Decrying everything that doesn't have a low-income subsidy as "inequity" is disingenuous and undermines your better justified claims. It's OK if poor people pay the same price as rich people for the same service and it's OK to have broad income subsidies or progressive income/wealth tax to help poor people. It's not reasonable to claim that every fee for service is "inequitable".
Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
171–180 of 276 posts
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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). That, or companies implement flexible working hours, which allow time shifting without penalty.
That doesn’t work if you have kids. You miss seeing them in either the morning or evening, and the schools don’t time shift to match your schedule.
I don't know about where you live, but in UK many school have breakfast clubs to deal with this sort of issue.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of nitpicking, we can just look up the actual calculations.[1] They're on the order of 20 cents per mile traveled. Half of that is crashes, which insurance already covers. Most of the rest is congestion costs. Air pollution and global warming costs are actually quite low compared to the harm caused by crashes and congestion. Noise is also a rounding error. Of course this is aggregate data. Congestion costs ar…
If you can find any studies that take the context of Manhattan (or anywhere else in the first world with similar population density really) I'd be happy to look at them. The study you're looking at doesn't do so. So while I assume that it's a perfectly valid study it really doesn't apply.
I could use that same logic to refute a study showing public transportation is cost-effective as long as that study wasn't done in San Francisco. It would be an obviously incorrect argument in that case, and that is also true in your case regarding cars.
The study's numbers are far more connected to reality than your made up numbers. You are making an isolated demand for rigor.[1]
1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#174I 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…
I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. If people are commuting into Manhattan, they should take public transit to and from parking lots in Brooklyn/Queens/New Jersey. You will never convince me that there are low income workers who need to drive in the city as an essential pa…
Seems like it might be easier to eliminate parking, rather than ban vehicles. If there was no street parking, a lot of people would have no choice but to park outside of Manhattan. That would also still allow taxis and ride sharing to drive people from the subway to wherever they needed to go.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument against here that I find most compelling is that the externalities of you driving your car are so insanely huge that it should be priced into the range of ridiculousness. Things that you have to consider (The numbers attached are completely made up and probably off by multiple orders of magnitude in most cases, but are to make the point that you should be assigning costs to these things. Then you should…
There are serious attempts to estimate the externalities that arise from automobile use in general: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.661... Adjusting those estimates (only) for inflation, they work out to about $2.14 per gallon in driving externalities.
So.....even if you add it to the price of US fuel, it's still cheaper than fuel in the UK? And British cities have just as much trouble with congestion as American cities do. I guess what I mean is that if this extra money is meant to be a deterrent to driving it's just not enough. I'm not sure what the price would need to be to be honest. I've been to Portugal recently and the price of petrol is just insane - in the order of $8-9/US gallon. And yet people sitll drive, larger cities still have loads of congestion. And Portugal is very poor by European standards.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are serious attempts to estimate the externalities that arise from automobile use in general: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.661... Adjusting those estimates (only) for inflation, they work out to about $2.14 per gallon in driving externalities.
So.....even if you add it to the price of US fuel, it's still cheaper than fuel in the UK? And British cities have just as much trouble with congestion as American cities do. I guess what I mean is that if this extra money is meant to be a deterrent to driving it's just not enough. I'm not sure what the price would need to be to be honest. I've been to Portugal recently and the price of petrol is just insane - in the…
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#177I 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…
If everyone who drives is opposed to congestion control, why is it even on the table?
Eh? When has that been how we make laws? “If everyone who uses drugs is opposed to drug laws why are they on the table?” “If everyone who steals is against theft laws why do we have them?”
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument against here that I find most compelling is that the externalities of you driving your car are so insanely huge that it should be priced into the range of ridiculousness. Things that you have to consider (The numbers attached are completely made up and probably off by multiple orders of magnitude in most cases, but are to make the point that you should be assigning costs to these things. Then you should…
There are serious attempts to estimate the externalities that arise from automobile use in general: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.661... Adjusting those estimates (only) for inflation, they work out to about $2.14 per gallon in driving externalities.
If this is a reasonable calculation, then I don’t think the costs are so insanely high.
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. If people are commuting into Manhattan, they should take public transit to and from parking lots in Brooklyn/Queens/New Jersey. You will never convince me that there are low income workers who need to drive in the city as an essential pa…
Seems like it might be easier to eliminate parking, rather than ban vehicles. If there was no street parking, a lot of people would have no choice but to park outside of Manhattan. That would also still allow taxis and ride sharing to drive people from the subway to wherever they needed to go.
I’m good with that plan too. I wake up every morning to giant trucks beeping in reverse because the street parking blocks them turning a corner. And thirty jerks who drove in from Long Island are honking their horns behind that truck. Every day!
Re: Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. If people are commuting into Manhattan, they should take public transit to and from parking lots in Brooklyn/Queens/New Jersey. You will never convince me that there are low income workers who need to drive in the city as an essential pa…
Seems like it might be easier to eliminate parking, rather than ban vehicles. If there was no street parking, a lot of people would have no choice but to park outside of Manhattan. That would also still allow taxis and ride sharing to drive people from the subway to wherever they needed to go.
can't shit in your car.