Gotta love the man. (Well, actually, I don't know much more about him than the nickname, party affiliation, and this speech, but of those three things, what's not to love?)
And isn't congestion pricing his too? Boy, that would be nice in NY.
Everything I ever read about congestion pricing in London was in the British automotive press, and they loathed it, so I'm probably biased against it. As far as applying something similar to New York, I don't really get the impression that Metro-North, LIRR, and PATH are underused. Do you?
If you'd watched Livingstone struggle for victory and then funding against the fairly despicable entrepreneurs of New Labour's new establishment, you would have loved him the more, LB.
Eh, there's more capacity there, and there's more traffic than necessary or optimal in Manhattan. Most of the reasons anyone needs a car in Manhattan are episodic -- you need to move something, or start or end a long trip somewhere, so an occasional congestion charge wouldn't be a hardship. If you've set up your life so that you drive in Manhattan every day, you should be firmly encouraged to change either your driving habits or your residence, and I think a congestion charge would be a very reasonable way to accomplish that. We could use the money to build more public transportation capacity.
Firmly encouraged with a truncheon.
LB,
Here's what I've never understood about congestion pricing, since it's a one-time fee inside the city limits and not road pricing. (They are talking about expanding to a national road pricing scheme with prices varying depending on where you live. I think that this is better than raising petrol taxes, since public transportation is limited in rural areas, and those people don't have other choices. Cheap charges in Dorset would work okay.)
But getting back to my main point/ question. If you live within the zone and have a car, do you have to pay it, if your car doesn't go outside the zone on any given day?
What about the wealthy people who need to be driven around from place to place? What are they supposed to do, take the subway?
Might as well move to North Korea, say I.
Probably not. An eight-square mile zone (what they've got in London) is small enough, though, that most reasonable trips would go outside it, don't you think? People driving incredibly short distances solely within the inner city, while obviously the worst offenders, have got to be fairly rare.
Hmm, sure. If it were tried in New York, I would imagine that Manhattan would be a logical boundary, and I could imagine that there might be cab drivers who never left Manhattan.
True, but we don't need congestion pricing to limit the number of cabs -- we could do that just by limiting the number of medallions. I have to think that reducing traffic by cutting down the number of private cars would make fewer cabs necessary -- less traffic=faster trips=more passengers served by each physical cab. But I may simply be daydreaming here.
The number of medallions is already quite limited—there was a New Yorker thing a few years ago about it.
Medallions are limited and because of this, exorbitantly expensive.
Ponies would spook the cabs.
Sometimes I wonder this. I wonder if part of the reason terrorists are drawn to terrorism is because of a deep rooted feeling of inferiority.
Assuming this is true then it seems to me such screeds merely motivate more terrorists.
Yeah, I know, I'm a bleeding heart liberal, I want bin Laden to win, yada yada yada, I've heard it all.
But what if saying over and over "We're better than you and we always will be" does more than makes us feel better? What if it prolongs the conflict?
I have no doubt that we actually are better than them. We are. But every sports team knows you don't want to provide locker room bulletin board material for your opponents.
But so the cycle goes. Over and over and over again. We will assert we have to be stronger, we have to be louder, we have to be prouder, we have to be more patriotic. We will count the ways we are better, and so the cycle goes.
Have we considered ponies?
"Pedestrians and passengers were daily appalled by the spectacle of overworked animals straining under the weight of crowded cars and being beaten by drivers anxious to remain on schedule. Death for the animals was common. Horses often stumbled and fell, in which case they were destroyed where they lay. Among the unfortunate beasts in the 1880s, an estimated 15,000 horses died each year on New York's streets alone, and as late as 1912 Chicago experienced 10,000 such deaths annually. Carcasses were left in the gutters, there to collect flies and to give off a stench that but for an adjustment peculiar to the olfactory sense would have driven human life from the town."
Abby: Residents within the zone get a massive discount. There are some other discounts for emergency service workers, etc. See here.
From my perspective, it's worked very well and I hope they extend it. I can see how it is in a sense a regressive tax, but I think the net effect is actually much more on those who use cars unnecessarily, and thus can rarely claim to be genuinely impoverished. But for the lungs, the ears, and the side-effects on the speed of the buses, a big thumbs up.