alt Hacker NewsIn New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No mention about change in average commute time?
Congestion pricing == demand pricing
Yet it’s good if the city does it but bad if a Corp does it?
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
Yea, if they could keep ALL of the poor people out, image how great that would be!
You know what else would drop pollution and ease traffic congestion?
Allowing employees to work remote.
Some people are really going to hate this.
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.
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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.
Im curious why no one is discussing this but this is basically a middle finger for poor people.
Rich people now have a great way to continue driving their cars, everyone else is fucked?
They should put subway stations in each of the 3 big airports.
It may have dropped pollution in Manhattan but I guess more pollution added up to the surrounding borroughs in addition to more traffic.
NY dropped the goals of cleaner air and any premise of regulating traffic flow. Once the Feds approved the plan the State of NY made fixed, increasing, revenue targets their only goal. If they cared about emissions they could try to regulate idling, which worse emissions profiles. Here in NYC they do this money making charade of "street sweeping" for 90 min twice or more times a week. And people sit in their cars with tge engine running that whole time. It too is focused on revenue, though they do actually mechanically sweep the street sides.
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.
> 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