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Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

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Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#71

Post by lkbm »

sampo wrote: post #39

> 5. Gasoline and gas taxes. Are they suggesting progressive gas tax? The price of gas you pay at the pump would depend on your salary?

I think they're suggesting that if you oppose decry congestion pricing because it's a not progressive, you should also oppose gasoline cost and gas taxes because they're not progressive.

Their thesis is that congestion pricing shouldn't be dismissed on grounds X, not that all these other things should be dismissed on grounds X. It's pointing out the inconsistency of supporting a bunch of inequitable policies while rejecting another simply because "it's inequitable".

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#72

Post by hedora »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #65
hedora wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not 100% Tesla’s. There are also parents with children and fleet vehicles.

Those latter two categories are already as low occupancy as they can be. I suspect they’re representative of HOV users in other states.

Simply eliminating that HOV lane would probably improve the commute though. There’s data from a UC Berkeley study that more or less proves it.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#73

Post by avar »

oneplane wrote: post #54
avar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fuel taxes are just another version of taxing the wrong thing. People using gasoline for e.g. yard equipment aren't using the roads, but they're effectively paying road tax to trim their hedge. Someone who owns a Tesla also isn't paying their road tax.

Taxes and tolls should be based on what/where/when you drive. Someone driving in circles in downtown Amsterdam in the middle of the day is causing a lot more externalities than someone doing the same thing in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

Nothing about saying fees shouldn't be externalized is an argument that there shouldn't be investment in infrastructure. Although I think you'll find that once car infrastructure would have to pay real property tax and pay for its externalities (including pollution etc.) we'd need less road infrastructure. You'd get more density, more things shipped by train instead of trucks etc.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#74

Post by tomasien »

The electric vehicles item here is disingenuous without including how massively subsidized their oil-based competitors are. I understand why urban transit people target electric cars to counter the "electric cars will save the world!" narrative but it falls flat to me in an otherwise compelling list.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#75

Post by jabl »

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…

Basically what many economists are recommending for dealing with climate change, namely a carbon tax + dividend scheme. That is, a (rising) carbon tax sufficient to reduce carbon emissions quickly enough, and proceeds from said tax paid out in equal amounts to each citizen.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#76

Post by DataWorker »

tgb wrote: post #51

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…

Gas taxes and congestion prices are different. If you can’t grasp that then you probably don’t see the foolishness of the original article and probably are as confused as the articles author about what critics of congestion pricing think and why.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#77

Post by barrkel »

devereaux wrote: post #3
rocgf wrote: post #2

> 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.

It sounds obscene to me too. A car uses a parking spot. The spot is no longer available for someone else- regardless of your income. Incomes is orthogonal to the problem. Flat taxes are the fairest taxes. Take trash taxes for example: you produce 100 lbs of trash, you pay for 100 lbs of trash because disposing of 100 lbs of trash in a landfill or a recycling facility won't be affected by the income of the person havi…

Flat taxes are not the fairest taxes for a very simple reason: the decreasing marginal utility of money. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility...

If you're poor, a tax - no matter how small - affects things like food expenditure.

If you're income rich, the difference tax makes affects things like what kind of car you buy or what quality of hotel you stay at when you're on vacation.

These are not like for like tradeoffs, they're qualitatively different.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#78

Post by mikeash »

zozbot123 wrote: post #64
radicalbyte wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 highe…

I guess Bezos’s mansion and Gulfstream are basically the same as Homeless Guy’s tarp and stolen shopping cart.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#79

Post by paganel »

maxsilver wrote: post #45

Author uses a really backwards definition of equitable. Equability is not about making every price defined as percentage of income. Equability is about making things so cheap that everyone can easily afford them, regardless of income. In perfect equitably, everything would be free. Public Schools are equitable, because every child can attend public school, there are no barriers to attendance. Public Water utility sys…

I think one of the main sub-texts of this type of articles is that roads are not “public goods”, or at least that they shouldn’t be reguarded as “public goods” anymore, but that instead road-users should be made aware that using those roads is a “privilege” (for lack of a better word) which they should pay dearly for.

Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

#80

Post by devereaux »

adrianN wrote: post #28
devereaux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive. No, it's not reasonable. The goal is not to discourage use, but to price in the negative externality. > For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production, And that's good, even if we suppose your argument is right. Bear with me: what's the perce…

I'm pretty sure 5% of the population can create more of whatever negative externality you'd like to tax than the lower 95%. Someone rich might not drive a car at all and instead take a private jet. An average person from the US produces fifty times as much CO2 as an average person from Kenya.

If we were talking about CO2, I'd agree with you.

But we are talking about parking spaces, and production of trash within a country.

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