Implement congestion pricing for all drivers.
Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
41–50 of 327 posts
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#42What about public transport?
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#43> Uber and Lyft “are using public roads, and the profit is going to their companies,” Phil Washington, Metro’s chief executive, said at a recent meeting. Public roads are supposed to be paid for through fuel taxes, which every Uber and Lyft driver pays. California has gasoline taxes of: * 55.22c per gallon (second only to Pennsylvania) * 18.4c per gallon (federal) * 2.25% sales tax Additionally, taxing only rideshari…
This is a very bad solution, especially as share rides decrease the number of cars when people use uber pool
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#44This doesn’t fundamentally change the supply and demand problem in LA, which is a city built entirely for cars and nowhere near the road capacity for everyone to be able to make all the car trips they would like to. For cities that want people to be able to get around AND for the roads to be relatively uncontested, the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving - ie. significant conges…
> public will being the primary > impediment to progress. What an extremely arrogant statement. If the public will does not agree with your world view, perhaps the latter needs adjustment, and not the former, like you imply?
The American public is unbelievably misinformed. Public opposition to an idea indicates only how much cable TV the public has been watching recently and says little about the merits of the idea. Just as an example of such a thing, the median survey respondent believes that foreign aid is the largest component of federal spending, and the overwhelming majority are against increasing it. However when those same people are informed that foreign aid is among the smallest parts of federal spending and that the USA is by far last among rich countries in per-capita and per-GDP aid those same people in the same survey at the same moment largely change their minds.
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#45> Uber and Lyft “are using public roads, and the profit is going to their companies,” Phil Washington, Metro’s chief executive, said at a recent meeting. Public roads are supposed to be paid for through fuel taxes, which every Uber and Lyft driver pays. California has gasoline taxes of: * 55.22c per gallon (second only to Pennsylvania) * 18.4c per gallon (federal) * 2.25% sales tax Additionally, taxing only rideshari…
This is a very bad solution, especially as share rides decrease the number of cars when people use uber pool
If you believe that Uber and Lyft are decreasing the number of cars on the road, then taxing them to "free up congested roads" is misguided, as it will have exactly the opposite effect.
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the roads and streets. Roads are massively subsidized from general revenues. If you are proposing a $5/gallon fuel tax then I completely agree. That would be about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel and consistent with the state's greenhouse ga…
That's misleading -- yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes cover only part of the expenses, but that's not because of personal cars . Damage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.
Are there studies for how these measure up in practice? Also curious about wear per weight characteristics between concrete and asphalt.
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the roads and streets. Roads are massively subsidized from general revenues. If you are proposing a $5/gallon fuel tax then I completely agree. That would be about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel and consistent with the state's greenhouse ga…
That's misleading -- yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes cover only part of the expenses, but that's not because of personal cars . Damage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.
That's not really the view from a city budget. Cities don't have that many truck routes and their costs are dominated by maintaining streets where virtually all the traffic is light vehicles. For the state it is a bigger problem because almost all state route are truck routes.
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#48This doesn’t fundamentally change the supply and demand problem in LA, which is a city built entirely for cars and nowhere near the road capacity for everyone to be able to make all the car trips they would like to. For cities that want people to be able to get around AND for the roads to be relatively uncontested, the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving - ie. significant conges…
>the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving You can also reduce the need to travel by increasing density, which LA is attempting in certain respects.
How so? There was this reddit comment where someone listed all the ridiculous parking requirements they impose that torpedos apartment projects, regardless of how close to downtown or transit they are.
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_arc...
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are there plans to tax traditional cabs by an amount commensurate with their cruising time? Traditional taxis already pay a steep annual franchise fee to the city (even after it was cut down on recent years, probably in part because less-taxed rideshares reduced the level of franchise fee that was supportable).
Franchise fees also benefits the taxi companies. It constrains the supply to taxis, thus shielding the taxi companies from potential competition. They're paying for protection from competition.
> Franchise fees also benefits the taxi companies.
In the presence of a substitute service not subject to them, they do not.
Actually, since there seems to be both a non-automatic approval process and a franchise fee, they don't really even without such competition; the approval process shields them from competition, the franchise fee is a pure cost. (Of course, there is a linkage between the two, but as long as the process is in place, incumbent taxi firms benefit from minimizing the fee.)
Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's misleading -- yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes cover only part of the expenses, but that's not because of personal cars . Damage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.
That's not really the view from a city budget. Cities don't have that many truck routes and their costs are dominated by maintaining streets where virtually all the traffic is light vehicles. For the state it is a bigger problem because almost all state route are truck routes.
Even then, the same phenomenon means that the dominant source of damage to those streets is the delivery vehicles; smaller cars still cause a disproportionately small fraction of the damage and are overpaying via taxes. Ubers are not externalizing here.