Road capacity is a scarce resource, and it should be allocated with a market mechanism like every other resource. You can then take the economic gain created by the increased efficiency and tax it to provide more public transit services.
Among others, this creates an incentive to keep the resource scarce and to not invest into maintaining and expanding it. Why? Because the lowest level infrastructure is a natural monopoly: Even if it was technically feasible (put wires next to existing wires, put pipes next to existing pipes, put streets next to existing streets), nobody can afford to do this. The lowest level infrastructure is only efficient if shared.
And for this simple reason, it only works well as long as the lowest level infrastructure is public good. This is true for all basic needs: water (pipes, sewer), electricity (wires), transportation (streets, rail roads) and even the internet (wires, radio masts and towers).
The debate about the latter one is also known as net neutrality. But it's really just a special case of the general pattern - if you accept internet as a basic need in today's world.
On top of that public infrastructure, a free market can and should evolve. But note that it will only be a free market if the basic layer access is non-discriminatory, which in particular means that it is easy for newcomers to get in. Otherwise you have maket distortion from day one, and all arguments about market mechanisms are moot. Which is unfortunately the reality in many areas, although its badness varies from country to country.
Specifically,
1. driving causes pollution
2. people local to the freeway are heavily impacted by the pollution,
3. global warming is a real issue - solo drivers are a heavy contributor.
4. the freeway cost money and should have to pay its costs same as transit systems are made to pay their costs.
fyi - i carpool to work / take transit. I would rather see free buses and heavily charged car usage.
If you raise fuel taxes because there's too much congestion that's going to equally affect someone who lives in some rural area where congestion isn't an issue at all, and someone who's driving down a busy freeway every day contributing to congestion.
You also raise the price of gasoline, which has other uses that have nothing whatsoever to do with road transport.
If you want to discourage specific behavior you should tax that specific behavior, not tax something one or two steps removed from the behavior you care about.
PS: People often say you can't out build congestion, but the data in no way supports that argument. D.C. Metro area for example has horrible traffic, but just looking at road layout the failures are obvious.
Not all vehicles that cause congestion even use gasoline, which is another reason for why trying to solve congestion with higher fuel taxes is a bad idea. Your Tesla is just as bad for congestion as a gas guzzler.
Even ignoring that, regional fuel charges don't fix the problem. There's plenty of big cities where you can drive in specific areas or at specific times without causing any congestion problems, which is why it makes sense to charge road tolls on specific roads at specific times.
Vehicles can also drive to different regions to fill up, which becomes a big problem of arbitrage if you try to make the regions too granular.
PS: We want higher mileage people to get electric cars, so having no transit tax actually efficiently promotes higher mileage people from making the switch first. It's just one of many subsides associated with electric cars, but we will eventually just charge based on odometer readings.
> Congestion already has it's own price
> directly in increased travel time.
You just keep asserting that people should pay for their pollution, I agree! But that's not always the maximum price you should pay.
> charge based on odometer readings.
40$ is actually close to the market rate of time saved for a large percentage of people driving on that road. So, you might not think costs that don't evenly map to dollars as equivalent, but clearly the market disagrees.
> around in circles on a private track.
Easily tracked and an exception could be made, but most people would not feel the savings as worth the effort. Remember laws are thousands of pages long first and second order objections can easily be included.
PS: In effect every road in the US is a toll road, you might not agree with the prices and exceptions but people still pay billions.
Price signals are exactly the sort of thing that can be used to optimize (and fund) the maintainance of infrastructure. Right now roads are placed and funded by fiat, which is why they’re often located nonsensically or in highly irregular states of repair.
Billionaire Bob can spend $100,000 on a whim, but Pauper Paul can't scrounge $10,000 for life-critical health-care. Or after a natural disaster, market theory says equilibrium prices rise to balance demand, but prices cannot rise enough so that Bob hesitates to buy all the ice for his drinks, pricing Paul out of buying ice to keep his insulin cold.
It almost feels like there needs to be some fixed currency that everyone gets equal amounts of per day and that can be exchanged for the really important things. But then some people will accumulate that currency, and we're back to wealth distortions.
But most market exchanges do not involve the government (except sales tax). The government can't efficiently capture the excess funds Bob is willing to spend on ice to provide ice for Paul (though the increased price should provide great incentive for people to increase the supply of ice...)
1) Using markets to allocate resources without real money: http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/article/why-fa...
2) Finland charges road fines on a "day-rate" that varies depending on the offender's income: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
—- Medicare payroll taxes are proportional to salary.
—- Low income people that use hospitals generally don’t end up paying for their surgery and care which is passed on to people that do pay their bills.
—- Big pharma offers heavy discounts to low income patients for expensive drugs resulting in higher costs for the rest of us.
—- Under the current Afforadable Care Act free/low cost insurance is provided by raising taxes on the upper income people.
I don’t know what’s the best way to improve the system; I just wish the costs, who was paying for it, and where the money was going was more transparent. It appears that it is intentionally designed to be inscrutable.
Still fairer than the US, though.
Both the "fake money" and the "cost scales with income" are great ways to extend the applicability of markets to areas without currency or to minimize wealth effects.
Votes could be that, but they too are depreciating.
You just need to be a little less greedy.
“Scarce” in economics doesn’t mean “rare”, it means “has a non-zero marginal cost” and usually “has a concave supply curve”.
Merely that they idea that everybody can't have it, and there it must be rationed by economic means is a little crazy.
We can't all have private jets; but efficiency gains in food production suggests we can easily produce enough food. We are choosing not to distribute it.
This happened recently in Texas not because of a market failure, but because Texas has “anti-gouging” laws that prevent people from raising prices around a disaster, which entirely predictably had the effect of people being unable to get what they needed (wood, water, etc.) during Harvey.
https://hbr.org/2013/07/the-problem-with-price-gouging-laws
"A well-known gouging case involves the invisible hand actions of John Shepperson. After the Hurricane Katrina disaster, John bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul truck, and drove 600 miles from Kentucky to Mississippi. In return for his efforts and risk, he hoped to sell the generators at double his purchase price. Instead, he was arrested for price gouging, spent 4 days in jail, and the generators were confiscated. It’s a tricky issue: while Mr. Shepperson’s morality can be debated, his initiative would have unequivocally added supply and made some people better off. We all are charitable, of course, but how many of you would have rented a truck and driven twelve hundred miles round trip to sell generators for the price you purchased them?"
But we have a free market. /sarc
Consider police vehicles, ambulances and utility maintenance vehicles. Does anybody really think they should have to pay tolls? A real market forces purist would say yes, but in reality passing along those costs efficiently isn’t practical. Similarly in theory all roads could be toll roads, but the cost of raising those tolls would massively increase the cost of the road infrastructure, driving up tolls in a vicious cycle. The gas tax is a reasonable compromise by taxing road use indirectly, it doesn’t capture the differing costs of different segments of roads and the demands on them, hence tolls on specific roads. So in the real world you can’t just treat everything like a nail and hit it with a market forces hammer. It’s a powerful and useful tool, one of the best we have, but still needs to be wielded responsibly with an eye to the intended outcome.
If the electricity meter hadn't been invented, or cost millions of dollars, it's doubtful your home would even have electricity today.
Here's the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge as an example: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Even-police-cars-ambu...
The problem with _not_ charging any money for road capacity is that you are still rationing, but now the price is measured in people's willingness to waste time in traffic. And that time is just that, wasted. The money collected can be re-routed to other purposes.
Well... the mechanism is prices. A market machaninism, but not really a market in the full sense...
Anyway the result of this mechanism are fairly predictable. Fixed, scarce, resource. Price system. Unequal distribution of wealth/income. Most of the scarce resource will be allocated to the wealthy, who will outbid the rest.
At present, the non market price-like mechanism is generally time, and all people get 24 hrs per day.
Radio spectrum is a scarce resource
You can't solve those with market mechanisms
Electrical transmission and generation facilities are somewhat scarce and we all see how the "free marked" worked great in the Enron case there
Radio spectrum auctions are fairly commonplace these days.
Organ markets work reasonably well in Iran, and would be great for the rest of the world as well.
Electrical transmission and generation work really well in a market setting in most places that's been tried. What does Enron have to do with it?
Before accusing others of trolling make sure you understand the arguments presented, which you clearly don't.