This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
Sounds good overall, should reduce traffic levels significantly and make people consider whether they really need to drive their car in such a compact city.
Not sure if I agree with tolling motorcycles though, they don't take up anywhere near the same footprint as the average car
Well what are we tolling? Square footage? Noise? Carbon emissions? Deaths and injuries? Yes. Motorcycles are better in some categories and worse in others
fair point that I didn't consider! my assumption would be traffic, seeing as the toll is branded as "congestion pricing" - which wouldn't really make sense for motorcycles because they make up so little of the actual cause of traffic in NYC (large motor vehicles).
If we're talking about noise though, and how clean the engine burns fuel, motorcycles are 100% guilty as charged IMO.
Deaths and injuries is a little muddier because there are several factors at play, fault could lie on any individual involved in the accident, or maybe even the road design itself. I don't think these would be robust enough to use as the sole basis for a toll fee
I and most other people are riding around on stock engines with stock exhausts. Those confirm to stricter quiet standards in Japan than anywhere in the US.
To your second point, modern car engines have efficiency gains due to important innovations like direct fuel injection, whereas most motorcycles are stuck with port injection, a limitation currently forced by the fear of having a very high pressure fuel pump between rider's legs..
In spite of that, total bike emissions are lower for the same distance vs a car, we're not lugging an entire chassis, air conditioning etc. The result is that even carbureted bikes from the 80s could go 55-60mpg. Bikes also have much lower engine displacement, your v6 2L has about 2000 cm^3 of air and fuel burned per revolution, whereas most motorcycles are in the 6-800 cm^3 range, per rev.
Manufacturers could make them quieter, but that adds both weight and cost, more of one if you adjust the other. I look forward to electric bikes with great range, as I don't really do more than 350 miles on my long trips unless I'm late for something.
E: looks like Japan relaxed their standards since 2013, per some internal documentation, see slide 9 for harmonized requirements. Still quiet, all things considered.
Neat, thanks for the additional insight!
Motorcycles are still FAR noisier than cars, even brand new with the OEM exhaust. I don't think my stock bike is overly obnoxious, but it's certainly the noisiest vehicle around most of the time. Modern cars you don't even necessarily notice the engine from further than a few feet away.
Also, motorcycles have lower carbon emissions than most cars, but higher everything else. Can't exactly fit a catalytic converter on there. NOx, fine particulates, etc, are all much worse than a car's IIRC.
In the end these factors don't matter much because motorcycles in the West are mostly a hobby, so there's typically not enough of us to be a huge societal problem. However, if I'm going in the city I usually opt for my ebike because I live close enough and it doesn't make sense to annoy everyone with my noisy dinosaur fart machine.
You're partially correct, older bikes didn't have catalytic converters. Compliance with Euro 5 means all new models past... 2018 I think, must have one equipped.
As for noise, 75db is louder than a modern car, but we don't have room onboard to dissipate a lot of the sound energy like a car's long, standing-wave tuned exhaust does.
I don't have a car, just a bicycle and motorcycle. I like them both, though I trust my bicycle more when there's a blizzard.
P.s. I also like fortnine videos, he's mostly correct (though dead wrong about physicists being the grownup version of engineers) but look at the data for yourself. Keep in mind all these values are far, far lower than they used to be. We shouldn't stop striving for better, but we should keep things in perspective too: https://www.bts.gov/content/estimated-national-average-vehicle-emissions-rates-vehicle-vehicle-type-using-gasoline-and
Motorcycles are loud and the exhaust can be pretty bad, we don't want everyone buying one to get around the congestion fees. They still take up more space than a standard bicycle or someone who took the subway.
Eric Adams actually being useful? Now that's rare
His support has become more tepid lately. I wouldn't count him out of some eleventh hour bullshit.
The article got slashdotted so does anyone know how often that 15$ would be charged? Is it like a daily fee? Monthly?
Gothamist has more info, but passenger vehicles and motorcycles only pay once per day. For other vehicles, the toll is incurred every time the vehicle crosses into the zone below 60th Street/Central Park. There are a bunch of discounts and details for evening hours and tunnel users that already pay a toll, and additional surcharges for rideshare drivers. It's a little complicated.
https://gothamist.com/news/mta-board-approves-congestion-pricing-tolls-initiating-60-day-review
It's a specific area and it sounds more like a toll than a reoccurring charge. Not really different if that's your daily commute but it is avoidable.
instead of charging people why not invest in better public transit? why punish people who may not have a choice?
i hear public transit in ny is awful
this is what the money is being used for
trillions were just printed to bail out banks in the last few years, somehow we end up paying for everything but it never comes back to us.