Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

I don't think you read my entire comment: "When I lived in an area where I could commute by subway, I had a full service grocery store and several smaller specialty markets (a produce market, a butcher and a bakery) on my way home"

I was referring to the comment asking how to shop by subway -- the answer is to shop in smaller increments, but now that I bus/bike to work and no longer walk past a grocery store on my way home, I just have groceries delivered.

Your answer seems to be saying that the answer to shopping on the subway is to not take the subway and drive to work and stop at the store on the way home.

But they're not getting to their destination faster. They were getting there in fifteen minutes, now it takes three hours because they can no longer afford to drive but the bus doesn't actually go to their destination.

> We'd make separate bus roads, bicycle roads, and car roads, and then the road user would select their mode and their road and be done with it.

You don't need separate roads, you need mass transit that actually goes where people need to go.

Or better yet, to put more people where mass transit already is.

> Prioritizing a car solution makes it worse for busses and bicyclists to use the same road.

A bus can use the same uncongested road as a car with no problems, and traffic congestion is the same problem for both. There are a hundred different ways to address congestion other than "punish drivers" -- add new mass transit routes, build more housing on existing routes, lower or eliminate mass transit fares, switch from property tax to land value tax to encourage density, etc.

The point is that it's not free money. You don't get to spend resources without paying for them. The money comes from someone and that has a cost.

And where they come from is worse than where most other types of taxes come from, because it's an incredibly regressive form of taxation.

> Sales and income tax don't discourage traffic jams.

They also don't come disproportionately from working class people. And there are better ways to discourage traffic jams.

> But if you want, sure you could send the income from congestion pricing to something else and use other taxes to fund alternatives.

There is no such thing as directing specific tax money to a specific purpose. That's just an accounting dodge politicians use to lie to people. Money is fungible. The people paying don't pay a different amount and the people getting paid don't get paid a different amount.

What you can do is fund mass transit improvements from sales or income tax and not have congestion charges at all, which a significantly less regressive way to fund mass transit improvements.

> They can, but they don't.

Many of them do. More of them would if we had higher density housing and it was easier to find close neighbors who work in the same area, or just take the train to work.

> Yes, they have been tried. There's a good reason why experts say that congestion pricing seems to be the only thing that works. With every other approach, traffic grows to fill the available space until you get massive traffic jams.

China built a huge number of highways as a jobs program. They didn't suddenly fill up with traffic.

Los Angeles has worse traffic than New York City, even though there are more people in New York (both the cities themselves and the surrounding metro areas). Because New York has double the population density, and better mass transit. If population and density always caused traffic then how is New York better than Los Angeles?

And that's with New York shooting itself in the foot like this:

http://furmancenter.org/research/publication/are

You're not allowed to build housing with no parking even when it's next to a subway station. So housing in the city costs more because of the expense, causing more people to live outside the city and have to commute in. Meanwhile the people who do live there have mandatory parking spaces, encouraging them to own cars even when they live next to the subway.

New York also has density limits that would prohibit many of the existing buildings from being constructed today. Meanwhile they still charge money for mass transit -- not a lot, but enough to deter people for no good reason, and then a huge chunk of the money collected gets wasted on the infrastructure needed to collect and enforce the fees.

This isn't what having tried looks like.

> The US isn't the only country with this problem; many countries have it. Netherland has tried for years to solve it without congestion pricing by building more and wider roads, mass transit, zoning and whatever, and it's not working.

There are a hundred ways to do it wrong. That doesn't mean it's impossible to do it right.

> Meanwhile, countries that have tried congestion pricing see it working.

It's only working if reducing congestion is the only criteria and it doesn't matter if you're heavily taxing the working class or forcing them into even longer commutes or artificially scarce overpriced housing when they can't afford the congestion charges.

Politicians like congestion charges because they generate money instead of costing it. But it comes from the wrong people, and all you're really doing is changing the relative cost between driving and alternatives. If you want to do that, why can't you tax the rich and then make mass transit free? Or do something to lower market rate housing costs in the city so more people can live there instead of having to commute in?