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Comment by saas_co_de | Hacker News Reader

It seems like it would be fairer to privatize the roads entirely and force the people who can actually use them to pay the entire cost.

Otherwise poor people are subsidizing roads reserved for the rich that they can't even use.

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Even though this pushes road use into being more of a transaction I still don't believe that we should think about road use as a pure transaction. Infrastructure shapes how people live, work and play. Roads that cost $12 to drive will change the city differently than roads that cost $50 to drive on.

Specifically, I'd be worried about driving away tourists and commercial traffic. I doubt a lot of well-off locals would start driving in Manhattan if there were a congestion tax and less traffic, they'd keep taking Uber.

Even if we did view normal everyday road use as a transaction, the road infrastructure is critical to other services like police, fire, and ambulance that still make sense to be funded from taxes. If you want to be able to call the police, you're relying on roads being available.

Funding it with a progressive tax makes more sense to me than charging everyone the same flat rate.

Tourists is probably less of an issue for Manhattan than it would be a lot of places. Sure, there's the family of five from a nearby state that drives into the city for the weekend because the train costs add up for that many people. But, for most, trains, planes, or busses make a lot more sense given parking costs and the fact that driving into New York is pretty much a big pain. I've done it but not when I've had other reasonable options.

>Otherwise poor people are subsidizing roads reserved for the rich that they can't even use.

Welcome to the state of infrastructure everywhere, but especially in big cities like NYC.

Not so much poor people (who don't pay much if anything in taxes) but middle-class people.

Poor people already don't drive in Manhattan. They use public transportation.

What makes you think the best alternative to cut out the poor entirely?

My point is that charging both fees and taxes means that the poor are excluded, because they can't afford the fees, but they still have to pay part of the taxes.

All public goods are taxed even if they don't have associated fees. So, if we were to move everything to a fee-for-usage system, I don't think you'd like the result since the wealthy pay an extraordinarily outsized portion of funding for public goods and services (which they use far less than the average person). The poor would still be excluded because the new fee would be at least the existing tax+fee, plus some additional increased amount to account for the wealthier people who were paying an outsized portion through income tax previously. Now that rich person gets to pay the same $x as the poor person. The poor person is still priced out in your scenario.

> The poor person is still priced out in your scenario.

correct, but they haven't been taxed for something they can't afford to use anyway, so they are better off.

A lot of things are partly public-funded and partly user-funded - museums come immediately to mind. That doesn't seem wrong - the public funding is justified in terms of the public benefit (even a road that's only used by "the rich" can increase productivity enough that the generated tax revenue outweighs the cost), and the user funding is justified because those who use it get the benefit.

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