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Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

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Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#221

Post by stevietopsiders »

reading-at-work wrote: post #28
burlesona wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I included the second part of my statement, which you did not quote: we would need to use the proceeds to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of alternatives to driving so that people had a realistic choice. I totally agree with you that people are driving mostly because they have to, not for fun. However, retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally di…

> we would need to use the proceeds to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of alternatives to driving so that people had a realistic choice. I agree, but public transit projects take years to complete, so in the interim you'd have very expensive driving and worse congestion than before (due to construction), which sounds like hell on earth. Would it be feasible to invest the costs up front and collect the…

Sevilla, Spain is the poster-child of rapidly building out a bike network[0], and with the political will, that could be replicated elsewhere (especially somewhere flat and sunny like LA). Another easy way to improve transit is paint dedicated bus lanes for BRT lines. Not as sexy as dropping a few mil on light rail, but quick, cheap, and rapidly scalable.

[0]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/05/07/six-secrets-from-the-...

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#222

Post by vidarh »

jdhn wrote: post #98
2dollars27cents wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have mentioned, taxing efficient cars doesn't seem to make much sense. Maybe tax actual miles traveled instead? That would solve the problem of increasing efficiency and also decrease the value of loitering and cruising in-between pick-ups.

I'm real curious as to how taxing miles travelled would work, especially if you travel between states. Would you have to keep track of how many miles you drove in State A and State B, and how would you pay State B if you lived in State A? Since we'd need to replace the federal fuel tax as well, would the federal government require states to hold yearly odometer inspections, or would you have to fill out a form on you…

In Norway the use of GPS has been discussed for a few years, and as far I understand the newest solutions being discussed have been approved by the data privacy watchdog, which generally tends to be very negative to government surveillance.

There are many options there, at the cost of making audits/complaints harder, such as e.g. only keeping GPS traces for a very short time (or not at all), and gradually overwrite more and more details, such as coordinates, reducing time precision, and finally consolidate to amounts owed. Those settings could be left under the control of the car owner as well, or let you dump a signed record of the precise data if you as the owner suspect inaccuracies and want to collect evidence, and then allow you to wipe the details from the device and only leave aggregate numbers.

The point is if the device is tamper-proof enough, you don't need it to record your movements, you just need it to monitor your movements and location with sufficient precision to decide what amounts should be added to running totals of tax.

Of course there is a risk some governments will decide they'd really like more detailed records.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#223

Post by bredren »

foepys wrote: post #213
mikeash wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the average car in the US gets about 25MPG, while the average tractor trailer is 6MPG, so about 4x the fuel per mile. Accounting for the higher tax rate, they’re paying maybe 5x the tax per mile, while causing maybe 5,000x the damage.

You could tax trucks like 1000 times more. But don't expect the butter and milk to stay the same price.

The point may be that they should not be this price to begin with.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#224

Post by vidarh »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #78
briandear wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should less efficient vehicles be taxed more? If they are already paying more for fuel, doesn’t that already “tax” them more? It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people.

> Why should less efficient vehicles be taxed more? Taxation serves two purposes: (a) to fund roads, and (b) to discourage society damaging behavior. For (a), we need to tax all vehicles, for (b), we need to tax some vehicles more than others. > It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people. True. Perhaps the efficiency tax can be built into the initial n…

Many countries (Norway would be an example) have special taxes on cars that takes into account a variety of metrics around pollution, weight and engine capacity, as well as price. Overall car taxes in Norway are among the highest in the world, to the extent that it massively skews which car models people buy.

Here's the Norwegian tax authorities form for calculating taxes. While not all the descriptive text is available in English it seems most of the form is:

https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/duties/cars-and-other-...

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#225

Post by wutbrodo »

integrate-this wrote: post #88

I'm a LA resident. People in this city like to talk about congestion as though they see it as a problem, but they don't actually see it as a problem. Only people in the valley see it as a problem because there are limited choke points into and out of LA proper which keep people from getting to work. LA's limited transportation infrastructure prevents DTLA's homeless from getting to Beverly Hills, Long Beach's gang-re…

I spent a lot of my childhood in Beverly Hills and still have friends in the area: what you're saying has historically been absolutely true, but in the last 5 years, my perception has been that the seemingly all-the-time-and-everywhere traffic has gotten to the point where even people living in the nice parts of West LA are fed up and opening up to a functional transit system.

This is obviously somewhat anecdotal, though; it's possible that for some reason my sample is skewed enough that it's different from the population's views in general.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#226

Post by nserrino »

It's really frustrating that in so many cities, car owners are perceived to have more of a right to the road than non-car owners (aka those who take only rideshare). Roads are payed for by public subsidy and there shouldn't be special handouts for car owners.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#227

Post by stretchwithme »

Charging for use of the road is the only way to balance supply and demand for road. More at peak times and a discount off-peak. Fixed price subscriptions for your commute.

But I see no reason to treat Uber cars differently, except that having a driver does not qualify to one to use the carpool lane (which I would eliminate anyway)!

I'd also allow subscribers and those who buy ahead to sell their prepaid trip when the price surges. Wait an hour and make $5 when there's an accident.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

nitwit005 wrote: post #177
habosa wrote: post #160

The congestion caused by Uber and Lyft in SF is bad . It's not because of the number of cars on the road, although that's certainly something, it's because of how those cars behave. Ubers and Lyfts pull over at unpredictable spots (wherever the app says to) and then just throw on their flashers. It doesn't matter if they're blocking a lane in rush hour they just stop. I will never for my life understand why an Uber o…

All the delivery services park illegally as well. For a long time I assumed they had some sort of exemption because it was so common. They just eat the tickets as cost of doing business.

I suppose tickets should have exponential increase and decay built-in - this way, collecting a bunch of tickets in a row wouldn't be edible for companies, but intermittent tickets (corresponding to base rate of traffic violations) would cost no more than before.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#229

Post by rypskar »

sgustard wrote: post #183
shereadsthenews wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas in Switzerland is currently about $9 USD per gallon (CHF 2.27 per liter), chiefly in taxes.

What's your average distance driven per year? In the US it's 13,476 miles (21k km).

So because you drive longer, which of course produce more Co2, you should have a lower price? l/100km or mpg is not really the most important, what count is l or g per year. Last time gas prices where high sales of SUVs and trucks in US did go down, as soon as the gas price did go down sales of cars with terrible mpg ratio did go up

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#230

Post by dmitrygr »

jacobolus wrote: post #214
perl4ever wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The American public is unbelievably misinformed." This may be true without implying any defense of something that is contrary to the public will. The public can be totally awful and that doesn't mean people who have contempt for the public are any good.

I don’t see how saying that “public will is an impediment to solving traffic congestion” indicates contempt for the public. It seems like a straight-forward factual statement, and not a particularly controversial one. After we acknowledge that “public will” is an impediment, we can then probe whether the problem is really so bad after all, what “public will” really means, whether it is self-contradictory, how strongl…

Op said that "public will is an impediment to progress". That is much more arrogant statement than the one you claim to defend: "public will is an impediment to solving traffic congestion"
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