Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

cityobservatory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 276 posts

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#61

Post by jacques_chester »

curiousmiro wrote: post #59
bradleyjg wrote: post #34

I 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?

Other police, mostly, but also NYFD, teachers, pretty much anyone who puts an official-ish looking placard on their car.

Or sometimes just some stickers from the various police quasi-unions in the tristate area.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#62

Post by bilbo0s »

jacques_chester wrote: post #60
bradleyjg wrote: post #34

I 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... https://twitter.com/placardabuse

Outside NYC, they probably never even heard of "placard abuse".

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#63

Post by lsc »

adolph wrote: post #58
lsc wrote: post #46

it 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

my understanding is that it's any tax used to price in an externality. An effluent fee would be just one example.

wikipedia supports my usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

"A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of such externalities are environmental pollution, and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption."

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#64

Post by zozbot123 »

radicalbyte wrote: post #56
mikeash wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real difference between Very Rich Guy and Homeless Guy is plausibly lower today than during any other previous era of history, including the mid-20th century. When he isn't working at Amazon or playing with his rockets, Jeff Bezos is, by and large, buying the very same kind of goods and services you or I buy-- his consumption may be larger than mine by some factor, say 3x or whatever, he might pick slightly higher quality stuff, but that's about it. This was very much not the case historically.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#65

Post by shereadsthenews »

hedora wrote: post #57
jonstewart wrote: post #47

In 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 tim…

I don't think that is a very good example because that particular "HOV" lane is 100% Teslas with a single occupant, and because the HOV lane ends abruptly in the middle of 237 before anyone exits. The real lesson of these projects is that the EV sticker program was a failure and the cost to drive down 237 at rush hour should have been $50 instead of whatever it is.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#66

Post by seibelj »

curiousmiro wrote: post #59
bradleyjg wrote: post #34

I 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?

The commenter didn’t spell it out for some reason, but he or she means family members and friends of city employees. They use various tricks to get free parking even though they shouldn’t, and as they aren’t official city employees they won’t get reimbursed for congestion fees and their scam will become more expensive.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#67

Post by benologist »

zdragnar wrote: post #35
buzzdenver wrote: post #18

The way I conceptually see it is that people with lower income pay less once a year, during tax time, and save a lot of money then. All other times it's just much simpler if prices/fees/whatnot are based on actual usage. Can you imagine owning a gas station or running a parking lot and having to deal with income verification from all your clients, and then dealing with the government to get reimbursed because Joe Sch…

I was approached twice on the same day at a cub foods once by people offering to buy my groceries with their food stamps in exchange for a lesser amount of cash. I still think the program is valuable, but damn it hurts to see it be abused (especially since one of the guys had his little kid with him). A discount card or whatever that works on the spot is practically guaranteed to be abused as an easy money maker for…

If the majority of people are acting responsibly within the program does abuse warrant changing policies for everyone else, ie optimizing around the frauds, or should abuse be handled separately?

When GOG.com optimized around the frauds they came up with a refund policy for their ethicals that's driven by preventing the frauds, now their real customers wanting refunds must work within a hostile framework designed to deny their refund because it assumes they're an adversary.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#69

Post by jacques_chester »

bilbo0s wrote: post #62
jacques_chester wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... https://twitter.com/placardabuse

Outside NYC, they probably never even heard of "placard abuse".

Until I moved here, I hadn't heard of it. The lawlessness of law enforcement is striking.

It's doubly galling when it's "courtesy" extended to non-police. A lot of officers can argue that they need to get to work and they need to park somewhere. Police cars also have to be parked somewhere. The City will need a carrot as well as a stick.

But when it's stuff like "NYPD Family Member", I think only of collecting and sharing new four-letter expletives. That's just flat-out corruption.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#70

Post by hedora »

jonstewart wrote: post #47

In 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…

> Commuters have effectively time-shifted, alleviating and smoothing congestion. It has been so effective that the length of I-66 subject to this treatment will be extended.

Also, has anyone computed the cost of the economic externalities here? Time shifting ones commute either has severe financial repercussions for the employer (lost productivity) or the employees (a decrease in effective wages).

I suspect those numbers will dwarf the cost of investing in a light rail system or widening the road after a few years.

Similarly, if traffic is below about 45mph, then further slowing traffic increases CO2 emissions by lowering fuel efficiency, and the congestion on the road distorts property values, lowering prices in more places than it helps them, which hurts school funding (especially in minority areas), etc, etc.

As I said in the other comment, consider raising peak commute throughput instead of devising ways to suppress peak demand.

Post reply on HN