I think most of the comments here are misunderstanding the article. It seems to be saying "Don't say congestion pricing is inequitable without also saying that these are things that we already have are inequitable." It's meant as a counter-argument to people saying "but congestion pricing is regressive against poor people therefore we shouldn't have it." So if you think that gas pricing should not have to be based on one's income, you aren't refuting the article since you presumably also don't think equitability concerns apply to congestion pricing either.
Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
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Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#52I really take exception with their point on insurance. They try to insidiously suggest that the poor and urban population pays more for insurance than other populations due to... Well they don’t say, but I do take their inference. The fact of the matter is that the auto insurance industry is highly regulated and cannot discriminate on many factors. Their rate books are reviewed by regulators. The fact that poor and u…
In Ontario, Canada, your insurance rates are tied tied to where you live, if you have a garage, and if you put on snow tires in winter.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#53I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context. Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Ma…
"Nobody drives a car in Manhattan cause traffic is just terrible!"
All kinds of excuses will be made to increase the taxes in this system where NO amount of money will add up to enough for this government.
New York City in particular has a MEDICAL ONLY section of its pension benefits for city employees that adds up to $100 Billion. Medical, only. Not including pension payouts.
Puerto Rico defaulted on $71 Billion worth of debt, which was all of it, just recently.
This reckoning that is on its way is going to be epic. Nothing in NYC government makes a profit or operates properly without gigantic losses and pathetic performance in every metric when compared to the past city performance.
This will be the Olympics of Mental Gymnastics.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#54This seems rather US-centric, but perhaps there are some universal things in there? In The Netherlands, we usually split off some of the issues; for example there is the tax that covers road usage paid per active registered vehicle. This depends on the vehicle, so depending on how expensive/big/powerful etc your new car would be, you'd pay more or less tax. For public transportation, more and more networks are gettin…
Yeah much of it doesn't transfer, but on the subject of the taxes in The Netherlands a lot of it is nonsensical: 1. You pay tax per weight of the vehicle, and that's a (mostly?) linear relationship. Whereas a 10 ton vehicle causes much more than 10x the wear & tear to roadways than a 1 ton vehicle. 2. Even if it were adjusted for the wear it shouldn't be a fixed fee, but based on actual usage. Paying it for a combina…
That tax is not the only one paying for the roads; the normal tax on fuel and the fuel-specific tax on top of that (which also differs per type of fuel) offsets the heavier engines or heavier users.
At the same time, a project people abandoned a few times (mostly because or scare tactics) is in the works to see if we can lower or abandon some of the taxes in favour of usage-based taxes measured by vehicle kilometers on-road. So if you drive more, you pay more.
At the same time, I don't think it makes sense to make all tax super dependant on what you drive, where you drive it, and what money you make. We already have some specific systems in place to deal with the discrepancy between high income and low income (and the gradient in the middle), so instead of making the tax system more complex by adding yet more variables to existing rules, a rule with a highly specific target is simpler and reaches more of the people it applies to.
Basically, if you are poor, or simply don't make enough money to save or invest, a lot of the taxes no longer apply. At the same time, if your income is so low you are getting towards the edge of not surviving (depending on where you are I guess) you get money for rent and healthcare. And on top of that: if you don't have a lot of money, it makes no sense to own a car anyway.
I don't think a true per-use system that only relies on what the current usage of anything is will work, simply because we cannot predict what we will need or use in the future and it disables all paths to investments or building infrastructure because it is a lifeline to certain areas. After all, it's not a for-profit corporate system we're talking about, it's a country or a government. While sensible decisions are of course needed, and adjustments to how some things are paid for can be very sensible, making a very tight integration between what is available and what it currently used is a very bad idea for humans.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#55For the people who believe this is fair and just- Should engineers and programmers pay more money for the same laptop as an art student? I'm unsure if this pricing should only exist in the public sector or should extend to private services. Looking to hear your rationale. I'm one of those, treat everyone equal, types. Would like to hear your reason.
> Should engineers and programmers pay more money for the same laptop as an art student?
No, of course not, if it's the same laptop.
But suppose there is a laptop tax of $300. If the engineer and art student buy the same $3000 laptop, that's 10%. But let's be realistic here: art students will probably have a $1000 or even $500 laptop. Suddenly their tax rate is 30% or 60%, compared to the engineer's 10%.
Excises and levies are not flat taxes. They are regressive in structure. Whether you agree with progressive taxation is one matter, but I feel as though everyone agrees that taxation should at least be linear to the thing being taxed.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#56> parking meters don’t charge different rates to users based on their income; you have to pay the same amount to park your used Jetta as you do your new Mercedes [...] That’s inequitable. I guess it depends on which end of the political spectrum you are, but this sounds absolutely obscene to me.
I don’t understand why this example is there at all. This is just a product being sold for a price. Is it unfair that a banana costs the same for Jeff Bezos as it does for the homeless guy he walked past on his way to the store? I mean, you certainly could argue that this is unfair, but at that point you’re basically arguing for a different concept of money and commerce, which is a rather bigger subject than the unfa…
In the past we solved the problem on the supply side by reducing the difference between Bezos and Homeless Guy. However ideas like that have been made unpalatable to the people who most benefit from them - in a quite frankly brilliant campaign of social engineering - so we're left discussing unworkable "solutions" like this.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#57In Northern Virginia outside DC, I-66 had been subject to directional rush hour restrictions on single occupancy vehicles. It was illegal to drive a car with just yourself for a few hours every weekday and you risked a ticket if you were caught. People put blow up dolls in their passenger seats. Last year they rolled out automatic congestion pricing for SOVs. All the news stories were about how the toll could hit a r…
In the Bay Area, when they added the ability to pay a toll to use the HOV lane, and also extended the HOV lane hours to end at 10AM instead of 9AM, it immediately added 30-45 minutes to the 880 -> 237 commute from East Bay.
Extending congestion hours by lowering road throughput is counterproductive, so saying “it smoothed congestion” is applying the wrong metric.
At this point in time, we can measure door-to-door time of commuters, and also the number of trips per hour. Instead traffic engineers use metrics that seem to be designed by NIMBY’s that want to increase the cost of commuting into high property value areas.
The bus lanes you propose are likely to have the same problem.
Since you have the ability to improve the success criteria for transit projects, please consider using better metrics.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#58it seems to me that the right way to solve the regressive nature of pigovian taxes like congestion fees or gas taxes is to implement them with subsidies so that they are largely revenue neutral. The idea being to give everyone a tax credit equivalent to what they are probably going to spend on usage fees. The incentive structure remains, as they get to keep the money if you aren't contributing to the negative externa…
”A Pigovian (Pigouvian) tax is a liquid waste, or effluent, fee which is assessed against private individuals or businesses for engaging in activities that create adverse side effects. Adverse side effects are those costs which are not included as a part of the product's market price.”
Source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#59I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context. Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Ma…
> traffic control refusal to enforce the law with respect to certain favored populations
Elaborate?
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#60I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context. Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Ma…
For those outside NYC, it can be difficult to understand the sheer scale of this phenomenon ("placard abuse").
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/12/28/streetsies-2018-placa...