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

nytimes.com

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

#351

Post by ocschwar »

hourislate wrote: post #53
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” In New York, low-income New Yorkers who own a car (or live in the zone) will be eligible for a waiver [1]. People with disabilities, too, will probably be eligible for a waiver. (Some carve-outs are still being pinned down.) Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the u…

How do people feel on a congestion fee for sidewalks. Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable. If you want to walk on a sidewalk during the busiest times you should pay a congestion fee. Why would we stop at just roads?

Seems easier to widen the sidewalks by taking away a car lane.

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

#352

Post by ocschwar »

qmanjamz wrote: post #271
a_c_s wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NYC (at least in Manhattan where congestion pricing is being implemented) food delivery is primarily done via bicycle, sometimes via subway or walking, very rarely by vehicle.

Are they flying bicycles?

No, but they are cyclists who would benefit from having an easier ride thanks to less car traffic.

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

#353

Post by ocschwar »

dannyw wrote: post #3

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.…

The "cultural freedom of driving" in America means a majority of Americans need a license form the government just to leave their homes and return with a gallon of milk.

It's really a bizarre way to define freedom.

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

#354

Post by ocschwar »

pif wrote: post #80
l1ambda wrote: post #68

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…

> We have congestion pricing ... and it just works. Please, could you explain with a bit more detail what you mean with "it just works"?

Boston has a proxy to congestion pricing: parking spaces are heavily regulated. Inside Boston proper they are effectively capped. Outside of the Seaport, you cannot build new parking.

The rationale is that if you build more parking, people will drive to reach the parking spots, and it will cause more traffic congestion.

What this translates to is parking being really, really expensive. You can drive downtown any time, and there WILL be a parking spot waiting for you. But will cost you $15 for the first hour at minimum. So nobody does it if they don't need to.

If you're, say, a hotshot surgeon and need a parking spot by your nice apartment, you can buy one. They're called deeded parking spots: plots of land sized for parking, which you can buy and sell. You have to pay property tax on them. The cheapest one in Boston recently sold for $60K. Others have sold for $250K. For 12 feet by 20 feet of land.

We have a road system. It's congested, but not insanely so. And everyone knows not to use it if you can avoid it. But when you do need it, it's there. I would never drive to work, but if I need to go to Mass General Hospital, I can just budget $40 for parking and get in the car.

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

#355

Post by Proven »

If the streets aren't free, then even congestion plans can't justly distribute the cost of building and maintaining them.

If the author was concerned about just cost allocation of infrastructure, he'd be arguing for private roads and privatization of existing public roads.

Congestion pricing doesn't "finally" make that clear. Private roads existed before and still do, and don't cost anything those who don't use them.

A distributionist will of course argue for public roads (with or without congestion pricing) because private roads don't give them a way to distort cost allocation to benefit their re-election chances and ideological goals.

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

#356

Post by FakeComments »

yonran wrote: post #346
FakeComments wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I follow your argument on 2. If people aren’t free to adjust their driving habits, congestion pricing merely raises the cost for them, because the time to commute doesn’t go down (appreciably) — everyone is still on the road at the same time. It then effectively becomes a regressive tax: those least free to change their schedule are those in the lowest earning jobs, and hence those most coerced to pay th…

I disagree with your premise. There are people on the margin who decide to drive or not because of the traffic (or who are forced to queue unexpectedly). If the roads and parking garages had infinite capacity, then there would be hundreds of thousands more cars on the road in Manhattan. It’s implausible that all the people who remain on the road today are purely inelastic. I also disagree that the tax would be incide…

That decreasing the price causes elastic demand doesn’t indicate that raise the price decreases demand elastically: there can be a largely inelastic base load.

> Higher-paying workers are more likely to pay more, since people with price-inelastic demand for driving are more likely to be those who value their time more highly.

Again, this is only true absent coercive forces —

Higher paid workers (on average) also have more schedule flexibility and ability to use money to cover for their physical absence.

By contrast, lower paid workers have less flexible schedules and a greater need to utilize their time — eg, they have to perform childcare because their market rate per hour is below child care services.

This leads to a situation where high paid workers have more elastic price demand than low paid workers, and raising prices ends up charging low paid workers because if market distortions from other factors.

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

#357

Post by C1sc0cat »

hannasanarion wrote: post #214
C1sc0cat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you allow card drivers to opt out of paying for the metro or busses then

They can already do that, by not buying tickets.

I was talking about the Taxes that subsidize public transport DUH

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

#358

Post by kadendogthing »

closeparen wrote: post #349
kadendogthing wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Having less cars drives up the value of land, making land more expensive for everyone You just repeated what he said... while also repeating it again. I want to know how having less cars drives up the value of land.

The N-minute radius around a destination is a lot smaller when you are walking to transit vs. driving. People who can afford to will spend to keep their door to door times low. A huge chunk of American housing supply is in places that only made sense to settle because they were connected by freeways to downtown parking. Take that away and there will be just as much money, chasing less land.

>A huge chunk of American housing supply is in places that only made sense to settle because they were connected by freeways to downtown parking.

Err, no. It's because the government heavily subsidized it at the detriment to city centers. You don't have to be NYC. City centers by their very nature our extremely economical beneficial and affordable.

Our current housing infrastructure is in no way reasonably affordable or even sane. Building houses in a dense manner is not expensive.

I'm not sure what the confusion is here.

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

#359

Post by notacoward »

fjp wrote: post #330
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Fewer overall cars because fewer people own cars due to taxis and uber and Higher utilization of the cars that do exist because a higher % of cars are taxis and ubers 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 gr…

> Fewer overall cars

Fewer cars, but more miles. Every moment that a car is going between one drop-off and the next pick-up adds to the total.

> Each physical car sees much higher utilization

Higher utilization is a mixed blessing. The more a car is driven per day, the fewer days it will be until replacement. There's not much difference between two cars each being driven half the time all year and two cars each being driven all the time half the year. At best you get some benefit from keeping the car warmed up, but that's outweighed by the passenger-less miles.

> t's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion

That would work a lot better if demand were uniformly distributed, but in fact it's highly cyclic - toward office areas in the morning, away from them in the evening. This asymmetry is even worse for things like sporting events. Once a driver has taken a commuter to work, going anywhere else means 2x distance because they'll have to come back for the matching commute home.

The only way to reduce ecological footprint is to reduce the number of vehicle miles per person. It doesn't matter who or what is driving the vehicle. Reducing commute distance works, even when people are still in cars but especially when people can walk/bike instead. Increasing per-vehicle occupancy helps, whether it's car pooling or mass transit. Replacing private cars with shared ones doesn't make a dent, and in some cases can make things worse.

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

#360

Post by adrianmonk »

adrianmonk wrote: post #275
seattle_spring wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We paid for it with our tax money. I hate this argument so much. It comes up all of the time when chronically underfunded national and state parks say they need to raise prices. "buT muH taX doLLarS alReaDy PaY for MAH PARKS!!" Doubly true for places that add quotas and lotteries to curb overcrowding delicate areas. This is the exact same situation: Your tax dollars paid for part of it, sure, but not close to enoug…

I think you are reading more into the argument than is there. It's not an argument that the current system is good or that the new system is bad. It's an argument that the premise that we thought they were free is a bullshit premise. Debating which tax policy is better is a perfectly fine thing to do. But it's not fine to begin that debate by mischaracterizing the status quo. The new system might be wonderful, but th…

Correction to my comment above (too late to edit): "exist" should be "excuse".
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