Hey, NYC? Just ... go away, OK?

[unixronin]

I'm tired of NYC trying to be the tail that wags the dog.  If it's not one thing, it's another.  You've got the Mayor going around the country making illegal straw-man gun purchases in an effort to blackmail gun dealers into accepting intrusive monitoring of their business that he has no legal authority to do.  You've got NYPD stealing legally-owned Harleys from their owners because of alleged irregularities in the way the VIN numbers are stamped, to the extent that Harley-Davidson sent out letters for all of their registered owners to carry certifying that yes, they really do own the motorcycle they're riding.

And then there's the carpool thing.  NYC will ticket you for riding a motorcycle in a HOV/carpool lane.  Federal law says you're legally permitted to do so.  (It's Title 23 United States Code, Section 166.)  NYC will ticket you anyway.  Last month's American Motorcyclist, which I just now got around to finishing, has a story about a woman who got ticketed by NYC for riding in a HOV lane and fought the ticket.  It took her three years, but finally she beat it, and a NYC administrative board acknowledged that she was exercising a legal right under Federal law and dismissed the ticket.

Most cities would, at this point, concede defeat and accept the inevitable.  But not NYC.  NYC is now trying to overturn the Federal law and get the Federal government to declare motorcycles a danger in HOV lanes nationwide.  Because NYPD wants to be able to keep writing HOV-lane tickets to motorcyclists... apparently, because they can.

You go to hell, NYC.  And NYPD specifically.  You want to be asshats in your own city, hey, that's your problem.  But you don't get to export your asshattery and make all the rest of us in the US live with it too.  We're very glad to have places that Are Not NYC.  And you can't have them.

Disclaimer:

If you live in NYC, and you like NYC, that's fine, I don't have a problem with that.  It's your city, you're allowed to like it.  But I don't have to live in your city, and you can't force me by exporting it to me.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the London-style fetish for security cameras everywhere. And congestion-charging.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with congestion charging?

BTW, the majority of New Yorkers are liberal pedestrians, so the only uproar I heard was when Giuliani cracked down on jaywalking ...

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with congestion charging?

One, the amount of surveillance and tracking of individual movements that's required to collect it. "It is bad civic hygiene to engineer technologies that facilitate a police state."
Second, businesses will relocate outside the congestion-charging zone. This has happened in London already, and a mutual friend of mine and unixronin's who's an American and travels to London frequently on business can cite examples.
Third, it's regressive. If the congestion charge applies only at certian hours, well, it works for you if you're the boss and can set your own hours so as to avoid it. If you're some peon whose manager says "be here at 8:30 or you're fired"? Not so much. Especially if you're the sort of peon who can't afford to live on or near mass transit--an increasingly common phenomenon at least in the Boston area where housing near subway stops commands a significant price premium.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.

The first is a red herring. You just have to keep track of number of vehicles, not individual vehicles. Highways already do this.

The second is the intended effect, to reduce congestion. If environmental costs are internalized (e.g., through carbon taxes) as well as the construction costs, the market will help find the optimum.

The third can be applied to anything. People who make more money always have more convenience/freedom. The question is whether this should apply to gov't services, and if roads are the same kind of service as police or social security.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

First, without number plate recognition, how do you know to whom to send the bill? Unlike toll barriers on a limited-access highway, it's impossible to put physical toll barriers at every entrance to a downtown area.

Second, BZZZZT, WRONG, thank you for playing. It simply plays beggar-thy-neighbor with the congestion. The businesses relocate and the congestion relocates along with them. That's the problem with government regulation--the organism does what it damned well pleases despite the "best" intentions of the planners.

Money does in fact buy convenience but government regulation should apply reasonably equitably across all levels of society. It shouldn't deliberately set out to screw those least able to pay the bills. Saying anything else is saying "fuck the poor." It's amazing how few liberals actually realize the cost their desired policies have toward the people who are just barely scraping by and trying to make ends meet.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I may be mistaken. San Diego has a variable toll system based on how much traffic there is; I didn't realize New York's involved sending bills to individual drivers. If so, f*&# that.

As for the other points:

* What's stopping planners from having congestion-based tolls on all roads above a certain level of traffic? And it's not like people can move their offices and homes in a minute -- if the tolls get high on the highway into downtown, the alternative is mass transit, not relocation.

If highways were privatized, this would happen anyway. Europe shows that private highways work fairly well; apart from issues of gov't mismanagement, a comparable gov't scheme has legs, IMHO.

* How do you define "equitable?" If you define it as "same charge to everyone," charging by supply and demand seems to be equitable. However, if you argue that poor people are hurt more by increases in automotive costs, then it seems you want highways for free as an entitlement, like public education.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I may be mistaken. San Diego has a variable toll system based on how much traffic there is; I didn't realize New York's involved sending bills to individual drivers. If so, f*&# that.

I don't know anything about New York's, but that's certainly what London's does.

if the tolls get high on the highway into downtown, the alternative is mass transit, not relocation.

Unfortunately, almost without exception, US cities do not have truly functional mass-transit systems. Attempts to create even merely better mass-transit systems are frequently hampered by NIMBY reactions. Attempts to extend the Bay Area's BART system from its current terminus in Millbrae south down the Peninsula to San Jose, as you doubtless know, have been stalled for twenty years because Los Altos and Palo Alto don't want BART to run through their towns. (It might bring in The Wrong Kind Of People, after all.) A San Jose extension finally looks to be on the cards now, but only by going the long way around through the East Bay, and it's still meeting heavy opposition.

Part of the problem is that US cities tend to sprawl so far. There's just too much territory to cover with effective mass transit, short of completely re-inventing mass-transit in some new form. (No, I don't know what form that might be at this point. Autonomous city-cars, summonable on demand, have been suggested as a speculative future transit system, but I'm unconvinced that this would actually solve the problem, and I'm sure cab drivers would do everything in their power to fight it on the probably-correct assumption that it would devastate — if not eliminate — the market for manned cabs.)

Honestly, I think the real answer is to decentralize, and have more and smaller cities that are more self-sufficient and actually pleasant to live in, and where people can live closer to where they work. But the USA has too much invested in its mega-cities to change that aspect of America quickly, and in any case the trend of human civilization seems to be to congregate in fewer, larger, more dysfunctional cities.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Is it that US is sprawling because of the huge subsidies for roads, or rather are there huge subsidies for roads because the country is sprawling?

There's certainly some of the latter, since roads are cheaper than railways. But it's also a lot of the former -- here in Japan people build around train stations, whereas in the US they build around road.

Also, what do you think of New Urbanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism)? Perhaps a little too Disney-fascist, but there is a market for it in delapidated urban centers, driven by young professionals who want a short commute and city services.

Rather than top-down planning, I think I'd rather let drivers pay for carbon-taxed gas and the highways they use, and let the market decide ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'd say New Urbanism seems to be going in the right direction. The steep rise in home values in New Urban communities seems to be a good indicator that they are, as intended, pleasant and desirable places to live. Surely among the most important things about any community is that it should be pleasant and practical to live there.

As far as letting the market decide, well, since I doubt we're going to tear up every city and suburb overnight and replace them all, in a sense building New Urban style mini-communities and seeing whether they take off is letting the market decide. If people move to them and stay there, and ten years from now they're vibrant and thriving, it'll be because they've succeeded. If ten years from now they're empty, decaying and abandoned, it'll be because they failed. But the market won't get a chance to decide if the option isn't there. I know cymrullewes would sooner work a mile from home, or even five miles, than seventy, and so would I — as long as doing so doesn't mean we have to live in a grimy, dreary 19th-century-mill-town row-house or a cramped, noisy, overpriced downtown condo, or for that matter a giant Silicon Valley apartment complex with paper-thin walls and neighbors who file noise complaints every time somebody sneezes.

One could even argue it'd be healthier. Let's face it — how many Americans these days can walk to work, even if they want to? With gas at $4 a gallon or more, how many would walk to work if they could?

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm glad when private developers give New Urbanism a whirl, rather than having city councils shove it down.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I think the real answer is to decentralize, and have more and smaller cities that are more self-sufficient and actually pleasant to live in, and where people can live closer to where they work. But the USA has too much invested in its mega-cities to change that aspect of America quickly, and in any case the trend of human civilization seems to be to congregate in fewer, larger, more dysfunctional cities.

Yup. Straight out of Jane Jacobs.

Actually, the US did a fairly good job of decentralizing during the industrial era. Sure, you had your "A-list" cities like NYC and Chicago, but there were plenty of "B-list" and "C-list" cities that were also fine places to live. The problem today is, you don't work in the same place for 40 years any more, so if you live in a B- or C-list city where professional employment opportunities are limited, what do you do for your *next* job? If I wanted to be close to the Smokies and Deal's Gap, I could move to Knoxville, TN. I might even be able to get a good, even a great, job there. But what do I do for my *next* job when that job goes away in five years? At this point the employment opportunities in the post-industrial economy have concentrated themselves in a short list of maybe half-a-dozen or seven or eight "A-list", high-cost-of-living cities on both coasts.

Similarly for housing. Why buy a house that's a mile from your current job if it's going to be forty miles from your next one? (One reason why I think homeownership in fifty years will be only for the upper-middle-class and better--it'll be a big marker showing that you don't have to "move where the work is".)

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

A large part of the problem with mass transit in the US is the mass transit agencies themselves. The worst examples of the attitude that "this job would be great if it wasn't for the customers" isn't to be found at your local fast-food outlet any more, it's the people who "work" for many big-city mass transit agencies. SEPTA (Philadelphia) is about the worst but the MBTA is pretty bad too. I tried commuting from my apartment in Belmont to a job in South Boston for a year and a half by T. It was sheer hell, to the point where "no T commutes" was a requirement when I went looking for a job again. A trip that might have taken half an hour by car often took three times that, and that was with one theoretically-frequently-running bus and one subway ride. The bus that serves my neighborhood was supposed to run "Every eight minutes or better" according to the schedule and often left me waiting for half an hour. And that's before we got into the chronic delays on the Red Line. You can't tell me it's lack of funding because the T fucks up even the stuff that costs zero money--like communicating to the passengers just why it is we're sitting between stations and when we can expect to be moving again.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

SAMTRANS gets its fair and deserved share of the hate too.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

BART does get weird about a few things.

Bicycles, for one, they have no racks for them, and they are prohibited at peak commute hours. I rather like what Santa Clara County's (where San Jose is) light rail system does for bikes, hooks in the celling, for the upper wheel, and a rail to hold the wheels steady on the wall, obstructs no one when not in use, holds 3 bikes in the space for one or two people.

Then again, VTA does some weird things, like run their trains 24x7, unlike BART, who needs 4 or so hours off every day, and more like 8 on Sunday. Oddly enough, that light rail system is the only rail system in the Bay area not on BARTs maps.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

yeah, London's congestion-charging scheme (and the one proposed for adoption in NYC) involve setting up a zone (in NYC's case, it would be all of Manhattan below 96th St.) and then charging individual drivers for entering that zone. And it doesn't apply to highways, it applies to city streets--which would be a cast iron b*tch to privatize. Are you going to pay a toll to the owner of every building you drive past?

Congestion-tolling highways, or even putting up new tolls, would push the problem off onto local streets as drivers will use them as "shunpikes".

I *would* be in favor of privatizing limited-access highways and charging tolls on them, as long as I didn't have to pay fuel taxes to drive on them. If tolls are supposed to pay for the operating costs of the road, then if I pay fuel taxes I'm paying for it twice.

As far as paying for streets, roads, and highways, they're already supposed to be paid for by gasoline taxes--which are about the closest thing we have to a user fee. It's not perfect but gasoline taxes map fairly closely to miles driven and to vehicle weight, and vehicle weight is a useful proxy for damage done to the roads. Granted, it's not perfect, and I could see several places for improvement, but it's the current scheme and it works. (As long as gas taxes aren't stolen and put into the general fund to pay for other things, that is.)