Kathy Hochul’s decision to halt congestion pricing in NYC — if it holds — is a generational setback for US climate policy. It is worse than the Mountain Valley pipeline or Willow project in Alaska, and it will have lacerating national implications.
I wrote about it: heatmap.news/economy/kath...
get her ass
if she has to reverse course, it wouldn’t be the first time she stabbed an important piece of NYS climate action in the back and failed to check that it was sufficiently dead before letting the world know about it
an error Cuomo never would’ve made, lol
Oh come the fuck ON! I have been on vacation and haven’t been paying attention, but for fuck’s sake, seriously? With dems like this, who needs republicans?!
I was infuriated when the legislature boned us on this in 2008, and this is spectacularly more boneheaded now.
Gah.
New York is under such spectacularly bad leadership right now. I hope NY Dems dump Hochul and Adams the next chance they get and replace them with legitimate Democrats.
Oh come on. It’s not any kind of hit against climate policy. It would barely dent even the local climate conditions. Not long ago, this was considered by the left to be neoliberal governmentality. There are far better policies we can implement
The point isn’t that this specific change to traffic in Manhattan would affect climate, it’s that the general idea of making driving in individual cars less attractive would affect climate.
If we can’t even do this (because of a Democrat no less!) there’s no way we can do more.
Not only can we do more, but we already are doing far more. This particular policy is very badly designed and wouldn’t even do what little it is meant to do.
We should try to associate Hochul with traffic in the minds of every voter nationwide.
- “We’re sitting in Hochul traffic”
- “Expect a Hochul slowdown on I-95”
Why do I feel like this is a repeat of the carbon-pricing circular firing squad in 2010? Like carbon pricing, congestion pricing is a NEOLIBERAL proposal. It could work, but we can't tie ourselves to it, or we'll sink and drown.
Unpopular opinion on Bluesky, but true: congestion pricing is a neoliberal approach, like carbon pricing, & carries similar negatives.
Congestion pricing would be much more politically viable in the US if someone decides to learn from Justin Trudeau. But that's Canada, let's just roast our own.
sure throwing automobiles into compactors and installing bollards around the city would be more effective than congestion pricing, but you shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
I’m fine with congestion pricing, and with @alonlevy’s critique of Hochul. As they point out, though, there are European very-pro-transit politicians and parties who prefer alternatives to congestion pricing.
I can't access it, but the stated rationale is that people for whom mass transit does not work for getting to their jobs, for whatever reason, would pay $3600 /year they could not afford. While the real reason is likely elections, do you have a thought on that cost?
Because it is a vanishingly small number of people. 1.5% of commuters to the affected zone drive to work. It is worth charging that relatively small number of drivers for their use of a limited public resource in order to improve transit quality, frequency, and accessibility for everyone else.
The best estimate I’ve seen is that driving a car into downtown Manhattan imposes $100 of costs on the rest of society, in terms of congestion, slower deliveries, delayed ambulances, etc. So daily car commuters should really be paying $26,000.
