The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I don’t think people expect streets to be free in the same way you don’t expect the police department to be free, the fire department to be free, public schools, etc.
In any case, my point is, we paid for the streets with our tax money and our debt, so don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” where the people are FINALLY going to have to pay for those roads the government’s been giving away for free for so long.
Because that’s just not true.
In New York, low-income New Yorkers who own a car (or live in the zone) will be eligible for a waiver [1]. People with disabilities, too, will probably be eligible for a waiver. (Some carve-outs are still being pinned down.)
Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab.
(Crowded streets have all kinds of nasty externalities. I live in the zone. Crowded streets mean lots of honking at all hours of the day and night. It means the constant smell of brake pads at street level. When I look out of the window and see a stranded ambulance, it's a reminder of the risk my loved ones and I will face when the day comes when we need an ambulance. Et cetera.)
[1] https://710wor.iheart.com/content/2019-04-01-congestion-pric...
One, pedestrian congestion doesn't exhibit traffic congestion's negative externalities. (You have to get to trampling-risk densities before that occurs.)
Two, "sidewalk passes" have no precedent. Congestion pricing has lots of precedent [1].
Three, this is a problem getting attention [2]. America has spent decades throwing lanes at traffic. Not all of that was a waste. Similar effort has yet to broadly benefit pedestrians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
[2] https://www.thevillager.com/2019/04/grassroots-group-calls-f...
Also keep in mind pedestrians have to share space with sidewalk planters, outdoor seating, trash bags, and many times, cars parked partially on the sidewalk, making the usable walking space less than 10% of the size of the total street space, yet still allowing exponentially more people to move faster than the cars the street was designed for.
Here's what they looked like before: http://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/c/c/3/a/cc3a56fafeaa6119/S...
Why do cars need a 6 lane road through the middle of the busiest pedestrian neighborhood in the world?
Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Simultaneously, they reduce the incidences of drunk driving, providing positive externalities.
Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone.
The failings of the subway and train infrastructure are due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA and untenable, collectively bargained contracts. At the same time that driving within the city will become more expensive, these forms of transport have been reducing service within the city and to the surrounding regions while simultaneously increasing fares.
[0] https://medium.com/@johnnyknocke/the-mta-loses-six-billion-d...
[1] https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Cuts-to-Metro...
[2] https://jalopnik.com/new-york-wont-shut-down-a-major-subway-...
>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
[0] https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partne...
According to this article [1], combined Uber and Lyft ridership in NYC was about 200,000/day in July 2016 (the most recent possible date for the original data). By July 2018, daily ridership was almost 600,000.
Is possible that Uber/Lyft lower congestion when first introduced, but worsen it over the long-run?
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-rid...
I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say.
[0]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-i... [1]http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
The major one being cost. IME uber most definitely increases the number of vehicles on the road.
The charge is levied on private transport and Ubers et cetera. It's unlikely to shift demand from Ubers to private vehicles.
On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect.
> The failings of the subway and train infrastructure is due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA
The MTA is a complicated problem. Part of it is high labor costs due to inefficient labor use. Part of it is conservatism with train speeds. Part of it is chronic under-funding.
The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
The congestion already does that. The issue is that it's a hard problem. You can't make deliveries to shops at 3AM because there is no one there to receive them. To the extent you can make deliveries at 6AM, they already do. But a delivery driver loads up the truck and then makes deliveries for eight hours. Telling them to work a de facto 14 hour shift because you're going to put two separate three hour blocks of "don't drive during peak hours" into the middle of their day is going to drive up costs.
And freight rail serves an entirely different market. That's used to transport bulk products in industrial quantities, not to deliver bread to the corner deli. Trucks sometimes are used in contexts where freight rail could be used but those aren't the ones driving through Manhattan during rush hour.
> The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
The problem is that the externalities are really just failures in the markets for alternatives that have dumped their natural demand onto the roads, because all of the externalities come from congestion, which could be absorbed by better alternatives if they existed.
If you make the subways better then fewer people drive. If you make them less expensive then fewer people drive. That means paying for them from taxes rather than fares -- just getting rid of the fares and using taxes instead would get a huge number of cars off the road and eliminate the overhead cost of all the fare collection infrastructure.
When you have things like minimum parking requirements or anti-density zoning rules, that makes it more expensive to build high density housing and subsidizes car ownership for people in urban areas. Then the people who live there drive more, because they have somewhere to park a car and therefore own one, meanwhile there is less housing there which means people need to live further away and then many of them will drive back in to their jobs.
Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives had already squeezed into congested roads. It makes driving worse when what we need is for alternatives to driving to be better.
Every other city's experience with congestion pricing shows decreased car use in favor of alternatives. Effects on local grocery prices were minimal. And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion.
Suppose the forest is on fire and instead of spending money to put the fire out, we just ignore it. Then a bunch of wolves come into the city to flee from the fire.
Someone suggests that we introduce bears to the city in order to drive out the wolves. Many people point out what a terrible idea that is, but some cities do it anyway. Then the proponents point out that some of the wolves have fled back to the forest.
But now your city is full of bears. And the surrounding forest is still on fire.
> Effects on local grocery prices were minimal.
This is cost disease in a nutshell. "We did this one thing that was a bad idea, but the net effect was small, so that makes it alright." What's the cumulative effect of using that logic as a general principle?
> And in the end, revenues paled in comparison to the health, infrastructure, policing, quality of life and economic costs of traffic congestion.
Compared to the untenable status quo, or compared to the better alternatives?
When the status quo is a dumpster fire, "this is better than a dumpster fire" is not a very high bar.
If someone says that managing programmers is like herding cats, retorting that programmers are not exactly the same as cats is not very helpful.
What is your actual counterargument? Why should we make driving worse instead of making alternatives to driving better?
## Fix the subway (by which I mean make it more like Japan's rail):
* Make loitering illegal, enforce it
* A 'short loop' everything recorded space
This is anti-vandalism / for crimes within a day
* Since this is the US, safety barrier the train
* In-city Automated circuits, automated schedule.
## An interface between the subway and the rest of the world:
Large parking silos close enough to the city to be on the subway grid (with good service), BUT, far enough out to have good use of the land. These too should have somewhat short loop subservience for security (maybe a 7-day rotation here). Parking can be charged for, but it should be less than the cost of having an automated driver take you in to the city, drop you off, and pick you up later.
## Every-day Freight backhaul:
As a transportation utility, during the more downtime hours the subway could be used by semi-automated transport cars to route pallets (or a replacement transfer unit) of things classified in several storage classes: Frozen, Refrigerated, 'room temp', not conditioned, 'special'. (Special being an un-conditioned, but ventilated with normal air, room that provides power for local regulation.) The transfer pods would be ferried along normal subway lines between cars during the downtimes. The stops would probably mostly be off of the normal ones, but exceptions might be made. Nearby storage rooms would receive the contents and buffer them. Those rooms are a city owned public utility (somewhat like paid parking spaces are now). Again, subservience on short loop, with added restricted access via RFID fobs and needing to show faces. Automated logging of who's checking in and which pallets they're taking out. At this point they may be close enough to hand/forklift transport, or maybe form an airport luggage style electric powered tram delivery.
## Reducing friction of desired transport methods:
Probably the free# (for people; #paid for with taxes) transport, and keeping the costs of the last-mile backhaul minimal for commercial ideas would be the biggest reduction. The increased patrols, and automated subservience backup (to trace fault after humans identify issues) are also supposed to reduce friction. In the narrative I've setup the civil enforcers are only supposed to be providing help, not hassling random people asking for papers.
You're already effectively paying a premium to account for the extra time the drivers have to spend in traffic. It's not clear whether the congestion charges will be more than the labor-time saved.
Also, a general point: typical market goods are, by default, "regressively priced", because most of them don't look at your income to determine the price. This is generally a good thing, because if every good's price scaled with income, there would be no material gain to earning an extra dollar.
Any time you recognize a real scarcity and ensure it's priced explicitly rather than allocated by an ever-choked queue, it's going to be regressive in this sense. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker by itself.
https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/31/inenglish/1548938901_32...
This doesn't make sense to me.
IME - the vast majority of time there is a single customer or group in a taxi or uber. Assuming this is in fact the case. Taxis and ubers increase the number of trips taken by vehicle, but let's pretend in their favor that they leave that number flat. While they have a passenger in them they are trading 1-1 for a private vehicle to a "public" vehicle. While they don't have a passenger in them they are trading 0-1 for private vehicles to "public" vehicles. That results in a net increase in vehicles.
You can't transport by car and reduce both at the same time!
Some combination of these two factors could mean that there are fewer cars idle at any time ("storage") and more cars in service at any time. I'm not necessarily saying that's what is happening but it's definitely possible.
Looking into the future, a great outcome of driverless cars would be the commoditization of car transport. You essentially say where you're going and whether you are willing to share the ride. A driverless car pops off the queue to pick you up, or a multi-person car slightly diverts from its route to pick up up (a la Uber Pool).
- Each physical car sees much higher utilization, allowing fewer cars to exist overall and parking space needs are reduced.
- A large network of efficient driverless cars means it's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion from everyone's route. Ideally an improved shared ride experience would result in higher usage of shared rides, meaning that fewer cars need to be on the road at any given time = lower pollution and congestion.
Fewer cars, but more miles. Every moment that a car is going between one drop-off and the next pick-up adds to the total.
> Each physical car sees much higher utilization
Higher utilization is a mixed blessing. The more a car is driven per day, the fewer days it will be until replacement. There's not much difference between two cars each being driven half the time all year and two cars each being driven all the time half the year. At best you get some benefit from keeping the car warmed up, but that's outweighed by the passenger-less miles.
> t's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion
That would work a lot better if demand were uniformly distributed, but in fact it's highly cyclic - toward office areas in the morning, away from them in the evening. This asymmetry is even worse for things like sporting events. Once a driver has taken a commuter to work, going anywhere else means 2x distance because they'll have to come back for the matching commute home.
The only way to reduce ecological footprint is to reduce the number of vehicle miles per person. It doesn't matter who or what is driving the vehicle. Reducing commute distance works, even when people are still in cars but especially when people can walk/bike instead. Increasing per-vehicle occupancy helps, whether it's car pooling or mass transit. Replacing private cars with shared ones doesn't make a dent, and in some cases can make things worse.
I'm not sure this is actually a common pattern, though.
As other comments have said, the effects on congestion are controversial [0][1].
> which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit
Not necessarily. If a trip would not have occurred otherwise, then there would be no decline in public transit utilization (subway lines seem to be closing with increased frequency recently, and people may have no other means of returning home). Of course, this would point to increased congestion.
> the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves
Would eliminating street parking further this policy? On many streets, it would allow for 1-2 additional lanes to be created.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
[1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
Arguably the problems are from systemic austerity:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Yes, they used to claim this, but studies show the opposite:
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-servic...
I read a study not too long ago (sorry couldn't find it), but it found the opposite - that ride sharing increased the amount of congestion.
At first it didn't make much sense to me, but the study did acknowledge car ownership decreased, but that there was more congestion. This was largely due to the time between trips for Lyft and Uber - driving from a dropoff to a pickup.
Taxis and Uber are most certainly NOT forms of public transportation. Both are owned and operated by third parties, not the public.
Not under any definition of public transit I've heard. Lyft and uber are private companies that exploit labor in unsustainable ways to compete with actually efficient forms of public transit. Taxis are much closer to being actual public transit as their cost reflects the inefficiency of having a devoted driver, but they are still not owned by the government and are disproportionately available to the rich.
Busses are public transit and actually reduce congestion. Uber and lyft are well-marketed and vc-funded luxury services. They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
This smells very similar to "access to affordable" housing and healthcare. Sounds great, but at the end of the day, people are still without health care and housing, so they clearly DON'T have access. Ownership is the only way to guarantee material access.
buses, trains, subways, and other forms of transportation
that charge set fares, run on fixed routes, and are
available to the public.
However, in the current context of discussing congestion—i.e. who gets to use the thing we all pay for—and other externalities like pollution and use of fossil fuels, public ownership is the salient thing to discuss.
From source [3], as provided above:
>> The taxi should not be viewed as antagonistic to public transport, people who use taxis are in general 'public transport users' not 'car users'. Any improvement in the taxi service should therefore be viewed as an important improvement in public transport provision. Any improvement in the provision of taxi services will be very valuable for people with mobility problems since they rely on the taxi for a significant amount of their travel due to the door to door nature of the taxi service.
> They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
As other comments have discussed, this is controversial.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
[1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
Taxis are absolutely antagonistic to public transit, as demonstrated by the ratio of human labor to humans transported. Cars are simply the most comfortable version of transit available to people who have the means. It is not available to those without the means. The idea that the taxi users are the same as bus users is simply being class-blind.
Charging people to offset a negative externality they are entirely responsible for should not be conflated with penalization.
NYC having congestion pricing isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world. Some might say it's long overdue. But the legislature doesn't have the political will or want to actually implement a fair, flat fee. Instead, the people who don't fit into a easily defined interest group will have to pay, and everyone else will get to drive for free.
If I have to pay to drive, then everyone else should to, regardless if they are poor, disabled, rich, taxis, ubers, or whatever.
This (like most other flat consumption taxes) is a regressive tax. It is a stated policy goal of the ruling party to reduce income inequality, not increase it.
The disabled are a group with very inflexible transportation demand, in that they are very unlikely to change their behavior in response to higher prices (because they can't); we already make a whole ton of legal accommodations for them like handicapped parking, and this fits into that overall policy.
Unfortunately, this sort of thinking has been the dominant mode in politics and legislation since, I dunno, the Roman empire? Riddle your laws and regulations and tax-codes with exemptions and deductions and carve-outs so you can please the people who put you in power and who will keep your in power. And since almost everyone is part of some random interest group (and many, part of a lot interests groups like married home-owning couples with kids), it usually works.
There's also that not all vehicles are going to tear up roads in the same way. Why would it be fair for trucks and what not to pay the same flat fee despite causing far more wear and tear on the roads?
Your argument would result in the poor and disabled being priced out of driving on the road.
Which sounds fairer to you: a movie theater that charges $5 for a ticket, or one that charges a percentage of your income?
People can choose whether or not to purchase a ticket. Many people cannot choose whether or not to drive. Which is why again, a flat tax would not be fair.
How would it be fair to expect someone on minimum wage or disability to pay the same amount to access a required service as someone far better off?
Congestion dynamics don't care about your income. Same imposition on society, same scarce good consumed, same price to get the incentives right.
But now, low-income? There are problems:
. You can be low-income and still own a car, and still be near public transport. Why would you be incentivized to own a car, first off, and drive it into a congested area?
. It's not the "low-income" exception that's the last exception. There are tens of thousands of City-provided placards for teachers, firefighters and civil servants with an unspoken rule by the police to never ticket them, even if parked illegally. This, plus the idea of exceptions just smell like another foray into a De Blasio handing something out for please one union or group or another.
These are parking placards, and I used that example to demonstrate what happens when we pick and choose winners and losers - what criteria do we go by, in a city of 8.5M? Which group suffers the most?
. There are low-income allowanced for things such as HPD buildings and other subsidies. I know people who make (as a couple) half a million dollars a year who still own real estate with income restrictions, because the income was only verified Year 1 and it became de facto voluntary in the years after that.
. A huge percentage of people are low-income in this City. And hold on just a second - you're low income but you're spending how many hundreds of dollars a month on a lease, gas, maintenance, and so forth for a far, and insurance in one of the most expensive insurance markets? Have people lost their senses to not question that?
I’m going to be that guy.
Why not write them a cheque whether they drive or not?
Everyone paying taxes to support some is fine when that thing is beneficial to society at large (e.g., public education, fire departments, welfare, etc.) I don't think driving counts as an activity that should be subsidized by the taxpayer.
IMHO, it better to tax normalized_areanormalized_weightnormalized_congestion . For example, if vehicle is 30% spacer than average, has 50% more weight per space than average, and uses road at peak hour when road usage is 50% more than average, then it should pay 1.3 x 1.5 x 1.5 = ~3x tax. If owner want to reduce tax, then it should use smaller, lighter car, and use it at off-peak hours, e.g. 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.5 = 0.4.
Weight or axles, but fuel tax isn't the way to do this. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with the sedan MPG necessary to beat a 40,000 lbs. semi that gets, say, 3 MPG. (And, BTW, semis haven't done as poorly as 3mpg for a long time.)
I'm saying we should tax vehicles in proportion to some integer power of vehicle weight, since the road damage is superlinear with respect to vehicle weight. a big truck that weighs ten times as your Cayman does much more than ten times the damage. since we're trying to fairly distribute the costs of transit, the operators of these vehicles should be paying the lion's share of maintenance costs.
No, it doesn't. Paying through general revenue doesn't make any sense at all. Congestion pricing is beautiful because only the people who use it will pay it, and that includes your examples. People who take Ubers or order something online or get food delivery will still pay congestion pricing, but they'll pay through increased prices.
We will end up paying some combination of tax money and tolls/congestion pricing, but it most certainly doesn't make the most sense.
You're not going to avoid these fees because you don't drive, you'll just be paying for them through higher prices on the goods you buy.
You're basically saying that the lower/middle class folks driving those delivery trucks will simply have to work at night, so you can avoid paying for your plan.
[0] https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/nys-leaky-gas-taxe...
1. https://taxfoundation.org/statelocal-road-spending-covered-u...
If we're going to cut funding for things that you don't personally use, we should cut public education before the roads. The roads are absolutely critical to the economy. Your kid learning Shakespeare is not.
Kind of how parking meters are FANTASTIC because they mean I can finally get a damn space for the rare occasion when I rent a van or car and need to park in front of my flat. I just wish they'd raise prices on my street because it's still tough sometimes.
It is too regressive to achieve that end. If you have a lot of money, it is a trivial cost for convenience. If you are poor, but would really benefit from road access, you still may not be able to afford it. You could easily frame this as "keep the poor off the road so the rich don't have to deal with traffic".
Anyway, making walking and cycling as crappy as possible by giving people congested, polluted, dangerous streets is pretty inconsiderate to poor people as is.
And the article specifically mentions waivers for low income people.
But true, the _worst_ for cycling is very busy but still fast roads. Wilshire blvd on a Saturday comes to mind
If this congestion charge reduces traffic and makes buses run faster, it's possible that it would actually massively benefit poorer individuals.
Driving in manhattan is already such a miserable experience, I'm not sure that $10 adds enough extra misery to significantly reduce weekday traffic, but I could certainly be wrong about that (and hope I am).
I haven't seen any real breakdowns on "who is driving around manhattan on a Thursday" but it seems to me that it is mostly taxis, car services, buses, and commercial vans/trucks -- almost all of whom can absorb or pass on the costs.
Someone who commutes in an SUV from Fairfield to Manhattan every day should have to pay much, much higher fees than someone who rides their bike from Greenpoint to Brooklyn heights.
Once (particularly wealthy) people are made to incur the true cost of their lifestyle choices, the hope is that better choices are made.
Public biking infrastructure wouldn't be possible without the roads and right-aways we already have for cars and pedestrians; someone only using a mile of roadway on their daily commute is benefiting from the entirety of the transportation infrastructure that everyone has been paying into equally despite their level of use.
The guy biking or even walking to work every day I'm sure orders food occasionally, buy groceries, pays for utilities, or otherwise participates in commerce, all of which require roads and vehicles. He's getting a massive benefit from something he doesn't directly use.
And as for the environmental damage, that is clearly the bailiwick of fuel taxes rather than congestion pricing.
So the only thing congestion pricing could be good for is to reduce congestion, i.e. suppress demand. But you don't want to suppress demand -- you don't want people to stay home instead of patronizing local businesses etc. The problem isn't too much demand. Demand is good. The problem is insufficient supply.
In some cases, particularly in suburban areas, when there isn't enough supply you can solve it by expanding the roads. In urban areas you typically end up with alternatives like increasing housing density near mass transit hubs, to shift the demand away from the roads because there isn't space to expand them. But in any case what you want isn't to eliminate the demand, it's to satisfy it somehow. Because once you have enough supply to satisfy the demand, you no longer have congestion.
This is not a choice between people staying home and patronizing local businesses. People are not driving into the congestion zone in Manhattan during rush hour to patronize local businesses. They're going to work. They are going to go to work one way or another. You realize there are other options besides driving alone in a car and sitting at home, right? If people have to pay the full cost of driving by themselves, they might instead choose to carpool, take public transportation, bike, telecommute, or other options.
Aren't they though? You drive to work, you stop at a coffee shop for a coffee and a muffin, you go to work, on the way home you stop somewhere and pick up dinner.
The bus isn't going to stop at the coffee shop and wait there for you to get your coffee, and if you didn't drive in then you don't have your car at work to go anywhere on your lunch break either.
> They're going to work. They are going to go to work one way or another. You realize there are other options besides driving alone in a car and sitting at home, right?
Options that are worse, by definition, or they would already have chosen them. And one of those options is to not go to work -- you take a job closer to where you live at the cost of lower pay, because you've been priced out of the one you had before. That is not a social benefit.
Compare this to improving the alternatives. Build more housing in the city, so that the density is higher, people don't have to travel such distances to begin with, and you can justify running buses and trains every ten minutes instead of every half hour. Which makes them quick and convenient enough that you can reasonably step off the bus to get a coffee and just catch the next one. Make things better instead of worse.
> you don't have your car at work to go anywhere on your lunch break either.
Dude. Again. We are talking about downtown Manhattan, not some suburban office park. Nobody needs to drive anywhere for lunch. There are hundreds of places to get lunch within walking distance.
> Options that are worse, by definition, or they would already have chosen them.
They are worse because you are currently able to offload the negative externalities of your driving onto everyone else. Now that you have to pay for those, you can weigh the true cost of driving vs. the cost of other options.
> And one of those options is to not go to work -- you take a job closer to where you live at the cost of lower pay, because you've been priced out of the one you had before. That is not a social benefit.
That's fine. How is that not a social benefit? If it encourages people to find work closer to home, that means less transportation, less pollution. Everyone wins. On the other hand, maybe it encourages employers in the city to pay more to offset the costs. That's good too.
>Compare this to improving the alternatives. Build more housing in the city,
This is not mutually exclusive. We can have congestion pricing and build more housing in the city. With fewer cars running around thanks to congestion pricing, that means we don't need as much parking, so there's more space to build housing. There you go.
And then you pay more for lower quality, because if you have to buy it in a specific location there is less competition and they know it. And paying more for lower quality is how you reduce overall transaction volume. You have to use the coffee shop next to your office, not the one you actually prefer, so either it's somewhat worse for you or it's sufficiently worse the transaction doesn't even happen.
> Obviously you don't stop in the middle for it. That is a ridiculous strawman.
It's the exact thing that people in cars actually do, to their advantage.
> We are talking about downtown Manhattan, not some suburban office park. Nobody needs to drive anywhere for lunch. There are hundreds of places to get lunch within walking distance.
This is all about marginal costs and competition. There is a place you love to go for lunch, but it's three miles from where you work and you don't have a long enough lunch break to walk there and back. There are six places right across the street that aren't as good.
No car and no frequent mass transit and your choice becomes patronizing the worse closer place or brown bagging it. Either of those is worse, and at scale they cause the better place to go out of business because they had been better by leveraging volume into a cost advantage that paid for higher quality at the same price. And the reduction in competition allows the worse place to get even worse or more expensive.
> They are worse because you are currently able to offload the negative externalities of your driving onto everyone else. Now that you have to pay for those, you can weigh the true cost of driving vs. the cost of other options.
The infrastructure is a sunk cost and the environmental impact should be handled with fuel taxes, so the only remaining externality is congestion. Which you're already paying for with your time.
Congestion pricing is just the rich taxing the poor off of the publicly funded roads so that they can express their strong preference for time over money, without making the changes necessary to make people choose alternatives voluntarily.
> That's fine. How is that not a social benefit? If it encourages people to find work closer to home, that means less transportation, less pollution. Everyone wins.
If everyone wins then why wouldn't people have chosen it to begin with?
Because it's a regressive tax that generates perverse incentives. Today you make $50,000 working in the city. Introduce congestion pricing and you would have to pay $5,000 in congestion fees a year, so you take a $40,000/year job somewhere else because all the extra $10,000 would now be going to state and federal taxes and congestion charges. But finding a new job is a cost for you just to break even, and a cost for your employer to replace you and potentially have to move out of the city due to the cost, and a cost for the government which has just lost tax revenue on the extra $10,000 in income.
And there is no guarantee the result is even less transportation. You could have to take a job which is twice as far in the other direction but avoids the congestion zone and then burn twice as much fuel and spend twice as long commuting.
> On the other hand, maybe it encourages employers in the city to pay more to offset the costs. That's good too.
On the other hand, maybe it encourages employers in the city to lay off their employees and close up shop, because the employees can't afford the congestion charge and the employer can't afford to pay them more.
And if they do pay more, then they may have to raise prices.
> This is not mutually exclusive. We can have congestion pricing and build more housing in the city. With fewer cars running around thanks to congestion pricing, that means we don't need as much parking, so there's more space to build housing. There you go.
Or you can build more housing without parking and there are fewer cars running around, and then you don't need congestion pricing.
Ok, I'm beginning to suspect you are arguing just for the sake of arguing, or have possibly never been to Manhattan or any other major city. Where do you think there is more competition among coffee shops:
1. Downtown in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
2. A suburban strip mall.
Seriously, just think about this a little bit.
> This is all about marginal costs and competition. There is a place you love to go for lunch, but it's three miles from where you work and you don't have a long enough lunch break to walk there and back. There are six places right across the street that aren't as good.
You're still thinking like this is a suburban office park. Nobody. I mean, not one single person, who works in Manhattan below Central Park is currently traveling 3 miles anywhere, by any means for lunch. Nobody. There are not "6 mediocre places across the street" there are "hundreds of restaurants ranging from hot dog carts to Michelin-starred restaurants" within a 10 block radius. Seriously, visit a city once in your life.
> Because it's a regressive tax that generates perverse incentives. Today you make $50,000 working in the city. Introduce congestion pricing and you would have to pay $5,000 in congestion fees a year, so you take a $40,000/year job somewhere else because all the extra $10,000 would now be going to state and federal taxes and congestion charges.
What? Congestion pricing is going to force people to give up $10000 rather than spend $5000? It's somehow going to make people forget how to do math? That seems unlikely. The state and federal taxes already exist and have to be paid regardless of whether there's congestion pricing, so those are a non-issue. The only difference would be the congestion charge, which from what I've seen, will probably be more like $3k per year, and most of the people driving in to work in Manhattan are making significantly more than $50k. For those that aren't, there will be subsidies.
If you want to shoot yourself in the foot and take a massive pay-cut rather than pay a nominal surcharge as some form of protest, well, your prerogative I guess.
> Or you can build more housing without parking and there are fewer cars running around, and then you don't need congestion pricing.
The congestion isn't coming from the people who live there. They can already walk or take the subway. The congestion is people driving in from elsewhere.
The comparison isn't between coffee shops in Manhattan and coffee shops in the suburbs, it's between coffee shops within ten minutes of your office in Manhattan as measured at a walking pace compared to the speed of a motorized vehicle.
> Nobody. I mean, not one single person, who works in Manhattan below Central Park is currently traveling 3 miles anywhere, by any means for lunch. Nobody.
Because the transit situation is such a mess. You can get away with it because of the density, but that doesn't make it good that it's so inconvenient to get from one end of the island to the other. You have a huge relative advantage and then give half of it back because the MTA sucks.
> What? Congestion pricing is going to force people to give up $10000 rather than spend $5000? It's somehow going to make people forget how to do math? That seems unlikely. The state and federal taxes already exist and have to be paid regardless of whether there's congestion pricing, so those are a non-issue.
Apparently some people have already forgotten how to do math.
If you make $50,000, the various governments take $5000 or more of the top $10,000 in taxes and benefits phase outs. So if you made $40,000 instead, you wouldn't have $10,000 less money, you would have $5000 less money because you would also pay $5000 less in taxes. If keeping the $50,000 job also costs you $5000 in congestion charges, the job that "pays more" no longer does.
The taxes on the extra $10,000 don't have to be paid regardless, if you make $40,000 instead of $50,000. There is $10,000 in total being lost, but $5000 is being lost by the employee (which is equal to the congestion charge) and the other $5000 is being lost by the government (who doesn't get to choose which job the employee takes).
> For those that aren't, there will be subsidies.
Which makes no sense at all, because then they won't be deterred from driving at those times even though they're the most price sensitive and that's how congestion pricing operates. Is converting it from a tax on the poor to benefit the rich to a tax on the middle class to benefit the rich supposed to be some great advantage? And that requires you to raise the congestion charge even higher to achieve the same level of deterrence.
> The congestion isn't coming from the people who live there. They can already walk or take the subway. The congestion is people driving in from elsewhere.
That's the point. So you build more housing in the city and then more people can live there and take the subway.
> The taxes on the extra $10,000 don't have to be paid regardless, if you make $40,000 instead of $50,000. There is $10,000 in total being lost, but $5000 is being lost by the employee (which is equal to the congestion charge) and the other $5000 is being lost by the government (who doesn't get to choose which job the employee takes).
My friend, you are seriously, seriously confused about taxes. People making $50k per year are not in the 50% marginal tax bracket. If you want to work this out with real numbers, you'll see it's nowhere near as dire as you're pretending.
I would be willing to wager there is almost nobody making $50k who drives to work in lower Manhattan by themselves. They would already be priced out by the current tolls and parking. People at that wage are going to be taking the subway. You're arguing for a figment of your imagination.
You're not counting state and local taxes and benefits phase outs. The benefits phase outs are a bear -- for low and middle income people they often exceed the taxes.
> I would be willing to wager there is almost nobody making $50k who drives to work in lower Manhattan by themselves.
To wear a suit and work in an office? No, probably not. But many service workers don't get paid very well and nonetheless work in Manhattan. And it's hard for people making that amount of money to afford to live in Manhattan either -- because there isn't enough housing there.
> They would already be priced out by the current tolls and parking.
This is why the current tolls are also bad. (And Uber and Lyft have got a solution for the parking.)
But what about the principle is dependent on the income level to begin with? It's just an example. Isn't it also bad to force out the person making $70,000 who then takes another job somewhere else for $60,000?
How is congestion pricing better than building enough housing in the city that everyone who works there can afford to live there instead of having to commute in?
You have to use real numbers. The congestion charge is going to be about $3k per year, which is NOT a $10k difference in gross income at this level, no matter how many taxes you include. If someone happens to find a job that pays exactly the perfect amount less where they break even on paying the congestion charge, well, good for them, I guess? Salary is not the only reason people take jobs, and it's likely they'd have more opportunities to advance in the city anyway.
>How is congestion pricing better than building enough housing in the city that everyone who works there can afford to live there instead of having to commute in?
Here are several ways it is better:
1. Building housing costs money. Congestion fares raise money.
2. The city is generally not in the business of building housing. This is something the private sector does.
3. Again, there is absolutely no reason we can't do both.
The cost algorithm is wonky because the value algorithm is wonky. Actually, there IS no value algorithm. Even if the data were available (and it wasn't Big Brotherly for the gov to collect and keep it) there's no way to calculate the individual value extracted per person, it's NP-ish yeah?
Honestly, it seems like a pretty simple matter to look up a car's make and model from its license plate/EZ-Pass registration. You could do it on the spot before charging the toll.
You could even just base it on the class of license you need to operate the vehicle, if you wanted to keep it very efficient.
For example, I ride a bike and don't own a car. Should I pay taxes to maintain a freeway I never use? What about the day that I get hit by a car and the ambulance takes that freeway to and from the hospital?
Traffic is a problem, I agree. But to me congestion pricing seems like economic segregation.
(In the example, should I be able to, say, pay an extra $100 and get priority lane scheduling?)
You don't need a road for public biking infrastructure. The BEST public biking infrastructure doesn't come anywhere near a road.
There is nothing wrong with having road infrastructure to move people and goods between urban centres.
There is however, a lot wrong with designing cities around the use of the most inefficient form of transportation, which increasingly looks like one person in a giant gas powered SUV or pickup truck going to work or the grocery store.
There is a reason that cities with functioning political systems are tearing down urban freeways and moving toward narrower, human centred street design. These are highly desirable places to live, and people are clamoring to move to these communities.
If you ever have the pleasure of riding on a properly funded and maintained rapid transit system (of which there are very few in the US), you will know that it is preferable to being stuck in traffic in a private vehicle.
Just because the dynamic implied by the article is irrational doesn't mean it isn't ubiquitous. Most people are horribly stricken with status quo bias, and the costs of car infrastructure and usage is one of the worst examples I've seen of special-casing costs and taking them for granted.
Also, congestion pricing is less about revenue and more about discouraging demand (meter parking on the street is often the same).
Tax money does pay for it, but taxes are created by people who get in that position by being popular with the people they're taxing. It's in their best interest to keep taxes as low as possible. This can create races to the bottom where we are, as you say, running at a deficit just to keep the lights on. The people running the budget have been kicking this can down the road (no pun intended) for a while.
Simply put, our taxes are paying for it, but they're underfunded for the level of planning and improvement needed. Congestion is a failure to scale.
Something to think about as Tax Day approaches...especially if you think your taxes are too high.
I hate this argument so much. It comes up all of the time when chronically underfunded national and state parks say they need to raise prices. "buT muH taX doLLarS alReaDy PaY for MAH PARKS!!" Doubly true for places that add quotas and lotteries to curb overcrowding delicate areas.
This is the exact same situation: Your tax dollars paid for part of it, sure, but not close to enough to support what is needed. Therefore you either need to pay more to either increase capacity or reduce impact.
Rather than charging everyone and giving some people waivers, increase the taxes with a progressive tax rate, where low-wage people pay less.
If you want to take them out and force everyone to use public transportation that's one thing - But if they exist they ought to be subsidized to ensure everyone can use them.
We need more economic equality, not less, particularly when to comes to such important things as basic infrastructure.
Given the cost of driving in NYC, using congestion pricing to pay for transit would almost certainly be a move that increases, not reduces, equality.
In a way it's analogous to any other resource allocation problem. There are lots of approaches other than "richest wins"
but that's basically what they are now, in as much as they are catering for the most expensive form of transport (aircraft and tanks notwithstanding).
Having the streets for everyone means having them be for walking, cycling, scooters, bikes, buses, etc. Hell, donkeys while we're at it.
Debating which tax policy is better is a perfectly fine thing to do. But it's not fine to begin that debate by mischaracterizing the status quo.
The new system might be wonderful, but that doesn't exist hyperbolic, inaccurate journalism.
If the public space were reconfigured to accurately reflect the taxpayer makeup, then you would see a lot less space dedicated to cars and a lot more dedicated to pedestrians, mass transit, and non-automobile transportation options like bicycles and e-scooters.
There is necessary traffic within highly populated areas (deliveries, public transport, locals, ...) and there is totally unnecessary traffic e.g. a single person in a SUV taking up the space of half a bus or 20 pedestrians.
The article also makes the annoying case that there are those who live in apartments and dwellings that have to pay for parking by code, but don't use that parking because they don't drive; however, this entirely fails to take into account the effect on the city as a whole. Parking and road access isn't about individuals, it's about making an entire metropolitan area functional.
While these people may not drive and thus are seemingly cheated out of tax money, I have to ask, where do they get their groceries and other goods? How do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency? How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?
We all pay for the roads because we all use them, whether we as individuals own a vehicle or not.
You don't need cars for a metro to be functional. This is purely a 1st world construct that we've burdened ourselves with. It can and should be undone.
>where do they get their groceries and other goods?
From stores in the neighborhood. There is typically truck access and back alley ways for things to get unloaded. If there is not, most roads have some wiggle room to them where the truck can pull over.
>how do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency?
Via the road. But you don't need parking for emergency vehicles. Not sure what world you're in, but emergency services don't just throw their hands up in the air if all the parking spaces are taken. Not sure why you think they'd act any different with less parking. It's a really funny example, to be honest.
>How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?
Not having a car free's up a lot of money. Assuming you think the cost of goods would rise to some absurd amount, it'd still be way, way cheaper to pay for those goods in comparison to getting cheap goods because you own a car, and forcing the entire community to pay for miles and miles and miles of road.
>We all pay for the roads because we all use them
Roads aren't going away. We just probably need less of them, and we need to not construct our cities and metro's with a "car's first" attitude. Because it just shifts the costs elsewhere, for absolutely no gain and quite a few negatives.
You know what's great? Not having to drive 30 minutes somewhere. That's 30 minutes I can spend walking out in the sunshine. Not dealing with traffic while risking life and limb, and not paying a boat load of money to go buy $20 worth of goods.
Not "usable-as-in-present", but "usable-as-in-available".
Having less cars drives up the value of land, making land more expensive for everyone, and making that land less usable for any one person specifically.
You just repeated what he said... while also repeating it again. I want to know how having less cars drives up the value of land.
A huge chunk of American housing supply is in places that only made sense to settle because they were connected by freeways to downtown parking. Take that away and there will be just as much money, chasing less land.
Err, no. It's because the government heavily subsidized it at the detriment to city centers. You don't have to be NYC. City centers by their very nature our extremely economical beneficial and affordable.
Our current housing infrastructure is in no way reasonably affordable or even sane. Building houses in a dense manner is not expensive.
I'm not sure what the confusion is here.
If they live in New York, presumably they get their food from bodegas. Those corner stores in turn get their inventory shipped in mostly by truck. So, when congestion taxes go into effect, that shipping will get more expensive and the food will get slightly more expensive. Which seems fine to me.
Either you are paying for it directly through your taxes or indirectly through pricing, but one way more directly places the burden on the industries that use the roads, creating (in my opinion) less market distortion and better allocation of resources. If fewer people use the roads in a major city, the vehicles that do will have an easier time of it. This would likely make food delivery and emergency services cheaper, not more expensive.
I don't live in a major city, but I do live in a suburb with extremely bad traffic during rush hour. A big part of the problem is that there is a disconnect between the cost of the roads and their use. As a result, people treat the roads as a free resource and this creates traffic. The government attempts to expand the road system to handle the traffic, but that just encourages higher usage. There is no back pressure and people who don't drive much subsidize those that do. Charging people directly for road usage rather than hiding it in gas and other taxes would be helpful.
One of the (many) reasons the Civil War was fought was because the north believed in taxpayer-paid free-to-use roads in order to boost commerce and general welfare.
The south wanted almost all roads to be privately-owned toll roads.
Although I understand the need for congestion mitigation, in a lot of ways the nation's road system is regressing.
Right now, you have no clue where your taxes go, nor do you get a cent by cent breakdown of how much went to each cost.
There is an enormous amount of economic waste in state and federal budgets before considering 10yr government contracts where incumbents almost always win because of the exorbitant amount of one off acomodations made during the previous decade, but most u.s. government contract bids by law require to entertain 3 bidders before most of the time choosing the same one.
Also, by the way, uber works this way. The price will go up for 5 drivers when 100 people need the same 5 drivers as opposed to if 3 or 5 people need them. Alot of economic incentives are made here:
1. More drivers will come to the space because the pay is good.
2. People who can't afford it arent going to pay this congestion price making it possible for drivers to even attempt to prioritise etc. It also helps drivers prioritise. Do they really need to drive. It also helps competition come in and make up this economic gap if there is one.
Also, NY energy pricing market, as well as California, Texas and MISO region all operate on real time energy markets using "congestion costs" as one of the frameworks to expose pricing based on demand.
The only difference is:
1. You actually get to see an objective algorithmic breakdown of WHY the cost is what is. Try asking the government for that now for street costs....ha
2. The transparent pricing exposes market signals for competition to come compete, for a lower price, making a more economic system
both which over time
1. lower prices for consumers (in this case people who use the streets)
2. Create a more efficient system (if a road system is inefficient, and that is the root cause) as a result of 1.
In the long run, this is a positive move in the right direction towards governments being more transparent about where costs are allocated. It's a far cry from being able to vote by knowing where your tax money actually goes, but it's a step in the right direction and it doesnt completely divorce government from competition to keep exorbitant costs in check on the government side.
And in a lot of cities, roads take up more space than private residences. Such a huge waste.
It's certainly not unrelated to what you pay in gas taxes.
There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. You just have to have the price mechanism in place to signal it. People will figure it out and adapt once you have implemented congestion pricing. Practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems.
Importantly, you have to resist the temptation to set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change and basically a bad tax. (E.g., the true cost of congestion spurs demand for apartments and transit options near the city center, which in turn reduces traffic congestion.) Also important that it is purely congestion pricing and not resulting in crony government. Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur subsequently.
I am excited for NYC to pilot this and hope it becomes a success for that city.
Please, could you explain with a bit more detail what you mean with "it just works"?
The rationale is that if you build more parking, people will drive to reach the parking spots, and it will cause more traffic congestion.
What this translates to is parking being really, really expensive. You can drive downtown any time, and there WILL be a parking spot waiting for you. But will cost you $15 for the first hour at minimum. So nobody does it if they don't need to.
If you're, say, a hotshot surgeon and need a parking spot by your nice apartment, you can buy one. They're called deeded parking spots: plots of land sized for parking, which you can buy and sell. You have to pay property tax on them. The cheapest one in Boston recently sold for $60K. Others have sold for $250K. For 12 feet by 20 feet of land.
We have a road system. It's congested, but not insanely so. And everyone knows not to use it if you can avoid it. But when you do need it, it's there. I would never drive to work, but if I need to go to Mass General Hospital, I can just budget $40 for parking and get in the car.
Roads (nor rails, nor buses, nor sidewalks, nor any other bit of government infrastructure) should be a restaurant that charges $50 for a $20 meal because keeping the masses of poors out makes for a better customer experience for those left who can justify the cost.
I understand why NYC is doing this. NYC has other options. You can and most people do live there without a car. Other cities, cities where you can't live without a car without making massive sacrifices should not be implementing toll lanes and congestion pricing. Kicking the poors off the system so that people rich enough to justify the daily tolls can have a good experience. If the well off don't want to deal with gridlock on the streets and packed train cars below the streets during rush hour and aren't willing to travel early/late then then they should be willing to do what is necessary to improve the system as a whole.
FTA:
> Where there are few other choices, like reliable bus routes, congestion pricing risks burdening poorer drivers in particular. But that is a problem we’ve thought about before, too, Mr. Manville said, if we’re now willing to treat roads as we do other infrastructure. He pointed to “lifeline” utility services: subsidized rates for electricity and gas offered to users with fewer resources.
> “Fortunately, congestion pricing comes with its own built-in solution,” he said, “which is that it raises a ton of money.”
Congestion pricing policies can (and should) also include bonds to fund immediate construction of public transportation infrastructure, be it via bus or rail.
In any case, we're no longer arguing about the merits of congestion pricing, but are arguing about the implementation details, and that's a good place for the debate to be.
Aren't these two very different things ?
I own a home in MPLS and I don't know anything about congestion pricing there. I think you must be talking about the lane restrictions on the freeways ?
Congestion pricing, as it is in London, and as is being discussed for NYC, is the concept of the city center being an island of paid entrance. As if you could not enter downtown MPLS without paying a fee.
I don't have any comment on your broad, economic analysis - just that the lane restrictions on 35 are really not the same thing as the congestion pricing being discussed here...
Only if you are driving a car. Walk, ride a bike, take public transportation. In other words, make the folks causing the problem pay for it. This seems reasonable.
senior folks will happily share their opinions with you, so no need to speak for them.
Unfortunately where I live the public transportation is awful, so I end up driving more than I would prefer.
The missing component is that when you ban cars, you have to have good public transit to replace them, especially for the elderly and disabled.
since "love" is an intensified term already, the italics seemed to imply sarcasm to me, but i'm open to being told i misread the prior comment. =)
The problem with the car-free plan is that many senior citizens literally do not have the ability to walk unassisted. And the car-free plan seems to exclude these people in a dramatic way. That’s why I intended the parent comment to be sarcastic.
I get that some old people love to walk. But some old people LITERALLY ARE UNABLE to walk, and those are the ones who would love this plan the most. (I AM BEING SARCASTIC HERE).
Unfortunately, many seniors physically can't walk long distances. The fact that you don't personally know them doesn't mean they don't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Guide
Hint: Why would a tire company put out a restaurant guidebook?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_and_ride
They can work pretty well if you have good transport (e.g. trams/rail) from the Park and Ride into your city.
About a decade ago I remember being in some city in France (Bordeaux maybe? Bayonne maybe?) while studying there and the city center was demo'ing a car free plan. There were parking lots for delivery trucks outside delivery hours (when they had street access, 0200-0400 or something) then bikes would come and ferry things in. I remember being shocked at how great it all worked. Not sure if it's still in place, but I'd love to see more of that here in the States. The noise reduction alone was worth it.
I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip.
Public transport is not a suitable option. Instead of 45 minutes one way, the combined trip time balloons to 2 hours (4 hours to and back) due to poor proximity to train stations, and bus connections that require waiting.
Every time I drive, I feel less free to move around my city. I feel less free to visit my friends and family. 'Freedom of movement' isn't some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.
As a resident of Chicago, I would be in favor of congestion pricing within a few miles of the loop. The traffic congestion doesn't just affect other drivers, but those of us walking, biking, and using public transit. I would welcome a far quieter city with less road noise more priority given to multi-modal transit.
Due to Chicago's budget issues I'm not sure how to do that beyond providing direct incentives to do something besides drive.
For all practical purposes it doesn't cost me anything more than my time to exercise my free speech rights.
Something that's nominally "free" from direct government control but the government gets to dictate the monetary cost of using it is not free by either definition.
Anything that increases the monetary cost of freedom of movement (time is not such a big deal because rich and poor alike have 24 hours in the day, hence I don't see traffic jams and crowded subway platforms being that big a deal) is a bad thing, even if the increase is a trivial amount to the upper classes. Mass transit (not the same thing as public transit though the sets intersect) should not be like a restaurant where you pay $50 for a $20 meal because that keeps the poors out and that is exactly what congestion fees and tolls are designed to do.
Yes you can talk freely, but if you want to say something louder than everyone else, you typically have to pay for advertising or a platform.
You can move freely, but if you want to move faster/farther than others, you have to pay for it.
Your being able to drive for free comes at the expense of my being able to walk about town freely. I have to worry about being struck by vehicles and about all the soot I breathe in, and I have to take less favorable routes because some road crossings are just too dangerous. You're arguing your own peculiar interests here rather than what's good for everybody, or what's good for our country overall.
* their freedom to drive on the fastest route possible * their freedom not to have a large road in front of their home * their freedom not to have their taxes invested in a road infrastructure ballooned to a level that they might not need * their freedom to live in a world that is not inflicted by global warming
Freedom to move does not mean you can do so at any cost to the freedom of others.
The actual point is that freedoms should be curtailed when they cause harm to others.
In this case unchecked freedom of movement can cause harm to society in different ways, so some forms of movement are restricted. Which is already true, we have signs, lights walls, fences, licenses, etc to restrict our movement. So the argument is really about how much more should they be restricted.
* EDIT, Zarath already called me out on that, but I still think it's a stretch
Negative freedom: Freedom from something
I agree with your more general point though: framing the entire matter in terms of freedom is detrimental to the debate. However, it’s almost always initially done by the side that wants to retain the status quo.
Another example: ambulances. The traffic in Manhattan means ambulances take a really long time to get to and from their patients. Those minutes cost lives.
When I encountered the idea that cars being common causes them to lose all benefit for most people while also causing them to become necessary, I initially thought it overblown. Then I ran the numbers. Well. Crap.
[EDIT] and don't forget to factor in minutes or hours per day spent working to pay for car+maintenance+gas.
On top of the distance taken out of commutes, think about the space taken up in terms of real estate. In Munich, which is a fairly dense city, the estimated share of parking space of the city area is about 12.5%. If you include space for moving vehicles, that estimate approaches 50%. That’s a substantial driver of real estate prices and rents.
(1) https://www.urbanist-magazin.de/das-konzept-der-effektiven-g...
Furthermore, at artificially low prices, more people drive until congestion is unmanageable. Without that pricing your 45 minute drive might balloon to twice that amount of time. Congestion is so bad in NYC that interferes with city services, like busses.
While I agree in principle, congestion pricing is generally a monopoly and not subject to the ordinary pressures of supply and demand, which means there's little to stop the price from being too low or too high.
Congestion is not a big deal. People willing to put up with it will put up with it. People not willing to will use the resource at different times. You will never have a system that does not get congested at peak times. The more capacity you have the less time the system will run at peak capacity (compare rush hour start/end times across cities to see this). Think of it like dumping a 5gal bucket into the sink and system capacity being the drain size. This statement applies to road, rail and everything else.
It is a big deal to people waiting on services like fire trucks and ambulances. It is a big deal to people breathing air near roads. It is a big deal to public transit users whose needs often get de prioritized in favor of private cars.
So nobody can say they benefit indirectly without paying.
I think difference in traffic insanity between Sydney and NYC is at least an order of magnitude.
Congestion pricing is the only rational, workable solution.
Point is these new funds won’t make transportation better in any significant way.
Perhaps this new fee will be used to fund MTA’s pension liabilities, and the current spending on pensions gets allocated to food stamps.
New money never goes to where it’s said it’s supposed to go. That’s because government funding is a Ponzi scheme.
Source: https://congestion-pricing.com/
Presumably if you didn't have to pay this fee, then the route would be a lot more congested...
https://www.rms.nsw.gov.au/sydney-motorways/toll-charges/ind...
As the NYTimes article says, everyone ends up paying one way or another, whether in taxes, or use-charges, or congestion prices, or delay. The question is how the total cost should be shared.
You're paying tolls because those roads were bought and paid for by an ASX traded company: https://www.transurban.com/roads-and-projects/sydney
In any case: in high density environments such as NY and, yes, Sydney, public transport is the obviously superior option. In Manhattan it is so de facto: current subway trouble nonewithstanding, it is still superior to taking your car into the center. Car traffic in MH moves at about pedestrian streets on average. Economically, parking is unaffordable, and no amount of freedom-loving can change the particular part of physical law that prevents multiple objects from occupying the same coordinates in space and time.
If Sydney is worse, that’s a collective failure to act, and it is having an impact on your quality of life. That should be the subject of you anger.
In Paris, Tokyo, London, and Berlin, investment bankers take the subway. I use that specific group because they are not known to easily succumb to financial pressure or readily defer to some idea of collective benefit in lieu of selfish interests. If they make that choice, it is because it is better even in terms of narrowly defined personal comfort and efficiency.
We really do risk heading into a ‘roads are for the richest’ future. We need to accept that the car isn’t going away, that public transport cannot work well in many situations, and build more road capacity for an electric and maybe self-driving future.
And encourage personal light electric vehicles (electric bikes/scooters/skateboards) instead of fearing/banning them!
For an illustrative example, look at what Houston did to the I-10: they thought like you did and decided to just build and build until the traffic went away. There’s a stretch of I-10 outside Houston that is now twenty-six lanes wide, and it didn’t work: within a few years of completion, travel times returned to what they were before the buildout. Exactly how many lanes do you think will fix the problem if 26 won’t?
(And even if it did, there’s no more room in Manhattan for more roads. There is no way to increase supply even if we wanted to.)
Average that over the whole population, each with their own individual unconscious time limit. The result is: if commuting is faster, people are willing to live farther from their jobs. If commuting is slower, people live closer to their jobs. Adding more capacity doesn't change this.
Seems like your sense of restriction originates from the density of your city, not the rules of its roadways.
It's funny how many people think the relationship between prices, supply, and demand is just the bee's knees ... until it comes to use taxes or fees that directly affect their own behavior.
Presumably, that limit is a function of the way the roads were designed, and a straight road directly from your apartment to your loved ones would have been faster. Though you probably didn't complain then how the city wasn't designed to enable your freedom of movement.
How is this new congestion pricing any different? Did it discriminate against you personally in any way? In fact, it probably reduced your commute time, by making you pay more. Im guessing that Sydney probably has some assistance for people who actually can't afford this price, which you probably didn't qualify for (guessing since you're here at HN), so I'm really struggling to sympathize with your argument of how it curbs your freedom of movement (unless you're poor and there's no assistance from the government for you).
We all have many freedoms but almost none of them are free. In fact they all come at great costs. 30 dollars doesn't actually sound that high all things considered.
Yeah, and he probably factored in the five minute walk to work too. It's not possible to optimise for every possibility.
The US should spend some money researching this possibility. There used to be ideas of moving sidewalks, jet packs, flying cars, etc. These probably won't work but small, high-speed, electric pods in tunnels might.
I understand that you would rather pay x than 2x, but this is not “cultural freedom”, it is haggling over a price. But the fact that we ignore the $1 in wear on the drive belt because that won’t be a problem for three years, but we are annoyed about $1 to use a road right now, says a lot about human psychology.
Given climate change, and that sitting in traffic is not very nice, it seems a superior system to me to leverage psychology to bill at the point of use rather than squirreling the costs away in oil changes and in the fine print of financing paperwork and in making pedestrians walk longer between places through parking lots. It may be the case that transit is impractical for this route but the only real way to determine that is to have a functioning price mechanism. I mean it is probably faster to visit your family by helicopter, and helicopters do exist so there is a usecase for them. But we have the good sense to charge about what they cost.
This cost is dominated by the production of the car and goes down almost linearly to something like $0.25/mi before maintenance would even be an issue.
This is cheaper than almost any other form of transport.
The road system is essentially free at this scale.
There are no significant subsidies that make this possible. It's just that cheap. And most of the cost is production – a positive-sum activity.
A congestion charge is a transfer payment (zero-sum). In general these should not be expected to significantly impact the value of civilization.
For one thing, the economy tends to route around them. A mortgage interest tax deduction causes house price inflation, for example. It's not clear there should be any long-run sensitivity of commuting times to commuting taxes. People are already paying their hourly wage to commute, and they will pay any tax on it also with that wage...
That said, I would say that congestion pricing could be a good thing for road building as it gives a value on building new ones. Hopefully the Boring Company can have some success and get tunneling prices down. Then with some idea of how much people will pay to not sit in traffic, we can get some tunnels built and start enjoying life again instead of sitting on congested freeways.
With enough high-speed tunnels one could convert all surface roads to max 25 mph mixed use and return the earth to the people like all those anti-car people dream of. Work for the win-win outcome.
I live in Madrid, which has a metropolitan population of 6.5 million (compared to Sydney's 5.2m). I can get pretty much everywhere from anywhere in about 1 hour, combining metro and buses.
So when I want to visit a friend, I just go out the door, and walk to the metro station. If I had to drive a car just to do that I would feel I have less freedom of movement than I have now.
The ubiquity of this kind of myopia makes me worry about transit policy, and I've seen little evidence that voters are capable of or willing to engage in second-order thinking, especially when their incentives are involved. Though I suppose it's not like our transit policy could get much worse....
Today, in 2019, I drive a car that generates absolutely no pollution, makes no noise, is powered entirely by renewable wind electricity, and can drive itself in many (but not quite all) situations. This should be the best thing ever. This is the cleanest, safest, most reliable, most convenient, and cheapest public transit that has ever been invented. There should be cities filled with skyscrapers full of these things.
But instead, urbanists have convinced everyone that 19th century Europe was the pinnacle of humanity, and they are attempting (and succeeding) at removing/eliminating all of our best public transportation infrastructure. Gone are public parking structures, gone are public freeways. Gone is clean affordable housing. Gone are inclusive communities. The lessons we learned and progress we've made is all being lost.
Now you should take a tram or bus, wait 80% longer on every trip, always deal with weather directly, have to plan every trip on routes and timetables, and only live/work in the (super expensive) places their routes allow for it. They want all transportation to be long, frustrating, and limited. Because that was good enough for your great-grandfather, it should be good enough for you too.
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I get why it's happening. If you limit transportation and freedom, you can further artificially inflate property values, and further monopolize people's finances. (They have less options on where to live, less options on where to shop, less options on where to send children to school, less options to simply consume less and spend less on anything at all).
But it's so incredibly frustrating because there is not a single valid reason for it, and it's so disheartening to see such huge regressions happening throughout our cities today. To the extreme that cities today are basically not even for real people anymore, just capital.
But it's not public transit. It's private transit, because it's your car. Actual public transit will either not be subject to the congestion fees (buses) or will be able to split the fee across enough riders to make its effects negligible (taxis, Uber).
Cars are a form of public transportation whenever the public drives them on public roads and freeways. Public infrastructure does not become "private", just because a private individual is in it.
Incorrect.
Break and tire dust are still environmental pollutants.
There is also a one time environmental cost to manufacture your car.
And when it comes to affordable housing, car infrastructure makes it very hard. Underground parking stalls in a major urban city can cost up to $30k each to build! And above ground parking lots in cities take up land that could be used for housing.
Not to mention wider streets are needed for cars, that is space that could be used for more housing and more commercial activity. If you visit the dense parts of London or Tokyo that are served by mass transit, you can see how smaller streets closer together leads to more livable cities.
> Now you should take a tram or bus, wait 80% longer on every trip
Depends on how well built out the infrastructure is. In cities with top tier public transit, subway cars are coming every 3 - 4 minutes, traveling underground, avoiding all traffic.
My car shows me the average speed of my trips. If I am driving through a city, I am lucky to average out 20mph. During bad traffic I can easily be at 10 or 12mph.
Mass transit doesn't have that problem. An underground line is always going to travel at the same speed. During rush hour it may be more cramped, but the travel time isn't any greater, unless the subway is full and you have to take the next one. Which comes in three minutes. Which is less time than I have waited at a single stoplight to make a left turn!
Newer cities have horrible designs. They streets are too wide, so there is less land, and housing costs more. They often have laws on the books about minimum parking requirements, so housing costs more to construct. They have requirements about parking for commercial businesses, so more of the city is devoted to places to park than actual business!
Strip malls are the worst possible example of this!
And if you start building low enough density, cities actually start losing money. Property taxes on parking lots are next to nothing, especially if they are free parking for businesses. But the city still has to run infrastructure to those parking lots, pay for maintenance on the surrounding streets, and pay for all the externalities of having more cars on the roads.
> They have less options on where to live, less options on where to shop, less options on where to send children to school, less options to simply consume less and spend less on anything at all).
If I can hop on a subway and get anywhere in a city in 30 minutes, I now have more choices of where to live! More choices of where to shop! As for schooling, look at Tokyo, where children regularly take the subway to school.
In a city without mass transit, if I am in one part of the city and I want to go to a shop in another, I have to decide if I really want to suffer through:
1. Walking back to my car 2. Navigating through traffic to my next destination 3. Finding parking there (possibly paying, and hoping there is parking!) 4. Walking from parking to my destination 5. Getting back to my car 6. Driving through more traffic to get home, or to my next destination
It sucks. In contrast, even a city like Boston with good but not great public transit[1], when I'm visiting Boston and some friends call me up and ask if I want to go see a movie, so long as the theater is on a transit line, the answer is sure! In a city without transit I have to worry about if I can get there given traffic at that time of day, in a city with mass transit, I know I can go.
[1] Compared to Seattle, Boston has great public transit, but whenever I talk to anyone from Boston they complain about it, so I'll avoid calling it "great" even though from my perspective I love using it when I'm there!
Also, cars are not "public transit". Not sure how you arrived there....
The same principle applies here. Do you have an option to drive there and avoid toll roads? If so, how much extra time would it take you? Surely not 15-20 hours like it takes to see my family.
It's really a bizarre way to define freedom.
The same is true for land value taxes. Tenants pay the scarcity price for land anyway (in the form of land rent) regardless of the level of tax, so the government might as well harness that energy and use it to benefit all the people instead of a few.
1. People can arbitrarily convert time into money, ie, there’s not a reason they’d prefer to pay some expenses in time.
2. People are free to change their travel times, and aren’t being coerced into traveling at a particular time. If travel time is a monopsony, then this is mere rent extraction because people can’t adjust behavior in response to economic pressures.
1. You’re right, congestion pricing forces drivers to reveal the marginal price for time. In a congested road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a specific time? Because he knows that it will take too much time due to traffic (or because he is simply forced to queue). In a toll road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a given time? Because he knows it will cost too much money. At the margin, congestion pricing turns a time cost into a monetary cost.
For those individuals whose value of time is lower than the marginal driver (i.e., people who would rather have a traffic jam than pay the toll), congestion pricing itself can make them worse off, but when the proceeds are reinvested in transit I think it’s probable that congestion pricing will generally benefit lower-income people.
2. Congested roads already force people to change their travel time. If you try to cross a congested bridge at a specific time, you will be queued until all the people in front of you have passed. So I suppose you could say the road already is extracting rent and throwing it away. Congestion pricing harnesses the value (of all the drivers whose value of time is above the marginal driver) instead of discarding it.
If people aren’t free to adjust their driving habits, congestion pricing merely raises the cost for them, because the time to commute doesn’t go down (appreciably) — everyone is still on the road at the same time.
It then effectively becomes a regressive tax: those least free to change their schedule are those in the lowest earning jobs, and hence those most coerced to pay the cost.
I’m not sure I believe that’s an effective way to raise money for government.
I also disagree that the tax would be incident on those with the lowest paying jobs. Higher-paying workers are more likely to pay more, since people with price-inelastic demand for driving are more likely to be those who value their time more highly.
Finally, I don’t think the primary purpose is to raise money for the government, but instead to manage the road resource so that the throughput is high.
> Higher-paying workers are more likely to pay more, since people with price-inelastic demand for driving are more likely to be those who value their time more highly.
Again, this is only true absent coercive forces —
Higher paid workers (on average) also have more schedule flexibility and ability to use money to cover for their physical absence.
By contrast, lower paid workers have less flexible schedules and a greater need to utilize their time — eg, they have to perform childcare because their market rate per hour is below child care services.
This leads to a situation where high paid workers have more elastic price demand than low paid workers, and raising prices ends up charging low paid workers because if market distortions from other factors.
*(particularly in the US where they are cross subsidized the most)
It’s just that this cost in time isn’t distributed nearly as ideally as it could be. It costs an individual the same amount whether they take a bus or a car with four people or four cars with one person each. If we tax per-vehicle instead, that pushes people not only to shape their travel times more ideally, but to also use more efficient forms of transportation.
So long as this is used as a means to shape travel to be more efficient and not just as a way to gobble up revenue, it might be alright. I think toll bridges/roads are mostly this way, where they’re free in the dead of night when few are on the roads, so I’m hopeful.
this is an underappreciated point, as it underlies the popularity of congestion pricing among wealthier folks, whatever their politics (left-leaners ostensibly would otherwise support more egalitarian/progressive policies).
currently everyone pays with their time, whether rich or poor. you can't buy your way out of the problem just for yourself. irksomely, money is of no advantage. but with congestion pricing, you could, and that's really appealing to wealthy folks.
i'm not arguing against congestion pricing, just noting a less-visible motivation. a progressive pricing scheme (pay more if you have higher income/net worth), for example, would still reduce congestion while providing more egalitarian access.
>“Over the past several years, we’ve been proud to work with a diverse coalition to fight for comprehensive congestion pricing, and we’re excited to see Albany take action to reduce congestion and invest in mass transit,” said Harry Hartfeld, an Uber spokesman.
>Roughly $1 million went to some of the top city lobbyists, including Stu Loeser, a onetime senior aide to former Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
>Another $700,000 went to fund the Fix Our Transit coalition’s ad campaign that targeted undecided Albany politicians.
[0] https://nypost.com/2019/04/03/uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-thr...
We can't even pass a tax in my town to give necessary funds for road repairs beyond the most basic. I wonder how something like that would fair.
My hope is that if someone sits alone in their big SUV stuck in traffic, pedestrians, cyclists and others will look at that person disparagingly. Like how people look at dog owners not picking up their dogs feces, cigarette smokers or how they look at obese people buying ice cream... Or how hypochondriacs who go to the doctor when they don't need to are shamed in countries with socialized health care.
Maybe it is not nice to use shame as a weapon, but it is a powerful one. We have about ten years to completely change how our societies work before it is to late. All options should be on the table.
> no reasonable way to listen to music
...headphones?
More likely it's old people living alone and with nothing better to do who sit in the health centers before opening.
There's been a couple of others that I remember seeing, but I don't remember them or which sources I saw them at.
Driving was always limited by the costs of somebody sitting behind the wheel. Look how congested many cities of third world countries are, low labor costs for cab drivers are a factor there.
It's not just cab drivers in particular. Having a driver is quite common for even middle class people or a sales person making the rounds during the day.
I personally believe that self-driving in congested cities is a long way off. But it will absolutely be the case that if driving around empty is cheaper than parking that's what will happen.
How much does tire pressure matter in that? If two vehicles have the same weight and number of tires taking the load, evenly distributed among the tires, but one of them runs with higher tire pressure, it will have a proportionately smaller contact area, and so a proportionately higher ground pressure.
In general, a tire supporting weight W at pressure P will have a contact area A such that P x A = W.
I'd expect total road damage to depend on both area and pressure. Pressure would determine whether you are going to damage the surface, and area would determine how big an area will damaged.
For causing cracks that lead to potholes, I'm not sure area matters as much as the pressure, so am curious about lighter vehicles with high pressure tires.
My car has a pressure of 32 psi. Back when I was a regular bike commuter [1] my bike had a pressure of 110 psi.
Wikipedia has a nice table of the ground pressure of several things [2]. Some excerpts, in psi:
4 Diedrich D-50 T2 drilling rig
8 Human male
15 M1 Abrams tank
25 1993 Toyota 4Runner
25 Adult horse
30 Passenger car
40 Mountain bike
90 Road racing bike
470 Stiletto heel
So...trucks being more damaging than cars is quite believable. More interesting is different kinds of passenger cars. Honda's recommended tire pressure for a Civic and a CR-V, e.g., are largely the same range. Does this mean a CR-V is not much more damaging than a Civic?
And where do bikes with high psi fit in? The have the pressure of a delivery truck, but have a much smaller contact area. Is there some minimal area needed before even high pressure damages the road, so bikes are OK? Or is it just that because the areas is smaller it takes longer to cause enough cumulative damage for people in cars to notice?
[1] when I lived in flat Cupertino. That died when I move to Seattle and found that fat people on bikes don't get along well with hills.
I know that the folks who actually do this work calculate weight per axle rather than weight per square inch. Why they do it that way I don't know.
It seems plausible to me that if you drove trucks over an unlined parking lot completely randomly, then it would last much longer than when you run the same trucks on a highway lane.
The USA and our interstate system are the same way. The cost was enormous, the maintenance burden continues to outpace the money we make on gas tax and registration, yet we had political and social good reasons for building it. The interstate was a massive investment, and investments of similar scale could give us a HSR network at least on major corridors. But for some reason, we have a social good attitude towards highways and a social waste attitude towards subsidizing rail.
The actual answer is "An insurance company with an army"
Would such a policy work well if brought over to the states? Given the amount of tangentially connected regulations and special interests such a strict ban may just increase prices and make things worse.
I'd love to see the tenents stay in business with a dirt road out front. Or a pasture that no cars can pass through.
They're not doing us any favors. They're keeping themselves in business.
in addition to the odometer, include a chronometer: something like "hours driving above 5mph". Then tax on a combination of those.
That seems like it would have been be able to implicitly price congestion into a progressive use-based tax.
Yeah and people are irrational and wrong, that's why the right incentives must exist so they are more incentived to buy smaller cars such as single-person or 2 person cars.
> Either way you seem to completely miss the idea that alternative methods of transportation like mass transit
I did not, of course better transportation its the solution in long term but in the short one we need viable solutions as well.
I do see companies set up satellite or second offices. I do wonder if an companies of scale use proximities and travel time to influence renewing leases or moving office buildings. What do these formulas look like? What data do they use?
Why not? You claim it like a truth without justifying it: A person living near a restaurant that want a job there should get it over someone just as qualified in the opposite end of the city.
If you use any criteria other than the qualifications of the job, you open yourself up to accusations of discrimination. Rightly so.
Outside of government, I haven’t seen equally qualified candidates. When government organizations achieves this, they do it be using fixed duration “contests”. Gov optimizes to minimize discrimination. This approach is not something that matches the needs of businesses, specifically as they are often competing for talent that will take another job if delay in offer, retention of other works who are burdened by the position not being filled, and business objects that will not be met or costs incurred if delayed.
The fact is that in all population centers cost increases closer to the center, many types of business and locations with shorter transit times to these desirable locations. In other words, the poor live furthest away from their jobs.
This isn’t even bringing in the topic of diversity, which is much more nuanced. Here though there is no argument that many groups live in communities and those communities take real space. In other words, distance from a business is unlikely to correlate to diverse communities.
Jobs only attract people that can survive with the income it returns, meaning nobody is going to take a job from a poor person living in the opposite end of the city if living near the location costs more than what is being paid; meaning the proposed incentive still works because this poor person still gets the job over some other poor person living in a near-by city willing to commute from there.
You proposal a complex system, but use simple examples. Assuming you have equally qualified candidates, which you don’t because you can’t afford to wait, how large of an incentive and in what industries? How do you address the “other side of the track” situation? This quickly has all the markings of discrimination.
You disagree that the only considerations for a position should be the ability to do the job? Incentives is the flip side of discrimination.
The poor is just one impacted protected class by your proposal. Working elders also make different choices in living arrangements including location.
You also assume business mobility.
What regions have this utopia?
Even if obviously correct... see : https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/nys-leaky-gas-taxe...
In Europe, we do the opposite.