I don't live in NYC but I have friends, both conservatives and liberals, who live in NYC and they couldn't be happier with congestion pricing. Increased subway ridership has increased police presence at the stations which has made the subway feel safer and reduced crime. Hopefully more cities follow their lead.
~15% of the PM2.5 pollution in NYC comes from vehicle traffic, so if you're concerned about that then maybe driving isn't the solution to your problems. if you were actually concerned about your PM2.5 exposure levels, you should be applauding any effort to get cars off the street.
Lots of things are also bad for you, but not only is pollution higher underground than at street level, the pollution on the subway is from iron-based particles which present different dangers. I'm all for reducing traffic, but not when it's done by packing more and more people into tunnels filled with unsafe levels of neurotoxins. 'Fix the public transportation to make it safe before forcing more people to take it" shouldn't be a controversial idea.
Your answer is to literally add more of the thing creating the pollution. This is not a serious opinion.
Mind you, overwhelmingly more people are killed by cars directly or through environmental pollution than from breathing in toxins while riding public transportation. Your focus on this is bizarre.
> Your answer is to literally add more of the thing creating the pollution.
No, the pollution in the subway contains high amounts of iron which comes from the trains (the metal wheels, brakes, and rails) and doesn't come from the cars on the street. Cars have their own pollution problems sure, but they're also out in the open. The neurotoxins produced by the trains are building up in tunnels and flooding enclosed stations every time a train goes by.
If you have to spend an hour either standing outside on the sidewalk near the deadly and evil cars or down on the platform near the trains, choose the sidewalk.
If we're determined to use things like congestion pricing to strong arm more and more people into going into the subway tunnels the very least we can do is make them safe to breathe in first. Improved ventilation and replacing the wheel system on the trains should help to do that. Then we can reduce the number of cars on the road without knowingly poisoning more and more of the population in the process.
> If you have to spend an hour either standing outside on the sidewalk near the deadly and evil cars or down on the platform near the trains, choose the sidewalk.
Do you have any idea of how many pedestrians are killed by cars every year? This is like choosing to drive across the country instead of taking a plane out of fear of the additional X-rays you get while flying.
> This is like choosing to drive across the country instead of taking a plane out of fear of the additional X-rays you get while flying.
If I knew that by flying I'd be exposed to radiation at levels 17 times higher than what was already considered unsafe* driving might start to look a lot better.
*Yes, technically, there isn't really a "safe" level of radiation. There is a range that is generally considered acceptable and a range which is basically unavoidable, but you know what I mean
Unlike 9/11 which was a single event, this is happening every single day, multiple times a day. Over 25% of the subway lines and platforms are filled with unsafe levels of neurotoxins. Forcing more and more people to use the subway without first making it safe for people to use is extremely unsettling.
The fact is that congestion pricing is driving people to an unsafe alternative that will result in more autism, schizophrenia, ADHD, and cancer. Fix the public transportation so that it's safe and more convenient and people will take the better option without the need to punish anyone.
And living near a highway is linked to health issues like cardiovascular disease, dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS. More cars and road is not more healthy.
That's also true, but more people in Manhattan ride the subway than live live next to a highway and trading one pollution hazard for another isn't improving anything. It'd be a lot better to make the trains safe before forcing people onto them than to point to other people who are also being poisoned.
At this point it is clear you are trolling, either intentionally or not. You want to drive more people to cars, which are a leading cause of death in the United States. Trains don't even rank.
We've tried for decades to make cars safer. They still kill more people than virtually everything other than heart disease, lung disease, and cancer (which themselves are all positively correlated with car use).
No, and I never said that. Acting as if I just want more people to drive cars would be like me acting as if you just want to gas the poors in subway tunnels all so that you have less traffic to deal with while you drive into the city in your car.
By all means, let's get more people into trains and out of cars, but before we do that, let's remove the dangerously high levels of neurotoxin that makes the trains unsafe to use. It's not as if we can't, so why wouldn't we choose to?
This is a chicken egg problem. No one is demanding better public transit if the demand isn't there and we already know more cars are a problem. Congestion pricing increases demand for transit, takes cars off the road, and increases MTA funding to fix these issues. It is not perfect but it is better than cars sitting in Manhattan smogging up the air in traffic.
Also not good for you! It helps a lot that most of that stuff is outdoors while hanging around in an underground train station is more like hanging around in a closed garage while your car is running.
I'm not arguing that cars are ideal and we should all use more of them. I'm just saying let's not force people into tunnels filled with neurotoxin when we can just remove the neurotoxin first.
Acting as if I just want more people to drive cars would be like me acting as if you want to gas the poors in subway tunnels just so that you have less traffic to deal with while you drive into the city in your car.
