Once the Uber drops you off, it's available to take someone else somewhere they need to go. Car services are an essential part of a total system that enables people not to have to drive. Personal cars are the opposite of that.

It's one of those things about the way Americans think about transit that makes me insane, they try to assess the ROI of every single individual leg of a transit system rather than assess the system as a whole.

For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.

That's just one example. Here's another more suited to your example. What if you generally switch to taking transit into the city, and only take an uber when it's raining or you have something heavy to carry?

If I allow there to be a robust market for Ubers in the city then that's possible. If I aggressively charge Ubers then you can't do that, and you're back to driving every day.

There's plenty of examples. But in short it's clear that private cars are by a mile the worst and most inefficient thing occupying the roads. That's what we want to have the strongest incentives against.

>For example they'll cancel late night bus service because very few people use it. Except that the people who do, are people who occasionally are forced to stay late at their job and rely on the bus running late. Once it's cancelled they have to drive to work every single day since they're not sure they won't be stranded. The 3-4 bus rides a month they used to take are exchanged for 22 private car trips because you cut back service.

That's a cute anecdote but is there any empirical evidence behind this? I'd imagine the people who commute downtown, stay late often enough that this is a concern, is willing to take the bus even though they have a car and can otherwise afford daily commute downtown (gas/parking), but at the same time can't pay for an uber on those late nights, is approximately zero.

My empirical evidence is going to Europe and looking around.

I'm being somewhat argumentative on purpose but the concept I'm explaining actually is important. There's something similar to a phase change when a city/area becomes sufficiently well connected so that transit can basically solve every problem.

You go to somewhere like Switzerland and it just jumps out at you. There's a fundamental approach that everywhere someone wants to go should be accessible by transit in a way that's workable. There's also a fundamental decision that being able to bring a car somewhere isn't necessarily something that has to be supported.

It's just a different way of looking at things.

Can you envision an American town that literally does not allow cars anywhere near the actual town, like at all?

If that seems utterly impossible to visualize then you're starting to see what I mean. Now try to visualize a Swiss town that literally has no ability to connect to the broader transit system.

Service industry workers tend to get off between 2:30 and 4:00AM. If you get off at 2:30, great, you can take the bus or train back home. If you're held late to clean or do prep for the next day? You'll be waiting until transit service resumes in the morning (as late as 6AM).

So what do you do? You drive to work every day and pay the parking costs, because it's preferable to ending up stuck downtown with everything closed for several hours while you're exhausted from working a double.

This problem with public transit is the single biggest reason people who work at restaurants have to always drive to work. It's exactly as the comment you're replying to put it.

I guess to me it just seems like you want to deter end users picking taxis/ubers over trains a bit more, and $1-2 is not going to do that when they are already paying 5-10x subway fare for their ride.

I can see by your example how over the course of the day the taxi/uber collects a lot of CPZ fees for the city, I just don't see the fee reducing anyone at the margin from using taxi/uber.

At the end of the day I'd love to see transit improve, and if all this does is reduce traffic for the well heeled who already are taking taxi/ubers.. I mean I win there too, but it doesn't feel great.

For the record when I commute it's always by transit, the problem is weekend/night service has degraded to the point that I feel forced to take taxi/uber quite often. I've lived in NYC nearly 20 years and have found, if anything, night/weekend service to be less predictable and more perplexing. This again harms the less well off even more, as they are more likely to be doing shift work / non-traditional workdays than your M-F 9-5er.

Just this weekend, yet again, I was trying to get around midtown and Apple kept telling me what should be a 6min trip would take 30min by train even though I was 5 seconds from subway entrance. I couldn't understand why, and went to MTA website and saw no alerts for the 6th ave line. Then I went to the live train time page and realized the problem - the 6th Ave line was running at 15min headways, so Apple had me walking 2 blocks to 8th Ave then to wait 15min for the train (possibly 30min if its a B/D and I needed an F/M). This was Saturday around dinner time. Just awful service.

Agree that service in NYC these days is worse than it was about 15–20 years ago. At the time I didnt know that the MTA was the center of a political power play between city and state, depending on whimsical politicians in two centers to cooperate to get anything done. The main improvement in the last 20 years have been the time tables and the linkage to maps on the phone, which at least make the pain predictable at most times, even if not always explainable. I hope service can improve soon and more trains thrown at peak times. The current situation is borderline dangerous at crowded stations during my commute peak hours and if more people yet use the subways without improved service things will turns worse yet.

> This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?

It's not obvious that Uber is exclusively the higher-class option. Someone could easily make the same calculation you just did and decide that for them even owning a car wouldn't be worth it, they'll just do Uber every time they need to. You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.

I don't have data to back it up, but I would actually be surprised if the average Uber customer in NYC owns a car at all.

> You can afford to own a car and do Uber anyway, others can only afford to Uber occasionally when needed.

This isn't really a different class.

The other class is the people who can't afford a car or Uber and can barely afford the MTA.

Agreed, I'm just using the terminology that OP was. The actual class lower than this doesn't pay the toll at all, whether the Uber toll or private car toll.

Think of the congestion charge as a charge on the vehicle, rather than on the person, as the stated policy goal is to reduce the number of vehicles in the CBD, not the number of people overall. The Uber is very likely going to continue to be used to service other passengers after dropping you off within the same calendar day, so one potential "fair" solution is to split the congestion charge among the many passengers using that one vehicle. That is your reduced Uber toll charge. But even in this case, it's not really an even split, taxis are going to generate a much higher congestion charge revenue than a single passenger car.

The rideshare toll is already a charge on the vehicle and not the riders. If you share an Uber with two other people, the per-person congestion fee for the trip drops to $0.50.

Alternatively, day parking rates drop enough (due to market forces) to compensate for the cost of the toll.