321–330 of 375 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the whole reason congestion charges exist: to get people to weigh comfort and laziness against personal cost. > no reasonable way to listen to music ...headphones?
Listening to headphones while bicycling isn't safe, and playing it from a speaker where everyone around you will hear it feels rude.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a hell of a claim to back up. Any kind of argument for this idea? Ownership is meaningful. What is access—is my local McDonalds a public service? This smells very similar to "access to affordable" housing and healthcare. Sounds great, but at the end of the day, people are still without health care and housing, so they clearly DON'T have access. Ownership is the only way to guarantee material access.
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…
However, in the current context of discussing congestion—i.e. who gets to use the thing we all pay for—and other externalities like pollution and use of fossil fuels, public ownership is the salient thing to discuss.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The carve-outs are precisely the problem with the congestion pricing. If everyone in mid-town just had to pay a flat fee, fine, that seems somewhat fair. But now every interest group is rent-seeking and going to lobby to be exempt. That's the unfair and corrupt part, not the fee. NYC having congestion pricing isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world. Some might say it's long overdue. But the legislature doesn't…
Can you explain how a flat fee is fair to someone making minimum wage versus someone making 90k+ per year? A flat fee would be a larger portion of their income which would be decidedly unfair. There's also that not all vehicles are going to tear up roads in the same way. Why would it be fair for trucks and what not to pay the same flat fee despite causing far more wear and tear on the roads? Your argument would resul…
Congestion dynamics don't care about your income. Same imposition on society, same scarce good consumed, same price to get the incentives right.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have all the money in the world for infrastructure and not fix the congestion problem. There's a hard limit to how many cars can physically fit on the roads at a time, and the number of people who want to use the road at rush hour exceeds that limit. Given the cost of driving in NYC, using congestion pricing to pay for transit would almost certainly be a move that increases, not reduces, equality.
I'm all for reducing the traffic, but I think having the streets be only for the wealthy is among the worst ways to solve that problem. In a way it's analogous to any other resource allocation problem. There are lots of approaches other than "richest wins"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have all the money in the world for infrastructure and not fix the congestion problem. There's a hard limit to how many cars can physically fit on the roads at a time, and the number of people who want to use the road at rush hour exceeds that limit. Given the cost of driving in NYC, using congestion pricing to pay for transit would almost certainly be a move that increases, not reduces, equality.
I'm all for reducing the traffic, but I think having the streets be only for the wealthy is among the worst ways to solve that problem. In a way it's analogous to any other resource allocation problem. There are lots of approaches other than "richest wins"
but that's basically what they are now, in as much as they are catering for the most expensive form of transport (aircraft and tanks notwithstanding).
Having the streets for everyone means having them be for walking, cycling, scooters, bikes, buses, etc. Hell, donkeys while we're at it.
I think Emily Badger sort of misses the point. A scarcity tax is completely different from a user benefit fee for road maintenance. For public goods, it’s a good thing for the government to subsidize the fixed costs of the public good. But where there is traffic, the road is not entirely a public good anymore and we are already paying the cost of congestion, but the price is in the form of time and inconvenience rath…
1. People can arbitrarily convert time into money, ie, there’s not a reason they’d prefer to pay some expenses in time.
2. People are free to change their travel times, and aren’t being coerced into traveling at a particular time. If travel time is a monopsony, then this is mere rent extraction because people can’t adjust behavior in response to economic pressures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think they were more arguing that the cost algorithm is wonky for those roads The cost algorithm is wonky because the value algorithm is wonky. Actually, there IS no value algorithm. Even if the data were available (and it wasn't Big Brotherly for the gov to collect and keep it) there's no way to calculate the individual value extracted per person, it's NP-ish yeah?
All motor vehicles are already registered with the state. The dimensions of unmodified vehicles are already a matter of public record, easily looked up based on make and model. Seems to me that all you'd have to do is a simple cross-check of the person's vehicle size before charging them. Bikes and motorcycles would only need a separate fixed cost for each. Honestly, it seems like a pretty simple matter to look up a…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It lessens the amount of car storage needed too, though, which is also important. It would be nice if multi-person trips like UberPool would be exempted to encourage their use, but I don't know if that's technically feasible.
It lessens the amount of cars storage and increases the amount of cars on the road. You can't transport by car and reduce both at the same time!
Some combination of these two factors could mean that there are fewer cars idle at any time ("storage") and more cars in service at any time. I'm not necessarily saying that's what is happening but it's definitely possible.
Looking into the future, a great outcome of driverless cars would be the commoditization of car transport. You essentially say where you're going and whether you are willing to share the ride. A driverless car pops off the queue to pick you up, or a multi-person car slightly diverts from its route to pick up up (a la Uber Pool).
- Each physical car sees much higher utilization, allowing fewer cars to exist overall and parking space needs are reduced.
- A large network of efficient driverless cars means it's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion from everyone's route. Ideally an improved shared ride experience would result in higher usage of shared rides, meaning that fewer cars need to be on the road at any given time = lower pollution and congestion.