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an extra $200 a month expense is considerable to the majority of ppl in the USA
Yeah but we’re talking about people who work in Manhattan here, not the majority of ppl in the USA
Also, you can't even drive from point A to point B in New Jersey without paying a bunch of tolls. What are they complaining about that New York did the same thing?
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Mentally, insurance and depreciation are marginally "free", so going driving is "free" or only costs gas. Adding a direct toll increases the perceived cost of driving like 10x.
Coming from New Jersey now costs between $22 and $40 depending on whether you have EZ pass, a car or truck, etc.
For a daily driver making under 80k/year, that's probably too much to handle.
But yeah, hard to see how the extra $7 (it was $15 before) was the breaking point.
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No one is factoring seasonality into these pictures. We really have no idea yet.
I find it crazy that a $9 tax is somehow forcing people to make better decisions. A $9 tax.
Because costs feel much more real when they’re made explicit and precisely quantified.
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idk nearly doubling the price of something often will act as a disincentive. cigarette taxes have been effective at much lower increments.
You pay insurance and depreciation anyway, regardless if you drive to Manhattan or not.
It is something like the coldest 2 weeks since forever.
Might well be the weather, bit early to tell.
Opportunity cost, year round tourism has historically powered the NYC economy since the bankruptcy
With an additional 9 * days spent in city costs changes the dynamics of trips and meetups
There’s zero chance that $9 makes a difference to tourists, especially when every shitty hotel in the city is like $300 a night now
I think some of this has to be an initial shock that will wear off for this reason. Or it’s weather
What if I told you there’s a simple way to earn an extra 6-7 figures per year.
And the best part?
You can do it with this 1 daily process
It does seem like something is going on like underlying spending weakness (?)
Ppl should stop crowing abt congestion pricing until there’s more data
Ummm the toll at the Lincoln tunnel is like 15 dollars by itself.
The round trip without parking now probably costs more like 50 dollars given how bad the roads are on the cars.
I’d say it’s a psychological difference in paying a toll vs paying those other things incrementally as you go
Coming from the outer boroughs used to be free, it's effectively tolled all the east river crossings (thank god).
What if I told you there’s a simple way to earn an extra 6-7 figures per year.
And the best part?
You can do it with this 1 daily process
Im worth a few million and I still wont pay 20 cents for a shopping bag, I'll balance 12 grocery items on my forearm
Maybe it’s not Jersey drivers and it’s outer borough drivers. Does anyone ever consider this?
I have to assume all this data is super front loaded protest behavior and pretty shortly people will be back to their old habits
Because it used to be free. Free to not free is a massive leap in a way $1 to $9 isn’t.
I'm not familiar with the system. Do you have to sign up for an entirely new EZ pass or whatever?
Even if not, any perceived barrier to entry is going to be "a wall" to a lot of people, like how a news site making you create an account just turns people away.
I had a panic attack in 2019,
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Because $9 is a 60% increase on a $15 base cost.
This is how normies are bro
They will spend unbounded amounts of money on frivolous things but stop at a toll price or subscription service
Same people that say shit like “oh you paid $8 for X I would never do that”
Taxing people to deter them instead of offering better options they would use of their own free will isn’t in the spirit of what America is supposed to be.
Pricing psychology is a wild world - those costs don't hit you immediately, $9 does though
I think there were just a lot of people who drive around lower Manhattan because it’s fun.
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You don’t measure your depreciation day-to-day lol. A car is a consumable.
It’s psychological. Straw that broke the camel’s back type of thing. For me I just thought, “fuck New York it’s just too much at this point.” You forgot to mention EZ Pass, which is already like $13 for cars over the GWB.
Congestion delay starts going up really fast once you hit a certain number of vehicles, so you don’t need to get rid of that many for things to drastically improve
Suburban traffic from Long Island to NJ, used to select the holland tunnel for lowest toll cost. (Traffic delays is not factored in mentally)
The congestion pricing made the veranzano bridge cheaper, so suburban traffic bypass Brooklyn and Manhattan. It patched a tolling glitch
More than that, the toll was $16 and there's a partial credit that makes the congestion fee only $6. People aren't responding rationally to an incremental increase in price, they've been scared off at the idea of "congestion pricing" and received a message to not drive
They are likely picking very specific streets.
The data I have seen is that on the entries and exits (bridges, tunnels, feeder streets), there is a big drop in time taken.
But for other routes within Manhattan there has been hardly any change.
I had a panic attack in 2019,
I was $1M in debt,
only $500k in inventory,
with a $20k/ mo rent,
and $50k/ mo payroll,
Here's what happened,
Because they're not deterred from going into Manhattan.
It's about the marginal cost of taking the train instead of driving. And $9 is apparently more than enough for people to deal with the general public.
It’s not. You only have to shift a few percentage points of traffic to turn a massive jam into smooth flowing cars
I think a lot of people just permanently operate as if the marginal cost of operating a car is zero, rendering the $9 a conscious choice in their minds whereas they treat gas/insurance costs as somehow ‘priced in’/involuntary
The internet suggests the effect is slightly exaggerated due to January, but I'm guessing this is a) a super easy-to-calculate marginal cost and b) a situation where a large percentage of drivers teetered on the edge of the drive vs ride decision already.
I genuinely think the New York Post's hyperbolic coverage helped - the kind of people who drove into Manhattan tended to be Post readers and they've been bombarded with coverage that it is so expensive
The big irony here? The years of fighting and push back against this policy have essentially made it *more* effective - it's reached a level of popular salience that the perception of cost is greater than the reality
This is implying they’re just not getting into Manhattan now, when they still are, they’re just taking public transit. Price elasticity of demand is high when there are substitutes. This would only be surprising if the conservative fear mongering about NYC’s subways were true.
I don’t consider depreciation, insurance, or maintenance when deciding to make a trip or not. I don’t think any person does.
Gas and tolls matter because you’re immediately seeing the cost of those items in a way you don’t with the other factors.
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One is a directly attributable cost (you get the bill “immediately” for that specific action). When you fill at pump, pay for insurance, buy a new car, it’s a “one time cost”.
I think it will equalize over time as the policy intended. Right now no one is driving bc they think this is some unfathomably large additional fee. But you’re right, $9 doesn’t seem to be insurmountable and I assume traffic will resume (unless all the drivers get train-pilled)
It's all BS. Traffic will return to normal numbers. When someone goes to the city in a car roundtrip
$12 Turnpike Tolls
$17 Tunnel Toll
$50 Parking
You think NJ folks care about $9...
Traffic will be back to normal within 2 weeks.
There were always blocks without many cars, at least at some times of day. The parking reserved for loading/unloading.
You're not supposed to see blocks full of traffic. If cars are moving properly then they'll get to their destination in a timely manner.
I've known people who will drive 40 miles to get gas for $2.90 instead of $3.00. People don't process what numbers mean.
People overestimated how bad traffic in Manhattan was before congestion. It really is not a hard city to drive around other than very specific streets at very specific times. Most little jams are from getting stuck behind double parked trucks or garbage trucks
the costs of gas, insurance, depreciation, and time for driving all extremely well-hidden and societally normalized. A $30 roundtrip uber to most drivers feels worse than spending $10 on gas, $5 on depreciation, $15 on parking, etc to go somewhere.
There's only a 7% decrease in traffic, I hear, so these reports of empty streets seem a bit exaggerated.
It is the immediate $9, followed by the $21.60 commercial CPZ that is included in all services, food that you would want to buy but now will get priced out on.
1 of my contractors flew into EWR, took an Uber thru CPZ to Williamsburg and paid $80 for a dinner by himself.
It’s the media hype. It’s already 15-25 or more in existing tolls. The surcharge just got a lot of people overreacting. It will equilibrate.
All of those other costs are invisible and not associated in the minds of drivers with that specific trip.
I think people don’t usually consider depreciation and insurance while driving, even if they should. It’s not as direct as parking or congestion charge. Even fuel use, they won’t treat it the same as a subway fare
It's not just NJ traffic that's impacted. It's also traffic from Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island too.
This idea that all the traffic is caused by NJ alone is absurd
The simple answer is most people don’t consider indirect/implicit/non-cash costs.
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Same for outer boroughs. Roundtrip metrocard is $6, what's an incremental $3?
hiking the price of something by two thirds is a lot. i know gas is famously an inelastic good but very little is THAT inelastic.
honestly I wonder if the whole political hullabaloo actually materially impacted peoples’ conceptions of congestion pricing. People think about how much hay was made about it and not that it’s just a 9 bucks bridge toll.
