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> the more one drives inside NYC city limits, the richer one is. Why would you say that? A rich person would not spend hours every day commuting though rush ho

> the more one drives inside NYC city limits, the richer one is. Why would you say that? A rich person would not spend hours every day commuting though rush hour traffic, or spend most of their day inside their work vehicle. They would buy or rent a central home, possibly near the central office building where they work. City driving in itself makes for a very low quality of life and most rational people would minimize it, given the option. So I would expect there's either no driving-income correlation, or it's inverse. So reducing congestion would make life easier for rich people, who don't care about the money and only care about the time - by pricing out people who are, by definition, poorer and can't afford to buy that convenience. You could say that the resulting post-tax distribution is progressive, the rich paying and driving more; but that's just a way of distorting the initial argument, that introducing a flat congestion tax is strongly recessive - to the point of completely pricing out poorer people.

gojomo 8y ago
I would say that because I'm familiar with the NYC area! There's expensive tolls, and limited & expensive parking, but excellent public transportation – the USA's most extensive and most-used subway system. NY state has the nation's highest (regressive!) gas taxes. New York is far-and-away the US city with the lowest rate of car ownership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... Manhattan is the most likely place for congestion pricing. But, though rare in the USA, many Manhattanites never learn to drive! And only 8% of Manhattanite workers commute by car to work: https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-their-cars https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-their-cars (I highly doubt that 8% is correlated with the poorest Manhattanites.) Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households: http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/ http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/ So, people who elect to drive in NYC (outside of driving-on-the-job) are richer than the New Yorkers who don't drive. Further, New Yorkers are richer than other Americans. Ergo, a fee that falls on people who choose to drive in NYC is unlikely to be "regressive", barring any actual evidence to the contrary.
- bumholio 8y ago
  > Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households. I have no doubt that's true, as in most other places on the planet. The thing is, you are making an absolute argument: those who drive in NY are richer than those who don't. I don't deny that. I'm making a relative argument: within the driving group, the poorer ones will be priced out. You say those are not poor, but "merely wealthy". Our grand-father said they are blue collar workers. You both lack data, and I suspect that we will see a wide, gentle slope, with most rich people driving, but also an important minority of the lower classes, depending on personal circumstances. The thing is, does the exact composition of the driving public mater for the regressivity to be a political problem? Some will be priced out and they will scream bloody murder, because from their perspective they were sacrificed in favor of the rich. You could go out and say "boo hoo, you are merely rich", but that's a politically imprudent move - a thousand personal stories will pop up about those marginal blue collar workers no longer able to feed their families. So you could be right that it is not regressive in a broad, social justice sense, but that's not the sense in which the problem will be sliced. Rather, the vast majority of the affected merely rich will invoke the principle of the matter, and in principle it's designed to price out the poorer drivers, there's no doubt about that. An idea I'm toying with is to distribute "tradable driving coupons" to all people holding a drivers license. A flat tax would develop on the market, so the net effect is similar to congestion charging. But now the tax does not go to the city, but to the poorer residents who opt not to drive. Ideally, fiscal credits should be earned, so as to not reward those who don't pay any tax and thus have no contribution to the infrastructure. This beautifully solves the political problem and makes driving a matter of personal choice: you are now rewarded for preserving the public good.
  - gojomo 8y ago
    OK, we agree that I'm likely correct, barring any other evidence that remains unpresented, that road congestion pricing in NYC wouldn't be "regressive" over all New Yorkers/visitors. If the congestion fees go to expenditures that broadly benefit all New Yorkers, it's far a simpler system than "tradable driving coupons" and could wind up highly progressive. (At one extreme, this "broad benefit" could be just a per-capita rebate of fees collected, in cash, to all residents.) A "coupons" system would trend towards being just like fees: at the margin, every coupon-holder has to decide whether they prefer cash (from selling their coupons) or driving, exactly like someone facing a congestion fee. Roughly the same set of people "priced out" by fees would be eager to sell rather than drive. A coupon-system might be nastier to the non-conscientious, because there's likely extra budgeting/deadlines/resale-effort involved. And the lost revenues for broad public projects would have to made up through other NY taxes – some regressive, some progressive – so the net effect on household budgets of a big "coupon giveaway" would be unclear.

gojomo 8y ago

I would say that because I'm familiar with the NYC area! There's expensive tolls, and limited & expensive parking, but excellent public transportation – the USA's most extensive and most-used subway system. NY state has the nation's highest (regressive!) gas taxes. New York is far-and-away the US city with the lowest rate of car ownership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... Manhattan is the most likely place for congestion pricing. But, though rare in the USA, many Manhattanites never learn to drive! And only 8% of Manhattanite workers commute by car to work: https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-their-cars https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-their-cars (I highly doubt that 8% is correlated with the poorest Manhattanites.) Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households: http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/ http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/ So, people who elect to drive in NYC (outside of driving-on-the-job) are richer than the New Yorkers who don't drive. Further, New Yorkers are richer than other Americans. Ergo, a fee that falls on people who choose to drive in NYC is unlikely to be "regressive", barring any actual evidence to the contrary.

bumholio 8y ago
> Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households. I have no doubt that's true, as in most other places on the planet. The thing is, you are making an absolute argument: those who drive in NY are richer than those who don't. I don't deny that. I'm making a relative argument: within the driving group, the poorer ones will be priced out. You say those are not poor, but "merely wealthy". Our grand-father said they are blue collar workers. You both lack data, and I suspect that we will see a wide, gentle slope, with most rich people driving, but also an important minority of the lower classes, depending on personal circumstances. The thing is, does the exact composition of the driving public mater for the regressivity to be a political problem? Some will be priced out and they will scream bloody murder, because from their perspective they were sacrificed in favor of the rich. You could go out and say "boo hoo, you are merely rich", but that's a politically imprudent move - a thousand personal stories will pop up about those marginal blue collar workers no longer able to feed their families. So you could be right that it is not regressive in a broad, social justice sense, but that's not the sense in which the problem will be sliced. Rather, the vast majority of the affected merely rich will invoke the principle of the matter, and in principle it's designed to price out the poorer drivers, there's no doubt about that. An idea I'm toying with is to distribute "tradable driving coupons" to all people holding a drivers license. A flat tax would develop on the market, so the net effect is similar to congestion charging. But now the tax does not go to the city, but to the poorer residents who opt not to drive. Ideally, fiscal credits should be earned, so as to not reward those who don't pay any tax and thus have no contribution to the infrastructure. This beautifully solves the political problem and makes driving a matter of personal choice: you are now rewarded for preserving the public good.
- gojomo 8y ago
  OK, we agree that I'm likely correct, barring any other evidence that remains unpresented, that road congestion pricing in NYC wouldn't be "regressive" over all New Yorkers/visitors. If the congestion fees go to expenditures that broadly benefit all New Yorkers, it's far a simpler system than "tradable driving coupons" and could wind up highly progressive. (At one extreme, this "broad benefit" could be just a per-capita rebate of fees collected, in cash, to all residents.) A "coupons" system would trend towards being just like fees: at the margin, every coupon-holder has to decide whether they prefer cash (from selling their coupons) or driving, exactly like someone facing a congestion fee. Roughly the same set of people "priced out" by fees would be eager to sell rather than drive. A coupon-system might be nastier to the non-conscientious, because there's likely extra budgeting/deadlines/resale-effort involved. And the lost revenues for broad public projects would have to made up through other NY taxes – some regressive, some progressive – so the net effect on household budgets of a big "coupon giveaway" would be unclear.