Why London’s tax on driving works—and NYC’s might fail

Thanks Ground News for sponsoring! Go to https://ground.news/evan to stay fully informed. Subscribe through my link to get 40% OFF the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan.

I think CBS NY could be suffering from a quite common form of confirmation bias

1 of the unfortunate differences between London & NY is that NY’s subway is geared to getting riders into Manhattan, ie the central business district. However, getting between, say, Brooklyn & Queens is still very difficult by mass transit. Whereas in London you can get from almost any point-to-point place within the wider London metro area via subway/train

As for the Wettex/Swedish Dishcloths, stateside Costco has sold them for at least a year or two.

Let the plebians walk like they are meant to.

All I'm going to say is this: you can charge drivers however much you like, but if refuse to tackle the rampant crazy behavior of passengers on NYC public transportation, people will still find a way to use it as little as possible.

Last month's commute to/from NYC on MTA express buses has been great. Less traffic, fewer delays along FDR.

One of the disclaimers about congestion pricing is that is requires adequate mass transit infrastructure to work otherwise it is just beating on drivers. For Manhattan, it can definitely work since there is a ton of infrastructure leading through and around it. That said, once you leave Manhattan, the rest of the city infrastructure is wanting at best. If you want to go north or south in bklyn and Queens, good luck. If you want to mass transit around SI, also good luck. Once you leave NYC in general, that car becomes a lot less optional. Still, Manhattan is very much a tourist and commercial capital and will never handle the cars people are trying to drive into it.

Walking is great for able-bodied people If you are unable to bike or walk (more than a few feet), charging the handicapped more seems unfair to me.

For walkable places in NJ, Jersey City and Hoboken as Vision Zero role models. Hoboken has experienced zero traffic deaths since 2017. Hoboken adopted a Vision Zero plan in 2021 after an executive order by Mayor Ravi Bhalla in 2019, and since then, they've been doing things like daylighting intersections with flexible posts or rain gardens, creating curb extensions to reduce crossing distances and improve visibility, and painting high-visibility crosswalks. In 2023 alone, Hoboken installed 78 daylighted intersections, 61 high-visibility crosswalks, 1 raised crosswalk, 9 curb extensions, and 14 multi-way stops. They also reduced the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph in 2022. In 2021, Hoboken had 21 pedestrian injuries, 18 cyclist injuries, and 51 motorist injuries. Compare these injuries and the zero fatalities to the Crown Heights in Brooklyn in 2021, Crown Heights had three fatalities, and over 400 injuries in total! To combat flooding, as a response to Hurricane Sandy, Hoboken turned to a Dutch firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, to create a design that won a contest sponsored by then President Obama. The contest was about looking for innovative designs to reduce storm impact as a response to Sandy, and Hoboken alongside Jersey City and Weehawken won, awarded 230 million dollars total by the federal government, and the state contributed an additional 100 million. They designed resiliency parks around Hoboken, inspired by Louisiana's response to Hurricane Katrina and Dutch water management systems, using a combination of above-ground green infrastructure and below-ground gray infrastructure to store stormwater. Expanding the capacity of the sewer system. A pump station allows water to be collected underground in a cistern and then pumped out to the Hudson River. These parks include recreational space, rain gardens, porous pavers, and cisterns for rainwater harvesting.

Jersey City was the first in New Jersey to implement Vision Zero with an executive order signed by Mayor Steven Fulop in 2018, and in 2022, the city realized zero car crash-related fatalities on city-owned streets, the first city of its size in the country to accomplish this! Rather than concentrate pedestrian safety improvements in a single area downtown, Jersey City worked with Street Plans and pursued interventions across six corridors, one in each of Jersey City’s six wards. Thus, they not only built trust across different constituencies, but was able to experiment and did it fast through tactical urbanism and committed local leadership. So Jersey City has been able to make rapid, transformational improvements through daylighting intersections, narrowing lane widths to reduce speeding, converting to one-ways to remove left-turns and reduce conflicts, building a growing protected bike lane network, and adding numerous stop signs and speed humps. Under Fulop, Jersey City also became the first in NJ to have a bikeshare system when Citi Bike expanded to Jersey City in 2015, while it expanded to Hoboken in 2021. To go with this, Fulop worked with community activists to implement a comprehensive Bike Master Plan that includes a complete protected bike lane system and has implemented the steps to create a safe environment with miles of safe corridors! Jersey City has experienced an Austin-level housing boom…in a city much smaller than Austin, thanks to the explosion of TOD around PATH and HBLR stations. And that's not mentioning the pedestrianization that has taken place downtown. Jersey City and Hoboken are both examples of a transit city in North America done right

There's also Bordentown, a cool colonial suburb outside Trenton, which has its own River Line station, an interurban that goes between Trenton and Camden (with connections to the NJT Atlantic City Line to Philly and Atlantic City at Pennsauken Transit Center, and the PATCO Speedline to Philly and Lindenwold at Walter Rand Transportation Center). Bordentown's first recorded European settlement was made in 1682, and then it was renamed after Joseph Borden in 1717! Bordentown is filled with transportation and revolutionary history! In 1734, Joseph Borden started a stage line and packet service between Bordentown and Philly. In the 1830s, the Camden and Amboy Railroad (NJ's first railroad) you mentioned used the John Bull locomotive which is now in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History! And In 1834, the Delaware and Raritan Canal (which helped transport anthracite coal to NYC during much of the 19th and early 20th centuries) had their Lock 1 at Bordentown. Bordentown was once the home of many revolutionaries. Patience Lovell Wright, the US's first female sculptor, was creating wax busts in King George's court in England. Patriots like Francis Hopkinson (a signer of the US Declaration of Independence) and Thomas Paine (who authored Common Sense and The American Crisis) also lived in Bordentown. Thomas Paine's home in Bordentown between 1783 until his death in 1809 was the only house he ever bought. Besides American patriots, Bordentown was also the home of Napoleon's older brother Joseph Bonaparte and Joseph's daughter Charlotte who did landscape paintings while in NJ. But more importantly, Bordentown was home to NJ's first free school by Clara Barton in 1852, who later founded the American Red Cross in 1881!

For walkable places in NJ, Jersey City and Hoboken as Vision Zero role models. Hoboken has experienced zero traffic deaths since 2017. Hoboken adopted a Vision Zero plan in 2021 after an executive order by Mayor Ravi Bhalla in 2019, and since then, they've been doing things like daylighting intersections with flexible posts or rain gardens, creating curb extensions to reduce crossing distances and improve visibility, and painting high-visibility crosswalks. In 2023 alone, Hoboken installed 78 daylighted intersections, 61 high-visibility crosswalks, 1 raised crosswalk, 9 curb extensions, and 14 multi-way stops. They also reduced the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph in 2022. In 2021, Hoboken had 21 pedestrian injuries, 18 cyclist injuries, and 51 motorist injuries. Compare these injuries and the zero fatalities to the Crown Heights in Brooklyn in 2021, Crown Heights had three fatalities, and over 400 injuries in total! To combat flooding, as a response to Hurricane Sandy, Hoboken turned to a Dutch firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, to create a design that won a contest sponsored by then President Obama. The contest was about looking for innovative designs to reduce storm impact as a response to Sandy, and Hoboken alongside Jersey City and Weehawken won, awarded 230 million dollars total by the federal government, and the state contributed an additional 100 million. They designed resiliency parks around Hoboken, inspired by Louisiana's response to Hurricane Katrina and Dutch water management systems, using a combination of above-ground green infrastructure and below-ground gray infrastructure to store stormwater. Expanding the capacity of the sewer system. A pump station allows water to be collected underground in a cistern and then pumped out to the Hudson River. These parks include recreational space, rain gardens, porous pavers, and cisterns for rainwater harvesting.

Jersey City was the first in New Jersey to implement Vision Zero with an executive order signed by Mayor Steven Fulop in 2018, and in 2022, the city realized zero car crash-related fatalities on city-owned streets, the first city of its size in the country to accomplish this! Rather than concentrate pedestrian safety improvements in a single area downtown, Jersey City worked with Street Plans and pursued interventions across six corridors, one in each of Jersey City’s six wards. Thus, they not only built trust across different constituencies, but was able to experiment and did it fast through tactical urbanism and committed local leadership. So Jersey City has been able to make rapid, transformational improvements through daylighting intersections, narrowing lane widths to reduce speeding, converting to one-ways to remove left-turns and reduce conflicts, building a growing protected bike lane network, and adding numerous stop signs and speed humps. Under Fulop, Jersey City also became the first in NJ to have a bikeshare system when Citi Bike expanded to Jersey City in 2015, while it expanded to Hoboken in 2021. To go with this, Fulop worked with community activists to implement a comprehensive Bike Master Plan that includes a complete protected bike lane system and has implemented the steps to create a safe environment with miles of safe corridors! Jersey City has experienced an Austin-level housing boom…in a city much smaller than Austin, thanks to the explosion of TOD around PATH and HBLR stations. And that's not mentioning the pedestrianization that has taken place downtown. Jersey City and Hoboken are both examples of a transit city in North America done right