4 ms·

> 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 y

> 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.
- bumholio 8y ago
  Well, since we are talking about a common resource and public law that applies to everybody, the subjectivity of value is not really much help. A flat congestion tax is proposed, so I was clearly referring to the monetary value one places on his own time, the amount of money they are willing to give up to reclaim that time. Cost vs. speed is a fundamental trade-off in transportation, nothing groundbreaking here. It allows an economic discussion and market allocation of various individual preferences. Otherwise we are stuck into positions like "my time with my family has infinite subjective value, so I should clearly be allowed to race my Formula 1 car down 5th avenue back from work" - and there is really no way for me to prove that you don't really love your family to that degree. What we can all agree is that time wasted in traffic is net social cost that affects everybody, and that it takes very little extra vehicles on the road to go from peak road efficiency to gridlock. The public resource of road infrastructure is badly mismanaged by leaving it in a a congested, unproductive state.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    If that's what you were trying to refer to, it might be better said as "rich people can pay more for their time", or "rich people can override the preferences of the poor in a market-based allocation".

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.

bumholio 8y ago
Well, since we are talking about a common resource and public law that applies to everybody, the subjectivity of value is not really much help. A flat congestion tax is proposed, so I was clearly referring to the monetary value one places on his own time, the amount of money they are willing to give up to reclaim that time. Cost vs. speed is a fundamental trade-off in transportation, nothing groundbreaking here. It allows an economic discussion and market allocation of various individual preferences. Otherwise we are stuck into positions like "my time with my family has infinite subjective value, so I should clearly be allowed to race my Formula 1 car down 5th avenue back from work" - and there is really no way for me to prove that you don't really love your family to that degree. What we can all agree is that time wasted in traffic is net social cost that affects everybody, and that it takes very little extra vehicles on the road to go from peak road efficiency to gridlock. The public resource of road infrastructure is badly mismanaged by leaving it in a a congested, unproductive state.
- wpietri 8y ago
  If that's what you were trying to refer to, it might be better said as "rich people can pay more for their time", or "rich people can override the preferences of the poor in a market-based allocation".