> On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect.
The congestion already does that. The issue is that it's a hard problem. You can't make deliveries to shops at 3AM because there is no one there to receive them. To the extent you can make deliveries at 6AM, they already do. But a delivery driver loads up the truck and then makes deliveries for eight hours. Telling them to work a de facto 14 hour shift because you're going to put two separate three hour blocks of "don't drive during peak hours" into the middle of their day is going to drive up costs.
And freight rail serves an entirely different market. That's used to transport bulk products in industrial quantities, not to deliver bread to the corner deli. Trucks sometimes are used in contexts where freight rail could be used but those aren't the ones driving through Manhattan during rush hour.
> The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
The problem is that the externalities are really just failures in the markets for alternatives that have dumped their natural demand onto the roads, because all of the externalities come from congestion, which could be absorbed by better alternatives if they existed.
If you make the subways better then fewer people drive. If you make them less expensive then fewer people drive. That means paying for them from taxes rather than fares -- just getting rid of the fares and using taxes instead would get a huge number of cars off the road and eliminate the overhead cost of all the fare collection infrastructure.
When you have things like minimum parking requirements or anti-density zoning rules, that makes it more expensive to build high density housing and subsidizes car ownership for people in urban areas. Then the people who live there drive more, because they have somewhere to park a car and therefore own one, meanwhile there is less housing there which means people need to live further away and then many of them will drive back in to their jobs.
Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives had already squeezed into congested roads. It makes driving worse when what we need is for alternatives to driving to be better.
