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$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

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Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#261

Post by lazerpants »

dalbasal wrote: post #245
harryh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is that you are prioritizing using "the fast lane in a floating price system" as the most important thing when for a lot of people that will not be the case. They might rather spend that money on housing, or education or chewing gum or who the hell knows what. The utility maximizing choice it to let them make their own decision as they know more about their preferences than you do. You making that deci…

(op) I don't know why the downvotes, you make valid points. I think what you say is true, but not in the context of this specific scenario. This scenario starts with a public good that is freely available to all. In the free-for-all, everyone has equal access to the good. The total value of that is somewhat diminished in theory, because the lack of a price system causes overconsumption ... traffic jams. In the price…

Seems to me that increasing the toll price with increasing levels of road usage would be the best way to ensure that those of lesser means still have access to the express roadway.

Example: Using the express roadway once a month is $10/use. Using it 100 times is 50/use.

This is similar to how California tries to restrict water usage by the wealthy.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#262

Post by simonh »

londons_explore wrote: post #244
simonh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually yes, but when one or a few suppliers are the sole source of a resource it’s not that simple. Especially when that resource is very widely used for a huge variety of applications. That’s becaus the benefit to society isn’t simple captured in the monetary cost. Consider police vehicles, ambulances and utility maintenance vehicles. Does anybody really think they should have to pay tolls? A real market forces pur…

History has shown that in many cases, it's finding an efficient way to measure and charge for a resource which is the real breakthrough to utilizing the resource. If the electricity meter hadn't been invented, or cost millions of dollars, it's doubtful your home would even have electricity today.

Very true, but that’s a fact regardless of whether market forces are a send to determine price. Ideally they should, because markets are usually good at determining relative value, but not always as for example in the case of industrial pollution. Eventually over hundreds of years we are beginning to implement some ways of factoring that onto market costs, but it’s been a long and painful process and there’s still a long way to go. For most of that time direct regulation has been the only workable answer, figuring out how to factor it into markets would have been too late.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#263

Post by tssva »

colanderman wrote: post #181
maxxxxx wrote: post #37

My main concern is that with tolls that high that only people with a lot of money can afford them (I make six figures but I doubt I would ever pay $40 for a toll. I would need much more money). These are also often the most influential people so they may think that everything is OK because they can afford the toll and never suffer in traffic. I think the same is happening with health care. Most people in Congress hav…

Exactly. Creating separate "deluxe" and "plebe" lanes only ensures that the quality of the latter degrades, because no-one with money and power sees any problems or is forced to care about them. You see this same problem with public vs. private schools (public schools get ignored and degrade when everyone with means avoids them), the "projects" (in which quality of life is allowed to degrade as various factors lead t…

Except there aren't separate deluxe and plebe lanes. Those paying the toll are using the same lanes as those utilizing HOV to not pay.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#264

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

Tinyyy wrote: post #160
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #29

I mean, one of the problems with tolls is that it is another form of taxing that has a bigger impact the lower income you have. Without getting into an ideological discussion, having surge pricing on tolls would contribute to a minor divide in class. In Australia this is a current topic, as (in Sydney specifically) there was a recent controversial highway widening which has been funded by tolls and constructed by a p…

Actually this is a form of progressive taxation that has less impact the poorer you are. Because the poor are less likely to pay for the roads, they on the average pay less taxes. And given that the road was previously completely banned, they also have access to plenty of alternatives, be it taking other roads or carpooling. On the other hand, the ‘dumb rich’ will pay out of their nose to not have to share their car…

>Because the poor are less likely to pay for the roads, they on the average pay less taxes

That is assuming that this isn't a critical road that poor people would want to use.

Anyway, I'm not talking about this specific case, I mean more generally that this isn't as simple as was made out, e.g. what if this road is good overall for balancing out wealth (if you view that as a good thing...), but then another case happens where it is a critical road that causes poorer people to have to extend their travel by 20 minutes to avoid the toll? (Ala sydney).

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#265

Post by humanrebar »

antisthenes wrote: post #238
londons_explore wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't they a market-priced good? It's a market with a fixed supply, but other markets like that work just fine. For example, the USA has a fixed amount of land, and that is sold at a market, and has settled on mostly reasonable rates.

Market rates for land in desirable place are anything but reasonable. I have no idea how you came to the conclusion you did, but in actual desirable places, land is unaffordable to all but the very wealthy.

Private land sales happen between voluntary buyers and sellers. From that perspective, prices are fair.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#266

Post by closeparen »

pm24601 wrote: post #102
vog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch! Regulating infrastructure purely by market mechanisms is an ugly anti-pattern that is well-known for decades, if not centuries. Among others, this creates an incentive to keep the resource scarce and to not invest into maintaining and expanding it. Why? Because the lowest level infrastructure is a natural monopoly: Even if it was technically feasible (put wires next to existing wires, put pipes next to existing…

I would like you to reconsider this point. Specifically, 1. driving causes pollution 2. people local to the freeway are heavily impacted by the pollution, 3. global warming is a real issue - solo drivers are a heavy contributor. 4. the freeway cost money and should have to pay its costs same as transit systems are made to pay their costs. fyi - i carpool to work / take transit. I would rather see free buses and heavi…

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

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#267

Post by closeparen »

CPLX wrote: post #126
closeparen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not a lack of urban planning; there's an urban planning (and popular) consensus "lack of vertical density" == "quality of life."

That set of values is certainly not a consensus opinion.

It’s the set of values that controls nearly all land use policy in the United States. YIMBYism exists, and I am one, but I recognize that pro-skyscraper or even pro-mid-rise is a fringe position.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#268

Post by jopsen »

wyager wrote: post #155
jopsen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resources people need: ice to cool insulin, food, healthcare, day care, basic housing, etc. are not scarce, or at the very least scarcity is fixable for little money. You just need to be a little less greedy.

> healthcare, day care, basic housing, etc. are not scarce “Scarce” in economics doesn’t mean “rare”, it means “has a non-zero marginal cost” and usually “has a concave supply curve”.

My point wasn't to say that these were free.

Merely that they idea that everybody can't have it, and there it must be rationed by economic means is a little crazy.

We can't all have private jets; but efficiency gains in food production suggests we can easily produce enough food. We are choosing not to distribute it.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#269

Post by dredmorbius »

thaeli wrote: post #228
dredmorbius wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose to run an auction on autos entering a given roadway?

The dynamic toll pricing, based on utilization, on this roadway is very nearly an auction.

Yes, but that's not an auction: one bidder raising over another.

You might be able to do this in a two-at-a-time case, with two lanes of cars. Problem is that the lane behind the car that consistently underbids is being affected by a third party's decision.

It seems that there's a problem with the feedback/response cycle in one-at-a-time pricing systems. The more effective systems approach is to set a scheduled or contingent pricing, perhaps at 10-15 minute increments, minimum. A regular schedule (as with peak / off-peak rail or transit schedules) is another option.

Hence: how does OP propose to run an auction?

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#270

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jonstewart wrote: post #251
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever heard of induced demand? That is not what happens. The effect they're measuring is that a road gets congested, the congestion suppresses the natural demand, and if you expand the road to reduce the congestion then more of the natural demand comes back and there is still more congestion than you expected. But the same applies to any of the alternatives. If you build more housing in the metro area then…

DC's been on a building spree and rents have stabilized, maybe even decreased a bit. In the greater Metro area, there are four fundamental problems: 1) new housing and jobs are placed too far away from Metro; 2) Metro is severely under-capitalized due to a lack of a dedicated funding source, so they can't undertake the projects they need to restore the level of service that was unsustainably enjoyed in the late 90s/e…

> DC's been on a building spree and rents have stabilized, maybe even decreased a bit.

You can obviously offset something that raises rents by doing something that lowers rents, but then you're only depriving yourself of the benefits you would have had from actually lowering rents (or lowering them more) instead of having the benefit canceled out. And it still screws over anyone who still can't afford to live in the city.

> new housing and jobs are placed too far away from Metro

It's probably also that new housing and jobs are placed too far away from each other.

> dedicated bus lanes

Bus lanes are crazy. It's impossible for them to cause congestion relief because the instant they actually did the bus lane would no longer confer any advantage to the bus and any incentive it provided not to drive would evaporate. So it's logically impossible for them to actually solve the problem, but they can easily make it worse by wasting road capacity when the reason people don't take the bus isn't just congestion, e.g. if the bus doesn't go where they need it to.

> If we tolled every car coming into DC (NYC and SF have tolls on their bridges and tunnels), that could be a nice funding stream for mass transit projects; but we can't simply because of Congress.

Tolls are popular with some cities because it's effectively taxation without representation. The city gets to collect money from people who live in neighboring cities and states, who don't get a vote on whether there should be a toll there. This is not commendable behavior.

And there is no magic. One way or another the citizens have to pay for the infrastructure. It's not like tolls can cost them less money than to pay for it with normal taxes. For most people it will cost them more, because tolls are incredibly regressive. Even more regressive than flat taxes. And on top of that you have to pay the overhead cost to collect the tolls.

Build housing and eliminate rules that prevent it from being built, and build infrastructure and pay for it with normal taxes. Don't make driving worse, make the alternatives better.

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