The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain

> Not under any definition of public transit I've heard

From source [3], as provided above:

>> The taxi should not be viewed as antagonistic to public transport, people who use taxis are in general 'public transport users' not 'car users'. Any improvement in the taxi service should therefore be viewed as an important improvement in public transport provision. Any improvement in the provision of taxi services will be very valuable for people with mobility problems since they rely on the taxi for a significant amount of their travel due to the door to door nature of the taxi service.

> They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.

As other comments have discussed, this is controversial.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043

[1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf

Unless you're making the argument that it takes 10 years to roll out a bus system, such a policy can be written to phase in the congestion charge only when the public infrastructure is ready (NYC's congestion tax only kicks in 2021 AFAIK).

In any case, we're no longer arguing about the merits of congestion pricing, but are arguing about the implementation details, and that's a good place for the debate to be.

> Do you honestly believe people who take public transportation don't go to coffee shops? This is Manhattan we are talking about. You walk out of the subway...there's a coffee shop. You actually see it because it's on the walk from the subway to your office.

And then you pay more for lower quality, because if you have to buy it in a specific location there is less competition and they know it. And paying more for lower quality is how you reduce overall transaction volume. You have to use the coffee shop next to your office, not the one you actually prefer, so either it's somewhat worse for you or it's sufficiently worse the transaction doesn't even happen.

> Obviously you don't stop in the middle for it. That is a ridiculous strawman.

It's the exact thing that people in cars actually do, to their advantage.

> We are talking about downtown Manhattan, not some suburban office park. Nobody needs to drive anywhere for lunch. There are hundreds of places to get lunch within walking distance.

This is all about marginal costs and competition. There is a place you love to go for lunch, but it's three miles from where you work and you don't have a long enough lunch break to walk there and back. There are six places right across the street that aren't as good.

No car and no frequent mass transit and your choice becomes patronizing the worse closer place or brown bagging it. Either of those is worse, and at scale they cause the better place to go out of business because they had been better by leveraging volume into a cost advantage that paid for higher quality at the same price. And the reduction in competition allows the worse place to get even worse or more expensive.

> They are worse because you are currently able to offload the negative externalities of your driving onto everyone else. Now that you have to pay for those, you can weigh the true cost of driving vs. the cost of other options.

The infrastructure is a sunk cost and the environmental impact should be handled with fuel taxes, so the only remaining externality is congestion. Which you're already paying for with your time.

Congestion pricing is just the rich taxing the poor off of the publicly funded roads so that they can express their strong preference for time over money, without making the changes necessary to make people choose alternatives voluntarily.

> That's fine. How is that not a social benefit? If it encourages people to find work closer to home, that means less transportation, less pollution. Everyone wins.

If everyone wins then why wouldn't people have chosen it to begin with?

Because it's a regressive tax that generates perverse incentives. Today you make $50,000 working in the city. Introduce congestion pricing and you would have to pay $5,000 in congestion fees a year, so you take a $40,000/year job somewhere else because all the extra $10,000 would now be going to state and federal taxes and congestion charges. But finding a new job is a cost for you just to break even, and a cost for your employer to replace you and potentially have to move out of the city due to the cost, and a cost for the government which has just lost tax revenue on the extra $10,000 in income.

And there is no guarantee the result is even less transportation. You could have to take a job which is twice as far in the other direction but avoids the congestion zone and then burn twice as much fuel and spend twice as long commuting.

> On the other hand, maybe it encourages employers in the city to pay more to offset the costs. That's good too.

On the other hand, maybe it encourages employers in the city to lay off their employees and close up shop, because the employees can't afford the congestion charge and the employer can't afford to pay them more.

And if they do pay more, then they may have to raise prices.

> This is not mutually exclusive. We can have congestion pricing and build more housing in the city. With fewer cars running around thanks to congestion pricing, that means we don't need as much parking, so there's more space to build housing. There you go.

Or you can build more housing without parking and there are fewer cars running around, and then you don't need congestion pricing.

Will you be satisfied by a dictionary definition:

  buses, trains, subways, and other forms of transportation
  that charge set fares, run on fixed routes, and are
  available to the public.

I will agree, many taxi services are (in practice if not in principle) excluded by this definition. Discriminatory practices with how they select their fares, for instance. Also most don't have fixed routes so you'd have to relax that requirement to allow taxis (but some taxi shuttle services operate on more or less fixed routes).