After the congestion pricing dust-up, let's look at the time/speed issues in southern Manhattan,
-40% of all vehicles cross 60th Street
- 200,000 vehicles come from the Lincoln/Holland tunnels
- 385,000 come from east side bridges
- In May, 2024 the average taxi speed was 4.5 miles per hour (it will get slower in the fall and Christmas)
- East 37th Street is the slowest half mile.
- Average time lost in traffic jams per year
NYC- 101 hours (highest in the known universe)
London- 99 (and they have congestion pricing already)
LA-89
Boston- 88
This, of course, does not include time wasted waiting in line at Mickey D's, the TSA or for your computer to boot up.
On the bright side, June 26th marked the 50 year anniversary of the first use of a bar code scanner to record the price of everything you buy. Think of all the time that simple act has saved us (and did you know that bar codes are based on a two dimensional expansion of Morse Code?).