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I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. I think if you took the exact same logic

• yipbub 9y ago
  The report says "None of those fees should be charged, the task force said, until repairs are made to the public transit system." so it wouldn't be like they'd be "surge charging" a necessity like schools.
  • lazerpants 9y ago
    True. Going into a little bit more detail of what I mentioned though, all of the high demand schools I know of have other nearby schools that are in low demand. Typically, the high demand school is in a wealthy neighborhood (let's say Brooklyn Heights), and the low demand school is in a bordering poorer neighborhood (Vinegar Hill). So, the city would not be surge charging for a necessity, just a preference for a high demand school. Likewise, most people would prefer to drive if they could, but the physical limitations of the system require that most people take public transport.
    • TuringK 9y ago
      >> just a preference for a high demand school Sometimes this is also a preference for safety, as I learned attending k-12 in NYC. And sometimes the safety isnt a result of bad students, but a result of the entire system just allocating more resources to some schools over others.
  • dr_ 9y ago
    It also indicates a timeline, where cars would have to pay by 2020. The public transit system cannot be fixed in 2 years.
• lotsofpulp 9y ago
  They're both common in society. Instead of the school directly charging more money, increase property taxes, or don't allow apartments to be built. That describes most of the public schooling in America, and why a child's future is most dependent upon their zip code. NYC is different in that the city government covers rich and poor people and can't legally separate the two so a different measure develops, such as entrance exams where kids whose parents are able to hire tutors perform better on. We can't have a hugely unequal society and expect certain bubbles in it to pretend as if those who have advantages aren't using them.
  • brailsafe 9y ago
    I'd offer up that while it may be useful to compare outcomes with zipcode, the same research would benefit from more granularity, and often is. For example, block to block neighborhood boundaries can reveal remarkable contrasts between socio-economic conditions.
• tlrobinson 9y ago
  Discouraging driving has other benefits such as reducing pollution, noise, space needed for parking, etc. The good schools are going to be filled no matter what, so trying to assign them the fairest way possible makes sense.
  • njarboe 9y ago
    Probably more that 50% of what makes a school good are the students that go to them. Once this is realized, fairly assigning students to the good schools becomes problematic.
    • jessaustin 9y ago
      ...what makes a school good are the students... This claim seems probably true for university and probably false for kindergarten?
      • Symbiote 9y ago
        For school age children, the parents are very relevant. Some of the youngest schoolchildren already know how to read, count, say the alphabet, listen, and so on. Their parents read books to/with them, buy educational toys and so on. Other children have to learn all this at school. The parents of the children in the first group would prefer that the other children were similar. Parents who care more are also more likely to get problems solved -- whether that's a problem their own child has (e.g. a learning disability) or with the school. So in general, the quality of the teaching is often less important than the children and their parents.
• DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  Most countries gurantee a right to education, but driving a car is considered a privilege - which is why congestion charges seem more palatable, to me at least, compared to a use-fee for education. ...not that it doesn't happen already. Don't most public schools charge parents for meals at school, after-school activities, and equipment if they join the varsity sports team?
• maxerickson 9y ago
  I think it's just more acceptable for roads to be a limited resource than for quality schools to be a limited resource. It's not a logical argument, it's values.
  • eldavido 9y ago
    I'm not sure if I agree or not but I think this is a very insightful comment. This is the level on which this conversation needs to take place - what's important? Are some things more important than others? It's not strictly about dollars and cents, or how to pay for it. For what it's worth I think they're about equally important. There's no such thing as "an alternate road system", you either have one, or you don't. And I also think there's a place for people who don't have kids, who make a considered decision not to fund schools but want good roads so they can go places and get to work. This is meat and potatoes politics: tradeoffs, values, what we think is important and are willing to pay for.
• isoskeles 9y ago
  > only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy Wouldn't libertarian philosophy, taken to its logical end, imply private schools and private roads, where you pay whoever owns the school/road to use it? But if we're going to have some public schools and roads, there's more of a moral principle behind the former than the latter. I would be uneasy with congestion pricing public schools because the moral principle they continue to exist on (nb: not that they were founded on, as far as I know) is equality of opportunity. That goes away the instant you start allowing wealthy people to fill up the best schools that otherwise non-wealthy peoples' children could have attended. It might as well be a private school.
  • KhanMahGretsch 9y ago
    >Wouldn't libertarian philosophy, taken to its logical end, imply private schools and private roads, where you pay whoever owns the school/road to use it? That is correct, though the government still has a major role to play in enforcing their citizens rights. If a private company were to build a poor-quality and dangerous road, this would amount to an act of violence towards the drivers, thus the government would need to ensure that standards are met. If education is defined as a right, the government would need to ensure that private schools are meeting the standard held in it's definition. Of course this is a simplification, but in a way I view these services as already being "privatised", except one organisation is granted a monopoly: the government! They indeed have some of the same conflict-of-interest that would scare some off private corporations replacing them; we all know that local politicians can be very selective in which stretches of roads receive maintenance, especially coming up to election time.
    • tbihl 9y ago
      I can't tell if we disagree, but I would attack this from a different angle. Libertarians clearly want less power concentrated at a central level, but it's not clear why that should carry down to every single entity that can be called government. If kids call their parents the government for the home, should libertarians be opposed to parental authority? I think it would be a fair statement that libertarians favor a strong family unit (certainly not its alternative, the dystopian sci-fi separation of children from parents at birth.) Households run in ways that are almost entirely communist. So why should this non-profit collaboration stop at the front door? I don't think a libertarian has to be opposed to every unit of government that dares to call itself government. So let's say you abolish your municipal government, but you don't have money to pay for private schools, security, road building and welfare. Maybe you have a neighborhood watch for security, a group of neighbors who fill potholes, and a church that provides rudimentary welfare and schooling. Is that government? Maybe it seems similar, but libertarians would argue that government is a monopoly on force, and that doesn't sound like what's happening here. But maybe a few people in town saved money to buy some livestock, and now they're having problems with coyote/mountain lion attacks. The obvious solution is to have the neighborhood watch carry guns, if they weren't already. After all, if they're already out, may as well kill two birds with one stone. So now you have a neighborhood watch who's also the gun-carrying livestock protection. You can't help but notice that now the neighborhood watch is the only guy carrying a gun around, and that probably makes you less likely to mess with him. Is that a monopoly on force yet? What about if there are enough herders in town to start paying that guy full-time, and he's used for neighborhood watch too (since he's already out, after all?) Hopefully you can see where I'm going; people will naturally band together to solve community problems, and that needn't always be via a for-profit venture. I think it's a misunderstanding of libertarian ideology to suppose that you have to be opposed to all levels of government, and it's a misunderstanding by those inside and outside of that movement. When you realize that most of the popular functions of government are performed by the local (or maybe state) governments, you have to think libertarians could gain a lot of support by re-framing themselves in that way, and it doesn't seem like they would be compromising.
• maxsilver 9y ago
  > Why is congestion pricing okay when applying the same philosophy to other matters of public good isn't? I think the real root of the problem is that congestion pricing is never okay in matters of public good, we've just conditioned ourselves to believe that infrastructure is this special case of impossible problem to solve, so our terrible workaround to this artificial problem sometimes seems begrudgingly reasonable in context. Which is why, if you took the exact same logic and applied it to almost anything else, the public would be outraged.
  • Eridrus 9y ago
    Manhattan is fundamentally limited by space, not sure how you expect to solve this problem when there is going to be more demand for this good than we can actually supply. This problem is only going to get worse as we get self-driving cars.
  • tbihl 9y ago
    The immediate problems of infrastructure are two-fold: funding and the matching of supply and demand. Ignore the environmental ramifications for the moment and kick that can to your kids like everyone else does. Supply and demand solves itself. The solution is staring right back at you any time you drive around a city at 5PM local. The funding could be solved by taking more money out of general revenue from income and other taxes. It's not too far a stretch from where we are now. The argument for congestion pricing could be framed as frustration with either of those two components. First, some people want to pay for their use in dollars instead of hours. Second, some people would rather target the users of the public good to recoup the enormous costs of it. Personally, I try to opt out to the maximum extent because I find the time cost unacceptable, and I would avoid the monetary cost for the same reason. And given the risk of runaway time cost or runaway money cost for a rare trip, I'd rather keep the time. If nothing else, my loss aversion would make me avoid driving like the plague after paying a high toll. We prefer bakeries to bread lines, and food is arguably more important to life than driving. So why should we want the bread line equivalent when it comes to driving? As far as I can tell, it's because that's the system we're used to, and change is hard.
    • 9y ago
• graeme 9y ago
  Physical roadspace is far more limited. In most other OECD countries, schools aren‘t nearly as segmented. Public school quality is across the board high. But all countries have road congestion issues, to my knowledge. It’s an intrinsic feature of road networks. There‘s also a lot more variance than with schools: roads are sometimes empty sometimes full. School attendance is static through the year. (Which suggests an optimal road price would actually be more like a surge, and vary through the day.)
• tantalor 9y ago
  You have a false analogy. Traffic increases as the size of the road network increases, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand This is not the case for schools.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• look_lookatme 9y ago
  > Why not start charging $3k a year per child (much less than private schools) at high demand schools in order to lessen the overcrowding of those schools? If you just moved to Boerum Hill and paid cash for a $5,000,000 brownstone and converted it into a single family home, I don't see why not. Take that money and put it toward improving the various segregated NYC schools that you used your money to avoid.
• rayiner 9y ago
  > I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. We have congestion pricing for schools. Try buying a house near one of the good elementary schools in DC or Chicago.
  • walshemj 9y ago
    And gerrymandering of catchment areas id assume as happens in the UK.
    • dnautics 9y ago
      That doesn't really happen in the us.
      • rayiner 9y ago
        Sure as hell does. Here's the boundaries for the elementary school in my area: https://imgur.com/M1bAKEh https://imgur.com/M1bAKEh. People are flipping out right now in part of one of the adjacent school districts, because they might be redistricted into the Annapolis elementary schools, instead of the Edgewater school on the other side of the river. I'll let you guess why.
        • dnautics 9y ago
          wow, that's pretty egregious!
  • paulgb 9y ago
    That may act functionally as a congestion tax for the home buyer, but instead of the tax going to the state where it can be used to fund other schools it ends up being an arbitrary transfer of wealth to homeowners who bought before the school was built.
    • imgabe 9y ago
      Part of it goes to the state in the form of higher property taxes due to the increased property value.
• gamblor956 9y ago
  In the U.S., a public education is considered a right. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and so the same considerations don't apply. For example, we already charge drivers for the privilege of driving: annual license fees, mandated insurance, gasoline taxes, etc. Congestion fees/taxes are simply an extension of the costs associated with the driving privilege. With respect to schools, we already have a de facto congestion charge, in the form of housing prices near desirable schools. In many states, property taxes near desirable schools are also higher to reflect the greater desirability of the neighborhood.
  • dnautics 9y ago
    But the "right to an education" doesnt feel like a right in the same way as "the right to free speech" is it "the right to not have your house used as quarters for troops"... What makes that difference?
    • jl6 9y ago
      This is the difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to” - two very different concepts of freedom which are disserved by sharing a name.
  • rsync 9y ago
    "In the U.S., a public education is considered a right. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and so the same considerations don't apply." I find this conversation very interesting - first, the thought provoking notion from your parent that supporters of congestion pricing invoke a "libertarian but only for this" exception that they wouldn't apply to other goods like schools. Then your (obvious) reply that driving is not a right, but a privilege. I would counter that while driving is certainly a privilege, the roads themselves are a right, or a public good, comparable to schools. So regardless of what hoops you have to jump through to purchase and license your car, once jumped, the roads are analogous to the schools. FWIW, I am personally enthusiastic about congestion pricing and have heard nothing but good things about its deployment in London. I would like very much to have it considered here in San Francisco.
• jdietrich 9y ago
  I think it's a matter of framing. You can parse congestion charges as either a tax on pollution and congestion, or a marketized way of redistributing a scarce resource more efficiently. It logically and intuitively fits within a broad range of ideological schema; it's both a collectivist means of pricing externalities and an individualist means of allocating resources. The same can't be said of charging for in-demand school places - from a collectivist perspective, such a policy would be read as punishing poorer families for aspiration and disincentivizing social mobility. It's plausible that essentially the same policy could be reframed by redistributing funding from higher-performing to lower-performing schools and allowing or requiring affluent parents to make up the deficit.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  I see the point but I don’t fully agree. There may be better examples than schools though. Congestion pricing is hopefully geared to be lower or zero at non peak-hours. That is, people who must drive at 8am can do that for a fee, and those that can leave it until 10am get it cheaper. In the school comparison it’s not a privilege but a right, and also you don’t just “do it later” you only get one education which can be really important for your future life. That said, to really ensure social mobility you also can’t have “school districts” where land/house prices depend on school quality.
• rbcgerard 9y ago
  Except that many (most?) of the people driving around New York city do not live in the city. We don't even let people from outside the city send their kids to school there.
• matwood 9y ago
  > Why is congestion pricing okay when applying the same philosophy to other matters of public good isn't? Good question. Will we see sayings like "Save Road Neutrality"? Net neutrality is something that prevents ISPs from practicing a form of congestion pricing (zero rating, charge more for certain packets, etc...), yet the death of net neutrality has been likened to the death of the internet. One of things I struggle with is aligning my belief system consistently across the board. It definitely leads to some challenging internal conversations.
  • IIAOPSW 9y ago
    Thats not really the same at all because the question with net neutrality revolves around being charged for the content of the data. No one is proposing congestion pricing which charges you based on the content of your vehicle.
    • vanjoe 9y ago
      Carpool lanes, different tolls for commercial vs personal. I think these are essentially doing that.
      • cpitman 9y ago
        Or a car with a "banker cargo" vs a "barista cargo". When I take a toll road, it is with full knowledge of what my time is worth, and that most people can't justify it.
  • wyattk 9y ago
    Not quite. We're talking about something that is publicly-owned (roads) to something that is (besides certain municipal projects) privately-owned (last-mile internet access). Compounding this difference, there is monopolistic tendencies that arise with internet as it's rarely competitive. We're talking apples to cows here.
• stordoff 9y ago
  For me, the difference is that with congestion charges, there is typically another way to achieve the same end - alternative transport methods, or routes which avoid the area in question. I think that's not necessarily true with schooling - even just having to travel further because the nearest school is chargeable may have an impact. I also think that there are reasons to avoid it with schooling even if the educational outcomes are the same -- I think separating schools into "can/will pay" and "can't/won't pay" would be bad for social integration/cohesion. Further, a congestion charge applied to road usage is probably, partially, intended to discourage use altogether. That clearly isn't the case for schools.
• imgabe 9y ago
  Traffic causes negative externalities: pollution, wasted time, noise, etc. Public education causes positive externalities: educated populace, a third party to help ensure kids are well taken care of, encouraging people to have children who will grow up to continue society, etc. Even people who aren't making direct use of public education receive the benefit from it, so it makes sense to encourage it as broadly as possible, not to try to restrict people from it.
• lewis500 9y ago
  There are already tolls on lots of roads and bridges, and you have to pay to park in public parking garages and street spaces. You have to pay to enter national parks, get services from municipal utilities, ride transit, use the courts, register your vehicle, etc. There is nothing philosophically wrong with the government charging people money to use its property and services. No rule of thumb really helps you decide outright whether something the government provides should be free. What you have to do is to evaluate whether in each case pricing makes sense and how much to charge. Roads are free mainly because they are difficult to charge and because for most roads there is no point to doing so, as most roads are uncongested nearly all the time. Downtown Manhattan is an exception and thus requires a special solution. It's okay to believe public schools should be free and still support congestion pricing. Congestion pricing has demonstrated that it works at solving road traffic externalities. In London it has saved many lives from reduced accidents, both in and around the charging zone. In Stockholm it has reduced asthma attacks substantially. The New York subway needs lots of upgrades and congestion pricing will pay for some of them (although it would be nice if they could get their costs under control). Public schools are doing fine being free and paid for by taxes. By way of fairness, I guess one could argue that since every kid by law has to go to school they should be free. But I think we actually have the free system simply because it has worked for a long time. There are problems with education quality in the US, but they aren't due to how schools are paid for. We know that because there are better schools in other countries that are still free. By contrast, downtown streets are as crowded and polluting and dangerous as they are mainly because they are free.
• moogleii 9y ago
  The biggest difference is there are cheap alternatives to driving in your own car (foot, bus, subway, taxi depending on distance, etc). Public schools are akin to walking on foot, charter schools are the cars using public school land, which I learned is fairly common on NYC under some kind of timeshare arrangement (but I also mainly say this in jest). As someone who moved from the Los Angeles area and enjoys driving (sans gridlock), it personally seems bananas to me to be driving in the city unless it's a cab/bus/freight/handicap vehicle.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dqpb 9y ago
  In my view, the fundamental difference between roads and schools is this (in general): more cars on the road == worse for me more educated people == better for me That said, I wouldn't necessarily oppose a congestion fee for schools, especially if that money was used to replicate the success of desirable schools in non-desirable schools. Although in reality I don't think feeding more money into our archaic school system is the answer, it needs to be reengineered from the ground up, but thats a totally different conversation.
• devinhelton 9y ago
  I think the reason is that we associate driving with negative externalities (pollution, renewable resource usage, etc.) and so if the response to congestion pricing is that people drive less and seek alternative means (using public transportation, telecommuting, etc) then that is an additional win. Whereas we associate having children and schooling with positive externalities -- the creation of an educated workforce that will keep our country strong and prosperous in the next decades. So we intuit that if people responded to the tax by having fewer kids or unschooling the kids, that would be bad for society. (I personally don't actually think that public school produces positive externalities but I'm extremely unusual in that belief). The other complication is that "good schools" are really the schools with the best students and best parents. With road congestion toll you are paying for an inherently limited resource -- wide, paved right-of-ways enabling leading connecting population hubs. Whereas with the limited number of "good" schools in NYC, the inherently limited resource is the good students themselves. So a "good school" tax is essentially charging good students to be around people like themselves, which is kind of a weird thing todo.
• 8note 9y ago
  isn't the public school example already true? houses around favourable public schools have higher value, and thus higher property taxes.
• sugerman 9y ago
  Parents already pay more to have their kid go to a specific public school in housing costs.
• closeparen 9y ago
  Because we want more people to be educated, and fewer people to drive.
• lsc 9y ago
  > I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. I think if you took the exact same logic and applied it to say, schools, supporters would feel completely differently about it. so, I think you are confusing people that believe that markets are useful tools with people who believe that markets are things that decide what is most ethical (which is, I think, what you mean by 'libertarian' in this context.) That's the thing. I (and many people) believe that markets are good tools in many (but not all) situations for organizing production and distributing goods. I don't believe that using a market to distribute goods organize production is any more or less ethical than using any other method for deciding those things, any more than I think that using a drill or a saw when building something is an ethical choice, (I mean, except to the extent that avoidable suffering is caused by using tools that are grossly mismatched to the goal) I think markets are great for matching up workers to jobs and schedules... and that's what we're doing, largely, with congestion pricing. If it costs a lot to get a worker to place x at time y.... well, that should be factored into the cost of whatever that worker is doing; because of this, I support congestion pricing. I think markets would be terrible for allocating public school slots, because the whole point of having public schools is to see to it that everyone has some minimum level of education... and to give those who are smart and/or ambitious a chance of climbing the ladder, even if they came from poor families. Markets would produce results that moved in the opposite of those goals, that's why we have public schools rather than relying on a private school system in the first place.