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You can't move all of the freight that the city needs by rail. Enjoy paying more for everything you buy.

And all this does is move more traffic to the outer boroughs (city leadership even acknowledges this will be a side effect).



Consider a relatively bulky item, say, a package of paper towel. Probably takes up about a cubic foot of volume, which is 0.027 cubic meters.

Suppose you drive that into NYC in a very small van, say a Ford Transit. A quick google tells me that has a cargo capacity of 10 cubic meters. The $15 toll amortized over 370 packages would add an additional cost of 4c per package.

This is the most extreme case I could think of off the top of my head. I believe most deliveries use vans with a much larger cargo capacity than a Transit.


> The toll will be $24 for small trucks and charter buses, and will rise to $36 for large trucks and tour buses

Still very acceptable for cargo.


Trucks already pay a significant cost on bridge tolls. Tolls will be dropped significantly at night, which is when trucks make most deliveries. It is unlikely to increase cost of goods.


I lived in NYC for 35 years and most trucks do not make their deliveries at night.


Fair. That said, the goal is to shift a lot of that delivery traffic to other hours.

There are about 125K truck crossings into Manhattan per day. In a NYC pilot program with receiving companies, carriers, and truck drivers; some participants implementing the off-hour policy at a number of their locations and it went fairly well.


USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL and LaserShip won't do it. Home Depot, PC Richards and other appliance and furniture delivery companies won't do it either. Moving companies won't do it because residential buildings won't let them. That's a pretty large amount of your truck traffic right there.


Well they ought to.


The freight will move faster with less congestion, which may well reduce costs overall.


$15 over an entire truck's worth of goods? Even if it was $150, this is pearl clutching at best.


Agreed. These same trucks often get parking tickets that surpass the cost of entry.


Exactly, which is why I mentioned double parking in my previous comment[0].

It's a USD$115.00 ticket for double parking and delivery trucks do so even when there's space for them to park legally, lest they get blocked in by another truck -- it's just the cost of doing business.

And it's disgusting. Streets which should have four lanes of traffic are reduced to one or two lanes with all the double-parked trucks. Those fines should be $1000+ and entering into Manhattan from anywhere in a car should be at least $100. Sadly, no one asked me. And more's the pity.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39842275


yeah I don't think any freight is being moved by (checks article) passenger cars


check again: ```Who Will Pay: Most cars, trucks and taxi and Uber riders.```


in any case

> Those tolls will be discounted by 75 percent at night,

which is when most truck deliveries are made

I would bet the value in time saved to a freight delivery business to be stuck in less traffic (composed primarily of passenger cars!) is well worth more than the toll paid


> Also congestion based pricing strategies have never reduced traffic anywhere they've been implemented. Go ask London.

Wrong.

Source: I am a transport engineer. In London.


According to INRIX, London is more congested than ever and it's so unpopular that 66% of residents voted against expanding the program and that very proposal is what sunk the Labour party in last year's by-elections.

Also London's public transit infrastructure is lightyears better than NYC's and way better managed. This whole pricing scheme is just to shore up the MTA which is massively wasteful with money and never gets any of its projects done on time (by decades).


a) You are confusing a congestion charge zone (CCZ) with an emissions charge zone (ULEZ) which specifically targets vehicles that do not comply with the latest emissions standards. These are two separate schemes, with different objectives. It is the later that was linked with Labour's by-election failures, in the very outer boroughs that have fairly poor public transport.

b) The INRIX scorecard is citywide. Assuming that they went with the conventional definition of "London", ie. whatever lies inside M25, this is an area of 1579 km2. The Congestion charge zone has an area of 21 km2, which is about 1.3% of the total.


> which is when most truck deliveries are made

That's simply not true.

Also congestion based pricing strategies have never reduced traffic anywhere they've been implemented. Go ask London.


> Also congestion based pricing strategies have never reduced traffic anywhere they've been implemented

this is so fragrantly incorrect I don't even know how to respond

they absolutely have, including in London

please engage with some of the published research instead of just guessing


fragrantly?

really?


Doesn't pass the sniff test ;-)


typo




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