HN Reader

> Particulates issued from tailpipes can aggravate asthma and heart disease and increase the risk of lung cancer and heart attack. Globally, they are a leading risk factor for premature death.

Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. The study is about PM2.5[0]. which will chiefly be tires and brake pads. Modern gasoline engines are relatively clean, outside of CO2, though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44407-025-00037-2

Not surprising. The real question is how do we measure the opportunity cost of these measures? Is it a net gain? You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits.

I would really appreciate it if the Bay area got real congestion pricing and also enforcement. We have lots of HOT lanes here, but they are basically unenforced so everyone sets their ez-pass to “3” and gets the free HOV pricing, which rapidly becomes economical at the rate of enforcement in the Bay.

Frankly, if they let me citizen report - I could likely cover my entire tax burden in 2-3 days. At $490/ticket, the ROI for enforcement seems obviously there.

This article confirms my existing bias/belief that user pays and auction[0] based systems improve governmental programs and finite supply systems in a society like the USA.

[0]- Yes I'm well aware this is not an auction based system in this case.

No mention about change in average commute time?

How does NYC congestion pricing deal with disparate impacts? Real question, I don't live near NYC

You know what else would drop pollution and ease traffic congestion?

Allowing employees to work remote.

They should put subway stations in each of the 3 big airports.

It may have dropped pollution in Manhattan but I guess more pollution added up to the surrounding borroughs in addition to more traffic.

I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.

Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.

Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?

There was a study published about how much air pollution dropped in NYC during the COVID lockdown. PM2.5 was found to have dropped 36%. However with more robust analysis, this drop was discovered to not be statistically significant. I would caution anyone reading this who is tempted by confirmation bias.

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7314691/

To head off the almost inevitable recapitulation of yesterday's parade of misinformed complaints by teenage libertarians, please actually read the paper before commenting. The paper shows there was no significant reduction in entries to the congestion charge zone by cars, vans, and light trucks. And you can confirm this conclusion is consistent with their source data using their github repo. The reduction in pollution is coming from the significant decline in heavy truck traffic. Truckers were using lower manhattan as a cut-through route to other places and they are now doing that less, exactly as congestion pricing planners long argued.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213504

They should make pedestrian-only streets in most dense places of Manhattan and use these money to improve public transportation. Even just a few blocks of no cars would make a huge difference for livability of the city center.

all i gotta say is, super work, everyone!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65127-x

Now we can get back to our regularly scheduled global warming, without all those pesky clouds in the way.

Congestion pricing == demand pricing

Yet it’s good if the city does it but bad if a Corp does it?

Yea, if they could keep ALL of the poor people out, image how great that would be!

Some people are really going to hate this.

Interesting study. Similar results in London I heard.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213504

Whatever you tax, you get less of.

Imagine it actually mattered to them and they didn't force everyone into downtown offices instead of allowing people to work from home. This is a cash grab.

One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes.

I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.

Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.