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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> taxi’s only get to use X amount

Right; road capacity is a scarce resource. There isn't an unlimited amount available.

> The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion

Sure, modern tech allows more flexible pricing than periodic capacity auctions. However, I wonder if it allows long-term investment, given that tomorrow your capacity could effectively disappear.

> and charge regardless of vehicle type

That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot?

> bullshit

Well if you put it that way ...

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> That ends up being regressive taxation.

“Regressive taxation” is a term for people paying what something costs. Carbon taxes are also a “regressive taxation” as well as sales tax, alcohol tax, etc.

Public resources are public goods, but they are rivalrous. If you don’t make people pay in a fair manner, you’ve just implemented government rations which incentivize all kinds of stupid shit (illegal taxi services for one).

> and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood?

If they can’t afford it then they don’t drive. It’s that simple.

The complexity only comes from trying to solve poverty (“oh, but that’s regressive”) at the same time as trying to solve a specific issue. Just give poor people cash stipends for transportation if transporting the poor is the problem you want to tackle. Then they can choose if they want to spend it on bus fares or use it towards ride shares, biking, whatever.

Prescriptive “there shall be 10 taxis for the people and they will enjoy them and no more” laws have basically never had good outcomes. Hedge funds paying millions of dollars to analysts with mountains of data have difficulty predicting market demand trends, there isn’t a chance in hell some bureaucrat is going to correctly balance a market.

This is a common pattern, poorest member M of society Y is not well off enough to do X, the cost of X is lowered for everyone until M can afford X. Except the members of Society Y that do X primarily consists of rich people, it looks fair because everyone is treated equally, in practice the support didn't solve the problem at all, and in the process a bunch of people got a free gift so they don't mind the damage.

The reason why politics doesn't work is that people aren't interested in solving the problem, they just want some kickbacks. The end result is a "fair" but dysfunctional society.

> That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot?

There are two separate problems. One is insufficient road capacity at time X for Y number of vehicles of size Z. You can adjust X, Y, or Z, all with the use of variable tolling.

Platitudes such as “public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay” will not solve congestion.

A second problem might be there are too many people in society too poor to be able to make use of a fair amount of limited resources, such as road capacity. This is a separate problem, and can be solved by giving poorer people money so they can pay to use the roads at peak times.

> Platitudes such as “public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay” will not solve congestion.

Calling it a platitude doesn't address that critical issue; it does suggest you don't know how else to address it?

It’s an issue that exists now. How exactly is it that you think a poor person without a car is able to make use of the interstate?

By purchasing anything that requires the interstate to move product. So literally everything.

I did offer a solution to address it. It’s a platitude for the purposes of solving congestion, which I specifically identified as a separate issue from poverty.

I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free, but yet be forced to pay a tax when I use (semi-)public transportation?

First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit.

> I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free

That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.

Also, you do use the roads all the time even if you don't drive yourself. Your hair stylist uses them to get to work, your groceries get to the store, your customers come to your store, etc. etc. Imagine your situation if there were no roads.

> (semi-)public transportation

It's a private, for-profit company.

> First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is.

I am forced to pay taxes for the roads since you can't possibly fund all of the rodes solely by taxing ride-sharing companies.

> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true.

Eh. Economics is not an exact science so there is no way for me to prove it to you. If you don't believe in that (and have another reason why iPhones are more expensive in higher taxed countries) then let's leave that.

> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.

Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).

> Your hair stylist uses them to get to work [...] Imagine your situation if there were no roads.

There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.

> It's a private, for-profit company.

Taxis are private and for profit, yet they are considered public transportation.

>> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.

> Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).

OK, why or why not? Are you proposing something?

> There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.

They do pay, via their taxes, which is the generally appropriate way to fund public goods.

I was responding to your proposal that businesses pay extra, via medallions to use the roads, while private drivers use the road for free (ie. no extra). Rather, I am saying that every user of the road should par for it.

Roads are paided for with taxes on gas. So whoever buys gas pays for road repair. Licenses, fees, etc also go towards that system.

No, they aren’t. There isn’t enough money from the gas tax to cover all of the roads. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-15/gas-ta...

> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit.

This isn't quite true. If Uber charged more to increase profit, they would lose more customers to competitors who didn't increase their prices.

Taxes can increase costs for (some of) those competitors as well. In that scenario, prices could rise to absorb the tax and there would be less relative change between competitors.

This is important for incentivising 'societal values', e.g. reducing pollution, increasing public health, etc.; either directly by discouraging people from choosing single-occupier taxis like Uber in favour of e.g. trains and buses; or indirectly by causing companies to compete on reducing their harm (and thereby avoiding the tax).

I don't have specific examples to hand, but I recall some companies advocating for such taxes (e.g. a carbon tax), since they want to make bigger improvements, but doing so individually would make them uncompetitive.

> First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true

It absolutely is in the long run. Reduced margin means fewer competitors and subsequently higher sustained costs for riders. There is little barrier to entry in the “rideshare” market so as long as high margins exist competitors will keep entering with cheaper prices to eat at the margin.

There is no scenario in a competitive market where an input cost is not reflected in the output cost of a good/service.

idk. I’ve yet to see an industry that doesn’t concentrate to fewer and fewer operators with time, regardless of taxation.

A natural law of wealth accumulation dictates that as trade continues the players with more wealth already, are increasingly more likely to get even more wealth at the cost of those with less. At time of hardship you would expect the less wealthy players to loose the business which eventually concentrates the industry to 2-5 players through acquisition or bankruptcy. Taxation is actually a way to counter this phenomena by means of redistribution.

EDIT: To clarify the above is only true if industries are competing for customers against each other. While a market is growing the growth of one player does not necessarily come at the cost of another. However at some point the market will be saturated and businesses new customers are exponentially more likely to come from a competitor rather then new to the market. At this point the premise holds true.

Why should people pay any tax for any public good that they don't use personally? Schools, healthcare, parks & rec, homeless shelters, space exploration, national defense, fire fighters, vaccine development.

Because we live in a society.

Yes, in principle. Frustratingly, for a goal like 'moving around cheaply, conveniently and safely, with minimal environmental impact', then subsidising driving is a worse investment than public transport.

The person I was replying to was not complaining about how revenue is distributed, they were complaining about revenue being spent at all on a public good that they don't use.

I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to rebalance the equations on how we spend money on roads, public transit, and various forms of energy subsidies. But all else being equal, getting that balance "right" is not going to make personal transit just go away. Some will shift to public transit, but you will always have a case of "your tax money" going to pay for roads used by private transit.

Personal transportation isn't like the things you mentioned. It has -by itself- value to the individual, but not to society. Having no fire fighters quickly becomes an obvious problem. Not having people drive their personal cars all over the city does not.

"Value to society" is the summation of "value to individuals". Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.

> "Value to society" is the summation of "value to individuals".

I disagree, not necessarily, and probably not in the case of unnecessary personal transportation (which is most of it). Everyone in society profits from fire fighters or hospitals, even when they don't need either just this instance. That's not the same for some luxury that some/most people enjoy and want everyone to fund.

> Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.

And we do, and we don't consider that an issue. People shouldn't have personal nuclear bombs, even though some would like to. Also, few people are arguing that personal transportation shouldn't exist, just that the required infrastructure should be funded differently.

Agreed. But if you analyse things then it's likely people use those facilities at a secondary level - eg you get something done for you by people who used schools to enable them, someone who provides value to your life used the healthcare services.

Yes, that was my point.

You in particular don't pay for permits, parking, tolls, fuel and sales taxes, licensing, registrations, etc. You do, however, get to enjoy all of the benefits of living in a society with ubiquitous transportation and democratized access to roads and infrastructure.

None of the minor fees you mention gets anywhere near to the cost of road maintenance, not to mention the effects on the health of people near roads, all the people killed in traffic, the environmental damage, etc etc

Do you purchase goods which were moved by road? Where does your food come from and how does it get to you? How do you generate your income and does any of that rely on transportation?

All of that could be done on gravel roads which are a lot cheaper than paved roads. Or trains once we are beyond the last mile.

Paved roads are required when there is a lot of traffic, but all the uses you named are a fraction of road uses.

This is why diesel has a higher tax.

This would be a good argument if the road network was sized for transporting goods primarily. As it stands, road networks in population centres are largely sized to accommodate private motoring.

The company that transports goods should pay for their use of roads. I pay for that through proper pricing of said goods.

Exactly; if the roads are subsidized (as in GP's concern), then some of that subsidy is showing up as a reduced price of goods.

Car infrastructure is not a public good.

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