Bad Traffic

Congestion pricing finally went into effect in New York City last week, over 15 years since the idea was first proposed. The new program charges a toll on vehicles (capped at $9/day for passenger vehicles) that drive in the central business district of Manhattan – that is, everything south of 60th Street. The goal is to encourage commuters to use of public transportation instead of cars, as the greatest city in the world currently boasts the world’s worst traffic congestion, despite having a mass transit system that runs 24/7. That system has been running in “crisis” mode for a long, long time with budget cuts leading to deteriorating infrastructure leading to overcrowding and unreliability. The billions of dollars in predicted revenue from congestion pricing is supposed to fund repairs (and fingers crossed, even expansion) to bus, subway, and rail lines. 

Congestion pricing has been incredibly controversial, even among New Yorkers, and nearly everyone’s a little unhappy with it (some, for example, want higher tolls; some oppose the program altogether). 42% of households in NYC own cars, which is less than half of the US average, but still a mindblowingly high proportion. Even here, car culture dominates. 

Oliver Milman recently argued in The Guardian that “extreme car dependence is affecting Americans’ quality of life, with a new study finding there is a tipping point at which more driving leads to deeper unhappiness. It found that while having a car is better than not for overall life satisfaction, having to drive for more than 50% of the time for out-of-home activities is linked to a decrease in life satisfaction.” 

Driving makes people miserable. Hell, driving makes me miserable, and I don’t even drive. I mean, I can drive; or at least there’s a driver’s license in my wallet. I haven’t been behind the wheel in about a decade. And honestly, I don’t need to drive to see its repercussions, to recognize how we have bent public space, public infrastructure to serve the needs of automobile traffic (and more generally, the automotive and petroleum industries). I don’t need to drive to tell you that cars have been a detriment to many aspects of health and civic life -- and not just in the obvious ways like traffic jams and environmental pollution. 

Sort of like the Internet.

(Something we should have seen this coming when Al Gore and others promoted the Internet as the “information superhighway.”)