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Given the problem, this seems like a reasonable action on the part of the NYC City Council. But I'm confused by section on congestion pricing: > Many experts b

Given the problem, this seems like a reasonable action on the part of the NYC City Council. But I'm confused by section on congestion pricing: > Many experts believe congestion pricing is the best way for New York City to fix congestion and secure the funds needed to fix the subway. Mr. Johnson supports the idea, but Mr. de Blasio has opposed it. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the subway, has said he will push for congestion pricing... Why does de Blasio oppose it? It seems like another reasonable approach to tackling congestion -- heck, it's the public version of building private toll roads -- with the added bonus of providing funds to improve public transportation.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
It seems that he believes that it would put an undue burden on poorer people commuting into Manhattan: > The de Blasio administration has steadfastly maintained that it can’t get behind a congestion pricing plan because it unfairly burdens low-income New Yorkers traveling into Manhattan from the outer boroughs. On Friday, the Mayor seemed to soften on his prior opposition. https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/19/16910546/nyc-congestion-pricing-de-blasio-cuomo-response https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/19/16910546/nyc-congestion-pric... But I can't actually find a quote of him saying that; everything I can find just says he thinks it's not fair, but doesn't specify why: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/nyregion/de-blasio-congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/nyregion/de-blasio-conges...
CPLX 8y ago
Because it's regressive. It takes money away from people who drive, who are often people who are blue collar, spread out in the outer boroughs, or who need to bring tools to do their jobs, those who are forced to cross the city to get anywhere west of town, etc. Sure, that's not the only effect it will have, it will also cost money for bankers that drive in from Westchester and park underneath their midtown offices. But, as you can imagine, it won't change their behavior much -- by definition the only people that it will affect are people who can't easily afford it. If you look at it in a different way, congestion pricing takes a public good that everyone paid to create, the roads and streets of the central business district, and reserves them so they can only be used by drivers with lots of money. There are problems with that approach. Of course there's another side to the argument, obviously. But I feel like many people don't realize this issue cuts in two directions, rather than just being an obvious "good idea".
- dionidium 8y ago
  This is the most common objection, but it's not a very strong one, for at least two reasons: 1. There's no reason we couldn't provide exceptions for the kinds of vans and trucks that blue-collar workers need to drive into the city to make their livings. 2. There's no reason we couldn't offer income-based exceptions to people who absolutely cannot ride transit for this or that reason. As in all proposals to ration some scarce resource, it's important to understand that we already ration it, even if it's not explicit. Today, we do it by literally clogging the streets so much that nobody else can get through. (And now we've added this new way, too.) Surely nobody thinks that's the smartest way to ration.
  - chlvsl 8y ago
    If we start to allow those who can't afford the congestion pricing to get a discount on congestion pricing, do we really have congestion pricing? Or just a new proportional-to-income "driving tax" in addition to state, county, and city taxes?
    - bumholio 8y ago
      >Or just a new proportional-to-income "driving tax" in addition to state, county, and city taxes? The difference is that you can avoid the driving tax by not driving; unlike the city tax that can only be avoided by not getting born. So it's less of a tax and more of paying for a public service.
    - dionidium 8y ago
      A "driving tax" is just another way to say "congestion pricing." Driving introduces massive negative externalities and should cost a lot more than it does today. Automobiles are one of the absolute worst quality-of-life-impacting things about living in Manhattan. They're loud, dangerous, and smelly. I'm not trying to hide my cards; if it were up to me, I'd ban private cars (at the very least) entirely in Midtown (at the very least).
  - dahdum 8y ago
    I'd argue it's still a strong objection, your solutions require a lot more bureaucracy and would still be filled with loopholes. A couple quick ones: 1. Registering the car in your grandparents name, who have no income, to avoid tolls. Or perhaps your stay at home spouse (assuming you file separately). 2. Make your next vehicle a light truck or van to avoid potentially hundreds in monthly congestion tolls. Luxury trucks are very much a thing. I agree your plan would technically work, but it would be filled with exceptions, loopholes, and political handouts. That is rather fitting for NYC though.
wpietri 8y ago
Congestion pricing is generally politically unpopular in that it trades clear price increases and the attendant hassle around charging for hazy-sounding benefits. At least until it's implemented, anyhow. Once people see congestion drastically reduced, it becomes more popular: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/12/06/for-politicians-congestion-pricing-is-an-exercise-in-delaying-gratification/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/12/06/for-politicians-conge... It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter.
- bumholio 8y ago
  > It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter. In many ways, a congested city works like a income-adjusted congestion tax, where you pay with your time. Since the time of rich people is more valuable, the burden seems "fair". The only problem is that the time is wasted, no tax is collected. Maybe we should accept that political reality and setup income adjusted congestion taxes, putting the revenue to work to ease congestion for everybody. Another option is to disburse a limited, equal number of "tradable driving hours" to each citizen regardless of income. You now have a market that eficiently allocates the limited public resource, allowing poor or thrifty citizens to earn tax credits, while allowing rich drivers to pay a fixed rate for each driving hour exceeding their allocation. It's good politics, bad economics - but still much better than wasting millions of man hours each day.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    The notion that "the time of rich people is more valuable" seems obviously wrong to me. In some cases the time of rich people has a higher price. E.g. a famous surgeon is rich and also charges a lot by the hour. But there are plenty of rich people that couldn't get minimum wage based on their skills and work ethic. I think value is an individual metric. E.g., I value good chocolate highly, but chocolate gives my girlfriend migraines, so for her it has negative value. So I think the time of rich people is exactly as valuable to them as it is to poor people. Or maybe less so, in that the rich people I know are on average much more willing to waste time than the poor ones. Given that, your other schemes are more plausible, but I don't know that they'd be better in practice; the nth-order effects are hard to calculate, but could easily be pathological. Given that the real problem in doing this is the way some people have orders of magnitude more money than people, the cleanest solution is just to tax heavily enough that the wealth difference isn't nearly as large. Which, given the sensitivity of US politicians to the desires of the wealthy, is entirely unlikely to happen.
Eric_WVGG 8y ago
The charitable explanation is that "rich people take Ubers, poor people in the outer borroughs drive their own cars." The cynic would point out that "Mayor Minivan" is notorious for driving an SUV from Manhattan to his favorite gym in deep Brooklyn every morning, making him precisely the kind of person who would take a hit from congestion pricing. As the subway crumbles, ride-share and taxis are the only practical way most people can get around. The cab-limiting "medallion" system led to infamous corruption (Michael Cohen, a name you might have heard from the news, owns an entire fleet of them); most New Yorkers thus consider ride-share to be a godsend. I don't see how capping ride share will result in anything but making Ubers as terrible as yellow cabs. btw, if ride-share is capped at current levels, that means that traffic would merely not-get-any-worse than it already is. This will do nothing to reduce traffic; congestion pricing would accomplish something.
Eridrus 8y ago
I think it's pretty clear why de Blasio doesn't like congestion pricing: people who are used to driving would feel acute pain, he's quite cozy with the Taxi lobby and raising prices/wages on Uber/etc is politically popular on the left. I don't know what de Blasio's plans are after his mayoral term is up, but this ticks all the right political boxes for him. Advocating for congestion pricing would mean no more Taxi campaign contributions, Uber the company is unpopular, and he would piss off those who benefit from toll free roads; as a politician that would actually take courage, so why do it?

pavel_lishin 8y ago

It seems that he believes that it would put an undue burden on poorer people commuting into Manhattan: > The de Blasio administration has steadfastly maintained that it can’t get behind a congestion pricing plan because it unfairly burdens low-income New Yorkers traveling into Manhattan from the outer boroughs. On Friday, the Mayor seemed to soften on his prior opposition. https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/19/16910546/nyc-congestion-pricing-de-blasio-cuomo-response https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/19/16910546/nyc-congestion-pric... But I can't actually find a quote of him saying that; everything I can find just says he thinks it's not fair, but doesn't specify why: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/nyregion/de-blasio-congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/nyregion/de-blasio-conges...

CPLX 8y ago

Because it's regressive. It takes money away from people who drive, who are often people who are blue collar, spread out in the outer boroughs, or who need to bring tools to do their jobs, those who are forced to cross the city to get anywhere west of town, etc. Sure, that's not the only effect it will have, it will also cost money for bankers that drive in from Westchester and park underneath their midtown offices. But, as you can imagine, it won't change their behavior much -- by definition the only people that it will affect are people who can't easily afford it. If you look at it in a different way, congestion pricing takes a public good that everyone paid to create, the roads and streets of the central business district, and reserves them so they can only be used by drivers with lots of money. There are problems with that approach. Of course there's another side to the argument, obviously. But I feel like many people don't realize this issue cuts in two directions, rather than just being an obvious "good idea".

dionidium 8y ago
This is the most common objection, but it's not a very strong one, for at least two reasons: 1. There's no reason we couldn't provide exceptions for the kinds of vans and trucks that blue-collar workers need to drive into the city to make their livings. 2. There's no reason we couldn't offer income-based exceptions to people who absolutely cannot ride transit for this or that reason. As in all proposals to ration some scarce resource, it's important to understand that we already ration it, even if it's not explicit. Today, we do it by literally clogging the streets so much that nobody else can get through. (And now we've added this new way, too.) Surely nobody thinks that's the smartest way to ration.
- chlvsl 8y ago
  If we start to allow those who can't afford the congestion pricing to get a discount on congestion pricing, do we really have congestion pricing? Or just a new proportional-to-income "driving tax" in addition to state, county, and city taxes?
  - bumholio 8y ago
    >Or just a new proportional-to-income "driving tax" in addition to state, county, and city taxes? The difference is that you can avoid the driving tax by not driving; unlike the city tax that can only be avoided by not getting born. So it's less of a tax and more of paying for a public service.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    A "driving tax" is just another way to say "congestion pricing." Driving introduces massive negative externalities and should cost a lot more than it does today. Automobiles are one of the absolute worst quality-of-life-impacting things about living in Manhattan. They're loud, dangerous, and smelly. I'm not trying to hide my cards; if it were up to me, I'd ban private cars (at the very least) entirely in Midtown (at the very least).
- dahdum 8y ago
  I'd argue it's still a strong objection, your solutions require a lot more bureaucracy and would still be filled with loopholes. A couple quick ones: 1. Registering the car in your grandparents name, who have no income, to avoid tolls. Or perhaps your stay at home spouse (assuming you file separately). 2. Make your next vehicle a light truck or van to avoid potentially hundreds in monthly congestion tolls. Luxury trucks are very much a thing. I agree your plan would technically work, but it would be filled with exceptions, loopholes, and political handouts. That is rather fitting for NYC though.

wpietri 8y ago

Congestion pricing is generally politically unpopular in that it trades clear price increases and the attendant hassle around charging for hazy-sounding benefits. At least until it's implemented, anyhow. Once people see congestion drastically reduced, it becomes more popular: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/12/06/for-politicians-congestion-pricing-is-an-exercise-in-delaying-gratification/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/12/06/for-politicians-conge... It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter.

bumholio 8y ago
> It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter. In many ways, a congested city works like a income-adjusted congestion tax, where you pay with your time. Since the time of rich people is more valuable, the burden seems "fair". The only problem is that the time is wasted, no tax is collected. Maybe we should accept that political reality and setup income adjusted congestion taxes, putting the revenue to work to ease congestion for everybody. Another option is to disburse a limited, equal number of "tradable driving hours" to each citizen regardless of income. You now have a market that eficiently allocates the limited public resource, allowing poor or thrifty citizens to earn tax credits, while allowing rich drivers to pay a fixed rate for each driving hour exceeding their allocation. It's good politics, bad economics - but still much better than wasting millions of man hours each day.
- wpietri 8y ago
  The notion that "the time of rich people is more valuable" seems obviously wrong to me. In some cases the time of rich people has a higher price. E.g. a famous surgeon is rich and also charges a lot by the hour. But there are plenty of rich people that couldn't get minimum wage based on their skills and work ethic. I think value is an individual metric. E.g., I value good chocolate highly, but chocolate gives my girlfriend migraines, so for her it has negative value. So I think the time of rich people is exactly as valuable to them as it is to poor people. Or maybe less so, in that the rich people I know are on average much more willing to waste time than the poor ones. Given that, your other schemes are more plausible, but I don't know that they'd be better in practice; the nth-order effects are hard to calculate, but could easily be pathological. Given that the real problem in doing this is the way some people have orders of magnitude more money than people, the cleanest solution is just to tax heavily enough that the wealth difference isn't nearly as large. Which, given the sensitivity of US politicians to the desires of the wealthy, is entirely unlikely to happen.

Eric_WVGG 8y ago

The charitable explanation is that "rich people take Ubers, poor people in the outer borroughs drive their own cars." The cynic would point out that "Mayor Minivan" is notorious for driving an SUV from Manhattan to his favorite gym in deep Brooklyn every morning, making him precisely the kind of person who would take a hit from congestion pricing. As the subway crumbles, ride-share and taxis are the only practical way most people can get around. The cab-limiting "medallion" system led to infamous corruption (Michael Cohen, a name you might have heard from the news, owns an entire fleet of them); most New Yorkers thus consider ride-share to be a godsend. I don't see how capping ride share will result in anything but making Ubers as terrible as yellow cabs. btw, if ride-share is capped at current levels, that means that traffic would merely not-get-any-worse than it already is. This will do nothing to reduce traffic; congestion pricing would accomplish something.

Eridrus 8y ago

I think it's pretty clear why de Blasio doesn't like congestion pricing: people who are used to driving would feel acute pain, he's quite cozy with the Taxi lobby and raising prices/wages on Uber/etc is politically popular on the left. I don't know what de Blasio's plans are after his mayoral term is up, but this ticks all the right political boxes for him. Advocating for congestion pricing would mean no more Taxi campaign contributions, Uber the company is unpopular, and he would piss off those who benefit from toll free roads; as a politician that would actually take courage, so why do it?