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1) If your roads are being overused you can easily ration that by raising the dollar price. 2) What is wrong with wealth accumulation? If credit recipients wou

by harryh 9y ago

1) If your roads are being overused you can easily ration that by raising the dollar price. 2) What is wrong with wealth accumulation? If credit recipients would rather do that than drive on roads they should be able to do so. They's how they get less poor! 3) If they credits are transferable then you are effectively giving people money. Just in an ass-backwards and overly confusing way.

pas 9y ago
Setting up a traffic-ration system fairly is probably a lot simpler than giving poor people money.
- harryh 9y ago
  I disagree. We have all the technology and processes we could ever need to distribute and charge people dollars for things. Creating a whole new kind of currency with its own special rules is a huge undertaking. Not to mention the ongoing pain-in-the ass cost to every citizen when they have to carry around and think about a new special kind of money that can only be used for one thing.
  - thatcat 9y ago
    The tech isn't the problem, it's that the avalibility distribution that is imposed on roads is the same as the income distribution. In a way it creates the same problems as removing net neutrality. If you did that with roads, what's stopping the upper income distribution from excluding everyone else from entire cities? A gated community concept might scale to an entire upperclass city with a private airport, hostpital, and 1000$ entry fee to keep out the poor. This might even effectively reduce overall costs for the municipality since homeless and property crime would be greatly reduced. On the other hand if other currency is used, it makes everyone easily trackable. I think the dumb pipes model still has some advantages.
    - pas 9y ago
      > it makes everyone easily trackable. zkSNARKs for the rescue! It's surprisingly easy to roll with that. (See Zcash, Monero, ETH and whatever.)
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  There are simple and effective (from a traffic-flow-control perspective) solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter I'd focus more on one of my other punts above: ways of drawing a correspondence between traffic and congestion, on the one hand, and alternative transit options (buses, rail, cycling, telecommuting, etc.) on the other. Market pricing signals fail to provide the coordination many of these options require. Typically, planning-based approaches are required.
  - pas 9y ago
    > alternative transit options I like driving, but I'm very bad at managing the stress associated with owning a car, finding a parking spot, sitting in congestion, trying to be there in time (speeding to gain a few minutes that makes no sense), hence I don't have a car. And I wouldn't live in a place that requires one. And I can't understand how the US is so deep in the hole with regards to mass transit / public transport, commute time, etc. Sure, I know, it's a classic coordination problem, and I'm probably very biased by having access to a very cheap and efficient public transit network.
    - greenleafjacob 9y ago
      Finding a parking spot is usually not an issue for US citizens since we mandate lots of parking through zoning laws.
dalbasal 9y ago
All depends on what problem you are trying to solve. IMO, the problem is "how do we allocate road so that high utility use gets precedent over low value use, without defining high/low value as 'rich/poor person wants to get from a to b'" Expiring credits is an idea, as are a lot of options. Designed markets are a devil-in-the-detail endevours. A market is a good tool for this job, that's why economists and wonks like tolls. But, not every market needs to be the market. In this case, The Market is probably worse than the no market free-for-all.
larksimian 9y ago
3) You're giving them things that cost you nothing to produce which they can then sell for money. I actually think this was a bit of an aha moment for me re: cryptocurrency and government. It's possible for a government to setup a market for a public good, create a currency for that good and distribute that currency equally to people. All without spending actual currency(ignoring administrative costs of setting up a blockchain). The value of the public good for people then determines the USD exchange rate, but poor people are never excluded from using the good and at the same time you are not massively inflating the money supply. edit. In fairness, nothing about this requires a cryptocurrency/blockchain. It's more a general argument in favor of governments charging for public goods by creating custom (maybe fiat) currencies which they distribute equally to all citizens. There might be administrative and/or psychological benefits to running all these custom currencies on blockchains.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Raising the HOV-units price provides equal purchasing capacity amongst all drivers. I mentioned the option of transferability for completeness. I'm not advocating for or against it. I am noting that it would change the dynamics somewhat. Your #2 is a rather more involved and tangential discussion. Historically, it has a strong tendency to end in tears, or worse.

by harryh 9y ago

pas 9y ago

Setting up a traffic-ration system fairly is probably a lot simpler than giving poor people money.

harryh 9y ago
I disagree. We have all the technology and processes we could ever need to distribute and charge people dollars for things. Creating a whole new kind of currency with its own special rules is a huge undertaking. Not to mention the ongoing pain-in-the ass cost to every citizen when they have to carry around and think about a new special kind of money that can only be used for one thing.
- thatcat 9y ago
  The tech isn't the problem, it's that the avalibility distribution that is imposed on roads is the same as the income distribution. In a way it creates the same problems as removing net neutrality. If you did that with roads, what's stopping the upper income distribution from excluding everyone else from entire cities? A gated community concept might scale to an entire upperclass city with a private airport, hostpital, and 1000$ entry fee to keep out the poor. This might even effectively reduce overall costs for the municipality since homeless and property crime would be greatly reduced. On the other hand if other currency is used, it makes everyone easily trackable. I think the dumb pipes model still has some advantages.
  - pas 9y ago
    > it makes everyone easily trackable. zkSNARKs for the rescue! It's surprisingly easy to roll with that. (See Zcash, Monero, ETH and whatever.)
dredmorbius 9y ago
There are simple and effective (from a traffic-flow-control perspective) solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter I'd focus more on one of my other punts above: ways of drawing a correspondence between traffic and congestion, on the one hand, and alternative transit options (buses, rail, cycling, telecommuting, etc.) on the other. Market pricing signals fail to provide the coordination many of these options require. Typically, planning-based approaches are required.
- pas 9y ago
  > alternative transit options I like driving, but I'm very bad at managing the stress associated with owning a car, finding a parking spot, sitting in congestion, trying to be there in time (speeding to gain a few minutes that makes no sense), hence I don't have a car. And I wouldn't live in a place that requires one. And I can't understand how the US is so deep in the hole with regards to mass transit / public transport, commute time, etc. Sure, I know, it's a classic coordination problem, and I'm probably very biased by having access to a very cheap and efficient public transit network.
  - greenleafjacob 9y ago
    Finding a parking spot is usually not an issue for US citizens since we mandate lots of parking through zoning laws.

dalbasal 9y ago

All depends on what problem you are trying to solve. IMO, the problem is "how do we allocate road so that high utility use gets precedent over low value use, without defining high/low value as 'rich/poor person wants to get from a to b'" Expiring credits is an idea, as are a lot of options. Designed markets are a devil-in-the-detail endevours. A market is a good tool for this job, that's why economists and wonks like tolls. But, not every market needs to be the market. In this case, The Market is probably worse than the no market free-for-all.

larksimian 9y ago

3) You're giving them things that cost you nothing to produce which they can then sell for money. I actually think this was a bit of an aha moment for me re: cryptocurrency and government. It's possible for a government to setup a market for a public good, create a currency for that good and distribute that currency equally to people. All without spending actual currency(ignoring administrative costs of setting up a blockchain). The value of the public good for people then determines the USD exchange rate, but poor people are never excluded from using the good and at the same time you are not massively inflating the money supply. edit. In fairness, nothing about this requires a cryptocurrency/blockchain. It's more a general argument in favor of governments charging for public goods by creating custom (maybe fiat) currencies which they distribute equally to all citizens. There might be administrative and/or psychological benefits to running all these custom currencies on blockchains.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Raising the HOV-units price provides equal purchasing capacity amongst all drivers. I mentioned the option of transferability for completeness. I'm not advocating for or against it. I am noting that it would change the dynamics somewhat. Your #2 is a rather more involved and tangential discussion. Historically, it has a strong tendency to end in tears, or worse.