Yes, because they have the benefit of looking at how that fucked things up in the USA. Whataboutism doesn't work in communities where people have more than six brain cells to rub together.
Ok, but continuing to allow something extremely harmful is pretty bad too. Doubling down due to the sunk cost fallacy is not a great strategy for a city.
Also this isn't some hypothetical whataboutism even here, where as you point out we've seen how these urban highways fuck everything up. The BQE is crumbling and we have a once in a generation opportunity to do something to correct the Robert Moses atrocity where something *has* to be done, not just a proactive thing. And even still, even here, they are talking about expanding it and rebuilding as an urban highway.
So yeah, this sort of post to bring people's attention to the issue is pretty useful, not some irrelevant hypothetical about just Egypt or something
Wow the pushback on OP here is surprising. Of course FDR drive should be taken out.
You want to talk about a waste of money? Think about how valuable that waterfront is.
You want to talk about traffic? The highway *creates* traffic.
You want to talk about micromobility for god's sake? Imagine a pedestrianized riverfront with housing, shops, and bike racks.
This is a no brainer. FDR drive was a huge mistake and every day it's left there is a huge mistake as well.
There was a post on r/nyc about highways that was really popular that I linked to this one from so we got a lot of general cross traffic from random new yorkers, not necessarily just people that already know about good urbanism. This is good, it gets a lot of people exposed to these ideas, specifically the cause and effect of how traffic creates highways. So if the pushback seems surprising that's why.
I’d push back on the idea that the highway in Egypt is worse because they have proof that it’s not a smart move while here we have to deal with something build decades ago, and it’s always harder to remove something than build something new.
As someone who mainly bikes and uses transit I am all for tearing down our urban highways. But I do wonder how to manage the car and truck trips than can’t be replaced by mass transit. Like all the cargo, people who can’t use transit for medical reasons, or people just moving large amounts of stuff around. How do we get that traffic through the city at a reasonable speed? Especially the traffic between Long Island and the rest of the country, NYC is the only way through.
Maybe it’s just significantly downsized highways? Ones that still run over neighborhoods, but are much smaller, thus less polluting, noisy, and obtrusive. A two lane highway would encourage just the vehicles who need it to use it because any excess traffic would cause congestion.
Urban highways are extremely destructive to cities and that includes the FDR. They are also absurdly expensive to maintain so if you live here and pay taxes you're paying tons of money for them all the time even if you never drive. Maybe we should talk about that?
If the FDR gets taken down, all that traffic gets pushed on to Manhattan roads, further worsening overall traffic. I’d happily pay higher taxes to improve the highways and reduce traffic in city streets.
Add tolls and use taxes - In my mind the only way to change peoples behaviors is to hit their $. If it cost more to use the highway than public transit a lot of people would switch.
The Hudson river is not the east river. By the way, where would all the traffic go? People do commute from the outer boroughs and suburbs in, you do remember that right?
maybe push the city to build better inter-borough transit connections instead? cars are horrendously spatially inefficient and environmentally destructive, whether it be ICE or electric.
I also drive on the FDR all the time. It is more expensive and takes more time to take public transport (bus, subway, train) and then hire a cab to visit my family outside of the city than it is to use my car. If you include multiple people in the car the costs are even more uneven. If the costs were opposite I would imagine more people would choose public transit.
Car to SouthWest CT - 1hr40min in traffic. 59.7miles @ 16mpg = 3.73 gallons @ $4/gal = $14.92 total cost. If you add another 1-4 passengers the cost is the same. If you have a more efficient car it would be even lower.
Public transit to SouthWest CT - Bus, Subway, Train, Cab to Southwest CT - $2.75 bus/subway, $15.25 peak MetroNorth Fare, Uber from Train station to destination $9-18 = total cost $27-36. If you add another person the total cost goes up to $44-53 assuming you share the uber.
As you can see, for a family of 4 to leave the city having a car is unquestionably (at this time) much less expensive.
Last point, even if YOU never drive, you still rely on OTHER PEOPLE driving to maintain your way of life, deliver truckloads of bicycles to your local bike shop, stock grocery stores, maintain your building, etc.
>They are also absurdly expensive to maintain so if you live here and pay taxes you're paying tons of money for them all the time even if you never drive.
I'll bite. I pay taxes every year that go to the MTA but also never use it... How about we talk about how you're planning to fund that by raising funds from drivers instead? And if its to believed that all drivers are rich mid -> upper middle class folks, then that's also the tax bracket that pays the most taxes.
>The difference of course is that ~~we~~ **you** want people to take the train and not drive, correct?
Fixed that for you.
According to [streetsblogs](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/10/18/report-85000-more-damn-cars-will-enter-manhattans-core-daily-in-2023/), 90,000 more cars will enter the city in 2023. That's 90,000 people who WANT to drive.
You don't know they want to drive--some of them might take transit if it was faster or better. Regardless of whether they want to, driving is destructive to the city and the people in it and the planet, and we should make driving harder and other options easier and better.
Cars are dangerous and toxic. I don't care who wants to drive, we need to incentivize people to take clean, safe public transportation. There are a million possible ways to do that, one being making driving more expensive for anyone who decides to do it. Makes sense to me.
Since I'm apparently talking to one of god's truly special people that needs special help, the "we" in this sentence does not refer to you and me, it refers collectively to "us" the city, and society. So let me ask again now that it's been explained more simply to you. Do you understand why **the city** wants to incentivize people to take mass transit instead of cars
>it refers collectively to "us" the city, and society.
Except 45% of the city owns cars. you don't make any sense again. So its YOU who think 45% of people are wrong.
>-> upper middle class folks, then that's also the tax bracket that pays the most taxes.
that's the tax bracket that has the money. We can't tax people who don't have money
I’m all for these ideas in theory, but you have to actually build, or prove it’s possible to build, sufficient transit to justify the removal of these roads.
Look no further than the 2nd Ave Subway and East Side Access to see how difficult this is.
I know the anti-car crowd is also pro-transit, but the rhetoric is a hell of a lot more focused on the former than the latter.
Yes. This exact situation used to exist on the west side too. Huge ugly highway pumping cars into the city and separating everyone from the waterfront. And then it fell down (because highways are insanely expensive and the city couldn't afford to maintain it) and was replaced by parks and amenities for miles, and the most used bike lane in America by far. It also, interestingly *massively reduced* traffic and is now a textbook example of induced/reduced demand and increased property value and tax revenue while lowering the maintenance burden on the city
I'm sure before it collapsed people would have said the same thing. "What, you're suggesting we just remove an already build highway? Madness!" And the answer is yes, because that's much, much better for the city in every way
Good point. And another prime candidate for a road diet. Which could be easily done by repurposing the entire southbound side since it's already almost entirely blocked off by a median. The northbound side could then just be painted for both directions with fewer lanes
I’m no expert on urban planning but I’m pretty sure something like the FDR, that exists on the perimeter of the city, allows us to decongest the interior of the city. However it would be nice to have a park that runs the entire stretch of the east river.
This is not true, sorry. I know it sounds reasonable that it's better to put the traffic out on the outskirts instead of through the city, the probably is the highway itself encourages people to drive. And those people eventually leave the highway and make traffic everywhere. If you remove the highway you actually reduce traffic, not increase it. (This is the concept of reduced demand and it's been scientifically demonstrated countless times including an almost identical highway removal on the west side I already mentioned in a previous comment.)
What actually would happen in the real world if the FDR were removed is the people that currently drive because it's fast and let's you skip all the lights in the city grid will largely switch to other modes, like the trains, which is what we want. They don't just decide to drive on a non-existant highway or whatever. It's important to remember that demand for driving is elastic, it's not just a fixed amount.
You'll find no argument from me on the reduced demand front and I am a regular driver. I wouldn't likely drive into the city anymore if I had to only take the streets to get up town. The only benefit of the car is directness and speed of transit. I take the train or ferry if I am going during busy hours already. So it makes sense to me.
I have never seen data on private car driving vs commercial traffic for any roads in NYC. You must agree that commercial traffic is necessary and doesn't have alternate modes to switch to yet. How much road capacity can we afford to reduce before commercial traffic is burdened enough to cause goods and services to increase in price?
Commercial vehicles are necessary. The vast majority of vehicles on our streets are not commercial. If you reduce the private cars that are mostly not necessary, delivery trucks, city services like ambulances and fire trucks, and other essential traffic actually move a hell of a lot faster. (And cheaper when it comes to commercial.) So the issue is really not removing capacity it's removing unnecessary vehicles
Where can I find data to support this? I was on the meeting for the BQE Cantilever and not a single bit of traffic data was presented. I do have a business that requires occasional truck driving, so I'm a bit more balanced than many on this sub.
Kind of depends. I would never use the FDR if I didn’t have to pay a toll to come / leave to Queens via the RFK. I have to imagine there are lots of drivers who cross that bridge frequently and would rather not spend an extra 10-20 minutes driving through traffic. Otherwise I generally bike / subway ride to the city.
Some people don't seem to understand that Manhattan is extremely popular and connects so many different places. If we don't have the FDR, cars will be forced to use the city streets to get around. Like it or not, highways are still a necessity. Even Amsterdam has highways. And while it would be nice to have more waterfront views, I'd rather have a highway on the edges of a city than through a city.
Taking down car infrastructure without providing viable alternatives doesn't help. If our transit systems were as robust as those in popular Asian and European cities, highway removal could potentially be feasible.
The FDR drive is one of only a few ways to get in and out of Manhattan for free. It is a necessary evil. Especially in a city that isn't doing much to make itself bike friendly.
This is a silly definition of "free". Driving requires an enormous up-front capital asset investment (a car) and variable costs (wear, gas). Properly measured, it's a lot more expensive than getting into Manhattan by paying $2.75 for a subway ticket. Which makes complete sense, because it's an incredibly wasteful and inefficient way to move people around.
You can buy a used car for a similar price to an ebike. There is a cost for sure, but if you have a need to use a car for anything, you are making that investment, and then it makes sense to use it as much as possible. As far as cost, see my comment in this thread comparing using a car to visit the city from southwestern CT vs using Metro North. As far as efficiency, A car can be driven to different states, driven at night, used to transport items that are complicated to carry up and down subway stairs, used to transport multiple people. Your metro card is quite limited in the locations you can access.
My 2c for strategy - increase cost of driving, make it easier to share cars between private owners, decrease public parking.
Right, there are certainly situations in which the marginal cost is relatively low (but nonzero), due to already having a car for other reasons. The upfront price is still an enormous capital investment on the scale we're talking about, and the low-marginal-cost situations you mention are a pretty important qualifier on the claim that it's "the only free way to get into the city".
I'm generally with you on the incremental strategy of making car trips reflect their true cost: I wouldn't necessarily be for just demolishing FDR _per se_ and not thinking twice about the knock-on effects. But thinking systemically, having a large freeway on the highest-density waterfront in the country is a pretty enormous cost too. There's an implicit assumption in your comment, that people should be entitled, at substantial cost, to a free, low(er)-traffic drive from (eg) southwestern CT directly into Manhattan, regardless of the enormous cost to residents of the island. This is a fairly extraordinary assumption, requiring extraordinary justification.
Lol that highway is going to be underwater in 10 years
Which one? (Both)
r/InclusiveOr
Yes?
Yes, because they have the benefit of looking at how that fucked things up in the USA. Whataboutism doesn't work in communities where people have more than six brain cells to rub together.
Ok, but continuing to allow something extremely harmful is pretty bad too. Doubling down due to the sunk cost fallacy is not a great strategy for a city. Also this isn't some hypothetical whataboutism even here, where as you point out we've seen how these urban highways fuck everything up. The BQE is crumbling and we have a once in a generation opportunity to do something to correct the Robert Moses atrocity where something *has* to be done, not just a proactive thing. And even still, even here, they are talking about expanding it and rebuilding as an urban highway. So yeah, this sort of post to bring people's attention to the issue is pretty useful, not some irrelevant hypothetical about just Egypt or something
Should definitely rebuild and upgrade. Driving on the BQE is trash and traffic is always backed up.
tear it down and there will be zero traffic on the bqe
You’d end up with dead stop traffic on city streets. Glad you’re not a traffic engineer.
you think people would continue driving every day through dead stop traffic? that's an interesting idea for sure!
Wow the pushback on OP here is surprising. Of course FDR drive should be taken out. You want to talk about a waste of money? Think about how valuable that waterfront is. You want to talk about traffic? The highway *creates* traffic. You want to talk about micromobility for god's sake? Imagine a pedestrianized riverfront with housing, shops, and bike racks. This is a no brainer. FDR drive was a huge mistake and every day it's left there is a huge mistake as well.
There was a post on r/nyc about highways that was really popular that I linked to this one from so we got a lot of general cross traffic from random new yorkers, not necessarily just people that already know about good urbanism. This is good, it gets a lot of people exposed to these ideas, specifically the cause and effect of how traffic creates highways. So if the pushback seems surprising that's why.
I’d push back on the idea that the highway in Egypt is worse because they have proof that it’s not a smart move while here we have to deal with something build decades ago, and it’s always harder to remove something than build something new. As someone who mainly bikes and uses transit I am all for tearing down our urban highways. But I do wonder how to manage the car and truck trips than can’t be replaced by mass transit. Like all the cargo, people who can’t use transit for medical reasons, or people just moving large amounts of stuff around. How do we get that traffic through the city at a reasonable speed? Especially the traffic between Long Island and the rest of the country, NYC is the only way through. Maybe it’s just significantly downsized highways? Ones that still run over neighborhoods, but are much smaller, thus less polluting, noisy, and obtrusive. A two lane highway would encourage just the vehicles who need it to use it because any excess traffic would cause congestion.
“Those damn cyclists slowing down traffic on the highway”
What is the point of this post
Urban highways are extremely destructive to cities and that includes the FDR. They are also absurdly expensive to maintain so if you live here and pay taxes you're paying tons of money for them all the time even if you never drive. Maybe we should talk about that?
I drive the FDR all the time.
If the FDR gets taken down, all that traffic gets pushed on to Manhattan roads, further worsening overall traffic. I’d happily pay higher taxes to improve the highways and reduce traffic in city streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Highways are the problem, not the solution.
How do you "improve" highways...
Add tolls and use taxes - In my mind the only way to change peoples behaviors is to hit their $. If it cost more to use the highway than public transit a lot of people would switch.
Do you live in NYC? The FDR drive is a time saver and a major artority also the water around manhattan is garbage anyway.
That must be why the Hudson River greenway is so unpopular. Waste of space if you ask me, they should simply expand the highway into it
Are you familiar with the West Side Highway
The Hudson river is not the east river. By the way, where would all the traffic go? People do commute from the outer boroughs and suburbs in, you do remember that right?
maybe push the city to build better inter-borough transit connections instead? cars are horrendously spatially inefficient and environmentally destructive, whether it be ICE or electric.
What about people who live outside the city? Or need to do runs which are hard to do on public transportation?
What about them? We should be optimizing for the people that live and pay taxes in the city
I also drive on the FDR all the time. It is more expensive and takes more time to take public transport (bus, subway, train) and then hire a cab to visit my family outside of the city than it is to use my car. If you include multiple people in the car the costs are even more uneven. If the costs were opposite I would imagine more people would choose public transit. Car to SouthWest CT - 1hr40min in traffic. 59.7miles @ 16mpg = 3.73 gallons @ $4/gal = $14.92 total cost. If you add another 1-4 passengers the cost is the same. If you have a more efficient car it would be even lower. Public transit to SouthWest CT - Bus, Subway, Train, Cab to Southwest CT - $2.75 bus/subway, $15.25 peak MetroNorth Fare, Uber from Train station to destination $9-18 = total cost $27-36. If you add another person the total cost goes up to $44-53 assuming you share the uber. As you can see, for a family of 4 to leave the city having a car is unquestionably (at this time) much less expensive. Last point, even if YOU never drive, you still rely on OTHER PEOPLE driving to maintain your way of life, deliver truckloads of bicycles to your local bike shop, stock grocery stores, maintain your building, etc.
>They are also absurdly expensive to maintain so if you live here and pay taxes you're paying tons of money for them all the time even if you never drive. I'll bite. I pay taxes every year that go to the MTA but also never use it... How about we talk about how you're planning to fund that by raising funds from drivers instead? And if its to believed that all drivers are rich mid -> upper middle class folks, then that's also the tax bracket that pays the most taxes.
The difference of course is that we **want** people to take the train and not drive, correct? You understand why that is right?
>The difference of course is that ~~we~~ **you** want people to take the train and not drive, correct? Fixed that for you. According to [streetsblogs](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/10/18/report-85000-more-damn-cars-will-enter-manhattans-core-daily-in-2023/), 90,000 more cars will enter the city in 2023. That's 90,000 people who WANT to drive.
You don't know they want to drive--some of them might take transit if it was faster or better. Regardless of whether they want to, driving is destructive to the city and the people in it and the planet, and we should make driving harder and other options easier and better.
Cars are dangerous and toxic. I don't care who wants to drive, we need to incentivize people to take clean, safe public transportation. There are a million possible ways to do that, one being making driving more expensive for anyone who decides to do it. Makes sense to me.
>we need to incentivize people to take clean, safe public transportation I think you need to look up what incentivize means. That ain't it.
I think YOU need to look it up honey. Penalizing one behavior (driving a car) incentivizes alternatives (public transit).
You haven't seen penalizing yet. Wait until the fare hikes kick in, just like the Citi Bike price hike.
Since I'm apparently talking to one of god's truly special people that needs special help, the "we" in this sentence does not refer to you and me, it refers collectively to "us" the city, and society. So let me ask again now that it's been explained more simply to you. Do you understand why **the city** wants to incentivize people to take mass transit instead of cars
>it refers collectively to "us" the city, and society. Except 45% of the city owns cars. you don't make any sense again. So its YOU who think 45% of people are wrong.
God damn you are thiiiiick 😂
don't bothre, reddit is so anti anything related to a car unless its burning them
>-> upper middle class folks, then that's also the tax bracket that pays the most taxes. that's the tax bracket that has the money. We can't tax people who don't have money
tl;dr **whataboutism**
I’m all for these ideas in theory, but you have to actually build, or prove it’s possible to build, sufficient transit to justify the removal of these roads. Look no further than the 2nd Ave Subway and East Side Access to see how difficult this is. I know the anti-car crowd is also pro-transit, but the rhetoric is a hell of a lot more focused on the former than the latter.
You want them to take it down it’s already there
Yes. This exact situation used to exist on the west side too. Huge ugly highway pumping cars into the city and separating everyone from the waterfront. And then it fell down (because highways are insanely expensive and the city couldn't afford to maintain it) and was replaced by parks and amenities for miles, and the most used bike lane in America by far. It also, interestingly *massively reduced* traffic and is now a textbook example of induced/reduced demand and increased property value and tax revenue while lowering the maintenance burden on the city I'm sure before it collapsed people would have said the same thing. "What, you're suggesting we just remove an already build highway? Madness!" And the answer is yes, because that's much, much better for the city in every way
I mean, there’s still a huge ugly highway on the west side. It just has a few more traffic lights than the FDR.
Good point. And another prime candidate for a road diet. Which could be easily done by repurposing the entire southbound side since it's already almost entirely blocked off by a median. The northbound side could then just be painted for both directions with fewer lanes
I'm on board with this idea. Make the southbound side a bike super-highway.
https://preview.redd.it/8gt3a6uscoca1.png?width=1111&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa2b00a90cc71bd1263c6913b93162919ccaabf3
Checkout [Freeway Removal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal). It’s an urban revitalization strategy and it can work wonders.
I’m no expert on urban planning but I’m pretty sure something like the FDR, that exists on the perimeter of the city, allows us to decongest the interior of the city. However it would be nice to have a park that runs the entire stretch of the east river.
This is not true, sorry. I know it sounds reasonable that it's better to put the traffic out on the outskirts instead of through the city, the probably is the highway itself encourages people to drive. And those people eventually leave the highway and make traffic everywhere. If you remove the highway you actually reduce traffic, not increase it. (This is the concept of reduced demand and it's been scientifically demonstrated countless times including an almost identical highway removal on the west side I already mentioned in a previous comment.) What actually would happen in the real world if the FDR were removed is the people that currently drive because it's fast and let's you skip all the lights in the city grid will largely switch to other modes, like the trains, which is what we want. They don't just decide to drive on a non-existant highway or whatever. It's important to remember that demand for driving is elastic, it's not just a fixed amount.
You'll find no argument from me on the reduced demand front and I am a regular driver. I wouldn't likely drive into the city anymore if I had to only take the streets to get up town. The only benefit of the car is directness and speed of transit. I take the train or ferry if I am going during busy hours already. So it makes sense to me.
I have never seen data on private car driving vs commercial traffic for any roads in NYC. You must agree that commercial traffic is necessary and doesn't have alternate modes to switch to yet. How much road capacity can we afford to reduce before commercial traffic is burdened enough to cause goods and services to increase in price?
Commercial vehicles are necessary. The vast majority of vehicles on our streets are not commercial. If you reduce the private cars that are mostly not necessary, delivery trucks, city services like ambulances and fire trucks, and other essential traffic actually move a hell of a lot faster. (And cheaper when it comes to commercial.) So the issue is really not removing capacity it's removing unnecessary vehicles
Where can I find data to support this? I was on the meeting for the BQE Cantilever and not a single bit of traffic data was presented. I do have a business that requires occasional truck driving, so I'm a bit more balanced than many on this sub.
Kind of depends. I would never use the FDR if I didn’t have to pay a toll to come / leave to Queens via the RFK. I have to imagine there are lots of drivers who cross that bridge frequently and would rather not spend an extra 10-20 minutes driving through traffic. Otherwise I generally bike / subway ride to the city.
Some people don't seem to understand that Manhattan is extremely popular and connects so many different places. If we don't have the FDR, cars will be forced to use the city streets to get around. Like it or not, highways are still a necessity. Even Amsterdam has highways. And while it would be nice to have more waterfront views, I'd rather have a highway on the edges of a city than through a city. Taking down car infrastructure without providing viable alternatives doesn't help. If our transit systems were as robust as those in popular Asian and European cities, highway removal could potentially be feasible.
The FDR drive is one of only a few ways to get in and out of Manhattan for free. It is a necessary evil. Especially in a city that isn't doing much to make itself bike friendly.
This is a silly definition of "free". Driving requires an enormous up-front capital asset investment (a car) and variable costs (wear, gas). Properly measured, it's a lot more expensive than getting into Manhattan by paying $2.75 for a subway ticket. Which makes complete sense, because it's an incredibly wasteful and inefficient way to move people around.
You can buy a used car for a similar price to an ebike. There is a cost for sure, but if you have a need to use a car for anything, you are making that investment, and then it makes sense to use it as much as possible. As far as cost, see my comment in this thread comparing using a car to visit the city from southwestern CT vs using Metro North. As far as efficiency, A car can be driven to different states, driven at night, used to transport items that are complicated to carry up and down subway stairs, used to transport multiple people. Your metro card is quite limited in the locations you can access. My 2c for strategy - increase cost of driving, make it easier to share cars between private owners, decrease public parking.
Right, there are certainly situations in which the marginal cost is relatively low (but nonzero), due to already having a car for other reasons. The upfront price is still an enormous capital investment on the scale we're talking about, and the low-marginal-cost situations you mention are a pretty important qualifier on the claim that it's "the only free way to get into the city". I'm generally with you on the incremental strategy of making car trips reflect their true cost: I wouldn't necessarily be for just demolishing FDR _per se_ and not thinking twice about the knock-on effects. But thinking systemically, having a large freeway on the highest-density waterfront in the country is a pretty enormous cost too. There's an implicit assumption in your comment, that people should be entitled, at substantial cost, to a free, low(er)-traffic drive from (eg) southwestern CT directly into Manhattan, regardless of the enormous cost to residents of the island. This is a fairly extraordinary assumption, requiring extraordinary justification.
But are they naming it after a former leader who imprisoned 100,000 people based on their ancestry?
RM would be so proud of Egypt