101–110 of 375 posts
It's sad to see congestion pricing in America. I had hoped that the long-lived cultural freedom of driving would keep it at bay for longer, but I guess not anymore. I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip. Public transport is not a suitable option.…
I understand that you would rather pay x than 2x, but this is not “cultural freedom”, it is haggling over a price. But the fact that we ignore the $1 in wear on the drive belt because that won’t be a problem for three years, but we are annoyed about $1 to use a road right now, says a lot about human psychology.
Given climate change, and that sitting in traffic is not very nice, it seems a superior system to me to leverage psychology to bill at the point of use rather than squirreling the costs away in oil changes and in the fine print of financing paperwork and in making pedestrians walk longer between places through parking lots. It may be the case that transit is impractical for this route but the only real way to determine that is to have a functioning price mechanism. I mean it is probably faster to visit your family by helicopter, and helicopters do exist so there is a usecase for them. But we have the good sense to charge about what they cost.
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Any new money for public spending is typically used to pay down the ballooning public pension liabilities. And if it doesn’t go towards pensions, it’s diverted away to other welfare projects, or education. Point is these new funds won’t make transportation better in any significant way.
The proposed budget explicitly says this money will go towards the MTA.
It’s just that this cost in time isn’t distributed nearly as ideally as it could be. It costs an individual the same amount whether they take a bus or a car with four people or four cars with one person each. If we tax per-vehicle instead, that pushes people not only to shape their travel times more ideally, but to also use more efficient forms of transportation.
So long as this is used as a means to shape travel to be more efficient and not just as a way to gobble up revenue, it might be alright. I think toll bridges/roads are mostly this way, where they’re free in the dead of night when few are on the roads, so I’m hopeful.
The streets were never free. We paid for it with our tax money. (Not to mention our 22 trillion dollar public debt) I don’t think people expect streets to be free in the same way you don’t expect the police department to be free, the fire department to be free, public schools, etc. In any case, my point is, we paid for the streets with our tax money and our debt, so don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic rec…
Driving in manhattan is already such a miserable experience, I'm not sure that $10 adds enough extra misery to significantly reduce weekday traffic, but I could certainly be wrong about that (and hope I am).
I haven't seen any real breakdowns on "who is driving around manhattan on a Thursday" but it seems to me that it is mostly taxis, car services, buses, and commercial vans/trucks -- almost all of whom can absorb or pass on the costs.
This is all kinds of wrong, the problem could be tackled much better, for example most companies have no incentives to hire workers near their premises (or relocating them to make it so), meaning they get no benefit if they emplooyes have a 10 minute commute over a 2 hour commute; car companies have no incentive to build smaller cars, small single-person cars should be far more common but instead we are stuck with hu…
That doesn't really seem true to me. Car companies make products that can sell. People vote with their feet. People make decisions to buy bigger vehicles so that's what is manufactured. If there is increased demand for compact cars the manufacturers will make more (like they do outside of the US). Companies might not seek to hire people nearby but they might put their offices in a more convenient location. Either way…
Yeah and people are irrational and wrong, that's why the right incentives must exist so they are more incentived to buy smaller cars such as single-person or 2 person cars.
> Either way you seem to completely miss the idea that alternative methods of transportation like mass transit
I did not, of course better transportation its the solution in long term but in the short one we need viable solutions as well.
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OK, how about "it's a way to make sure people who need the road most are the ones who get to use it" Kind of how parking meters are FANTASTIC because they mean I can finally get a damn space for the rare occasion when I rent a van or car and need to park in front of my flat. I just wish they'd raise prices on my street because it's still tough sometimes.
"it's a way to make sure people who need the road most are the ones who get to use it" It is too regressive to achieve that end. If you have a lot of money, it is a trivial cost for convenience. If you are poor, but would really benefit from road access, you still may not be able to afford it. You could easily frame this as "keep the poor off the road so the rich don't have to deal with traffic".
This is all kinds of wrong, the problem could be tackled much better, for example most companies have no incentives to hire workers near their premises (or relocating them to make it so), meaning they get no benefit if they emplooyes have a 10 minute commute over a 2 hour commute; car companies have no incentive to build smaller cars, small single-person cars should be far more common but instead we are stuck with hu…
This is a novel idea, but introduces worse problems of discrimination. You should not use candidates address or commute as criteria in hiring. I do see companies set up satellite or second offices. I do wonder if an companies of scale use proximities and travel time to influence renewing leases or moving office buildings. What do these formulas look like? What data do they use?
Why not? You claim it like a truth without justifying it: A person living near a restaurant that want a job there should get it over someone just as qualified in the opposite end of the city.
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Excellent. This would contribute to health. You want something. Walk to get it.
Senior citizens love this plan.
senior folks will happily share their opinions with you, so no need to speak for them.
I post something like this every time the congestion pricing subject comes up. We have congestion pricing in Minneapolis / St Paul and it just works. If I'm in a hurry, I have the option to choose to use the priced lane. We're rolling it out to all of the major highways (it's on 3 of them so far). I wish we had it on more lanes on all highways already, because what is the point of having a 60mph road if most of the t…