget of NYC plumber Mitchell Tnenski" They don't know Mitchell. They know that congestion pricing coming to their city would hurt them in very real ways. They also know that rich people don't give a shit about a couple extra bucks in fines for getting where they want to go by car. That's why this issue has resonated nationally.
> They know that congestion pricing coming to their city would hurt them in very real ways.
But why should they even care to begin with? Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing? This is the whole problem, that local issues are made mainstream news media specifically to cultivate fear and anger in people that literally have no skin in the game and a completely different lifestyle.
Why should they care about something that they feel will hurt them financially when they're already struggling and restrict their freedom on top of that? Why wouldn't they care?
> Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing?
Uber's "surge" pricing was what first introduced many of them to a world where the price of something they depend on changes from moment to moment. Dynamic/discriminatory pricing schemes have been worrying people for a long time now.
People don't like it, they consider it scammy, and they don't want it to spread.
I think that if NYC had just jacked up the toll price all the time it wouldn't have set off as many alarms, but ultimately people in other places aren't really worried about congestion pricing in New York, their worry is that it will come to where they drive and they can't afford people taking more money from them. They're struggling to keep food on the table and are drowning in record high levels of household debt. Of course they're scared of congestion pricing catching on.
Mind you, while some of their fears are reasonable, not all of them are. I've seen some of the more conspiratorial people talking about it as a way to control and restrict the movement of poor people (something shared with criticisms of 15-minute cities). The core of the problem though is that their standard of living is declining, their trust/confidence in government is bottoming out, they know that they're getting screwed over by the wealthy and they're on edge. They see NYC using some scammy pricing scheme to take more money from people like them while the wealthy are unaffected and it hits a nerve.
They'll have plenty of skin in the game if congestion pricing spreads (and its success makes that increasingly likely) and that skin is already stretched thin which is making them feel highly skeptical of government, suspicious of people's motives, and angry over being asked to make their lives worse for the convenience of the wealthy. They worry about driving where they need to go becoming a luxury they can be priced out of, and as bad as NYC's public transportation is (compared to what's seen in other countries) most of them don't have anything even close to it in their own cities. That's what I'm seeing in discussions surrounding this issue both online and offline anyway.
Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing? Why is this national news?
Everything you're saying has zero impact on 93-97% of the US population (New York State is 6% of the US population, NYC is 3%). None of these people have real skin in the game, because this literally has no effect on them. New Yorkers don't vote in other states.
Why is a single student's grade in OSU national news? Why is congestion pricing national news? Why is a library in the middle of nowhere California news?
None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system. In fact they're exactly unrelated which is why we're blasted with this stuff on the news 24/7. You're worried about a slippery slope argument when most of us are already being fleeced by current, real policies from government and corporations.
Congestion pricing is not the thing screwing over American families, it's the thing they're pointing at so you don't look at the actual thing.
> Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing?
Because in all likelihood this isn't going to be limited to Manhattan, and I'd argue (like many others) that it probably shouldn't be. The fact that it's been so successful makes it all but inevitable that the practice will spread. Why would people wait until they're forced to choose between driving to work and affording groceries before they speak out against it?
> None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system
I think a lot of people would argue that dynamic pricing schemes and governments taking increasing amounts of money from their pockets is, at least in part, why they are stretched thin. In any case, regardless of the cause of their struggles they are struggling. If they were feeling financially secure they might grumble at the increasing likelihood of paying fines to drive where they want to, but they wouldn't be panicking over it like they have been.
Congestion pricing isn't seen as something that's screwing them over right now, but it is seen as the latest scheme cooked up by government that will be screwing them over if they can't put a stop to it.
I think we'd agree that congestion pricing isn't the biggest issue impacting the struggling American family right now, but I can understand why it's being seen as a concern and as something they want to keep out of their own cities. For some that means putting a stop to the practice before it spreads.
Autoexec, don't you feel a little bit like Rhea Seehorn as "Carol" in her struggle with the hive-mind humanity of "Pluribus"? It looks as in this discussion there is a lot of anti-car hivemind at play...
Haven't seen it. The sad thing is that I share many of the concerns the anti-car crowd has, but their work is only going to be harder if they ignore the concerns that people have, can't reassure people that their proposed solutions won't hurt them, and/or don't ensure that their solutions are implemented equitably. They risk losing people who could be supporters.
I also wish they put less emphasis on punishing people for driving and put more effort into giving people alternatives that are genuinely better. When people are given an option to use something better than what they have, they tend to gravitate to it naturally and with gratitude. It's a lot easier than punishing people and trying to convince them that it's for their own good.
Autoexec, here, is simply right.
Congestion price could be redefined as the "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses and keep them f**ing out of the city center" price
There was a study published about how much air pollution dropped in NYC during the COVID lockdown. PM2.5 was found to have dropped 36%. However with more robust analysis, this drop was discovered to not be statistically significant. I would caution anyone reading this who is tempted by confirmation bias.
Take a look at their figure, especially in May 2020—the average appears lower, but, more significantly, there is much less variability in May 2020 compared to earlier years.
The authors' model quite strongly includes their preferred confound (secular decrease in PM2.5) but doesn't explore what other covariates could explain the differences between years.
It's fine to say that one should be skeptical, but one contrary report doesn't invalidate an antecedent report, and the structure of a linear model strongly influences an outcome.
"Not statistically significant" doesn't mean did not happen.
Given the physical mechanisms involved it is implausible that pollution did not decline. And if you look at their data you see a marked drop in 2020 at day 70
This is March 10 or thereabouts, I think. And there are ZERO high pm 2.5 days for a 20 day stretch or so. This isn't seen in other years. The vast bulk of days are below the trend.
And then for the rest of the year there are some days above the trend line but no high pm 2.5 days.
This fits with people being extra cautious in the early days and then relaxing a bit as things went on.
Now, I'm eyeballing this so I could be incorrect. But:
1. The effect was found in other cities
2. The physical mechanism makes it highly expected that there would be a drop
The study was about the slope of the regression modal, but if you had scrambled the years I'm fairly confident I could have picked 2020 out of the set.
We have fruit trees in our backyard. The year of the COVID lockdown they had so much fruit the branches broke from the weight. Most fruit I've seen in 20 years in the house, by a large margin.
They should make pedestrian-only streets in most dense places of Manhattan and use these money to improve public transportation. Even just a few blocks of no cars would make a huge difference for livability of the city center.
There's a large (long time) movement to do this to lower Manhattan, the most public transit connected area in the US (probably North America, definitely up there in the world). It's getting pick up again.
I would really appreciate it if the Bay area got real congestion pricing and also enforcement. We have lots of HOT lanes here, but they are basically unenforced so everyone sets their ez-pass to “3” and gets the free HOV pricing, which rapidly becomes economical at the rate of enforcement in the Bay.
Frankly, if they let me citizen report - I could likely cover my entire tax burden in 2-3 days. At $490/ticket, the ROI for enforcement seems obviously there.
Not surprising. The real question is how do we measure the opportunity cost of these measures? Is it a net gain? You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits.
> You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits
We did this in Times Square and on Broadway, and it's honestly been great. I say this as someone who takes cars far more frequently than most New Yorkers and has a place I lived at full time for over a decade off one of those closed-off sections of Broadway.
Well, the market decides where the optimum is *in response to* the price set by the government. So the government can decide at least approximately where they want things to end up by setting a higher or lower price.
Right. It finds an economic optimum limited to what people are willing to pay and their perceived value from that. That optimum doesn't naturally weight more complex factors like for the trade-off for the smog generated from your travel.
It could also be the case that making it viable to drive personal vehicles at all inside a dense city comes with opportunity costs (parking, roads that cut through infrastructure, pollution, noise) that aren't worth it.
You take a walk along a 55-mph stretch of highway, and then you take a walk down Broadway, and you see which one makes you feel better as a human being.
Since this is generating revenue for NYC, you can't consider whether this tax is good or bad in a vacuum though. The alternatives are a different tax with its own effects, or more debt, or less spending. (In this case, the revenue goes to the MTA.) Any opportunity costs due to less traffic are at least partially offset by opportunity costs you aren't having to pay somewhere else.
This article confirms my existing bias/belief that user pays and auction[0] based systems improve governmental programs and finite supply systems in a society like the USA.
[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York... says "By July 2025, there were 67,000 fewer daily vehicles in the congestion zone compared to before implementation. The same month, one study found that travel times within the congestion zone had decreased, and that delivery companies were opting to use smaller vehicles (which were charged lower tolls) in the toll zone".
> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.
> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.
The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.
I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all, even if the policy effects are incredibly income-progressive overall. This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy, the populace justifying turnstile hopping, lack of traffic enforcement by police, opposition to speed and red light cameras, opposition to rezoning unless it's built by free-range grass-fed vegan union labour and 100% below market, etc.
I mean, if we're gonna pick a group to impact, the ones who aren't already deeply struggling seem like the place to do it. Given the parent poster's commenting history here, though, I don't think they have a genuine concern in "disparate impact" at all.
>I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all
This "Distinctly American idea" you cite does not at all exist.
Tens of millions watch a news channel that openly stated we should euthanize homeless people. Millions more moved to a crazier channel because that one wasn't lying enough
They vote against free school lunch programs that cost very little.
They hate "welfare queens" with a passion, despite that being a lie, and still being a lie decades later.
Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
>This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy
No, the reason we get so many special interest carve outs in the US is that special interest groups fund election campaigns. Fix campaign funding (IE, make it publicly funded and extremely time limited) and you make it significantly easier for people who eschew bribery to be and stay politicians.
Sure, HN has a strong "Not perfect should never be done" bias, because HN is full of turbonerds that crave validation for how smart they are and always need to pipe up with a nitpick to be heard. 95% of the time, the exact "complaint" someone on HN makes up was already noted and covered in the very article. We aren't allowed to sass people for not reading the article.
This is not the case off of HN and in reality. Conservatives are perfectly happy doing "Obvious and common sense" measures that actually have insane second order effects. They insist tariffs are a good policy the way they are being implemented. Democrats want all sorts of things that are not at all perfect and would be happy to have slightly fewer new problems than the same problems our grandparents had to fight about.
> Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
this seems awfully coy. Why not just say who cheerled the bill and who went on the TV circuit to explain how great it was because of "super predators" - nice euphemism.
"Democrats" isn't some amorphous thing we can't tag to individual people. The last president of the USA and his sponsor (Bill Clinton) were adamant to get that bill passed. Biden spearheaded the legislation. This isn't just some "he voted yea on it!" sort of thing.
The rich were driving before, and are still driving.
The difference is that now they are paying for that service they were already using, and those funds are going to public transit which serves the majority of New Yorkers especially those with lower incomes.
The problem is that no one in NYC, rich or poor, has any confidence in the MTA's ability to properly and efficiently use these funds. This stems from a long history of incompetence and wastefulness by the MTA
> no one in NYC, rich or poor, has any confidence in the MTA's ability to properly and efficiently use these funds
They're already using them, and the results show. They could have done it cheaper. But the LIRR is operating at Swiss rail efficiecies since the recent electrification and signalling improvements.
What electrification and signal improvements are you talking about? Signal upgrades are a constant thing in the MTA, both for the LIRR and the subways. They are not something that just started with congestion pricing funds.
Also, efficiency was already on the upswing for the LIRR long before congestion pricing funds[1].
> They are not something that just started with congestion pricing funds
Correct. But they’re being expanded. Early signs are there. And we have precedent to show that funding this work, and funding it sooner, works.
> efficiency was already on the upswing for the LIRR long before congestion pricing funds
Correct. Congestion funds accelerate that process.
I spoke an inarticulately, but the point was trying to make is that we have precedence for quality and efficiency improving capital spending by the MTA. The bonds the MTA issued earlier this year double down on that. The early signs of that spending show those capital deployments are helping in the way the preceding spending did.
Are the funds actually going to public transit, or are they being used to pay off all the people whose support was needed to implement the congestion charges?
> In June 2025, revenue from the congestion toll was used to increase service on more than a dozen bus lines citywide… In October 2025, the MTA sold $230 million worth of bonds to help fund the first projects that were being partially financed using congestion-toll revenue.
> more money you have, more you benefit from this ruling
This is nonsense.
The poor of New York benefit from congestion pricing. It means more funding for the public transit they predominantly take. And for the minority who drive for a living it increases their revenues.
The opposition to congestion charges comes from principally outside New York, often from folks who have little to no familiarity with it.
As long as this system is a fixed price and is independent of the salary you earn, its benefits the rich more.
Its the same principle with kindergarden and late fee; Without a late fee, people sometimes were late getting their kids, with late fees more people were late getting their kids. Now they were able to 'pay' for this.
You now can pay for having less traffic for you. Who can afford this? The rich/richer person.
Because that’s not true. Cars are expensive compared to transit everywhere, but especially so in NYC. This was studied a lot before congestion pricing was implemented and only something like 2% of poor people were going to pay congestion charges. This did not stop a bunch of rich suburbanites from using them as a prop to demand that the city subsidize their lifestyle at the expense of NYC taxpayers, of course.
Even before congestion pricing this was the major factor. It's often quicker, more reliable, more pleasant, and has less variation in delays to ride the train/subway in NYC. Speaking from personal experience I could easily eat the congestion charge to daily commute into Manhattan, and I'd rather still take the train because I can do my mindless scrolling or read a book during that time.
The only time I've found that a car is better is during the weekends with a group larger than about 4 people. The train schedules are terrible, the commute time isn't bad, and the price per ticket (assuming you're coming from the outer suburbs) vs parking and tolls works out to be a wash.
I don't think poor people who lived in NYC were driving that often anyway? cars are expensive to begin with and parking is crazy in that part of the city
This mechanism allows people with more money to enjoy driving in the city or is this congestion prcing based on your salary? no its not its based on the time in the city independent of what you make.
A person with their high end car and miillions now can buy himself a nice little drive into the city while everyone else can't.
Do you seriously think that multi-millionaires drive to and from Manhattan to commute?
Our C-suite and top quant traders at our firm take the train, bike, or walk to the office daily. I asked around my office - no one has ever driven regularly to our office in 20+ years.
The reason why is because driving objectively sucks in the city.
That all might be true, but this is still not the point i'm making: Either you can afford it, than it doesn't matter to you, or you can't afford it but have to pay it than it affects you.
As long as the pricing is absolut and not relative to the owners salary, it is increase inequality.
Poor could also mean the middle class is more affected than the rich class (whatever you call the class above middle).
you clearly dont live here or you'd know that the poor of NYC are not the ones that own cars. they're the ones that take public transit. also, there are state benefits that offset congestion pricing and other fees for people who are poor
Very few poor people drive into lower Manhattan. And people whose work requires them to drive in that area (delivery drivers, plumbers, etc.) come out ahead. One of the first NYT stories after congestion pricing was rolled out had multiple quotes from tradesmen reporting that they're saving an hour or more a day and prefer the new system.
There was also an endless parade of NY Post stories about how Manhattan restaurants would suffer because their customers couldn't just drive in from Long Island and New Jersey.
The question becomes how critical is X and is there a close alternative. In this case I'd say for 95% of people yes driving is easily substituted by NYC's public transit options.
Im not sure this fits, they saw a much larger drop (18%) in heavy duty trucks entering the city, and a smaller drop (9%) in passenger cars. I am not sure the public transit options are close alternatives for heavy duty trucks.
I suspect that this is due to the elimination of toll shopping/avoidance. Per [0] and [1], the only way to avoid a toll entirely is to drive from the West Side Highway or FDR Drive to the Brooklyn Bridge, but commercial vehicles are prohibited on FDR Drive and the Brooklyn Bridge has weight restrictions [2], so heavy trucks don't have a legal way to dodge the tolls anymore.
If you need to reach Long Island, the incentive to avoid the (tolled) Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Verrazzano, and RFK bridges are gone; now you're paying for the privilege of sitting in Manhattan traffic.
Do we know that those heavy duty trucks were formerly used to do things you need heavy duty trucks for? It seems more likely that 18% (or more!) of the usage was by people who think heavy duty trucks look cool and wanted to show off theirs.
That's the difficulty with the Light/Medium/Heavy Duty categories. It doesn't tell you a huge amount about what the vehicle is being used for but most of them heavy duty mean commercial or utility. There are a handful of popular models that tip into the Heavy duty class and those are usually 3/4 ton pickups. Not sure how popular those are in NYC though.
For many people, the thing being substituted for an alternative is not "transportation into Manhattan", but more broadly "engaging in commerce in Manhattan"
What business or shopping trip into Manhattan is small enough that 9 dollars is a significant hurdle or increase in cost? It's there to disincentivize taking a car for no reason when you can use transit while being small enough to absorb if you have a reason to actually use a car.
What percentage of the road traffic do you think they constitute? How much of the value of the truck full of expensive seafood do you think the congestion charge represents? How many extra deliveries can a single driver make when they spend less time stuck in congestion?
Reducing the number of cars on the road helps everyone: we tend to focus on the enormous quality of life and health benefits to residents but it also helps everyone who doesn’t have the option of not driving, too. Ambulances getting stuck in congestion less is a win. Deliveries which can’t be done using cargo bikes similarly benefit from reducing the single greatest source of delay: cars.
Can they not afford to pay $9 per truck per day? Seems like a bad business plan that can't manage to pay such a minor fee. That's the design of the congestion charge it disincentivizes optional trips but is small enough for any money making business to absorb.
With reduced congestion, delivery companies will find marginally increased productivity (maybe 1 more delivery stop is possible per shift, for instance) that will likely make the fee worth it
Even without congestion pricing, the poor are the least likely to drive. Spending public money to subsidize driving (which we’re still doing on balance, even in Manhattan) disproportionately helps the wealthy.
IMO it would be even better if was an auction based system, maybe 24/7. That way if someone has an <= $8.99 threshold/need to drive, and they find a slot, they will. I think the static pricing will create a distortion in the usage, maybe having dynamic pricing (with a ceiling) would be smarter?
Yes, but also it's just annoying to have a car in NYC. For many routes the subway is going to be faster than driving and sitting in traffic, unless you're traveling between outer borough neighborhoods that only have a connection in Manhattan. If you're making that commute often (say, Bushwick to East Flatbush, or Flushing to Canarsie), a car might make sense, but then this whole congestion pricing thing doesn't apply to you.
Transit is $3/ride (in a few weeks), 24 hours, and all over the city. It's not perfect, but for the vast majority of cases owning a car in NYC is just not really worth it. If you need one because you have a weekend home out in Long Island or up in the Hudson Valley, you can afford the $9 toll.
It's economically infeasible for a large percentage of people to drive in a dense urban area, period.
That's true even without congestion pricing. A city would go broke and bulldoze itself trying to add enough stacked lane, highways, and parking to handle everyone who would prefer to drive in or through if the capacity existed.
is it? i dont see the relevant other studies, and my initial assumptions would be that the median subway user is lower income than the median car driver in NYC, so transfering funds from car drivers to subway improvements would be progressive.
However NYC's transit is notoriously bad at spending, so not sure it would achive that. Which studies linked in this thread are you refering to? I cant see them.
Regular driving in large working cities is usually only done out of professional necesscity and people who drive for a living tend to be in lower socioeconomic bands.
How many people on Wallstreet do you know that drive to work?
> How many people on Wallstreet do you know that drive to work?
A lot. Also white-shoe lawyers. They live in Greenwich, Westchester or Westport and drive into the city. (And still, they often park uptown because driving in the congestion zone is annoying and expensive.)
The poor in New York don't drive. If they do, they do so to earn an income. Less congestion helps with that.
I'm not so confident in that first claim, and my anecdotal evidence doesn't support your theory.
However you did mention some other studies on this thread that support your claim this is a regressive tax, I'm worried I missed them, can you share the links?
Regressive taxes aren't bad inherently bad. Regressive spending is bad.
In this case, you have a regressive tax with a huge positive side effect due to taxing an externality. If the funds are also spread into progressive services it can be a net positive for all income brackets.
I wish as a society we'd use this form of taxation more, and widely applied taxes less. In theory insurance is supposed to have the actuarial people who figure it out and properly price the choices in, but it's also surprising how crude they can be-- lumping very distinct situations as "the same". eg aggressive drivers are only penalized after they hurt someone, like the phrase "no harm no foul" (until there is harm). It'd be better if telemetry was collected and penalized in realtime.
They can also have their own significant externalities and introduce perverse incentives (in this case...) for revenue-seeking infrastructure governance.
Of course they work. If the government manipulates the equation to make something unaffordable, the poor can no longer afford it. That’s not the point.
After the election. And it's slated to go up at least $1 per year, and more if they miss their fixed revenue target. If the seccede in reducing traffic then the fees have to increase more.
Imagine it actually mattered to them and they didn't force everyone into downtown offices instead of allowing people to work from home. This is a cash grab.
> but I guess more pollution added up to the surrounding borroughs in addition to more traffic
Why? Fewer cars into Manhattan means fewer cars through the boroughs. And even if they all diverted, you’re still looking at less idling and less stop and start braking.
> I use my brake far more in stop and start traffic on the highway
Is that because of gridlock or because of the higher energies?
> In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights
Source? In my experience it's unexpected incursions, whether that be cars changing lanes, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk or food-delivery bikers yeeting themselves into an intersection.
The article speaks to this as well, "Pricing led to a drop in pollution across the greater metropolitan area, according to the study, published in the journal npj Clean Air."
So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.
This was a common anti-congestion pricing talking point, but it ends up not being the case. People either don't drive into the city, or they take transit.
The study found the opposite: people are picking healthier choices throughout the region. This makes sense: if you switch to taking the train, in addition to not driving in the congestion zone you also aren’t driving the distance between the closest train station and Manhattan, which for many people will be more engine operating time than they spend in the zone itself.
Good question, this happened in London for sure, congestion charging increased the net pollution from vehicles but reduced the metrics inside the city, probably not much either way.
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.
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.
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?
> where cities get all the benefit at the expense of the larger region
A pair of thought experiments. The tri-state area is depopulated and turned into a nature reserve. Everywhere except for New York City. How does it do?
Now, New York City is leveled and turned into a nature preserve. How does this affect those states’ non-urban populations? (Hint: economic collapse. Budget cuts. Unemployment.)
Cities suck resources from outside. But by and large, they also distribute largesse to their proximities and subsidize life for everyone around them.
> 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?
New York City has a population of 8.5mm [1]. That’s almost half of the metropolitan area’s population [2]. Include New York State and the non-voting population effect is a minority. Congestion charging isn’t a tyranny of the minority.
NYC has a big dick to swing, and it should swing it for the benefit of its residents even at the expense of everyone else, why would residents vote for anything else
I understand what you're saying but after 100 years of uninhibited car-centric design i think its reasonable for those of us who live here to want to prioritize the experience of people who live and work in manhattan, south bronx, and west queens and brooklyn. if people want to commute from places surrounding the city in a more efficient fashion i think its reasonable for them to redress that with the local or state governments instead of using nyc infrastructure for free in a way that inhibits community growth here.
> it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Is this happening in/around NYC?
> 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.
The are the same, you just have to pay the fee.
Also, for like 90% of NJ you'd be going the southern route into Brooklyn anyway, no congestion pricing involved.
The Verazano is already more expensive than congestion pricing. It's cheaper to drive to Manhattan from Jersey than Brooklyn via Staten Island. Never heard any Jersey driver complain though.
Both NY and SF were regional hubs before cars disfigured them. No commercial vehicle is going to be discouraged by a $10 dollar charge, and trade is so much easier when the roads aren't clogged by single people demanding 1000 sq-ft of ground space to move around.
It doesn't seem reasonable to complain that multitudes more of people should substantially worsen their everyday trips and suffer much higher risk of being killed by cars to make occasional trips that would pass through the city more convenient.
> 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.
This is a fixable problem. I'm still waiting on someone to do it though. NY is mostly interested in corruption from their preferred interests. (which is why they are working on a law to require a conductor on all subways instead of working to eliminate all that extra labor, instead of fixing their system so it is fast and reliable and then covers more area)
What you're describing as a problem is actually the solution, and what you think is the solution is actually the problem.
Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.
> Particulates issued from tailpipes can aggravate asthma and heart disease and increase the risk of lung cancer and heart attack. Globally, they are a leading risk factor for premature death.
Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44407-025-00037-2
It's true that brake dust is the primary PM2.5 emission from vehicles in an urban environment. However the PM2.5 component from tail pipes are still very significant, higher than the contribution from tires.
The order is:
1. brake dust 2. road dust 3. engine emissions 4. tire dust
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
and would it be true to say that regenerative braking on electric cars reduces significantly this dust?
Absolutely. Nearly eliminates. Even non-plugin hybrids have greatly reduced.
There was a "study" going around claiming otherwise, which sampled air captured by passing vehicles with a trash bag on a busy road, claiming EVs did not reduce brake dust, but even my brief summary here makes it extremely obvious how flawed this "measurement" is.
For those of us unclear why collecting air from passing cars to measure particulates is obviously flawed, could you elaborate?
EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, as well. Fairly significantly. It's not obvious to me that the decrease in brake dust isn't made up by the increase in tire dust.
The removal of the tailpipe emissions is really where EVs shine from a pollution standpoint. If you turn on your car in your garage, you don't die anymore.
EV brake pads don't hardly wear down, so they obviously can't have nearly the same amount of brake dust, yet the "study" showed they did. I'm guessing there's brake dust on the ground being kicked up.
> EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, Fairly significantly
In the USA, mass of EV is not significantly different than the alternative choice. EVs do not have increased tire particulate. If in Europe extremely lightweight tiny cars are actually a likely substitution for nicer, heavier EVs, then it seems reasonable that tire wear will increase proportionally. There's a lot riding on that "if" though.
It's not just the fact that EVs are heavier than the non-EV version of the same car, it's also that the regenerative braking means that the tires are dissapating energy that otherwise would have gone to the brake pads or to air resistance. Tires wear way faster on an EV, their lifespan in miles is generally much shorter.
> it's also that the regenerative braking means that the tires are dissapating energy that otherwise would have gone to the brake pads or to air resistance
This does not seem correct...
- Air resistance slows the car without putting anything extra through the tyres (the friction is between car and air rather than between tyre and road)
- Regenerative braking channels energy into the battery, and also heat, that would otherwise be dissipated by heating and ablating the brake pads and discs, but regardless or whether it's brakes or the the motor acting as a dynamo that puts resistance on the rolling of the wheels, for a given amount of braking you will have the same forces between the tyres and the road and the same tyre wear.
So I'd expect it's only any additional weight that contributes to increase tyre particulates from electric care. Perhaps a tiny contribution from lower air resistance (on average at least) for electric cars, as there's often quite an effort to reduce the drag coefficient for range reasons, but I wouldn't expect this to be substantial as air resistance is not huge part of braking.
Regenerative braking needs something to act against in order to slow the car down. Whether the thing on the car side is an electric motor generating voltage or a brake caliper generating heat, the effect of both is to create resistance to the axle turning. This slows the car via tire-road friction.
EVs tend to use regenerative braking, thus applying road-tire friction, much more often than an ICE vehicle uses brakes. In an EV if you are going tobfast and let off the accelerator, the regen braking slows you. With tires. In an ICE car, you will coast along and slowly slow down, mainly due to air resistance, unless you actively press the brake.
If regen braking only happened when then EV driver pushes the brake pedal with their foot, your expectations would be correct and weight would be the only differentiator. But the single pedal driving design decision means the tires wear more.
But if the car decelerates harder when you let off the gas than you expect (compared to an ICE), maybe you'll give it a bit more "gas", so that, in the end, your deceleration is roughly the same in both types of cars?
I haven't noticed EVs oscillating between full acceleration and hard braking when out and about. They seem to be driven pretty much the same as any other car.
If I'm not mistaken, this means that tyre wear should be roughly equivalent (for an equivalent vehichle weight). So EVs still have the benefit of reducing brake pad wear.
The oscillation you mention does exist, it's just small enough that it's tough to pick out visually watching the car. But it can be felt within the vehicle, and the small oscillations are certainly enough to wear tires more than the ICE alternative.
If you have any friends with motion sickness, ask them if it feels different to be a passenger in an EV.
Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.
All this isn't to say EVs aren't better than ICE vehicles. They are, in many ways. It's just that tire wear isn't one of them.
> Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.
I'm convinced they do, many people noted this. But I always thought it was mainly because the cars are heavier than what most people are used to, and they also have much better acceleration.
Those are also factors yes.
The engines are absorbing the energy that would have otherwise gone to the brake pads.
Tires apply the braking force to the ground in exactly the same manner on both EVs and ICE vehicles.
Firstly, the motors absorb half the energy. The other half goes to the tires. It would be great and efficient if the motors could.absorb it all but unfortunately physics doesn't work that way.
Secondly, if you've ridden in an EV, you would know that the drivers/cruise control often apply regent braking in situations where an ICE vehicle would have simply coasted to a stop. Hence more wear.
The tires wear the same amount here because either way, the car decelerates by the same amount at roughly the same rate.
No, it doesn't.
With the ICE car, if you want to go 55, you might accelerate to 57 and then coast down to 55 without using brakes.
With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
Tire wear is a function of how often you use your tires to slow down the car. With an ICE car that's every time you hit your brakes. With an EV that's both brakes and regen. An EV's time spent braking or regenning is more than the time an ICE car spends braking.
Someone could design an EV that behaves the way you describe, but aggressive regen sells better, so no one does.
> With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
No one with more than a few miles of one-pedal driving would do this; it’d be highly unpleasant.
What actually happens is you remap your pedal inputs: all the way off is braking, somewhere in the middle is coasting. Your brain will do it automatically and OPD is far more pleasant than two-pedal driving after a trivial learning curve.
I agree that OPD is better. I disagree that it's easy to coast with OPD.
What actually happens is you wind up decelerating for curves, accelerating on straights more, and otherwise having better control of the car. Holding the pedal in a location where power is neither going to or coming from the motor is very difficult; usually you want power going to the motor anyway to overcome air resistance.
Also, consider that most EVs will automatically regeneratively brake when going downhill with cruise control on. The last ICE car I owned just coasted and would speed up on large downhills with cruise on.
> With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
No you don't; in fact you can't. Letting off the accelerator enough to apply regen is going to take far more than 2 mph off your speed.
If you want to drop from 57 to 55 in an EV its done the exact same way you do it in an ICE vehicle: you coast.
Of the three EVs, all different manufacturers, that we've owned in the last decade, zero have coasting as an easy option. You have to either switch off OPD entirely, or else literally shift the car into neutral.
And yes, you are right, if you do that you can coast and then your tire wear will be no worse than an ICE vehicle.
Most EV drivers don't do those things.
Yeah, you're not shifting into neutral on your ICE car to coast from 57 to 55 either, you're just releasing the accelerator. You've still got the motor engaged, so you're doing mild engine braking on the ICE even if it's vernacularly called coasting.
Thanks to the magic of automatic transmissions, there's basically no difference!
Certainly not enough to make up the EV tire wear from regen.
Coasting wears your tires too. By the same amount.
That's...just completely false.
If you lack the middle-school-level understanding of physics to understand why, I'm not going to be able to give it to you in an internet comment.
Think hard about why braking and coasting would wear the tires differently. Here's a hint. Where does the energy go? What is doing the work to stop the car in each scenario?
I recall a discussion on HN explaining that while true, this might be offset by the higher average weight of EVs, leading to more dust from the tires and the road. Again, no easy solution unfortunately, just trade offs.
And to add info, an F-150 will change brake pads 3-7 times over 200k miles, while a Model Y will still be on the original set with nearly no sign of wear.
but compare the wear of the tires, and weigh tires vs brakes by the amount of "total pollution delivered to the environment", i.e. 20% more wear of something that is 2x as polluting is 40% more pollution. I don't know the numbers or the answer, I'm just saying it's not as simple as your statement makes it out to be.
Why are you just making up numbers then saying "it's not as simple"? Try educating yourself a little first instead of just jumping to conclusions which reinforce your existing biases.
> 20% more wear of something that is 2x as polluting is 40% more pollution
If an equivalent car wore down its tires 20% slower, and those tire particles contributed 2x the intensity of pollution than other types of wear-based pollution, than the increase in produced pollution from that source seems like it would be ~16%, not 40%.
If one car drives 100 km and produces 2 units of pollution per km, that would be 200 units. Another car wearing 20% more would produce 240 units, or roughly ~16% more.
> Another car wearing 20% more would produce 240 units, or roughly ~16% more.
This is some Fermat’s Last Theorem shit
If that were true of tires, you would expect an EV’s tires to get substantially less range before wearing out…which I don’t believe is the case.
IME they only wear out maybe 15-20% faster than you'd think. On the other hand, over the span of 40,000 miles, a tire loses a LOT more rubber by weight/volume than a brake pad loses pad material. No idea what the PM2.5 breakdown is though.
The difference is that only about 1% of the worn rubber ends up in the air whereas most of the brake pad ends up in the air. Most of the worn rubber stays on the road. Where it will get washed away by the rain to end up as microplastics in the water.
It is actually the case!
That's why your choice of tires on online sites gets so smaller as soon as you tuck the "electric/hybrid vehicle" case!
Specialized EV tires are also optimized for drag and noise, wear is just a factor. Anecdotally speaking I'm at over 80k km on a set of EV tires with at least 20k more to go. The issue has more to do with driving style and engine power than any other factors.
100%. Tire technology is a real thing. Tires have advanced a ton in the last 10 years. But driving style is the biggest thing. Some people can only get 10k miles out of a set of tires, while others with the same car and tires get over 40k.
But they do care about tire wear a lot, they know the acceptable wear life for the class. A couple years ago I bought a set of Pirelli tires that were ~50% off because they were an older version; hoping I’d get some benefit. Unfortunately they had half the life and were a bit worse in every way than the newer tires I had before and after.
Some tires are going to wear fast no matter what. I had some Pirelli PZero summer tires that I could never get more than 15k out of regardless of how I drove. The tire compound was very soft and sticky.
If you have something like really high performance tires, I recommend just using them. The grip is always there and you are always paying for it. As long as you aren't losing traction constantly, the difference is negligible in my experience.
Additional weight (which is minor; of best-selling vehicles, F-150 curb weight is 4000-5600 lbs, Tesla Model Y is 4400-4600 lbs) does not meaningfully increase brake wear because the brakes don't get used.
That sounds like a stretch tbh
I’m guessing not as much as standard transmissions, which largely eliminate the need for breaking while also reducing fuel usage. Yet there are almost no new cars with standard transmission. If only people cared a bit more.
You guessed wrong.
An electric car can use its engines to bring a vehicle to a complete stop. It can also use the motor to hold the car in place, even on a fairly steep incline. You can't do either with a standard transmission ICE vehicle.
There are people with electric cars that have their brakes rust out because they're never used. A standard piece of advice to EV owners is "make sure to use your brakes at least once a month".
You can get this lack of brake pad use with an ice with a manual transmission as well if you engine brake.
the engine cannot brake to a complete stop, so break pads are always in use. At low RPMs, the engine is going to stall (manual) or switch to neutral (automatic).
It can brake to nearly a complete stop though with the brakes basically holding the car in place at the end. I got pretty good at it.
Brake wear scales ~quadratically with vehicle speed. Applying them at 5mph vs 20mph is 16x less energy to burn off.
> though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.
Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles.
The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
PM2.5 is also a broad category of particulates that come from many sources. The PM2.5 levels in the air depend on many sources, with wind being a major factor in changing PM2.5 levels. It’s hard to draw conclusions when a number depends on the weather and a lot of other inputs.
Diesel looks good if you are focusing primarily on fuel economy (mpg / L/100km), and when companies cheat the tests on other emissions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
When you remove the cheating and give adequate weight to those emissions, diesel for passenger vehicles makes a lot less sense.
Not only that, in France for example the liter of Diesel fuel was always 10 to 15 euro cents cheaper at the petrol station due to how regular gasoline and diesel fuel was taxed.
That's why before EVs started to show up on the market en masse if you walked into a dealership they would always recommend that you pick the diesel engine if you wanted to save money of fuel costs.
That was actually the reason why the Yellow vest protests started in 2018 when the French government announced that the taxation gap between diesel and regular gasoline was going to disappear gradually.
Small edit to add to the context:
By that point, when the protests started in 2018, the governments(right and left) of France and the many French automakers had been pushing diesel engines as THE solution to alleviate rising fuel costs and so justifiably, the protesters thought that someone had just pulled the rug from underneath them.
Also this measure was in direct contradiction to Macron's campaign promise which was that he was going to reduce the tax burden or at least not increase it on the middle class, especially the rural middle-class that basically cannot get a job without having a car as public transport is almost non-existent in rural France.
That and many other things which I won't get into since it is not relevant for this discussion really riled people up.
In Canada, diesel fuel is priced around mid-grade gasoline (89). So it's slightly more expensive than regular, but slightly cheaper than premium (91/93).
Based on this, I've always thought of diesel as "more expensive", like you better get 15% more power/miles out of it if it's going to cost more! However, I suspect that most people purchasing diesel vehicles have as their other choice a car that would slurp premium, so for those buyers perhaps diesel is still a discount, even in Canada.
Diesel is less fuel efficient than regular gasoline except when you measure by volume. It gets fewer miles per unit of energy in the fuel.
Can you source that? Diesel is only 13% more energy dense than gasoline [1] so the difference between the two fuels isn't huge.
I suspect that modern (last five years) turbocharged gasoline engines are probably approaching diesel thermal efficiency, but I don't think that it's correct to say that they generally surpass it. The gasoline Ford EcoBoost is 33% thermally efficient while a BMW N47 turbo-diesel is 42% thermally efficient, as an example [2].
[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio...
The fundamental difference in how the engine operates by throttling fuel only instead of air and fuel accounts for a large fuel economy savings
Fuel is sold by volume, which is why volumetric fuel efficiency is desirable to the consumer
Fuel is sold by volume and fuel type; diesel is about 25% more expensive per gallon than regular gasoline where I am.
Correct - where I am it is cheaper most of the year, a bit more expensive in the winter.
And it is 10% cheaper than gasoline where I am (South-Africa)
Yes, but measuring miles per volume of fuel and setting increasing targets was a big focus of reducing petroleum dependency since the 70s.
The focus has more recently shifted to reducing overall emissions of CO2 and other harmful gases and particulates, which makes diesel much less appealing.
I don't think any car buyer has ever looked at Calories per litre of fuel as a relevant metric for purchasing.
People that buy cars almost exclusively care about cost of fuel to move between A and B.
Modern diesel engines with DPF and DEF are pretty clean from a particulate and NOx standpoint. Of course there are still older diesels on the road, mainly buses and trucks. In the USA, diesel is so unpopular as a passenger car engine that it's not even worth worrying about.
I don't think you can just say diesel is less popular in the US without bringing up the emissions scandals. It genuinely seems to me like companies can't deliver clean emissions and efficiency gains at the same time for it.
The scandals don't matter. The number of people in the USA who buy diesel passenger cars rounds off to "nobody." There's just no point in even bothering. Supposing you could make an ultra-low emission diesel (without cheating), you'd still sell almost none.
We would believe that except that car companies are known for lying about diesel emissions.
> The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
That's a thing of the past as as early as in 2023 diesels were already a smaller percentage of new cars than non-hybrid EVs:
https://www.acea.auto/figure/fuel-types-of-new-passenger-car...
To add to what others said: diesels always had a reputation of reliability. The cast-iron TDI 1.9 is legendary but even Italian cars fitted with the JTD line would just work and not require maintenance. I recall making light of a friend who was driving an Alfa Romeo until he mentioned that actually it's been more reliable than anything else he's driven - at least in terms of powertrain issues.
The love for diesel came from a catastrophic misunderstanding and the resulting belief that CO2 must be reduced at all costs. Diesel engines of the past produced slightly less CO2 per km than petrol engines in exchange for much worse overall emissions. The fact that they were slightly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption helped with the sales pitch, too.
Nobody was even thinking about CO2 when the policies that got Europe where they are were enacted.
Europe began embracing diesels 40yr ago when they were noisy and stinky and they did it because they taxed the crap out of fuel so people rightfully prioritized buying vehicles that got better fuel economy.
Giving a crap about CO2 is a recent thing.
I don't know about mainland Europe, but in the UK it really was exclusively about CO2 emissions per distance travelled, to the extent that Vehicle Excise Duty (the annual tax you pay on a car) was defined in terms of g/km of CO2 emitted. This happened in 2001 and wasn't changed until the wake of the emissions cheating scandals [1].
[1] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-re...
Interesting. If not to reduce CO2 emissions, what was the rationale presented to the voters for having high taxes on fuel 40 yr ago?
In the US, Federal lawmakers would be voted out of office (even now after the science of climate change has settled) if they imposed taxes on fuels anywhere near as high as European lawmakers do.
>Interesting. If not to reduce CO2 emissions, what was the rationale presented to the voters for having high taxes on fuel 40 yr ago?
Energy security. They didn't have north sea oil back then. Buying from Russia or the ME was fraught with political peril. And of course the .gov is never gonna pass up a chance to increase revenue.
> The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
And turns out the whole thing was a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
It's unfortunate that so much rhetoric around environmentalism is based on faulty claims. It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.
The latest one is AI data center water use- the extreme numbers like 5 liters of water per ChatGPT image just makes me feel sad that we can't have a civil discussion based on the facts. Everything is so polarized.
I'm confused by your comment.
You link an article that talks about how manufacturers lied on their emission figures.
But later you seem to imply that the actual lie was about how bad emissions are for humans/environment?
My point was that misinformation makes it impossible or nearly impossible to evaluate "is this environmental or not".
Best effort is not enough to guarantee a good outcome- for example, this car is diesel and has lower emissions, therefore I will buy it and I will be reducing my own emissions turns out to not be true all the time.
Just like congestion pricing might or might not actually affect pollution in the way that it's claimed. The obvious point being that the city loves the new revenue, no matter what the level of impact it actually has.
I'm actually in favor of congestion pricing in principle (whether or not pm2.5 is reduced or not). I'm just sad that often times it's impossible to figure out what's true.
>It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.
What does that even mean?
Honestly whatever it means it sounds like you would be the kind of person that would fall for the firehose of falsehood rather than look for the truth behind the actual claims.
For 99.9% of issues, we rely on trust to make up our minds. We assume people are mostly not lying. If a group of people are found to lie, then yes, maybe “look for the truth behind the actual claims” is worth it, but more likely shooting them out of the discourse and into the metaphorical sun is the right response. If you walk around lying, you don’t get to complain that people aren’t doing research on your claims.
Sure, but how does that relate to environmentalists? The people lying were the car industry, but somehow the OP questions environmentalism. Why are they not questioning the car industry?
This is something I see a lot in science skepticism.
Someone incorrectly conveys a simple science concept, and people blame the scientist, not the communicator.
Like, News says "New revolutionary battery" and people roll their eyes and say "Oh but this will never make it to prod" and decide that scientists are liars and conveniently ignore that lithium battery density has like doubled over the past 20 years or so.
The person who was wrong was the unaware journalist taking a PR person's claims at face value, and having no context to smell test such a claim, and having no time or interest to treat the claim with skepticism anyway because "Batteries slightly improve" never sold newspapers.
But they blame science!
>We assume people are mostly not lying
Why? There are massive incentives for people to lie in a great many cases, especially where profits exist. Car manufactures, as we know, gladly lie and fake evidence. Even when there are massive fines involved, the fines are generally less than what they make in profit from the lies.
What's even better is you can play both sides to confuse the issue. Create 3rd party groups on the other side of your claims and have them make up the stupidest claims "Just looking at a car will give you cancer". Flood the zone with false information, bullshit asymmetry. Lobby the shit out of politicians so they don't care about the issues, only the money it brings in.
The confused regulars in the middle are so propagandized to they no longer know up from down and billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.
>The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
It's expressly incentivized by their tax system.
Imagine the year is 1988 and you're some snooty jerk in Europe about to buy a Mercedes. Why on earth would you go with the noisy, smelly diesel option if not to save A TON of money over the life of the vehicle?
When I was at the military they told us that in case of war the government would start appropriating diesel cars, since those are compatible with the fuel the military uses and that there were ancient incentives to buy this type of car to make sure there were enough of them.
The Marine Corps has/had KLR 650 dirt bikes converted to run on diesel, kerosene, or JP8.
Diesel was promoted in the UK when we were worried about CO2 emissions. There was a subsequent back-pedal when particulates became a prominent issue
I believe the popularity of diesel car in Europe is actually a tax-related hack.
The idea is that diesel is the "work" fuel, for shipping, construction, etc... While gasoline is the "consumer" fuel, for personal use, motorsports, etc... Make the former expensive and it will affect the entire economy, everything will become more expensive and less competitive. Making gasoline more expensive will not have the same impact.
So, put high taxes on gasoline. The result was an increase in popularity of diesel cars, that cost less to run because of taxes.
Now, the situation is changing. Diesel, at least the one that is legal to use on the road is taxed at a level closer to gasoline. Diesel cars are also becoming less and less welcome with regards to low emission zones and green taxes, so many people are going back to gasoline.
Yes, in France as I pointed out in my other comment, the diesel fuel was always cheaper than regular gasoline. The re-alignment of the tax was (amongst other things) what sparked the massive yellow vest protests in France in 2018.
"relatively clean" means 85% of PM2.5 is from non-exhaust sources, and 15% is from exhaust after catalytic conversion. In New York EV and ICE are pretty much on par when it comes to this category of pollution, as the additional weight increases non exhaust sources. Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
It is different in Africa, where catalytic converters are harvested for precious metals and cars are driven without them.
That source is Europe, not New York. It claims EV's are 24% heavier than ICE vehicles. That might be true in Europe but definitely not the case in the US where the average ICE vehicle is a 6000 pound truck and the average EV is a 4000 pound Tesla.
It also assumes they're using the same tires. EV owners put on EV tires, which are formulated to have a lower rolling resistance, quieter and last longer. All 3 of those correlate with lower dust.
New York City has a more European balance of cars versus light trucks than most of the USA. Not easy to park a modern American pickup in any bourough except maybe Staten Island. Source: lived there
The subject here is New York City where I would expect people are less like to drive the heavy ICE vehicles (unless they are doing some that needs such a large vehicle).
But a 6000 pound truck doesn't get replaced with an EV sedan. Or vice versa. As things move to EV I don't know why the proportion of car body types (whatever you call this) wouldn't stay the same.
Yes, but that 24% increase in Europe is partly due to increase in vehicle size. Vehicle size is increasing over time in Europe, and the average EV is newer.
Also, cars designed as pure EV's are a lot lighter than EV's built on an ICE chassis.
A Telsa 3 is about 2% heavier than a BMW 3 whereas a Ford Lightning is 20% heavier than the comparable F-150.
the 24% increase has nothing to do with car size over time in europa.
Table 2 in the paper lists which cars where compared, and that 24% numbers is an average from comparing models where manufacturers offer EV and ICE variants.
> As things move to EV I don't know why the proportion of car body types (whatever you call this) wouldn't stay the same.
It's the same problem as giant phones. They make them this way in order to fit a bigger battery in.
People are not cross-shopping the Model 3 with a full-size pickup truck. They're cross-shopping against Camry, Accord, BMW 3, etc...
Is that true for slower moving vehicles? I can't imagine there's a lot of brake dust generated by stopping & starting in the 0-10 mph range.
Afraid the intuition is somewhat incorrect.
Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.
See for instance https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...
Makes sense, good points.
Tires and brakes. With EV's this gets relatively worse because they are heavier.
Minus brakes on EVs. They usually do not use their break pads.
ehhh, they certainly can and do... but I think there's a case to be made that this can be lower when managed appropriately
My only experience is BMW EV, but my i4 aggressively prioritizes regeneration over using the brakes. It even has an energy meter that shows negative/positive energy flow. The positive flow is blue until the actual brakes engage where it changes to black. And this is in two pedal mode, one pedal driving is even more aggressive about regen.
I would not doubt I use my breaks 1/20th of the amount that our X5 or Silverado use theirs.
It varies by model, I know some lower end EVs from GM still use the breaks quite often depending on the driving mode.
I have an Equinox EV and the brakes do not get used often. They did a great job with blending kinetic regeneration with friction activation, but you can still feel the difference when it kicks in.
They are active in reverse, to ensure that they are used and so that any rust gets cleared from the rotors. They also activate if you slam on the brakes or if the battery is at 100% charge and the kinetic energy can not be used.
I have about 12,000 miles on the car over the last year and the rotors and pads look the same as when I got them. The first annual inspection showed no measurable wear.
I've rented a Chevy Bolt before and in the normal drive mode (D) the brakes almost always get used in addition to light regen. In the single-peddle mode (P) regen is prioritized a lot more but passengers complained about not liking the feel versus standard braking.
Blending brake with regen is normal to avoid rust to develop on the rotor but I haven’t seen any EV that don’t prioritize regen over normal braking.
They can, obviously, but it is done very very sparingly.
EV's almost never use brakes, and the weight difference isn't really that much. A base trim model 3 is less than 10% heavier than a base trim Camry.
https://www.truecar.com/compare/tesla-model-3_standard-vs-to...
But the tires are individually controlled - less slippage - and the brakes are regenerative. As a bonus, NYC is pretty much best-case scenario for the latter.
> But the tires are individually controlled - less slippage
Not relevant for normal driving. The tires aren’t spinning appreciably due to acceleration except in brief moments with aggressive driving.
EVs can actually have higher acceleration related tire wear because they weigh more and have more instant torque on demand.
A lot of consumer EVs have filtered throttle pedal inputs to reduce the torque spikes though.
Not all tire wear is when skidding out. A car tire's contact patch is several inches wide (especially on trucks/SUVs where extra-wide tires are often used to give a more premium look), so any time that wheel is turning a corner, there's a portion of it at the outside and inside that's rotating at a different speed than the pavement beneath it is moving.
There's also the regular deformation of wheel just in the course of regular rotation, which is where the majority of highway wear dust comes from.
With extea weight and tire size, evs will have more slippage. It isnt about the entire tire slipping against the ground. It is about tread patterns slipping as the tire rolls at any speed, especially in corners where car tires cannot ever avoid slipping.
While this is generally true, tire wear is known to be generally faster on EVs due to their weight and instantaneous torque when accelerating.
Which, as an EV owner, feels like an "oh no, my steak is too buttery" kind of problem to have.
The instant torque also comes with better control over it, though. I don't doubt it's a thing, but I do doubt it outweighs all the other environmental benefits.
It’s the forces that accelerate the wear. Significant wheel speed is a rare occurrence in normal driving, but acceleration, cornering, and braking forces are ever present.
My Polestar 2 (shared design from Volvo's EVs) only uses brakes once it's hit its regen limit, this changes based on battery capacity and temperature but in the real world it means coming to a near complete stop from 50-60mph. The constant rust on the brakes are evident to that.
And you gotta have soft tires to harness that EV torque people expect. Not like the old days where they put hard stiff tires on Priuses to wring out every MPG.
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
TLDR regenerative braking reduces this significantly, nut getting the raw numbers is always fraught with today's horrific AI-addled search engines.
Also seems like a wonderful opportunity for the materials science people to print money coming up with better brake materials here. And if anyone here who can say "clean coal" with a straight face disagrees, point and laugh at them.
Edit: Uh Oh! Facts...
Whoops
Folks in the comments will say "not really" for EVs because of better control and lower speeds, but if you've ever driven in Manhattan, you'd know it's often light-to-light drag racing at times which with an EV and a heavy foot will undo a lot of the regen braking via stress on the tires.
How do EVs fare in this regard? Brakes are used significantly less, but the additional weight from the batteries chews through tires faster.
Why does everyone immediately pivot to EVs on this subject, instead of (looks around) gargantuan SUVs and trucks everywhere, due to peculiarities of US policies regulating SUVs more leniently than cars on fuel efficiency?
Because a lot if EV buyers are interested in the environmental impact of their purchase?
I say this as someone who owns an electric scooter and whose next car will be an EV—the sales pitch for EVs right now is basically pay more (especially now that the tax credit is gone) to have a worse time and maybe eventually claw some of it back over the lifetime of the car in fuel savings. The environmental impact is the pro in the pro con list. So if that doesn't pan out, or doesn't pan out enough it's going to be a tough sell.
Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
What do you mean by a worse time? The advantages are substantial- No oil changes ever again, performance that is on par with high end sports cars, less moving parts which should lead to higher reliability, in my state you don't even need to do an annual inspection. Those types of unexpected appointments are what really aggravate me when they are unexpectedly needed and eat up weekend time.
Depending on your commute length, you may be able to just use your regular plug to top up over night. Infra upgrades to support the future are unfortunate, but it should be a one and done kind of thing. It was probably time to update the panel and get 200 Amp service- you will recoup a portion of that if you ever sell the house.
The best part is batteries get signficantly (for some values of signficant) cheaper and better each year. Gen 1 Nissan Leaf owners can now actually replace their batteries for about 1/5th the initial pack cost and increase their range.
>What do you mean by a worse time?
Inconvenience when taking long trips.
When operating beyond your comfortable range you have to strategically plan charging the way shitbox owners have to stop and top up fluids. If it's your only car it's absolutely a degradation in the ~monthly ownership experience though you (in my opinion) make it back not doing oil changes and the like.
Even without the tax credit I still think that EVs are a great buy for most though. Charging shenanigans is simple and a "known known" whereas ICE maintenance is far more unclear at the time of purchase
So I was actually looking at it yesterday, and the top end ranges of todays EVs are actually the same range as my 2007 Honda Accord. Maybe I am unique, but I have never taken a road trip so long that I needed to get gas midway going one way, maybe this is more common out west. I have done some round trips for sure though that would require a top up on more than a charge.
I was surprised though that ranges, at least on the top end and very expensive EVs, are now comparable to ICE cars. This will continue to improve and hopefully alleviate any form of range anxiety in the future, especially as chargers just become more ubiquitous. I feel people really fail to realize they can just essentially top up each night and start out with a full "tank." I don't know, it all just feels very overblown with today's EVs.
It's not the overall range that gets you. It's when all the chargers in the work parking lot are taken and you need to go somewhere that doesn't have chargers after work and it's also winter that results in an inconvenient stop or cutting it uncomfortably close. It's absolutely surmountable but it requires planning you didn't have to do before.
IMO what you save by not going to the gas station is a wash if you have to habitually charge more than just at home. You're replacing one habit with another.
I still think they're worth it since you basically never get hit with an exorbitant repair bill for the engine/trans.
> Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
You likely don't need to replace the panel, as load management options exist. Wallbox, in particular, has an option where you can add a modbus doo-dad (carlo gavazzi energy management module) to your panel and it will monitor the overall usage and drop the EVSE current to keep it at a safe level.
It's more expensive than if you had a modern panel, but less expensive than replacing the panel itself.
I'm probably just going to bite the bullet and replace the panel but this is really good to know.
Another option is just stick to a smaller circuit.
80% of 15A x 120V = 1.4 kW
80% of 20A x 240V = 3.8 kW
Just going from a standard 15A outlet to a 20A/240V nearly triples the amount of power, and many homes that would need a new panel for a 50A charger have room for one more 20A circuit. Cars typically spend 8-16 hrs per day stationary in their own driveway, so 3.8 kW translates into tons of range.
While 40A or 50A is nice to have, it's far from necessary.
How many amps is your current service? I have 200A service where I live, but the house is 100% electric -- water heater, range, heat pump, washer, dryer, etc. All electric. There's even a little medallion on the front of the house about it: https://i.imgur.com/BrHj1XQ.jpeg The 70s were weird.
And when you say that your panel is old, just how old are we talking?
You likely don't need to install a special charger or breaker panel. A regular 120V wall outlet will give probably give you 30+ miles of range just charging overnight. If your commute is longer, you might want a better charger, but don't let someone upsell you on a high-speed charger if your average daily travel is under 30mi and 90%ile under 100mi.
Watch out for electricians who try to rip off new EV owners. Make sure you get a few estimates. When we added a charger, bids were $2000, $2000, and $500.
Mine was about $1,100 which included a $250 permit / inspection fee from my township.
My EV is the best most fun car I've ever owned. I had a V8 Mercedes E430 and my EV is faster and more fun to drive. You have it backwards. Having and ICE car is accepting a worse time in exchange for government subsidies on Oil.
> to have a worse time
I have a much better time in my EV than my ICE car but to each their own.
…to have a worse time
Says the person who has never owned an EV. Fifteen years of EV ownership, I’m never going back. Environmental factors aside, an EV is the overall better vehicle. You can keep your rattling ICE vehicles that need special fluid from specific vendors.
I guess I should have said "a more inconvenient time" where owning an EV kinda revolves around your charging setup/schedule in a way that you don't have to think about with ICE cars. I know some people swear by them being more fun to drive but that's the last thing on my list of requirements for a car. I will say I think you're giving ICE cars a bad rap, my little Honda Fit that will be replaced by the EV is at 150k miles with nothing other than like three oil changes (yes i know) and a new set of tires.
I guess I should have said "a more inconvenient time" where owning an EV kinda revolves around your charging setup/schedule in a way that you don't have to think about with ICE cars.
I plug it in when I get home, and when I get in it again the "tank" is always full. I think about the EV a lot less than I do our ICE car, which seems to need gas at the most inconvenient times. You might have an argument for road trips, but even that's almost a no-brainer these days. Sure, I can't just get off at some random exit in the Utah desert and expect to find a charger, but my experience says this whole "charging on a road trip" is way overblown, as if even the slightest bit of look-ahead planning is just too much for people to handle.
Doesn't constant charging to 100% wreck the battery longevity?
“Full” meaning 80%. With a 300 mile range, that’s plenty for day-to-day.
But to your question: I don’t know, does it still? Seems BMS has gotten a lot better from the early Nissan Leaf days, so I don’t if it yet time to retire that along with “discharge batteries all the way so they don’t get ‘memory’”.
Wait, you changed your oil every 50,000 miles?
One of the biggest bonuses for me is never needing to go to a gas station. So much more pleasant to charge at home overnight, or at charge stations if I’m on a road trip. I can’t imagine buying an ICE car ever again.
Alternatively: Because fossil fuel companies have a long, long history of astroturfing public opinion to benefit their business.
Same trick with solar farms: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
And wind: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-oil-and-gas-ind...
I see this argument almost exclusively from the fuckcars crowd, because their existing environmental arguments against ICE vehicles don't apply to EVs.
If you're claiming that the oil and gas lobby is facilitating their criticism of any automobile, I hope you're right because that would be hilarious.
> I see this argument almost exclusively from the fuckcars crowd...
That's not shocking to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)
> Friends of the Earth U.S. was founded in California in 1969 by environmentalist David Brower after he left the Sierra Club. The organization was launched with the help of Donald Aitken, Jerry Mander and a $200,000 donation from the personal funds of Robert O. Anderson. One of its first major campaigns was the protest of nuclear power, particularly in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
> Robert Orville Anderson (April 12, 1917 – December 2, 2007) was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist who founded [the United States' sixth-largest oil company] Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).
Consumers like SUVs. They are convenient, easy to get in and out of, flexible for hauling large items, many can pull trailers, offer good visibility for the driver, and do well in the snow.
They are also heavily subsidized by the US government in the form of relaxed regulations. The profit margins are higher which is why car companies push them. In their current ICE form they also benefit from massive government subsidies of the Oil companies. If you took those away it is unlikely that the convenience would be worth the additional cost.
>They are also heavily subsidized by the US government in the form of relaxed regulations. The profit margins are higher which...
Look in the mirror, that's who's responsible for this.
You people levied regulations. You levied them in half baked ways that resulted in the demise of sedans and station wagons. And now you complain that SUVs are "subsidized". Get out of here with that nonsense and take your stupid regulations with you so the rest of us can have diversity of vehicle choice back.
None of this stuff is a subsidy, construing "exempt from the screwing some other product category gets" is just a lie.
I take a less libertarian view on this. It because trucks and truck-like vehicles are under-regulated. The result being excess pollution and pedestrian fatalities. We need to remove the loop hole.
Wagons can do all of that too
They can, the main difference being they ride lower (like a sedan) and tend to have less headroom in the cargo area so might not be quite as good at transporting "stuff."
I had a Ford Focus wagon for quite some time, loved it. Cheap to buy, cheap to own, nothing exciting but very dependable and useful. With a small 4-cylinder engine it could not tow (at least not much) and rust eventually claimed it. Still ran like new with over 200K miles.
People want a solution to this problem that requires them to make approximately zero compromises.
The auto industry has positioned EVs as that solution, even though it's mostly not.
Because when you're talking about particulates in the air, one of the main local environmental harms from cars, EVs aren't the 100% clean people expect them to be.
Because EVs are the proposed solution
[flagged]
EVs are heavier than equivalent-sized ICE vehicles, but they do enjoy regenerative braking. The answer is to make smaller-sized cars but the auto industry has been pushing the farmer cosplay for decades because the profit margins are a lot higher on a $75k truck or SUV than $30k sedan.
It's a tough area, honestly, and will be until public charging is better. You need a bigger battery to get the range that people need (want?) to be able to reach the next charging station. Realistically, though, most people don't really venture far from home but they don't like the idea that they can't venture far from home without finding a place to charge.
EV charging availability has drastically improved over the last few years, so maybe there is hope for smaller EVs.
Chevy Suburban: ~ 5,700–6,100lbs
Model 3: ~ 3,860–3,900+ lbs
Suburban is about 1.5–1.6× heavier than a Tesla Model 3.
The Chevy Suburban has been one of the largest vehicles on the market since 1934. [1]
If you wanted an EV to match the Suburban it would probably be that Cadillac Escalade IQ in terms of size, comfort, and towing capacity -- that's got a curb weight of 9,100 pounds which is 1.5x heavier than the Suburban.
I'd think the BMW 3 Series has a similar vibe to the Model 3 and that has a base curb weight of 3536 which is about 10% less than the Model 3.
[1] it's the oldest nameplate that's been made continuously
A a bus is over 40,000lbs. More than 10x heavier than a Tesla Model 3.
"A Tesla Model 3 has a greater curb weight than a Chevy Suburban" -- what? Source?
Suburban - 6,051 lbs Model 3 - 3,891 lbs
https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/suburban/2025/features-spe... https://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-3/2025/features-specs/
Tires yes, brakes no. Friction brakes are barely used on EVs outside of specific scenarios. Mine will engage in three situations:
For #3, the only reason why the brakes are used when backing up is to ensure that they are used even the tiniest amount and to clear any rust from the rotors.Tire wear - yet, but in theory they should emit less brake dust thanks to regenerative breaking.
> A Tesla Model 3 has a greater curb weight than a Chevy Suburban
Google AI tells me that Tesla model 3 (heaviest modification - AWD) is 1851 kg and Chevy Suburban 4WD is 2640 kg. Is it wrong?
Tire wear is probably a thing - although I suspect the per-wheel control allows them to better respond to slips and sudden acceleration. I've noticed test driving a Tesla that it accelerates rapidly much more smoothly with no tire slippage than a combustion car.
Brake wear is likely nulled out by regenerative braking. And you're probably not driving highway speeds through Manhattan, either.
This is wrong. Exact weights vary with trim levels, but Model are around 4000 lbs. and Suburbans are around 6000 lbs.
Tire, yes. But not brakes. With an EV most of the kinetic energy is converted back to electricity thanks to regenerative braking instead of being turned into heat through friction.
Overall the EV emit fewer airborne particles even without counting the exhaust.
Why does everyone immediately pivot to SUVs on this subject, instead of (looks around) gargantuan Tesla Model Ys that weigh as much as a Ford Bronco and EV trucks everywhere, due to peculiarities of US consumer habits and the demand for huge vehicles to pick up groceries?
Aren't Tesla Model Y SUVs though?
No, they're crossovers. Closer to a hatchback.
I mean, they're literally called SUVs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_SUV
Even https://www.tesla.com/modely uses the term "Electric Midsize SUV"
huh well TIL, thank you. My definitions of Sports Utility Vehicle are outdated. They have almost no clearance, and the suspension is not tuned for anything more than small washboards.
EV's produce 38% less tire & brake dust than ICE vehicles.
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
non-exhaust emissions on an ICE vehicle are roughly 1/3 brake dust, 1/3 tire dust and 1/3 road dust. EV's have almost no impact on road dust, 83% lest brake dust and 20% more tire dust.
Thank you for sourcing an answer!
Tire wear on EVs has more to do with the weight of your right foot than the curb weight of the vehicle.
The high torque of EVs results in frequent wheel slippage for those eager to pull away from traffic lights quickly. Just like with high BHP ICE vehincles, smooth and gentle acceleration/deceleration will result in long tire life.
I'm not sure, and I assume it will vary a lot by speed.
EVs do also have higher torque, so that may increase tire-based particles, but you're right that it avoids the brake pads for the most part.
Fewer cars in general is the win from congestion pricing, though.
>Fewer cars in general is the win from congestion pricing, though.
And lower VMTs (vehicle miles traveled) is also a win for the planet, it's probably the best weapon the average person has access to in the fight against climate change. Transit usage begets transit usage; more fares paid to the agency enables better frequencies and more routes, leading to more people opting to take transit instead of driving... In a well-run system, it's a positive feedback loop (and the inverse, where people stop taking transit, can also lead to a death spiral, as happened across America in the mid-20th century).
If we're speaking about individual actions, isn't avoiding air travel more effective than any other form of individual vehicle travel choice?
It depends on what you substitute it with.
If you substitute with “don’t travel far [or at all]”, it’s a big savings. If you substitute flying 1000 miles on an airliner with “drive 1000 miles instead”, or flying US to Europe with a cruise ship trip to Europe, you’ve probably made it worse; in that regards, it’s less the mode of travel and more the total distance in these trades.
The observation that stuck with me is how much of my county's total carbon emissions are due to air travel which begins/ends at our regional airports (~3%), vs what percentage of the population flies in a given year.
The distribution of air-travel emissions, to me, seem pretty gross when juxtaposed with the number of people who are doing this travel. The incentives for business travel, in particular, seem misaligned.
I don't think you can just look at the "number of people who are doing this travel", as those same planes are also carrying air cargo and US mail. Not everyone flies, but almost everyone in the county receives mail, cargo, or benefits from same. (It would be easier to replace cargo than passenger transport with a more efficient and comparable total trip time mode of transport if such was available.)
The reason you get asked whether your USPS parcel contains hazardous substances X, Y, and Z and why the fines for violations are so stiff is partly because of passenger airline safety concerns.
Is it? Planes still pollute a lot less than cars per same distance (unless you have 4-5 people in them)
Yes, and the northeast has the best rail transit in the US, which NYC sits right in the middle of.
Rail transit in the north east is the best in the US. But it is terrible in many ways. As someone who lives in an area that would be marginal for rail even in the great rail countries of Europe of Asia I really need the north east to develop great rail - only by bringing great rail to places where it is easy can we possibly get it good enough that it would be worth bringing to me. Instead I just get examples of why we shouldn't bother with transit at all here: when all we can see is the stupid things New York is constantly doing to transit (where the density is so high they can get by with it) there isn't an example I can point to of that would be worth doing here.
A bit worse on tires because they are heavier (for comparable vehicle size, but obviously not if you compare a small EV with a ICE truck), and much better on brakes because of regenerative braking. Overall they are better.
With EV's this gets relatively worse because they are heavier. EV SUV worse than gas SUV.
I'd gonna guess "worse"
Brake dust is mostly some iron, carbon, silica. Not great to ingest but very much recyclable by the environment, unlike rubber.
And possibly much easier to greatly reduce (just build some shielding around the brake to catch most of the dust) than the tyre
Unfortunately it's also copper and asbestos :(. (Yes, they're banned, but nobody is checking aftermarket brake pads...)
But tire dust is definitely now the worst of the two, by far. 6-PPD alone.
>Yes, they're banned, but nobody is checking aftermarket brake pads..
On one hand you've got the people who insisted on regulating all of our manufacturing out of the country on environmental and safety grounds. On the other hand you've got the people who want to band asbestos and lead and all manner of other dangerous chemicals in consumer products. Both these people are dressed like Spiderman and they're pointing at each other. <facepalm>
And unfortunately there is some nasty stuff in tires
There never seems to be much discussion on reducing the harm from tire (and I suppose road surface) particulates. Maybe that's the next frontier?
There's quite a bit of materials science work in that direction.
For example, I have Michelin's CrossClimate tires, which are all-weather tires that do better in snow but don't break down as fast as dedicated winter tires do in warm weather.
I was thinking more from the perspective "make them out of materials that aren't too bad to inhale/ingest"
What material is strong, malleable, dirt fucking cheap, has a high coefficient of friction, easy to work with, amenable to additives, meets all the suspension properties we expect out of a tire, etc, and isn't bad to breathe a lot of the dust of?
Modern tires are works of material science miracle, working with dirt cheap inputs.
Even iron dust from steel on steel friction like with trains is bad for your health.
The human lungs just have bad filtration.
If nobody asks the question, nobody will try and look for one.
Sure, that's great too. But the rubber lasting longer means less of those bad things to inhale floating around at any given time.
How would you recommend them based on winter performance?
I live in a snowy area and am quite happy with them.
I believe they are directional tires so it would make it hard to operate with a full size spare otherwise I’ll definitely consider them
EU is introducing particulate regulation roughly now-ish (proposed 2022):
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/automotiv...
> Euro 7 will also regulate emissions from tyres and brakes for the first time worldwide.
Because a hard long wearing tire is a low grip tire and the direct tradeoff between safety and the environment is not something either crowd wants to deal with because there's so much overlap.
“Additional weight”? What additional weight? In comparison to America’s best-selling vehicle, the Ford F-150? Where was all this hand-wringing about weight and brake and tire dust ten years ago?
I guess those narratives aren’t going to support themselves.
It always surprises me when people want stop signs in their neighborhood for traffic calming. The last thing I want is all of the noise and pollution of vehicles stopping and starting over and over again; surely various piece of road furniture like bulb-outs, roundabouts, etc, do a better job with fewer drawbacks. Other than cost, of course.
My assumption is that stop signs act somewhat as a way to enforce the lower speed limits in residential areas. There's several stretches without stops in my suburb where I've seen drivers whizzing by very obviously above the 25mph speed limit, which is bad enough on its own but becomes a serious hazard when combined with the massive blind spots that come from curbs on both directions being filled to the brim with parked cars.
A better solution would probably be radar-based speed signs with printed threats of fines, though.
> A better solution would probably be radar-based speed signs with printed threats of fines, though.
I don't think people respond to those as much as they do to "traffic calming" like speed bumps, roundabouts, and narrow choke points.
Probably true, but all of those are significantly more involved installations or modifications.
To be clear, I'm all in favor of reworking neighborhood roads to be more friendly to pedestrians, but I think things like signs have a significantly better chance of actually being implemented in most circumstances.
Of course, drivers respond to speed bumps the same way they respond to other poor road surfaces: 3-ton SUVs.
They put one in front of my friend's house. It's a big plastic one almost as big as a speed table. The complainer Karens drive .03mph over it and get honked at or driven around. The trucks and vans, anything driven by an employee or a teenager just speeds right over and a small number of people go for air time. 11/10. Highly entertaining. And this is all in addition to having to listen to every vehicle accelerate after it of course.
Good synergy with those "road-diet" narrow chokepoints then.
>My assumption is that stop signs act somewhat as a way to enforce the lower speed limits in residential areas.
At the expense of basically training people to roll them.
They added a stop sign near me, and now I get to hear the engines rev as they accelerate.
The EVs passing by are nice, though!
There were a number of accidents which prompted the 4 way stop.
There are some early tyre and brake dust collection systems which might help, but that won't do much for the road dust.
I've been wondering whether, theoretically, if self driving cars become widely usable and deployed in cities, will they be able to safely operate with harder tyre compounds and harder road surfaces that shed less but don't grip as well?
If nothing else, less aggressive driving should lead to less shedding.
I wonder if it is the `congestion` itself that causes the PM2.5 spike. More stop and go traffic, more brake dust, more tire dust?
Congestion leads to more use of the brakes, which can have nonlinear effects.
Also, I thought tire particles tend to be larger.
There’s also ammonia from farmland, it reacts to form secondary PM25
co2, co, NO.
Nothing i would breath in a garage. Nothing i like to breath in while i'm driving.
This is actually a major nitpick. If this "study" is this sloppy, what else isn't quite true?
I am a little confused, why would sloppiness in the media release (the article that uses the word tailpipe), have anything to do with sloppiness in the study, which the above comment clearly highlights is about PM2.5, not specifically tailpipe emissions?
Are Yale's media releases typically done by the people who do the study?
The study isn’t sloppy, and I would highly suggest reading it before casting aspersions at the authors:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44407-025-00037-2
The study doesn't mention tailpipes (afiact). This press release/article does. Don't dismiss scientists because journalists reporting their findings incorrectly.
I won't change my mind about emissions in NYC. NYC is full of modern, western cars.
Two-stroke engines are terrible, classic automobiles are terrible, cars with no emission regulations will tend to be terrible. Cars in NYC will have catalytic converters and other technologies to reduce tailpipe emissions.
The notable source of bad tailpipe emissions in NYC are heavy diesel trucks, which, to my understanding, produce a large proportion of tailpipe particulates (and NOx) in the US, despite being a small fraction of overall vehicles on the road. There are strong correlations with heavy truck traffic and asthma rates.
Yeah, my neighbor at my last place had a diesel pickup and I could both hear and smell that it was diesel whenever he started it up.
Unlike many other places in the United States, NYC area’s railroads are almost exclusively passenger rail and there is comparatively very little freight railroad traffic serving NYC and therefore there are way more trucks in NYC. They emit way dirtier emissions. The problem is never the cars; it’s always the trucks.
And oh also the small engines powering street food carts.
My bad. Your original post did not imply NYC nor did it exclude motorbike engines. It was very general.
western? what is this less polluting non-western car you are advocating?
Pretty much any new car sold in the US, Canada, Mexico, and most of Europe. "Western" typically refers to "countries rich/developed enough to [in this case] add emissions regulations". It's a luxury that many countries haven't gotten to yet, but is widespread in North America and Europe.
The good news is that I believe Ho Chi Minh City is about to start, so hopefully they'll have much cleaner air in a couple years.
They probably mean two stroke motorcycles.
They have different ICE engines. Many two stroke scooters. Emissions are way different from those tailpipes. You’re doing apples to oranges comparisons.
And besides, even if lung cancer and heart attack may be the most common means of premature death, it does not entail that air pollution is the primary cause of them. I thought that smoking and bad dietary/exercise habits were the main factors. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd like to know.
Calculating Air Pollution’s Death Toll, Across State Lines - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/air-pollution-hea... | https://archive.today/HEapE - February 12th, 2020
Premature mortality related to United States cross-state air pollution - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1983-8 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1983-8
> I thought that smoking and bad dietary/exercise habits were the main factors
While that is true, PM2.5 is still a major cause of lung cancer in non smokers, see e.g.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11729863/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11969995/
I see from your sources that lung cancer in non-smokers is still one of the top causes of death, and of course air-pollution is a primary cause of that. Good to know.
Air pollution is pretty clearly correlated with reduced life expectancy, even if you don't directly die from it
Also noise pollution, and above ground trains are hella loud. (Or at least CalTrain and BART are...)
This is a widely debunked bad faith NIMBY talking point. A train, even at high frequencies, is less noise pollution than a highway or major road.
That's only if there are no crossings. Trains are required to sound their extremely loud horns at every crossing which can be heard from miles away.
Such crossings are pretty rare in NYC, and even rarer in passenger routes there.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Level_crossings_...
State/local governments can also declare a quiet zone. https://railroads.dot.gov/railroad-safety/divisions/crossing...
Quiet zones require crossings to be up to a certain standard. If the people opposed to train noise were serious, they could pressure their local/regional gov to upgrade crossings and establish a quiet zone. This tends to be more successful than trying to prevent the train entirely.
In the house I lived it was not debunked. It was fact. The caltrain blasted it's horn hourly (or more) 24/7 within earshot of my house. I could not sleep with my window open and often slept with ear plugs even with the window closed. I get you might be tempted to spout generic statistics, but I can tell you without a doubt it was ear blistering loud up close, and sleep disturbing even 2 blocks away.
Also for what it's worth you have no idea if it's good or bad faith.
So you would have preferred a roughly 12 lane freeway 2 blocks from your house to move the same number of people?
Perhaps, but more likely I would have preferred regulating the blasting of that damn horn.
There are regulations, encourage your local government to establish a quiet zone if that's truly your issue with the train.
https://railroads.dot.gov/railroad-safety/divisions/crossing...
I can choose to eat healthy and not smoke. I can't choose not to breathe.
I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
It’s a national issue because as soon as one city tries it out and it turns out to be pretty good and none of the doom scenarios ensue, congestion-charge opponents all over America lose most of their talking points.
Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York.”
> Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York"
But that's a real argument. They're not a $1.3tn economy ($1tn of which is Manhattan alone) [1] with fewer than one car per household (0.26 in Manhattan) [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City
[2] https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L...
Some cities are more like New York; they’ll go first. Eventually the argument will have to be, “We’re completely unlike everywhere else in America.”
I dunno, I think there's a hard stop at "having a functioning public transit system". I could imagine DC implementing a congestion charge. Nashville less so.
Sure, but that also drives the question of "why don't we have functioning public transit?" or "why aren't we building out our public transit?".
There will be a stop and balance struck everywhere, but this sort of thing really does make people that deal in the car industry nervous.
I'd gladly ditch my car tomorrow if I could catch a bus within walking distance.
I'm unfortunately 5 miles from the nearest bus stop.
> that also drives the question of "why don't we have functioning public transit?" or "why aren't we building out our public transit?"
The answer to which in many American cities being because there isn’t enough density.
Outside America’s 4 to six largest cities, ditching cars probably doesn’t work.
I'd argue there is, you just need good locations to board.
One problem that faces my city, as an example, is that we have a community that is being built out in a mountain area. There is a 2 lane highway going up there and, as you can imagine, it gets absolutely jam packed. On a clear day you can do the trip in 10 minutes, during rush-hour it can take over and hour.
This is the perfect place for something like a toll and a park and ride location within the community.
But instead we are maybe going to spend 10s (or maybe hundreds) of millions of dollars expanding the road.
This concept works great for airport's economy lots. It's a bit crazy that it doesn't seem to work for anywhere but the top 6 largest cities in the US.
I recall reading that many US cities started as railway stops! Back when the iron horse was the only way to ship cargo across the US.
> recall reading that many US cities started as railway stops! Back when the iron horse was the only way to ship cargo across the US
I've heard that from San Jose to San Francisco, the major towns (San Mateo, Palo Alto) are spaced about a day's laden carriage ride apart.
DC doesn't have a congestion charge that restricts all access to the city but it has dynamic toll road pricing that can hit rates that are far more expensive than NYC's congestion charge. It would be interesting to see an analysis comparing these 2 programs in terms of their effect on transit and air quality as well as the economics and public perception of each.
Attention economy, the algorithm, rage-bait, maximizing engagement, doomscrolling - pick your buzzword. Individual people care about all sorts of weird things, but on average, this and no other reason is why a person in Idaho suddenly finds themselves caring about Manhattan congestion pricing. It's easy to point a finger and laugh/marvel when it's something so obviously absurd to you, but of course you and I both have entirely different blind spots where our attention is marshalled and our opinion is formed by the rage-bait engine. Ours must seem preposterous to those on the outside looking in, too.
It's because everything is a culture war issue now, and anything remotely seen as helpful or benefitting society or taking even an inch from cars is "bad" for the people who live in places like Idaho (and Staten Island).
Probably very clear-cut, right? "No parking, no business" never made sense, but it makes even less sense in a city where cars are involved in less than a third of all trips
Especially considering that
* Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers, as they spend the most amount of time actually driving in congested roads
* Congestion pricing forces trips to self-select on cost/benefits in actual dollars, instead of time, so you optimize for wealthier trip takers, short stays or high value trips, where before you would favor long stays (which make looking for parking forever not so bad), and people who don't value their time very much
* Car use remains heavily subsidized, as motorists do not come close to paying the full costs associated with their road usage
...did you respond to the wrong comment?
yep
Not sure how I managed that
> The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
There are reliable ways to transform American rhetoric to collectivist vs. individualist.
"We should toll roads". This will reliably produce "we should all contribute through tax to the maintenance of roads and they should be considered a public good".
"We should have land value taxes". This will reliably produce "we should not have to pay rent to the government for something that we own".
A simple self-interest model will capture all participants in this discussion. This is why economically optimal policies have such opposition. People don't want to pay the price for their actions. They're ideally hoping to have someone else pay it. It is just as common for a position like funding for SF's Muni.
Propositions J and K made it clear. One said "let's raise Muni spending". The other said "if we raise sales tax, that will go to Muni spending. If we don't, the Muni spending proposition dies". People voted for the first and against the second. Pretty straightforward position: "We should spend more money but from a place that is not me".
The way welfare is organized in the US also shows this. Welfare is the largest sector of the US federal budget, and the ideal is to tax all productive capacity to pay for the aged. This aligns with the increased vote share from the aged. The classic two wolves and a sheep at dinner.
Feels like this is the curse of modern US politics. I'm convinced the majority of people that "want high speed rail in CA" don't live in CA. Further away they live, the stronger they will argue for why we should have it.
You run in very different social circles than I do. The only complaint I have ever heard about California's high speed rail plan (as a life-long Bay Area resident) is how damn long it's taking because of the yokels claiming it'll annoy their cows and almonds.
My assertion is most people arguing online about this do not live near the impacted areas. Happy to be proven wrong on this. I just have a lot of sour taste to the whole thing with how many people constantly harp on public transit, but then want me to see their brand new car.
The SF-LA transit project isn't a replacement for driving, it's a replacement for flying. Cars are replaced by local transit, the CA high speed rail line goes through a whole lot of nothing (read: the worst farmland they could route through) between SF and LA. Are you sure you live around here if you're this off-base with the basic premise?
This is completely the wrong way of thinking about it. Long distance and short distance transport form a symbiotic relationship.
And in most countries we wouldn't call multiple cities of 100k+ population 'nothing'.
HSR is the spine of the transportation network, that local and regional traffic docks to making a greater whole. It increases the reach and power of public transport as a whole.
For HSR to be successful, you need people using the in-between station for regional trips, not just end to end airplane like trips.
People have a habit of arguing online that this would replace people's commutes.
Which, to be fair, people online have a habit of just arguing past each other.
It might speed up the commutes of people coming into the bay from Gilroy, and it might make Madera a somewhat-viable commuter town (if you don't mind 2 hour commutes), but I can't imagine many people using it for daily travel who aren't already well-served by Amtrak/Caltrain
Of course because more people live outside of CA then inside. And lots of people talk about transport policy. Lots of countries talk about high speed rail and California is known globally.
It isn't necessarily a problem one way or the other, I should add. The observation, though, is that people are far far more forceful and opinionated on the situation the further from the area that they are.
I'm not sure how you measured how far away everybody talking about it is. If seen more passion form Americans then from Europeans about HSR in California. And I don't think most people in China are hot on it.
I guess there are some very passionate rail fan liberals in the Eastern united states that hope for true HSR on the East coast that really root for HSR.
But then again I have heard plenty of Californians passionately denounce/advocate for the project.
So I don't think your observation holds.
Two things can be true:
1) I wish we had better rail transit in the bay area and to the areas surrounding the bay
2) I have to own a car to get to places in Northern California
These don't seem like remotely contradictory positions.
Largely fair. Ish. If you are dreaming of Tokyo level public transit, though, you are dreaming of far fewer cars for the people that live there.
It's a chicken and egg issue. We don't build dense, mixed-use housing and commercial, we don't build transit. There's no way to live a Tokyo-like lifestyle in 95% of California. And the places where you can are often exorbitantly expensive.
Just to defend myself (similar to what I said in a different thread): I live in an area that would be marginal for high speed rail, but I still want it. If the US can get a great high speed rail network it would make sense to bring that to me, but as one of the last lines built! If CA can't build a good HSR where it should obviously work out there is no way it is worth trying here. They have to make the mistakes and then learn from them (this is the harder part!) in order to bring something to me where there can be no mistakes.
Don't get me wrong. I used transit for the majority of my career. Biked for as much of it. Love the ideas.
The VAST majority of people I would see have conversations about this seem to want others to take transit so that traffic is better for them in their car.
The vast majority of people I know have never lived where there was a transit system that would be useful for them. So of course they want other people to use it without planning on using it themselves. Give them a system that is worth using and they will use it (there will be a multi-year delay before they try/start using it though).
I've lived in Atlanta and Seattle. Both have perfectly workable transit. Even if Atlanta does seem to have gotten a bit worse over the years.
Workable is not a great endorsement. If things are not fast and frequent people will prefer to drive even if transit could work. Also both have workable transit only for some destinations - I don't live in either city, but I'd guess without looking getting downtown is easy but if your destination is one suburb over it is technically possible but you could baby crawl faster.
Yup, it's something I think people need to experience.
I lived in the UK for 2 years without a car and it ultimately did not negatively impact me (other than needing to memorize local bus routes). I lived in towns as small as 10000 people (Newtown, Wales) and they had both a connected rail system and a couple of bus routes serving the town and connecting it to other towns.
Buses absolutely can work in even quiet rural locations, they just need to be properly funded and prioritized. They also need to be subsidized. The American notion that public transit needs to either run net zero or turn a profit is backwards and fundamentally stopping it from working well.
I mean, yes. But I hate to point out that even in Tokyo, having a car is faster than not. Just a lot more expensive.
Seattle LRT has about the same usage as some german systems trams that are like 20x smaller. For a whole lot of the population that life around Atlanta and Seattle the public transport isn't workable.
It is workable for far more people than will make it work. Particularly in tech jobs.
The underlying issue remains that it is seen as a poor person option. As soon as people can afford a car, they get one.
Back when I didn't have a car, my future wife and I saw a comedian that literally had a joke about being above the poverty line of "do you take the bus?"
The thing is, people are not ideological. If the car is 5x faster and nicer, then people will use it. People use what is convenient, most people don't pick public transport when it is 'workable' they pick it when it is actually good.
And the reason it seen as 'for poor' people is because you only use it when you can't get a car.
So the underlying issue is the overall quality of the service (frequency, reliability, comfort and so on).
Ish. If the car costs 10x, then they will stick to not having one. See Tokyo.
Again, I lived for over a decade with a tech job and no car. In Atlanta. It is easily doable. Especially for younger people that don't have a family. When I got married and we started having kids, I never had "my" car. Stayed on transit and cycling to get to work.
It is frustrating, because I would be surrounded by progressive people at work that would go on about why transit doesn't work. But... it did. Just fine. You just can't also have a 4k square foot house at the same time. (I feel like I'm exaggerating, but that is literally the size of average home in some areas just around Seattle. My shared living in Atlanta was almost 1000 square feet. I remember dreaming of a 650 square foot "luxury apartment" someday.)
If a car cost 10x but public transport is 20x worse then people will still buy cars unless they can't afford it.
Look it might be easily doable for you, but the data shows pretty clearly that if one thing is easier and faster then another, most people, not all people will pick what is easier and faster. There are always 10-20% of people who will just prefer one thing, no matter what. See people who ride bikes in horrible dangerous conditions threw traffic. You might be willing to, but most people are not.
But what you need is a system with enough quality that enough people use it so they can demand continued increases in quality.
The data clearly shows that if you keep cars cheap, people use them. That is literally the point of this entire article. When they started making driving into the city more costly, more people started taking transit. Is literally the data.
Even in places like Tokyo, you will find that the wealthy neighborhoods have cars. The catch is in Tokyo, this is enforced by law. If you can't show that you have a legal parking spot, you aren't allowed to register a car. That is a very steep hurdle that makes the vehicle far more than just 10x. And is a large part of why even the largely confusing mess of major transit offerings that will require different tickets works, there.
In spite of that, commute times in Tokyo are, on average, still HIGHER than SF and NYC commute times. My commute time even on public transit in Atlanta was better than the average commute in Tokyo. I don't know how you want to start quantifying "worse" or "better." Are they "workable?" Yes. Absolutely. Will people use if they can afford to get and operate a car? No.
You're curious how an issue where government listening to experts results in obvious good outcomes and no serious failures became a national culture war issue?
Cars are en extension of some Americans' identity and driving is something they feel utterly entitled to.
I've lived all over the world and in NYC for decades so it seems silly to me. Bust most Americans have never seen or ridden an effective form of public transport. So they view congestion pricing as an infringement on their rights and quality of life.
I agree, and would add that there are others who are decidedly "anti-car" and you could say that this is part of their identity. This particular policy may be a strictly positive (no strong opinion here), but when viewed as part of the broader disagreement it drives some of the reflexive pushback.
> Cars are en extension of some Americans' identity
i hear this a lot and i also feel like this population is declining very significantly for a lot of reasons (cars that people care about are unaffordable, most cars on the road tend to fit into one of a very small number of categories, people find other ways to navigate depending on where they live, people don't do as many activities out of the home that require a vehicle, etc). at what point does the real population of car enthusiasts become small enough to be irrelevant in public policy and infrastructure decisions?
To be fair cars have always been an extension of their drivers identities in the US, or at least as far back as their being competing brands available.
Fox news.
Because success would encourage it in other cities facing terrible traffic.
People say they hate socialism, but drivers love car-socialism.
New York has long been an influential city. It was the Robert Mosses deputies that spread all over the US to drive highways threw every city center. If New York can do something, it might be copied everywhere.
That and right-wing politics where anything that harms the car as a religious symbol is seen as a 'values' based attack.
It's because Trump made it one of his obsessions for a period of time, putting it on the MAGA radar.
> It's because Trump made it one of his obsessions for a period of time, putting it on the MAGA radar
Had most people outside the tri-state area not heard and formed an opinion about congestion pricig before Trump brought it up?
Why would they? There is virtually no congestion pricing in the US outside of a few major metros and a huge portion of the population live in areas where the lack of density makes the entire idea moot.
I think it's because it disproportionately impacts the people who can least afford it. It allows the wealthy to continue to enjoy the convenience (relative to alternatives) of driving into the city while polluting and causing traffic at a price that has zero impact on their lives while it punishes those who already have much less and whose lives will be impacted by the fines and the often significant amounts of time they'll have to spend arranging and taking alternative modes of transportation.
That's a very hard sell when people all around the country are feeling continuous downward pressure on their lifestyle and financial security while billionaires are seen getting massive tax breaks and pillaging everything they want while escaping accountability for the harms they cause everyone else. Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work, and punishing them for it while once again giving the wealthy a pass was certain to upset people. in fact, by forcing more of the peasant class off the roads it makes driving into the city much more pleasant for the people with enough money to not care about the extra expense. Taking from the poor to improve things for the wealthy resonates with a lot of people.
It also doesn't help that in other contexts, congestion pricing has already hit people's wallets and is seen as an exploitative business model designed to extract as much money from the public as possible. The last thing most people want is seeing congestion pricing and other price-fuckery infesting another aspect of their daily lives, which is why the pushback against wendy's implementing it was so swift and severe that the company had to backpedal even after spending a small fortune on the digital menu boards they needed to enable it.
I think this comment is a great example of what the OP is talking about. Your comment is completely divorced from the context of congestion pricing in New York City. For example:
> Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work
That is simply not the case in NYC. Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work. It was already unaffordable to do so anyway because parking is incredibly expensive. People take the subway. Car ownership is already disproportionately preserved for the rich.
NYC is different from much of the country. I'm not going to make an argument that it's any better or any worse, but it is different. NYC congestion pricing as a national debate is missing the forest for the trees.
> Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work.
I assure you that Manhattan is filled with many employees and service workers.
> It was already unaffordable to do so anyway
Yes, it was a massive strain on the budgets of many people, and it's the people who managed to sacrifice enough to show up for work or get where they needed to go anyway even though it was difficult for them who were most impacted by congestion pricing.
> People take the subway.
Many do. When it's an option for them and at the expense of time/convenience. If this were an acceptable excuse we might as well just shut the roads into Manhattan down entirely.
This article proves that people have been being priced out of driving into the city and I promise you that isn't the millionaires who are suddenly navigating the subway system and waiting for the trains in filthy stations.
It's also important to note that nationally, nobody knows or cares about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities. The vast majority of the people outside of NYC complaining about it have never even been to the state. They just know that once again, it's the small guy who is getting screwed over and that they don't want the success of congestion pricing in New York (however that is measured) to cause it to appear where they drive, and who can blame them for that?
>I assure you that Manhattan is filled with many employees and service workers.
That is not a meaningful response to "Very, very few people must drive into the center of Manhattan to work.", the two statements do not contradict each other. Those employees and service workers take the subway.
> When it's an option for them and at the expense of time/convince
The subway is both faster and cheaper than driving in NYC at peak hours. Traffic has historically been awful, hence the congestion charge! Trading money to gain time/convenience is what the rich do. The "small guy" didn't have the money for the bridges, tunnels and parking before the congestion charge even arrived.
> It's also important to note that nationally, nobody knows or cares about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities.
Yes, that is literally my point about why conversations like this one are fruitless.
> They just know that the small guy is getting screwed over
Right but that isn't true. They are mistaken in what they "know" because, as you said, they don't know or care about the specific differences in NYC compared to their own cities.
> Those employees and service workers take the subway.
Not the ones who need to bring service vehicles with them. Not anyone who has to enter or return with heavy items or any number of the other many many reasons people choose to drive and not take the subway. The fact of the matter is that the subway has always been an option for many people, but not all people and it comes with costs of its own. The people driving into the city, as obnoxious as that trip is, were making the decision to put up with the traffic and parking for a reason. Now many of those people, enough to make measurable differences in pollution levels, have been priced out of that choice. "It's only a few poors, why are people bitching about it?" isn't going to make people across the country worry any less about it spreading to them.
> The subway is both faster and cheaper than driving in NYC at peak hours.
And also not an option at all for many and a less attractive option for many, as noted by the number of people who were driving. It's not as if the subway is a well kept secret.
> Right but that isn't true.
Just because you say it isn't doesn't make it true. Show me that millionaires are taking the subway because of the increased fines at the same rate as the hourly workers and I'll concede that the impact is being equally felt.
Again, this conversation would be so much more rewarding if you had read the paper and established a minimal level of factual basis for your statements. The number of light vehicles (cars, vans, pickups) entering the zone has not declined! At all!
> Again, this conversation would be so much more rewarding if you had read the paper and established a minimal level of factual basis for your statements. The number of light vehicles (cars, vans, pickups) entering the zone has not declined! At all!
The question was "How has congestion pricing become a national issue" and the answer isn't "the nation hasn't read this one study". For what it's worth though the study linked in the article does show a reduction in cars entering the zone. (ctrl-F "car" to find that)
This debate has been done to death. And it's always, always a vague group of people who are apparently affected. Never specific examples. And, as we see here, there's always an appeal to class warfare: "it's hurting the poors". And it's always by someone who wishes to speak on behalf of those poor people, never actually the people themselves.
Only 2% of lower income outer borough residents (around 5,000 people) drive a car into the city:
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/congestion-pricing-outer-bo...
When the congestion pricing rollout was paused, only 32% of lower income voters supported the move, compared to 55% of those earning more than $100,000:
https://www.amny.com/nyc-transit/congestion-pricing-pause-ho...
(AFAIK there isn't direct polling on a yes/no support question by income, this was as close as I could find)
The overwhelming majority of poor people in New York City take transit and stand to benefit from the funding congestion pricing brings. Highlighting that 2% of the population and ignoring the 98% is a fundamentally dishonest position to take, especially when you're not even in the group yourself.
> And it's always, always a vague group of people who are apparently affected. Never specific examples.
Someone on the other side of the country is only going to see the way this will impact the lives of people like them. They aren't going to say "Clearly this policy has impacted the household budget of NYC plumber Mitchell Tnenski" They don't know Mitchell. They know that congestion pricing coming to their city would hurt them in very real ways. They also know that rich people don't give a shit about a couple extra bucks in fines for getting where they want to go by car. That's why this issue has resonated nationally.
> They know that congestion pricing coming to their city would hurt them in very real ways.
But why should they even care to begin with? Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing? This is the whole problem, that local issues are made mainstream news media specifically to cultivate fear and anger in people that literally have no skin in the game and a completely different lifestyle.
> But why should they even care to begin with?
Why should they care about something that they feel will hurt them financially when they're already struggling and restrict their freedom on top of that? Why wouldn't they care?
> Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing?
Uber's "surge" pricing was what first introduced many of them to a world where the price of something they depend on changes from moment to moment. Dynamic/discriminatory pricing schemes have been worrying people for a long time now. People don't like it, they consider it scammy, and they don't want it to spread.
I think that if NYC had just jacked up the toll price all the time it wouldn't have set off as many alarms, but ultimately people in other places aren't really worried about congestion pricing in New York, their worry is that it will come to where they drive and they can't afford people taking more money from them. They're struggling to keep food on the table and are drowning in record high levels of household debt. Of course they're scared of congestion pricing catching on.
Mind you, while some of their fears are reasonable, not all of them are. I've seen some of the more conspiratorial people talking about it as a way to control and restrict the movement of poor people (something shared with criticisms of 15-minute cities). The core of the problem though is that their standard of living is declining, their trust/confidence in government is bottoming out, they know that they're getting screwed over by the wealthy and they're on edge. They see NYC using some scammy pricing scheme to take more money from people like them while the wealthy are unaffected and it hits a nerve.
They'll have plenty of skin in the game if congestion pricing spreads (and its success makes that increasingly likely) and that skin is already stretched thin which is making them feel highly skeptical of government, suspicious of people's motives, and angry over being asked to make their lives worse for the convenience of the wealthy. They worry about driving where they need to go becoming a luxury they can be priced out of, and as bad as NYC's public transportation is (compared to what's seen in other countries) most of them don't have anything even close to it in their own cities. That's what I'm seeing in discussions surrounding this issue both online and offline anyway.
Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing? Why is this national news?
Everything you're saying has zero impact on 93-97% of the US population (New York State is 6% of the US population, NYC is 3%). None of these people have real skin in the game, because this literally has no effect on them. New Yorkers don't vote in other states.
Why is a single student's grade in OSU national news? Why is congestion pricing national news? Why is a library in the middle of nowhere California news?
None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system. In fact they're exactly unrelated which is why we're blasted with this stuff on the news 24/7. You're worried about a slippery slope argument when most of us are already being fleeced by current, real policies from government and corporations.
Congestion pricing is not the thing screwing over American families, it's the thing they're pointing at so you don't look at the actual thing.
> Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing?
Because in all likelihood this isn't going to be limited to Manhattan, and I'd argue (like many others) that it probably shouldn't be. The fact that it's been so successful makes it all but inevitable that the practice will spread. Why would people wait until they're forced to choose between driving to work and affording groceries before they speak out against it?
> None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system
I think a lot of people would argue that dynamic pricing schemes and governments taking increasing amounts of money from their pockets is, at least in part, why they are stretched thin. In any case, regardless of the cause of their struggles they are struggling. If they were feeling financially secure they might grumble at the increasing likelihood of paying fines to drive where they want to, but they wouldn't be panicking over it like they have been.
Congestion pricing isn't seen as something that's screwing them over right now, but it is seen as the latest scheme cooked up by government that will be screwing them over if they can't put a stop to it.
I think we'd agree that congestion pricing isn't the biggest issue impacting the struggling American family right now, but I can understand why it's being seen as a concern and as something they want to keep out of their own cities. For some that means putting a stop to the practice before it spreads.
Autoexec, don't you feel a little bit like Rhea Seehorn as "Carol" in her struggle with the hive-mind humanity of "Pluribus"? It looks as in this discussion there is a lot of anti-car hivemind at play...
Haven't seen it. The sad thing is that I share many of the concerns the anti-car crowd has, but their work is only going to be harder if they ignore the concerns that people have, can't reassure people that their proposed solutions won't hurt them, and/or don't ensure that their solutions are implemented equitably. They risk losing people who could be supporters.
I also wish they put less emphasis on punishing people for driving and put more effort into giving people alternatives that are genuinely better. When people are given an option to use something better than what they have, they tend to gravitate to it naturally and with gratitude. It's a lot easier than punishing people and trying to convince them that it's for their own good.
Autoexec, here, is simply right. Congestion price could be redefined as the "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses and keep them f**ing out of the city center" price
You're replying to someone with the username "autoexec".
Probably referring to autoexec.bat, not cars.
lol I hadn't even considered that. I didn't know what that comment was getting at and thought that maybe it was a dig at my age!
It did remind me of this comic: https://boingboing.net/2017/01/02/autoexec-bat-the-tee-shirt...
The original seems to have disappeared.
Username checks out
There was a study published about how much air pollution dropped in NYC during the COVID lockdown. PM2.5 was found to have dropped 36%. However with more robust analysis, this drop was discovered to not be statistically significant. I would caution anyone reading this who is tempted by confirmation bias.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7314691/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7314691/figure/f002...
Take a look at their figure, especially in May 2020—the average appears lower, but, more significantly, there is much less variability in May 2020 compared to earlier years.
The authors' model quite strongly includes their preferred confound (secular decrease in PM2.5) but doesn't explore what other covariates could explain the differences between years.
It's fine to say that one should be skeptical, but one contrary report doesn't invalidate an antecedent report, and the structure of a linear model strongly influences an outcome.
"Not statistically significant" doesn't mean did not happen.
Given the physical mechanisms involved it is implausible that pollution did not decline. And if you look at their data you see a marked drop in 2020 at day 70
This is March 10 or thereabouts, I think. And there are ZERO high pm 2.5 days for a 20 day stretch or so. This isn't seen in other years. The vast bulk of days are below the trend.
And then for the rest of the year there are some days above the trend line but no high pm 2.5 days.
This fits with people being extra cautious in the early days and then relaxing a bit as things went on.
Now, I'm eyeballing this so I could be incorrect. But:
1. The effect was found in other cities
2. The physical mechanism makes it highly expected that there would be a drop
The study was about the slope of the regression modal, but if you had scrambled the years I'm fairly confident I could have picked 2020 out of the set.
That's a very surprising finding since the drop in traffic was very noticeable. I wonder where the PM2.5 is coming from?
We have fruit trees in our backyard. The year of the COVID lockdown they had so much fruit the branches broke from the weight. Most fruit I've seen in 20 years in the house, by a large margin.
That's an awesome story
They should make pedestrian-only streets in most dense places of Manhattan and use these money to improve public transportation. Even just a few blocks of no cars would make a huge difference for livability of the city center.
There's a large (long time) movement to do this to lower Manhattan, the most public transit connected area in the US (probably North America, definitely up there in the world). It's getting pick up again.
This is already underway
Big agree. Times Square would be a great place to start.
Isn't times square already pedestrian?
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/4/19/15358234/times-square-snohet...
A small section of it is.
> “Bowtie” bounded by Broadway and Seventh Avenue between 42nd and 47th Streets.
I would really appreciate it if the Bay area got real congestion pricing and also enforcement. We have lots of HOT lanes here, but they are basically unenforced so everyone sets their ez-pass to “3” and gets the free HOV pricing, which rapidly becomes economical at the rate of enforcement in the Bay.
Frankly, if they let me citizen report - I could likely cover my entire tax burden in 2-3 days. At $490/ticket, the ROI for enforcement seems obviously there.
Not surprising. The real question is how do we measure the opportunity cost of these measures? Is it a net gain? You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits.
> You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits
We did this in Times Square and on Broadway, and it's honestly been great. I say this as someone who takes cars far more frequently than most New Yorkers and has a place I lived at full time for over a decade off one of those closed-off sections of Broadway.
The point of congestion pricing is to let market mechanisms determine where the optimum is.
Well, the market decides where the optimum is *in response to* the price set by the government. So the government can decide at least approximately where they want things to end up by setting a higher or lower price.
Right. It finds an economic optimum limited to what people are willing to pay and their perceived value from that. That optimum doesn't naturally weight more complex factors like for the trade-off for the smog generated from your travel.
I wouldn't assume your last claim.
It could also be the case that making it viable to drive personal vehicles at all inside a dense city comes with opportunity costs (parking, roads that cut through infrastructure, pollution, noise) that aren't worth it.
And I'd wager that it is the case.
That's a straw man. I didn't say personal vehicles.
You take a walk along a 55-mph stretch of highway, and then you take a walk down Broadway, and you see which one makes you feel better as a human being.
Since this is generating revenue for NYC, you can't consider whether this tax is good or bad in a vacuum though. The alternatives are a different tax with its own effects, or more debt, or less spending. (In this case, the revenue goes to the MTA.) Any opportunity costs due to less traffic are at least partially offset by opportunity costs you aren't having to pay somewhere else.
Dynamic pricing based on congestion would solve this. It would also almost certainly result in higher costs for drivers though.
Try things and ask the people in a year if they like the results, then do the good ones more and the bad ones less.
It's called congestion pricing because you can measure the opportunity cost.
This article confirms my existing bias/belief that user pays and auction[0] based systems improve governmental programs and finite supply systems in a society like the USA.
[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.
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.
[flagged]
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.
Plenty of beatings to go around, but yeah, I agree, you have to follow the incentives here.
This is a totally normal and sane response.
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)
> 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
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.
Even those people don't deserve to be "dragged from their cabs and beaten by angry mobs"
Violence is when OpenAI's investors have a bad quarter. :(
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
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213504
No mention about change in average commute time?
21 minutes faster.
https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/the-...
congestion pricing is the gift that keeps giving
That was true at the beginning of congestion pricing and perhaps over the summer, but it is definitely not true anymore
Are there numbers to back this up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York... says "By July 2025, there were 67,000 fewer daily vehicles in the congestion zone compared to before implementation. The same month, one study found that travel times within the congestion zone had decreased, and that delivery companies were opting to use smaller vehicles (which were charged lower tolls) in the toll zone".
Your comment aligns with what I said. "Over the summer"
I'm asking if you have post-summer data you're referencing, as I'm struggling to find some.
all i gotta say is, super work, everyone!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65127-x
Now we can get back to our regularly scheduled global warming, without all those pesky clouds in the way.
Congestion pricing == demand pricing
Yet it’s good if the city does it but bad if a Corp does it?
The city does it for the benefit of the public, the Corp does it for the benefit of the shareholders
The public pays higher prices either way
Some people are really going to hate this.
Yea, if they could keep ALL of the poor people out, image how great that would be!
Interesting study. Similar results in London I heard.
How does NYC congestion pricing deal with disparate impacts? Real question, I don't live near NYC
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03612
> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.
> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.
The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.
I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all, even if the policy effects are incredibly income-progressive overall. This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy, the populace justifying turnstile hopping, lack of traffic enforcement by police, opposition to speed and red light cameras, opposition to rezoning unless it's built by free-range grass-fed vegan union labour and 100% below market, etc.
I mean, if we're gonna pick a group to impact, the ones who aren't already deeply struggling seem like the place to do it. Given the parent poster's commenting history here, though, I don't think they have a genuine concern in "disparate impact" at all.
Hey CJ! No I don't have a genuine concern at all. But it was a real question and thank you very much for answering it with a real answer.
FWIW, I like that there is a carveout for economically disadvantaged folks. Either way doesn't affect me since I'm not a NYer.
>I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all
This "Distinctly American idea" you cite does not at all exist.
Tens of millions watch a news channel that openly stated we should euthanize homeless people. Millions more moved to a crazier channel because that one wasn't lying enough
They vote against free school lunch programs that cost very little.
They hate "welfare queens" with a passion, despite that being a lie, and still being a lie decades later.
Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
>This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy
No, the reason we get so many special interest carve outs in the US is that special interest groups fund election campaigns. Fix campaign funding (IE, make it publicly funded and extremely time limited) and you make it significantly easier for people who eschew bribery to be and stay politicians.
Sure, HN has a strong "Not perfect should never be done" bias, because HN is full of turbonerds that crave validation for how smart they are and always need to pipe up with a nitpick to be heard. 95% of the time, the exact "complaint" someone on HN makes up was already noted and covered in the very article. We aren't allowed to sass people for not reading the article.
This is not the case off of HN and in reality. Conservatives are perfectly happy doing "Obvious and common sense" measures that actually have insane second order effects. They insist tariffs are a good policy the way they are being implemented. Democrats want all sorts of things that are not at all perfect and would be happy to have slightly fewer new problems than the same problems our grandparents had to fight about.
> Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
this seems awfully coy. Why not just say who cheerled the bill and who went on the TV circuit to explain how great it was because of "super predators" - nice euphemism.
[*] https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/biden-on-the-1994-crime-bi...
[*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlGM4TClIjA (Hillary apologizes for 1994 crime bill)
"Democrats" isn't some amorphous thing we can't tag to individual people. The last president of the USA and his sponsor (Bill Clinton) were adamant to get that bill passed. Biden spearheaded the legislation. This isn't just some "he voted yea on it!" sort of thing.
You know what else would drop pollution and ease traffic congestion?
Allowing employees to work remote.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213504
Whatever you tax, you get less of.
exactly. and the pandemic "lockdowns" showed those of us who actually live here that what we want is fewer cars in our neighborhoods.
that's great. because those cars trash the city.
[dead]
[flagged]
NYC has 8M people and 2M cars. Manhattan has like a 22% car ownership rate, and it's… not the poor people. https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L...
A parking spot will cost you more than rent in some other cities.
This doesn't change my argument at all.
The more money you have, more you benefit from this ruling. Now you can buy a service which was not possible before.
The rich were driving before, and are still driving.
The difference is that now they are paying for that service they were already using, and those funds are going to public transit which serves the majority of New Yorkers especially those with lower incomes.
The problem is that no one in NYC, rich or poor, has any confidence in the MTA's ability to properly and efficiently use these funds. This stems from a long history of incompetence and wastefulness by the MTA
> no one in NYC, rich or poor, has any confidence in the MTA's ability to properly and efficiently use these funds
They're already using them, and the results show. They could have done it cheaper. But the LIRR is operating at Swiss rail efficiecies since the recent electrification and signalling improvements.
What electrification and signal improvements are you talking about? Signal upgrades are a constant thing in the MTA, both for the LIRR and the subways. They are not something that just started with congestion pricing funds.
Also, efficiency was already on the upswing for the LIRR long before congestion pricing funds[1].
[1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/icymi-governor-hochul-cel...
Congestion pricing was agreed to in 2019.
Expected revenue was used to budget quite a few projects; this caused a bit of a scare when Hochul put it on hold for a while. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/nyregion/congestion-prici...
The loans backed by congestion pricing revenue weren't taken out until this year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-07/ny-mta-ge...
That money you're talking about was money that was already spent to implement congestion pricing
One specific loan was taken out this year. (And planning tends to preceed the actual loans.)
Planning is not the same as spending
It’s not shovel-ready spending. But it’s absolutely part of the process, and not one you can skip in a democracy.
That article was about expenses related to implementing congestion pricing, so I'm not sure what your argument is here
> They are not something that just started with congestion pricing funds
Correct. But they’re being expanded. Early signs are there. And we have precedent to show that funding this work, and funding it sooner, works.
> efficiency was already on the upswing for the LIRR long before congestion pricing funds
Correct. Congestion funds accelerate that process.
I spoke an inarticulately, but the point was trying to make is that we have precedence for quality and efficiency improving capital spending by the MTA. The bonds the MTA issued earlier this year double down on that. The early signs of that spending show those capital deployments are helping in the way the preceding spending did.
Sounds like a great area to advocate for improvement.
Are the funds actually going to public transit, or are they being used to pay off all the people whose support was needed to implement the congestion charges?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York...
> In June 2025, revenue from the congestion toll was used to increase service on more than a dozen bus lines citywide… In October 2025, the MTA sold $230 million worth of bonds to help fund the first projects that were being partially financed using congestion-toll revenue.
> Now you can buy a service which was not possible before.
It wasn't possible to drive a car in NYC before congestion pricing? I find that… unlikely.
It wasn't possible to buy reduced traffic.
> more money you have, more you benefit from this ruling
This is nonsense.
The poor of New York benefit from congestion pricing. It means more funding for the public transit they predominantly take. And for the minority who drive for a living it increases their revenues.
The opposition to congestion charges comes from principally outside New York, often from folks who have little to no familiarity with it.
As long as this system is a fixed price and is independent of the salary you earn, its benefits the rich more.
Its the same principle with kindergarden and late fee; Without a late fee, people sometimes were late getting their kids, with late fees more people were late getting their kids. Now they were able to 'pay' for this.
You now can pay for having less traffic for you. Who can afford this? The rich/richer person.
This increases inequality.
Because that’s not true. Cars are expensive compared to transit everywhere, but especially so in NYC. This was studied a lot before congestion pricing was implemented and only something like 2% of poor people were going to pay congestion charges. This did not stop a bunch of rich suburbanites from using them as a prop to demand that the city subsidize their lifestyle at the expense of NYC taxpayers, of course.
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/the-cost-of-killing-congest...
> curious why no one is discussing this but this is basically a middle finger for poor people
Because the poor don’t drive in New York, and to the extent they do, they likely qualify for an exemption.
You are assuming a car is required.
The whole issue with car dependency is that it is a massive barrier for participating in society.
Public transit is orders of magnitude cheaper, and very viable and often the better option in the New York area.
> and often the better option
Even before congestion pricing this was the major factor. It's often quicker, more reliable, more pleasant, and has less variation in delays to ride the train/subway in NYC. Speaking from personal experience I could easily eat the congestion charge to daily commute into Manhattan, and I'd rather still take the train because I can do my mindless scrolling or read a book during that time.
The only time I've found that a car is better is during the weekends with a group larger than about 4 people. The train schedules are terrible, the commute time isn't bad, and the price per ticket (assuming you're coming from the outer suburbs) vs parking and tolls works out to be a wash.
I don't think poor people who lived in NYC were driving that often anyway? cars are expensive to begin with and parking is crazy in that part of the city
Concern trolling.
Whats concern trolling?
This mechanism allows people with more money to enjoy driving in the city or is this congestion prcing based on your salary? no its not its based on the time in the city independent of what you make.
A person with their high end car and miillions now can buy himself a nice little drive into the city while everyone else can't.
> A person with their high end car and miillions now can buy himself a nice little drive into the city while everyone else can't.
This was already the case in NYC without congestion fees. (For example: https://nypost.com/2025/07/12/us-news/park-slope-parking-spo...)
Now they get to fund public transit a little bit while they do so.
Do you seriously think that multi-millionaires drive to and from Manhattan to commute?
Our C-suite and top quant traders at our firm take the train, bike, or walk to the office daily. I asked around my office - no one has ever driven regularly to our office in 20+ years.
The reason why is because driving objectively sucks in the city.
That all might be true, but this is still not the point i'm making: Either you can afford it, than it doesn't matter to you, or you can't afford it but have to pay it than it affects you.
As long as the pricing is absolut and not relative to the owners salary, it is increase inequality.
Poor could also mean the middle class is more affected than the rich class (whatever you call the class above middle).
Maybe nobody should be driving a car in an urban core? Baby steps...
you clearly dont live here or you'd know that the poor of NYC are not the ones that own cars. they're the ones that take public transit. also, there are state benefits that offset congestion pricing and other fees for people who are poor
And yes let’s think of the poor people who have no choice but to drive into Midtown and downtown for work.
Have you ever talked to poor people in NYC?
the only poor people driving personal cars in manhattan are projects residents with their taxpayer-subsidized parking spot
"poor" is relative. Ever thought about this?
Should i said poorer people who still need a car to drive in NYC to make it more understandable to the hn crowed Oo?!
> poorer people who still need a car to drive in NYC
This does not exist. Parking in the congestion zone starts at $25 for an hour and regularly goes above $100 for an evening.
Who needs a car in NYC? It's an expensive hobby and its time we stop letting drivers externalize their costs.
I'm not discussing if someone should drive.
My only point i'm making is, that this system increases inequality between financial richer people vs poorer ones.
And thats because its an absolut fee and not a relative one.
[dead]
[flagged]
Very few poor people drive into lower Manhattan. And people whose work requires them to drive in that area (delivery drivers, plumbers, etc.) come out ahead. One of the first NYT stories after congestion pricing was rolled out had multiple quotes from tradesmen reporting that they're saving an hour or more a day and prefer the new system.
There was also an endless parade of NY Post stories about how Manhattan restaurants would suffer because their customers couldn't just drive in from Long Island and New Jersey.
Parking garages: the OG congestion fee.
They could just park right in front of the restaurant if it wasn't for those damn bike lanes.
the parking garages are going to have issues in the near future with EVs, there was already a high profile garage collapse
The question becomes how critical is X and is there a close alternative. In this case I'd say for 95% of people yes driving is easily substituted by NYC's public transit options.
Im not sure this fits, they saw a much larger drop (18%) in heavy duty trucks entering the city, and a smaller drop (9%) in passenger cars. I am not sure the public transit options are close alternatives for heavy duty trucks.
I suspect that this is due to the elimination of toll shopping/avoidance. Per [0] and [1], the only way to avoid a toll entirely is to drive from the West Side Highway or FDR Drive to the Brooklyn Bridge, but commercial vehicles are prohibited on FDR Drive and the Brooklyn Bridge has weight restrictions [2], so heavy trucks don't have a legal way to dodge the tolls anymore.
If you need to reach Long Island, the incentive to avoid the (tolled) Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Verrazzano, and RFK bridges are gone; now you're paying for the privilege of sitting in Manhattan traffic.
[0]: https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info/faqs
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-congestion-pricing-...
[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/parkway-restricti...
Do we know that those heavy duty trucks were formerly used to do things you need heavy duty trucks for? It seems more likely that 18% (or more!) of the usage was by people who think heavy duty trucks look cool and wanted to show off theirs.
That's the difficulty with the Light/Medium/Heavy Duty categories. It doesn't tell you a huge amount about what the vehicle is being used for but most of them heavy duty mean commercial or utility. There are a handful of popular models that tip into the Heavy duty class and those are usually 3/4 ton pickups. Not sure how popular those are in NYC though.
For many people, the thing being substituted for an alternative is not "transportation into Manhattan", but more broadly "engaging in commerce in Manhattan"
What business or shopping trip into Manhattan is small enough that 9 dollars is a significant hurdle or increase in cost? It's there to disincentivize taking a car for no reason when you can use transit while being small enough to absorb if you have a reason to actually use a car.
If you're engaging in commerce, those few bucks are negligible..
[flagged]
What percentage of the road traffic do you think they constitute? How much of the value of the truck full of expensive seafood do you think the congestion charge represents? How many extra deliveries can a single driver make when they spend less time stuck in congestion?
Reducing the number of cars on the road helps everyone: we tend to focus on the enormous quality of life and health benefits to residents but it also helps everyone who doesn’t have the option of not driving, too. Ambulances getting stuck in congestion less is a win. Deliveries which can’t be done using cargo bikes similarly benefit from reducing the single greatest source of delay: cars.
They're probably enjoying the reduced traffic their trucks have to deal with?
The truck carrying $10k in sushi can afford and justify the daily $9 fee.
Can they not afford to pay $9 per truck per day? Seems like a bad business plan that can't manage to pay such a minor fee. That's the design of the congestion charge it disincentivizes optional trips but is small enough for any money making business to absorb.
With reduced congestion, delivery companies will find marginally increased productivity (maybe 1 more delivery stop is possible per shift, for instance) that will likely make the fee worth it
Even without congestion pricing, the poor are the least likely to drive. Spending public money to subsidize driving (which we’re still doing on balance, even in Manhattan) disproportionately helps the wealthy.
IMO it would be even better if was an auction based system, maybe 24/7. That way if someone has an <= $8.99 threshold/need to drive, and they find a slot, they will. I think the static pricing will create a distortion in the usage, maybe having dynamic pricing (with a ceiling) would be smarter?
By the time you could build such a system, autonomous cars will have completely taken over, so the rules could be as complicated as you wish.
working class people are predominantly using public transit to get around nyc
this claim has been debunked many times and anyone with eyes can see who the private drivers in NYC are
Because it's economically infeasible to drive?
Yes, but also it's just annoying to have a car in NYC. For many routes the subway is going to be faster than driving and sitting in traffic, unless you're traveling between outer borough neighborhoods that only have a connection in Manhattan. If you're making that commute often (say, Bushwick to East Flatbush, or Flushing to Canarsie), a car might make sense, but then this whole congestion pricing thing doesn't apply to you.
Transit is $3/ride (in a few weeks), 24 hours, and all over the city. It's not perfect, but for the vast majority of cases owning a car in NYC is just not really worth it. If you need one because you have a weekend home out in Long Island or up in the Hudson Valley, you can afford the $9 toll.
It's economically infeasible for a large percentage of people to drive in a dense urban area, period.
That's true even without congestion pricing. A city would go broke and bulldoze itself trying to add enough stacked lane, highways, and parking to handle everyone who would prefer to drive in or through if the capacity existed.
It would be before the congestion fee anyway - parking costs alone are absurd and cumbersome right?
Well yeah — cars are expensive.
That was the case before congestion pricing too.
Driving (and more importantly, parking) in NYC was never that much of a poor person thing.
This fits the template in the post you're replying.
No; it was already economically infeasible, and thus the drop was not marked.
You think it was primarily poor people who were driving their cars into Midtown?
That’s two new accounts claiming to be worried about the poor. We could use congestion pricing in these kinds of threads.
OR it encourages people to walk to transit which ALSO has positive side health benefits.
Pigovian taxes WORK, and are in many cases desirable, something lolberts just seem unable to get their heads around.
Pigouvian*, this is a regressive tax though that is probably unnecessary as the other studies referenced or linked in this thread show.
is it? i dont see the relevant other studies, and my initial assumptions would be that the median subway user is lower income than the median car driver in NYC, so transfering funds from car drivers to subway improvements would be progressive.
However NYC's transit is notoriously bad at spending, so not sure it would achive that. Which studies linked in this thread are you refering to? I cant see them.
Regular driving in large working cities is usually only done out of professional necesscity and people who drive for a living tend to be in lower socioeconomic bands.
How many people on Wallstreet do you know that drive to work?
> How many people on Wallstreet do you know that drive to work?
A lot. Also white-shoe lawyers. They live in Greenwich, Westchester or Westport and drive into the city. (And still, they often park uptown because driving in the congestion zone is annoying and expensive.)
The poor in New York don't drive. If they do, they do so to earn an income. Less congestion helps with that.
I'm not so confident in that first claim, and my anecdotal evidence doesn't support your theory.
However you did mention some other studies on this thread that support your claim this is a regressive tax, I'm worried I missed them, can you share the links?
Regressive taxes aren't bad inherently bad. Regressive spending is bad.
In this case, you have a regressive tax with a huge positive side effect due to taxing an externality. If the funds are also spread into progressive services it can be a net positive for all income brackets.
TIL that word.
I wish as a society we'd use this form of taxation more, and widely applied taxes less. In theory insurance is supposed to have the actuarial people who figure it out and properly price the choices in, but it's also surprising how crude they can be-- lumping very distinct situations as "the same". eg aggressive drivers are only penalized after they hurt someone, like the phrase "no harm no foul" (until there is harm). It'd be better if telemetry was collected and penalized in realtime.
They can also have their own significant externalities and introduce perverse incentives (in this case...) for revenue-seeking infrastructure governance.
Of course they work. If the government manipulates the equation to make something unaffordable, the poor can no longer afford it. That’s not the point.
[flagged]
> try to regulate idling, which worse emissions profiles
Most certainly regulated. There are people who make a living off of reporting idling trucks and collecting the bounty.
Not for cars what so ever. There is a 3 minute rule which is unenforced.
> Once the Feds approved the plan the State of NY made fixed, increasing, revenue targets their only goal.
The first thing the State of NY did with congestion pricing was halt the plan (arguably illegally) before reintroducing it six months later with a price reduction to $9 down from $15: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/congestion-p...
After the election. And it's slated to go up at least $1 per year, and more if they miss their fixed revenue target. If the seccede in reducing traffic then the fees have to increase more.
> If they cared about emissions they could try to regulate idling...
They have, for decades. https://nyc-business.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/idling-...
> NY dropped the goals of cleaner air and any premise of regulating traffic flow
What’s your source for this?
Also, why would a goal matter more than results?
>If they cared about emissions they could try regulating idling, which worse emissions profiles
They do, in fact, regulate idling my dude- https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02222
> In New York City, vehicle idling is illegal if it lasts more than 3 minutes or more than 1 minute when adjacent to a school.
Imagine it actually mattered to them and they didn't force everyone into downtown offices instead of allowing people to work from home. This is a cash grab.
Who's "they" here? I don't think it's the government forcing everyone at finance and tech companies to come into the office.
They should put subway stations in each of the 3 big airports.
JFK has a subway station (Howard Beach)
EWR is in New Jersey, so... not technically the NYC Subway. But taking the subway to Penn Station, then hopping on NJ Transit is pretty easy
LGA is the only one that straight up has no subway/train option.
It may have dropped pollution in Manhattan but I guess more pollution added up to the surrounding borroughs in addition to more traffic.
> but I guess more pollution added up to the surrounding borroughs in addition to more traffic
Why? Fewer cars into Manhattan means fewer cars through the boroughs. And even if they all diverted, you’re still looking at less idling and less stop and start braking.
Not necessarily. I use my brake far more in stop and start traffic on the highway than I do in Manhattan.
In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights, which are predictable, rather than the traffic itself.
> I use my brake far more in stop and start traffic on the highway
Is that because of gridlock or because of the higher energies?
> In the city stop and start is primarily determined by traffic lights
Source? In my experience it's unexpected incursions, whether that be cars changing lanes, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk or food-delivery bikers yeeting themselves into an intersection.
The article speaks to this as well, "Pricing led to a drop in pollution across the greater metropolitan area, according to the study, published in the journal npj Clean Air."
So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.
This was a common anti-congestion pricing talking point, but it ends up not being the case. People either don't drive into the city, or they take transit.
The study found the opposite: people are picking healthier choices throughout the region. This makes sense: if you switch to taking the train, in addition to not driving in the congestion zone you also aren’t driving the distance between the closest train station and Manhattan, which for many people will be more engine operating time than they spend in the zone itself.
Good question, this happened in London for sure, congestion charging increased the net pollution from vehicles but reduced the metrics inside the city, probably not much either way.
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?
> where cities get all the benefit at the expense of the larger region
A pair of thought experiments. The tri-state area is depopulated and turned into a nature reserve. Everywhere except for New York City. How does it do?
Now, New York City is leveled and turned into a nature preserve. How does this affect those states’ non-urban populations? (Hint: economic collapse. Budget cuts. Unemployment.)
Cities suck resources from outside. But by and large, they also distribute largesse to their proximities and subsidize life for everyone around them.
> 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?
New York City has a population of 8.5mm [1]. That’s almost half of the metropolitan area’s population [2]. Include New York State and the non-voting population effect is a minority. Congestion charging isn’t a tyranny of the minority.
As for why, self determination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
NYC has a big dick to swing, and it should swing it for the benefit of its residents even at the expense of everyone else, why would residents vote for anything else
I understand what you're saying but after 100 years of uninhibited car-centric design i think its reasonable for those of us who live here to want to prioritize the experience of people who live and work in manhattan, south bronx, and west queens and brooklyn. if people want to commute from places surrounding the city in a more efficient fashion i think its reasonable for them to redress that with the local or state governments instead of using nyc infrastructure for free in a way that inhibits community growth here.
> it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Is this happening in/around NYC?
> 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.
The are the same, you just have to pay the fee.
Also, for like 90% of NJ you'd be going the southern route into Brooklyn anyway, no congestion pricing involved.
The Verazano is already more expensive than congestion pricing. It's cheaper to drive to Manhattan from Jersey than Brooklyn via Staten Island. Never heard any Jersey driver complain though.
Both NY and SF were regional hubs before cars disfigured them. No commercial vehicle is going to be discouraged by a $10 dollar charge, and trade is so much easier when the roads aren't clogged by single people demanding 1000 sq-ft of ground space to move around.
It doesn't seem reasonable to complain that multitudes more of people should substantially worsen their everyday trips and suffer much higher risk of being killed by cars to make occasional trips that would pass through the city more convenient.
> 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.
This is a fixable problem. I'm still waiting on someone to do it though. NY is mostly interested in corruption from their preferred interests. (which is why they are working on a law to require a conductor on all subways instead of working to eliminate all that extra labor, instead of fixing their system so it is fast and reliable and then covers more area)
What you're describing as a problem is actually the solution, and what you think is the solution is actually the problem.
Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.
Robert Moses has you covered.
Manhattan is surrounded by a ring road. It is excluded from congestion pricing.