alt Hacker News> IMO what they should be keeping a careful eye on and tracking is how many fewer trips happen to businesses in those areas.
There’s a section dedicated to this which indicates visitors to business zones are up and OpenTable reservations are up.
If anything, the reduced congestion should be a boon for business deliveries and the congestion pricing should be a rounding error for those users.
IMO, people think driving is their preferred transportation method because it gives the illusion of independence. The subway goes everywhere in lower Manhattan and you don’t need to deal with the time, cost, or inconvenience of parking, traffic, driving stress, etc.
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Driving into NYC is one of those things that is most convenient at the beginning (driving in, stay in my car) but has a high cost at the end (looking/paying for parking, traffic, on a parking time limit, etc.) I do think if people grow ACCUSTOMED to taking the subway in, they will prefer that in most cases.
It would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending.
I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.