If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."
Cambridge in the UK tried it. They promised to improve the bus service only after introducing the charge.
It didn’t go over well.
And even for a small city like Cambridge it is a huge lift to go from an already inadequate public transport infrastructure and set of services to infrastructure and services suitable for a city where cars have been largely eliminated.
The irony of course is that bus services, specifically the guided busway, will be cut again soon due to ongoing lack of use. But the lack of use has been caused by long-running and poorly managed maintenance on the busway disrupting services to the point of unusability, rather than because of any real lack of demand.
Some people didn’t trust that promises would be delivered on public transport when it came to the congestion charge. Obviously cuts like this add fuel to that fire.
On a more positive note we have, over the past 10 years or so, gained two new railway stations, and that’s good. But we haven’t gained new rail lines and rail routes so they haven’t done anything really to improve the transport and congestion situations around the city. It’s easier and more convenient to get to London though, depending on where you are.
> and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
This is literally addressed by the comment you are replying to:
"What about the delivery people who need to bring this into the city?" They should be able to get in and out much faster, and their cargo makes it easy to amortize the cost!
> edit: and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
You charge the customer for the congestion charge and use it to pay the fee, just like anything else. I bid construction work and would include congestion fees into my bid or T&M rates if needed.
How do you think construction vehicles pay for parking? They charge the customer for it and use the money to pay for parking.
Definitely, 20 minutes of an electrician in a truck costs me about $45 ($135/hr cost). Probably closer to $170-180/hr in NYC which would be close to $60 if it saved 20 minutes.
Always the plumber who can afford every other toll but not the very low priced congestion pricing. No other occupation ever gets mentioned so we must think of the non-existent hundreds of thousands of plumbers who can’t afford it.
My point is that the parent to whom I was responding didn't address the cases where one need a motor vehicle for their work. If it had been addressed as 'those cases will have to pay for the charge and adapt their prices', I wouldn't have mentioned it. Of course, as pointed in another (more useful) response to my comment, for those cases it might become cheaper since they might spend less time stuck in traffic.
My counter point is very few people have those requirements beyond plumbers. That’s why everyone always uses the plumbers as an example. And as you stated someone else's point is that since there are very few plumbers they would benefit. So my point is that those people aren’t a large enough group to matter in the decision of implementing congestion pricing because their negatives from it are nonexistent or over-exaggerated.
> very few people have those requirements beyond plumbers.
I'd say everyone who's working in the various home improvements/renovations, so carpenters, tillers, HVAC/boilers installers and maintainers, roofers, painters, kitchen designers, those who install plancher or carpets...
and taking into account a minority that will have no choice but to interact with the new regulation (unlike service or white collar worker for whom it would be easier to take public transportation) seems like a good idea, no?
They were taken into account and the result is that the negative effects to them were negligible to the gains. They ultimately don’t matter in the end game. Sorry! But not sorry!
The MTA did a 10 year long study. It wasn’t something that appeared out of the blue.
I like trams, they're cool. I wonder if, once automated driving is advanced enough, we'll go back to cars and trams sharing the road (here in France all the trams I've seen have their tracks separated from the road and for good reasons).
Well I don't care how the money flows and neither should anyone else. It's a matter of allocating costs as closely to the origin of those costs as possible.
If you do that, it will turn out that buses (etc) are far superior methods of moving people around, but you really don't need to move money directly from one to the other.
> Well I don't care how the money flows and neither should anyone else
Why shouldn't people care how the money flows and why are you the decider of what people should care about? If the money from congestion pricing was for a new stadium for the Yankees, or to build a new heliport for billionaires' row, or it just went into the pocket of the mayor I think that would be concerning for everyone involved.
I've seen paid toilets in train stations (last month in le Mans, a few years ago in a corner of Montparnasse station, though that was before the last round of renovation) and in a mall (CNIT in la Defense). Some RATP train stations have public toilets that you can access with your train ticket, so it's not quite free.
> We'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm
While I'm sure the US has bombed a significant number of such people, I wouldn't call Iran as 'never meant us any harm' (though I'll still say the current war is a stupid mistake).
I tend to think that killing democratically elected leader of a country because they wanted to nationalize their oil, installing a dictator, then spending years trying to destroy the country could possibly upset people.
You clearly don't know much about Iran or Iranians if you think they are all raving lunatics bent on destroying the world for fun.
The clerics and politicians in Iran use the US as a great big boogeyman to drum up political support, but until recently most of the regular people just didn't care about the regular people in the US. Same with the people in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or ... If they do have an opinion about the US, its probably that they mostly wish we'd stop bombing their homes and just leave them alone.
But, it makes the defense industry a whole lot a money, and its good for getting Republicans elected. But helping US citizens, some of which might have gasp brown skin, that doesn't make any defense contractors any money at all! /s
If it happened, it wasn't in all of Innsbruck. I was there earlier this year and it seems a good chunk of the historical center hasn't been replaced by more modern buildings.
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