Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

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Ouch! Regulating infrastructure purely by market mechanisms is an ugly anti-pattern that is well-known for decades, if not centuries.

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.

I would like you to reconsider this point.

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.

Add in that subsidising commuting by comparison punishes locating closer to your destination.

That's what gas taxes are for. Living near a freeway you are better off if they reduced congestion. Increasing congestion increases pollution as cars accelerate and break more frequently etc.

Fuel taxes are a very crude tool, road tolls are much better instrument to actually regulate the behavior you care about.

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.

You could have regional fuel charges. However, you don't want to discrage driving in a specific place you want to reduce it everywhere to reduce pollution everywhere.

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.

Discouraging driving in general is one thing with one market price, discouraging driving where it leads to congestion is another thing with a higher market price.

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.

Congestion already has it's own price directly in increased travel time. Which pushes people to use optimal routes to a destination. However, routing around congestion increases pollution via trip length. So you want to increase peoples ability to go from A > B, not hinder peopling moving from A > B with increased cost.

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.

Which is clearly not enough, as detailed in the article. If people only had to pay with their own time they would, and the road would be congested, hence the high toll. This is basic supply & demand.

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.

Which would be another case of not charging based on the actual cost. You could drive your street legal car around in circles on a private track, and you should pay almost no road tax, but someone who exclusively uses public roads should pay more. Under this scheme you'd pay the same for both cars.

> Which is clearly not enough, as detailed in the article.

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.

Pressure to take transit, coupled with few transit stations and low-rise/single family zoning around those transit stations, is worse: now instead of sitting in traffic, commuters with the least access to premium real estate must walk the furthest.

> Among others, this creates an incentive to keep the resource scarce and to not invest into maintaining and expanding it.

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.

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