19 ms·

Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

233 points by oftenwrong 8y ago

rocgf 8y ago
> parking meters don’t charge different rates to users based on their income; you have to pay the same amount to park your used Jetta as you do your new Mercedes [...] That’s inequitable. I guess it depends on which end of the political spectrum you are, but this sounds absolutely obscene to me.
- devereaux 8y ago
  It sounds obscene to me too. A car uses a parking spot. The spot is no longer available for someone else- regardless of your income. Incomes is orthogonal to the problem. Flat taxes are the fairest taxes. Take trash taxes for example: you produce 100 lbs of trash, you pay for 100 lbs of trash because disposing of 100 lbs of trash in a landfill or a recycling facility won't be affected by the income of the person having produced said trash. Want to pay less taxes? Produce less trash.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    Now do water.
  - praptak 8y ago
    The point of the article is that the same arguments work in favour of congestion pricing.
  - voisin 8y ago
    The argument isn’t about whether the quantum of taxes is appropriate. It is how a fixed quantum turns a disincentive for some into an irrelevancy to others. If the purpose of the cost is to discourage use (peak period congestion charges), then it should vary with income so as to be a equally discouraging to all to whom it applies. For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production, whereas the rich aren’t affected and can produce far more before they feel the incentive to reduce waste. I think the parking spot item is more like a meal at a fine restaurant - there is no incentive or disincentive from a social standpoint that should justify variable pricing on income. But to the extend there is, say via congestion, pollution, etc, it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive.
    - ramblerouser 8y ago
      A poor person's car takes up the same number of parking spaces as a rich person's car, and a rich person has already paid a huge amount of their income to the poor person in the form of income taxes and welfare.
      - pas 8y ago
        poor might mean lower middle-class. no welfare income.
    - devereaux 8y ago
      > it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive. No, it's not reasonable. The goal is not to discourage use, but to price in the negative externality. > For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production, And that's good, even if we suppose your argument is right. Bear with me: what's the percentage of the population in your country that you would call "rich"? Let's say 20%. Do you think that 20% of the population can create more bags of trash than 80% of the population? I don't think so. In the parking example, do you think 20% of the population can park more cars than 80% of the population? I don't think so either. Someone rich may have more than one car, but I strongly doubt they are able to drive 2 cars at once.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure 5% of the population can create more of whatever negative externality you'd like to tax than the lower 95%. Someone rich might not drive a car at all and instead take a private jet. An average person from the US produces fifty times as much CO2 as an average person from Kenya.
        devereaux 8y ago
        If we were talking about CO2, I'd agree with you. But we are talking about parking spaces, and production of trash within a country.
  - skh 8y ago
    There are lots of people who don’t think a flat tax on income is the fairest tax. Presumably a person whose income is very large has a lot more to lose if society collapses so they should pay more to maintain society. I tend to believe progressive taxation on income/wealth is the most fair. But I’m someone who believes that there should be a ceiling and a floor on how much a person can have. The distribution of resources and wealth in the world is grossly unfair in my opinion.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    I don't agree with the fact we should tax more expensive cars for parking. But I don't think your reasoning hold either. If you have more money, it's easier to take less parking space, and produce less trash. I can certainly attest that it's easier for me now: I can afford a private parking lot and taxis, I can buy food in expensive organic shops that have less packaging, I can pay people to do things for me, that would result in more work, but less waste. Basically, when you have money, you can optimize for way more things than when you are constrained financially.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    Flat taxes are not the fairest taxes for a very simple reason: the decreasing marginal utility of money. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility... If you're poor, a tax - no matter how small - affects things like food expenditure. If you're income rich, the difference tax makes affects things like what kind of car you buy or what quality of hotel you stay at when you're on vacation. These are not like for like tradeoffs, they're qualitatively different.
    - devereaux 8y ago
      Decreasing marginal utility of money is just a theory, and there are many flaws in the theory - including measuring happiness with a discrete scale of questionable boundaries (5=very happy, etc.), considering self administered questions at face value, etc. Another theory is hedonic adaptation- you adapt to whatever and regress to a baseline. Finally, there seems to be proof that some people do not spent their money on what will make them happier, the typical example being buying an object instead of an experience.
      - barrkel 8y ago
        If you are seriously suggesting that a penny is worth the same to a wealthy man as a child, we cannot have a serious conversation.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Presumably the owner of the Mercedes is already taxed more than owner of the Jetta, when paying to register the vehicle, and also likely on the original income. Should the owner also be charged for its use? Should toll booths be more expensive too?
- ajkjk 8y ago
  The point of the article is that that would be ridiculous, right? I think most people people anywhere on the political spectrum would agree; that's why it was used as an example.
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    No, not all people would agree. It's coherent to think that a) government punishment should be the same for each recipient, b) we measure punishment (and thus it's "sameness") in terms of pain, and c) financial penalties need to be indexed against wealth/income to inflict the same amount of pain. Sweden (I believe it is) in fact does this. ------ Regardless, yes as the OP says if you think it's fair to charge a flat fine, then surely it's fair to charge a flat fee. The point is relative and thus holds whether you define fine equitability in terms of amount paid or difficulty in making the payment.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I don’t understand why this example is there at all. This is just a product being sold for a price. Is it unfair that a banana costs the same for Jeff Bezos as it does for the homeless guy he walked past on his way to the store? I mean, you certainly could argue that this is unfair, but at that point you’re basically arguing for a different concept of money and commerce, which is a rather bigger subject than the unfairness of tolls.
  - kd0amg 8y ago
    The "product for a price" idea is a little weird when talking about some service typically provided by a government who deliberately prices it below market equilibrium. If we're going to effectively subsidize this, it's fair to open debate on how that subsidy should be apportioned.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      Depends on the city. There's a lot of paid private parking out there. I agree with you that the price of government-owned parking is generally too low, and that it should be increased to a level to which available spaces nearby are reliably guaranteed.
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    In the past we solved the problem on the supply side by reducing the difference between Bezos and Homeless Guy. However ideas like that have been made unpalatable to the people who most benefit from them - in a quite frankly brilliant campaign of social engineering - so we're left discussing unworkable "solutions" like this.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      The real difference between Very Rich Guy and Homeless Guy is plausibly lower today than during any other previous era of history, including the mid-20th century. When he isn't working at Amazon or playing with his rockets, Jeff Bezos is, by and large, buying the very same kind of goods and services you or I buy-- his consumption may be larger than mine by some factor, say 3x or whatever, he might pick slightly higher quality stuff, but that's about it. This was very much not the case historically.
- howard941 8y ago
  Near a federal building in Tampa I usually see the Mercedes SUV with a handicapped tag parking at the meter for free and the used Jetta in a $10/day parking lot.
oneplane 8y ago
This seems rather US-centric, but perhaps there are some universal things in there? In The Netherlands, we usually split off some of the issues; for example there is the tax that covers road usage paid per active registered vehicle. This depends on the vehicle, so depending on how expensive/big/powerful etc your new car would be, you'd pay more or less tax. For public transportation, more and more networks are getting dedicated lanes or even dedicated roads, so buses for example are not affected by what the cars happen to be doing at that time.
- avar 8y ago
  Yeah much of it doesn't transfer, but on the subject of the taxes in The Netherlands a lot of it is nonsensical: 1. You pay tax per weight of the vehicle, and that's a (mostly?) linear relationship. Whereas a 10 ton vehicle causes much more than 10x the wear & tear to roadways than a 1 ton vehicle. 2. Even if it were adjusted for the wear it shouldn't be a fixed fee, but based on actual usage. Paying it for a combination of the weight and mileage/yr would still not reflect reality, but would be closer. 3. There's no tax for vehicle size, just weight (the two don't always closely follow each other), which produces an externality on small Dutch roadways.
  - oneplane 8y ago
    That tax is not the only one paying for the roads; the normal tax on fuel and the fuel-specific tax on top of that (which also differs per type of fuel) offsets the heavier engines or heavier users. At the same time, a project people abandoned a few times (mostly because or scare tactics) is in the works to see if we can lower or abandon some of the taxes in favour of usage-based taxes measured by vehicle kilometers on-road. So if you drive more, you pay more. At the same time, I don't think it makes sense to make all tax super dependant on what you drive, where you drive it, and what money you make. We already have some specific systems in place to deal with the discrepancy between high income and low income (and the gradient in the middle), so instead of making the tax system more complex by adding yet more variables to existing rules, a rule with a highly specific target is simpler and reaches more of the people it applies to. Basically, if you are poor, or simply don't make enough money to save or invest, a lot of the taxes no longer apply. At the same time, if your income is so low you are getting towards the edge of not surviving (depending on where you are I guess) you get money for rent and healthcare. And on top of that: if you don't have a lot of money, it makes no sense to own a car anyway. I don't think a true per-use system that only relies on what the current usage of anything is will work, simply because we cannot predict what we will need or use in the future and it disables all paths to investments or building infrastructure because it is a lifeline to certain areas. After all, it's not a for-profit corporate system we're talking about, it's a country or a government. While sensible decisions are of course needed, and adjustments to how some things are paid for can be very sensible, making a very tight integration between what is available and what it currently used is a very bad idea for humans.
Tade0 8y ago
let’s ask what it takes to create an overall system that is fair to all, considering all aspects of how the system is paid for, who benefits, and who bears the external costs Here's a crazy idea: instead of pricing congestion, let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction. Puts a hard limit on the number of cars that enter the zone and applies both to the rich and poor equally. Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more - although I don't think many would be willing to go to such lenghts.
- anticensor 8y ago
  > Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more This workaround would be made moot by adding a rule saying you can use at most the square root (or any other sublinear function) of number of your cars.
  - pas 8y ago
    Lease it, rent it, gift it, borrow it, legal technology.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > Here's a crazy idea: instead of pricing congestion, let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction. Good idea. Then make these points tradable, and you'll reach the same optimality as a congestion tax, but retain a system that doesn't exclude low-income folks.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  > let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction. [...] Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more - although I don't think many would be willing to go to such lengths. During pollution spikes in Paris, the city occasionally alternates each day between forbidding odd or even ending car plates from circulating downtown. The rich do precisely what you say: buy an extra car and make sure the license plates are so they can drive any day regardless of restrictions.
leemailll 8y ago
And then how about those can’t even afford a car?
- oneplane 8y ago
  They shouldn't live in the US I guess, because that place is designed for cars and nothing else.
  - sampo 8y ago
    There are places with lower car ownership in the US. Most notably New York City, where 45% of households own a car.
    - oneplane 8y ago
      I suppose that makes sense, there would be areas where the amount of cars, buildings and people per square meter is so high its usability implodes on itself. I imagine there must be areas with higher usage of public transportation, higher usage of bicycles or simply having everything for day-to-day life in walking distance.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  Stop doing drugs? Get roommates? Stop working part time? (used) Cars are 1-3k per year. Not exactly affordable if you are making 15-20k/yr.
- lkbm 8y ago
  See #2.
buzzdenver 8y ago
The way I conceptually see it is that people with lower income pay less once a year, during tax time, and save a lot of money then. All other times it's just much simpler if prices/fees/whatnot are based on actual usage. Can you imagine owning a gas station or running a parking lot and having to deal with income verification from all your clients, and then dealing with the government to get reimbursed because Joe Schmo is low income and got a 25% discount? That would be a recipe for wasteful bureaucracy, black market activities like low income people using their gas cards to fill up others' cars, and generally just tons of inefficiencies.
- bhickey 8y ago
  The author isn't suggesting that gas taxes should vary with income. His point is that they're a flat tax and flat taxes are regressive.
  - coredog64 8y ago
    I’ve made similar comments in other discussions, but there’s an element of redlining to this. Upper middle class people push for ever higher safety standards in new motor vehicles. This pushes the retail price higher for new cars, but also has the follow on effect of raising the price of newer used cars. As a result, vehicle consumers at the bottom of the economic ladder wind up with cars that are less safe, less efficient, and less reliable.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I drive a Kia Rio. It's one of the cheapest cars on the market and it's efficient and reliable. I don't know about safety. There are good cars available on the lower end of the market. I wish there were options with less power available to be even cheaper.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  I was approached twice on the same day at a cub foods once by people offering to buy my groceries with their food stamps in exchange for a lesser amount of cash. I still think the program is valuable, but damn it hurts to see it be abused (especially since one of the guys had his little kid with him). A discount card or whatever that works on the spot is practically guaranteed to be abused as an easy money maker for people, and the net effect ends up being counter to the purpose od the program and many others.
mberning 8y ago
I really take exception with their point on insurance. They try to insidiously suggest that the poor and urban population pays more for insurance than other populations due to... Well they don’t say, but I do take their inference. The fact of the matter is that the auto insurance industry is highly regulated and cannot discriminate on many factors. Their rate books are reviewed by regulators. The fact that poor and urban residents pay more has to do with the risk to the vehicle. The chance of damage, theft, the type of car, the experience and record of the driver, etc. all factor in. It may be unfortunate, but it is it not some grand conspiracy or inherent bias to hold these people down. I wish other types of insurance (like health) were as easy to shop for as auto insurance. You can easily shop multiple insurers and compare prices from the comfort of your home and pick what works best for you. It’s really incredible when you think about it.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  >I wish other types of insurance (like health) were as easy to shop for as auto insurance. You can easily shop multiple insurers and compare prices from the comfort of your home and pick what works best for you. Libertarian here, healthcare.gov is this. Its great. well, its about as great as heavily bribed government sectors can be. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s
  - mberning 8y ago
    Yeah, I wish they would do more to open up competition nationwide and unsaddle health insurance from employment. How ridiculous would it be if I needed to change car insurance every time I changed jobs. Stupid.
    - beatgammit 8y ago
      Exactly. Once we remove health insurance from employment, I think everyone will be a lot happier. One of the biggest stressors in changing jobs is health insurance. If employees didn't have to worry about that, choosing a new job would be less of a problem (or quitting altogether to work on a business idea). Once the majority of people are buying their own health insurance, the market for doing so will improve, and we could see private alternatives to healthcare.gov, as well as more brokers willing to take that on. If I could change one thing about history, it would be wage and price controls during WW2 that got us into the situation of employers offering health insurance, and if I could change anything now, it would be eliminating that. I ran the math, and _most_ of our employees would've been better off buying from the market (e.g. through the subsidies they don't qualify for because our company offers insurance). I presented this to my boss, and he rejected it on the grounds that people expect the company to provide it. We need to kill that culture before we can seriously consider changing health insurance/care again.
robertAngst 8y ago
For the people who believe this is fair and just- Should engineers and programmers pay more money for the same laptop as an art student? I'm unsure if this pricing should only exist in the public sector or should extend to private services. Looking to hear your rationale. I'm one of those, treat everyone equal, types. Would like to hear your reason.
- mberning 8y ago
  Their point on registering vehicles by weight is the only sane way of doing it. You pay commensurate with the wear and tear your vehicle puts on the road. Doing it based on income or vehicle value is ridiculous. You already get dinged when you pay tax, now they want to double ding you? What a load of crap.
- SweetLlamaMyth 8y ago
  Many manufacturers DO have discounted student pricing (not that it's publicly mandated).
  - astura 8y ago
    Student discounts, military/veteran + family discounts, employee discounts (negotiated pricing), bulk purchase discounts, preferred customer discounts, subscription discounts (like Amazon Prime), senior discounts, promotional discounts, price matching, negotiated pricing, courtesy discounts, employee discounts, retired employee+family discounts, low income subsidies, certain tax exemptions for certain populations, etc. The idea we all pay the exact same for the same product/service is... not accurate.
- oftenwrong 8y ago
  In the US, the idea of fairness is basically divided on political lines. On the "right", people think fairness is equality. On the "left", people think fairness is equity. Helpful graphic: http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads...
adolph 8y ago
The three major themes of the article seem to be: micro transactions, variable pricing, and unbundling. I think that one of the unintended consequences of the first two is that doing them well requires a lot of information about the consumer at the transaction point. I can see some risks in that and I’m sure more devious minds than my own can think of more.
- pas 8y ago
  Alas license plate tracking is already pretty widespread, adding a toll gate with contactless payment doesn't make much of a difference now. In car transponders of course would make the privacy problem worse.
bradleyjg 8y ago
I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context. Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Manhattan or they'd rather take commuter rail than sit in traffic. To the extent the latter take ubers or similar such services already pay congestion charges and there isn't too much fuss (except from the drives who don't have much political muscle). The bulk of car commuters into Manhattan are instead those with de jure or de facto free parking. That's largely government workers (e.g. teachers, cops, firefighters) and members of the trades (i.e. construction workers). For those with de jure free parking congestion pricing isn't a big deal, whatever authority is setting aside parking will either pay the congestion charge or get it waived. It's the beneficiaries of police and traffic control refusal to enforce the law with respect to certain favored populations that are up in arms about congestion charges. Because a congestion charge is likely to be enforced by an automated mechanism which, unlike parking control, will not engage in public corruption on their behalf. And these groups, unlike the uber drivers, do have a great deal of political muscle. +At least the ordinary rich, hecto-millionaires and billionaires might be a different story
- airstrike 8y ago
  "Nobody drives a car in Manhattan cause traffic is just terrible!"
  - gthaman 8y ago
    All kinds of excuses will be made to increase the taxes in this system where NO amount of money will add up to enough for this government. New York City in particular has a MEDICAL ONLY section of its pension benefits for city employees that adds up to $100 Billion. Medical, only. Not including pension payouts. Puerto Rico defaulted on $71 Billion worth of debt, which was all of it, just recently. This reckoning that is on its way is going to be epic. Nothing in NYC government makes a profit or operates properly without gigantic losses and pathetic performance in every metric when compared to the past city performance. This will be the Olympics of Mental Gymnastics.
raverbashing 8y ago
I "love" those kind of articles, though this one is a bit different. But it boils down to "let's make car owners pay a lot of money - (and this article) except if they're poor, then they can't afford being fleeced for wanting to drive" (really Capt. Obvious? so maybe fleecing drivers is not the way to go) There's a balance between preferring other types of transportation and hating cars. Not to mention this article is US centric and seems to ignore how it's done elsewhere. "Not pricing roads, which results in slower bus speeds. " there's an answer for that: bus lanes. Exists in several countries. "Poor people pay more for parking than the rich" Really? (Oh by the way, they don't because of convenience and you might prefer the parking that's further and doesn't have a cover for your old car while the rich might favour the valet parking one next to their office) I don't think there's much secret to it. Gas taxes are, in the end, a carbon tax. Use more gas pay more for it.
sampo 8y ago
> 5. Gasoline and gas taxes. Are they suggesting progressive gas tax? The price of gas you pay at the pump would depend on your salary?
- lkbm 8y ago
  I think they're suggesting that if you oppose decry congestion pricing because it's a not progressive, you should also oppose gasoline cost and gas taxes because they're not progressive. Their thesis is that congestion pricing shouldn't be dismissed on grounds X, not that all these other things should be dismissed on grounds X. It's pointing out the inconsistency of supporting a bunch of inequitable policies while rejecting another simply because "it's inequitable".
maxsilver 8y ago
Author uses a really backwards definition of equitable. Equability is not about making every price defined as percentage of income. Equability is about making things so cheap that everyone can easily afford them, regardless of income. In perfect equitably, everything would be free. Public Schools are equitable, because every child can attend public school, there are no barriers to attendance. Public Water utility systems are equitable, because every resident gets an identical cheapest possible rate for drinking water, so that the barrier to access to water is as low as possible. Public Libraries are equitable, because every resident gets identical access to the contents of the library, as cheap (or usually free) a price as possible. --- Urbanists attack the roads from the opposite angle. They are trying to invent as many barriers as possible to their use. (i.e., additional taxes, additional congestion charges, etc). Congestion prices can never be equitable, because the idea itself is intentionally inequal -- it's an attempt to punish people for using a public good (and more accurately, an attempt to maximally-punish each person as equally as possible). This is the exact opposite of true equability, which is all about delivering as much public good as possible, as cheaply as possible.
- paganel 8y ago
  I think one of the main sub-texts of this type of articles is that roads are not “public goods”, or at least that they shouldn’t be reguarded as “public goods” anymore, but that instead road-users should be made aware that using those roads is a “privilege” (for lack of a better word) which they should pay dearly for.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  > Public Schools are equitable, because every child can attend public school, there are no barriers to attendance. My experience of seeing/evaluating/considering public schools in rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods suggests that public schooling in the US is far from equitable.
lsc 8y ago
it seems to me that the right way to solve the regressive nature of pigovian taxes like congestion fees or gas taxes is to implement them with subsidies so that they are largely revenue neutral. The idea being to give everyone a tax credit equivalent to what they are probably going to spend on usage fees. The incentive structure remains, as they get to keep the money if you aren't contributing to the negative externality, and on average nobody is any worse off than before.
- adolph 8y ago
  ”A Pigovian (Pigouvian) tax is a liquid waste, or effluent, fee which is assessed against private individuals or businesses for engaging in activities that create adverse side effects. Adverse side effects are those costs which are not included as a part of the product's market price.” Source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp
  - lsc 8y ago
    my understanding is that it's any tax used to price in an externality. An effluent fee would be just one example. wikipedia supports my usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax "A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of such externalities are environmental pollution, and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption."
- jabl 8y ago
  Basically what many economists are recommending for dealing with climate change, namely a carbon tax + dividend scheme. That is, a (rising) carbon tax sufficient to reduce carbon emissions quickly enough, and proceeds from said tax paid out in equal amounts to each citizen.
jonstewart 8y ago
In Northern Virginia outside DC, I-66 had been subject to directional rush hour restrictions on single occupancy vehicles. It was illegal to drive a car with just yourself for a few hours every weekday and you risked a ticket if you were caught. People put blow up dolls in their passenger seats. Last year they rolled out automatic congestion pricing for SOVs. All the news stories were about how the toll could hit a ridiculous-seeming price of $40+, but that was usually only for a few minutes in the morning rush. Buried in the articles several paragraphs in would be a note that, oh yeah, it had been illegal to drive alone. Now a year later, peoples’ habits have changed and the toll has done its job. Commuters have effectively time-shifted, alleviating and smoothing congestion. It has been so effective that the length of I-66 subject to this treatment will be extended. I’m a smalltime neighborhood elected official in DC and I really hope I can convince DDOT to roll out bus lanes faster.
- hedora 8y ago
  In the Bay Area, when they added the ability to pay a toll to use the HOV lane, and also extended the HOV lane hours to end at 10AM instead of 9AM, it immediately added 30-45 minutes to the 880 -> 237 commute from East Bay. Extending congestion hours by lowering road throughput is counterproductive, so saying “it smoothed congestion” is applying the wrong metric. At this point in time, we can measure door-to-door time of commuters, and also the number of trips per hour. Instead traffic engineers use metrics that seem to be designed by NIMBY’s that want to increase the cost of commuting into high property value areas. The bus lanes you propose are likely to have the same problem. Since you have the ability to improve the success criteria for transit projects, please consider using better metrics.
  - shereadsthenews 8y ago
    I don't think that is a very good example because that particular "HOV" lane is 100% Teslas with a single occupant, and because the HOV lane ends abruptly in the middle of 237 before anyone exits. The real lesson of these projects is that the EV sticker program was a failure and the cost to drive down 237 at rush hour should have been $50 instead of whatever it is.
tgb 8y ago
I think most of the comments here are misunderstanding the article. It seems to be saying "Don't say congestion pricing is inequitable without also saying that these are things that we already have are inequitable." It's meant as a counter-argument to people saying "but congestion pricing is regressive against poor people therefore we shouldn't have it." So if you think that gas pricing should not have to be based on one's income, you aren't refuting the article since you presumably also don't think equitability concerns apply to congestion pricing either.
- DataWorker 8y ago
  Gas taxes and congestion prices are different. If you can’t grasp that then you probably don’t see the foolishness of the original article and probably are as confused as the articles author about what critics of congestion pricing think and why.
  - graeme 8y ago
    Why? In both cases the user of gas and roads is creating negative externalities for others. Taxing them compensates for the externalities. The externalities aren't dependent on income, so an income based tax doesn't seem appropriate. Externalities are: * Wear and tear on roads * Congestion * Cost of policing roads * Road deaths and accidents * urban pollution * co2 increase The latter two don't apply to electric cars, and urban pollution doesn't apply to a gas tax on rural drivers. Otherwise they both seems to be things either a gas tax or congestion charge could make up for.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      I drive an electric car. It is CO2 free only at the (hypothetical) tailpipe, not across the entire generation cycle. My car emits CO2 for every mile driven, just not right in the urban center.
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
        That CO2 emission is (or should be) taxed for its externalities at the power generation side, same as any other electricity, and doesn't need to be taxed again at the car level like petroleum-fueled vehicles must be. Plus, depending on where you're filling up, you may actually be using 100% renewable energy anyway, so you're not emitting CO2. There are states that are close to majority-renewable now, and will be in a few years.
tomasien 8y ago
The electric vehicles item here is disingenuous without including how massively subsidized their oil-based competitors are. I understand why urban transit people target electric cars to counter the "electric cars will save the world!" narrative but it falls flat to me in an otherwise compelling list.
zaroth 8y ago
I agree with TFA’s premise, but some of the specific arguments present are faulty. Flat vehicle registration fees Excise tax is not flat, and sometimes a luxury tax on top even makes it progressive. These are registration fees paid to the town instead of the state. The storm sewer subsidy The complaint here is that pollution is contributed by commuters / travelers but cleanup is paid by locals. The travelers polluting city storm water sewers are paying taxes in the city when they do business in the city, which is why they are using the roads. If there was no reason to come to the city, there would be a lot less stormwater pollution but also a lot less commerce and the city would be worse off. Insurance rates The fact that everyone pays for their own insurance means that is it not a tax. If we subsidized insurance based on income, then insurance would effectively be an income tax. Which, by the way, is true for health insurance. Gasoline and gas taxes Are meant to cover (part of) the externalities of driving. The same as the congestion tax the article is supporting. By covering the externality we discourage the polluting activity, which is equitable to be done for everyone who is polluting, regardless of income. EV tax credits If we want these (cheaper, more economical, cleaner, safer) cars to become available in the mass market, there is a multi-billion dollar R&D hill to climb. Economies of scale for li-ion and electric drivetrains do not materialize overnight. Getting rich people to spend $60-$100k on a new toy to fund this endeavor, by providing a $7500 carrot, benefits the poor and middle class in the long run. Hell, it benefits the whole planet in the long run. The rich people are putting up a lot more capital than the Federal government in this equation to make mass scale EV a reality. This is a huge win and to say it is inequitable totally misses the point of the subsidy.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  And clearly gasoline taxes aren't high enough if trucks and SUVs are the best-selling vehicles in the US. The effect of higher gasoline taxes wouldn't be higher taxes overall in many cases, it would simply mean people driving smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Converting a single gas car to a plug in hybrid has three times the impact of converting a hybrid to pure BEV, and the former is cheaper. All of the economies of scale you get from BEVs you get from hybrids. If every car were a hybrid, an immense amount of lithium batteries would be required, vastly more than we use today. It's hard to see the $7500 tax credit as little more than a gift to the rich, who can buy a Tesla because it's cool and virtue signal about being environmental. It's certainly not an example of thoughtful legislation. I live in Australia, where I use public transport almost exclusively (Ubers filling the gaps). We don't subsidize Teslas here, which I've heard friends bemoan, but it makes me happy. The money is better off being spent elsewhere. https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-emissions-tool https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-e...
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OtterCoder 8y ago
Can I just mention how mind-bogglingly stupid a milage tax on car registration would be? No matter how efficient your new car is, it's less polluting to repair the old one and keep it on the road, than to manufacture a new car.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  I think you're missing the point. The tax goes towards infrastructure maintenance. All vehicles damage infrastructure and the amount of damage a single car imposes is a function of their weight and miles driven. From an environmental view, the tax would be for cleaning storm water run off which contains contamination from the vehicle itself (e.g. oil, brake dust). From that perspective an older car is more likely to polute storm water than a new car.
jedberg 8y ago
> Gasoline and gas taxes This seems like a legacy problem that will soon go away. Gas taxes were done because they were a good proxy for both miles driven, when most cars got roughly the same milage. But now you have cars that get a few miles to the gallon while another car that might be heavier is getting 35mpg. And of course electric cars. I suspect gas taxes will switch to milage taxes in the next few years as more and more electric cars are adopted. In California they've already started charging electric cars an extra fee on the annual registration to make up for the lack of gas taxes.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  In Georgia there's an Alternative Fuel Vehicle fee charged on any vehicle that doesn't pay a fuel tax, or any AFV that does but chooses the AFV vanity plate. The AFV vanity plate entitles you to drive for free in all Toll lanes. All zero emissions vehicles are also allowed in HOV lanes regardless of occupancy since the HOV lanes were introduced to curb emissions in Metro Atlanta.
  - frankydp 8y ago
    Not directly related but Georgia also has a pay to carpool/alternative commute program. http://gacommuteoptions.com/ http://gacommuteoptions.com/
hopler 8y ago
Decrying everything that doesn't have a low-income subsidy as "inequity" is disingenuous and undermines your better justified claims. It's OK if poor people pay the same price as rich people for the same service and it's OK to have broad income subsidies or progressive income/wealth tax to help poor people. It's not reasonable to claim that every fee for service is "inequitable".
lazyjones 8y ago
Why does this political subject get posted every week on HN, why does it always result in ideological discussions sprinkled with personal anecdotes and why is everyone asking for the defeatist solution of taxation (to reduce the appeal of individual transport) instead of at least treating the underlying technical problems (logistics, pollution) as an engineering challenge? It‘s disheartening...

233 points by oftenwrong 8y ago

> parking meters don’t charge different rates to users based on their income; you have to pay the same amount to park your used Jetta as you do your new Mercedes [...] That’s inequitable. I guess it depends on which end of the political spectrum you are, but this sounds absolutely obscene to me.

devereaux 8y ago
It sounds obscene to me too. A car uses a parking spot. The spot is no longer available for someone else- regardless of your income. Incomes is orthogonal to the problem. Flat taxes are the fairest taxes. Take trash taxes for example: you produce 100 lbs of trash, you pay for 100 lbs of trash because disposing of 100 lbs of trash in a landfill or a recycling facility won't be affected by the income of the person having produced said trash. Want to pay less taxes? Produce less trash.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  Now do water.
- praptak 8y ago
  The point of the article is that the same arguments work in favour of congestion pricing.
- voisin 8y ago
  The argument isn’t about whether the quantum of taxes is appropriate. It is how a fixed quantum turns a disincentive for some into an irrelevancy to others. If the purpose of the cost is to discourage use (peak period congestion charges), then it should vary with income so as to be a equally discouraging to all to whom it applies. For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production, whereas the rich aren’t affected and can produce far more before they feel the incentive to reduce waste. I think the parking spot item is more like a meal at a fine restaurant - there is no incentive or disincentive from a social standpoint that should justify variable pricing on income. But to the extend there is, say via congestion, pollution, etc, it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive.
  - ramblerouser 8y ago
    A poor person's car takes up the same number of parking spaces as a rich person's car, and a rich person has already paid a huge amount of their income to the poor person in the form of income taxes and welfare.
    - pas 8y ago
      poor might mean lower middle-class. no welfare income.
  - devereaux 8y ago
    > it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive. No, it's not reasonable. The goal is not to discourage use, but to price in the negative externality. > For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production, And that's good, even if we suppose your argument is right. Bear with me: what's the percentage of the population in your country that you would call "rich"? Let's say 20%. Do you think that 20% of the population can create more bags of trash than 80% of the population? I don't think so. In the parking example, do you think 20% of the population can park more cars than 80% of the population? I don't think so either. Someone rich may have more than one car, but I strongly doubt they are able to drive 2 cars at once.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure 5% of the population can create more of whatever negative externality you'd like to tax than the lower 95%. Someone rich might not drive a car at all and instead take a private jet. An average person from the US produces fifty times as much CO2 as an average person from Kenya.
      - devereaux 8y ago
        If we were talking about CO2, I'd agree with you. But we are talking about parking spaces, and production of trash within a country.
- skh 8y ago
  There are lots of people who don’t think a flat tax on income is the fairest tax. Presumably a person whose income is very large has a lot more to lose if society collapses so they should pay more to maintain society. I tend to believe progressive taxation on income/wealth is the most fair. But I’m someone who believes that there should be a ceiling and a floor on how much a person can have. The distribution of resources and wealth in the world is grossly unfair in my opinion.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I don't agree with the fact we should tax more expensive cars for parking. But I don't think your reasoning hold either. If you have more money, it's easier to take less parking space, and produce less trash. I can certainly attest that it's easier for me now: I can afford a private parking lot and taxis, I can buy food in expensive organic shops that have less packaging, I can pay people to do things for me, that would result in more work, but less waste. Basically, when you have money, you can optimize for way more things than when you are constrained financially.
- barrkel 8y ago
  Flat taxes are not the fairest taxes for a very simple reason: the decreasing marginal utility of money. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility... If you're poor, a tax - no matter how small - affects things like food expenditure. If you're income rich, the difference tax makes affects things like what kind of car you buy or what quality of hotel you stay at when you're on vacation. These are not like for like tradeoffs, they're qualitatively different.
  - devereaux 8y ago
    Decreasing marginal utility of money is just a theory, and there are many flaws in the theory - including measuring happiness with a discrete scale of questionable boundaries (5=very happy, etc.), considering self administered questions at face value, etc. Another theory is hedonic adaptation- you adapt to whatever and regress to a baseline. Finally, there seems to be proof that some people do not spent their money on what will make them happier, the typical example being buying an object instead of an experience.
    - barrkel 8y ago
      If you are seriously suggesting that a penny is worth the same to a wealthy man as a child, we cannot have a serious conversation.
chatmasta 8y ago
Presumably the owner of the Mercedes is already taxed more than owner of the Jetta, when paying to register the vehicle, and also likely on the original income. Should the owner also be charged for its use? Should toll booths be more expensive too?
ajkjk 8y ago
The point of the article is that that would be ridiculous, right? I think most people people anywhere on the political spectrum would agree; that's why it was used as an example.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  No, not all people would agree. It's coherent to think that a) government punishment should be the same for each recipient, b) we measure punishment (and thus it's "sameness") in terms of pain, and c) financial penalties need to be indexed against wealth/income to inflict the same amount of pain. Sweden (I believe it is) in fact does this. ------ Regardless, yes as the OP says if you think it's fair to charge a flat fine, then surely it's fair to charge a flat fee. The point is relative and thus holds whether you define fine equitability in terms of amount paid or difficulty in making the payment.
mikeash 8y ago
I don’t understand why this example is there at all. This is just a product being sold for a price. Is it unfair that a banana costs the same for Jeff Bezos as it does for the homeless guy he walked past on his way to the store? I mean, you certainly could argue that this is unfair, but at that point you’re basically arguing for a different concept of money and commerce, which is a rather bigger subject than the unfairness of tolls.
- kd0amg 8y ago
  The "product for a price" idea is a little weird when talking about some service typically provided by a government who deliberately prices it below market equilibrium. If we're going to effectively subsidize this, it's fair to open debate on how that subsidy should be apportioned.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Depends on the city. There's a lot of paid private parking out there. I agree with you that the price of government-owned parking is generally too low, and that it should be increased to a level to which available spaces nearby are reliably guaranteed.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  In the past we solved the problem on the supply side by reducing the difference between Bezos and Homeless Guy. However ideas like that have been made unpalatable to the people who most benefit from them - in a quite frankly brilliant campaign of social engineering - so we're left discussing unworkable "solutions" like this.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    The real difference between Very Rich Guy and Homeless Guy is plausibly lower today than during any other previous era of history, including the mid-20th century. When he isn't working at Amazon or playing with his rockets, Jeff Bezos is, by and large, buying the very same kind of goods and services you or I buy-- his consumption may be larger than mine by some factor, say 3x or whatever, he might pick slightly higher quality stuff, but that's about it. This was very much not the case historically.
howard941 8y ago
Near a federal building in Tampa I usually see the Mercedes SUV with a handicapped tag parking at the meter for free and the used Jetta in a $10/day parking lot.

oneplane 8y ago

This seems rather US-centric, but perhaps there are some universal things in there? In The Netherlands, we usually split off some of the issues; for example there is the tax that covers road usage paid per active registered vehicle. This depends on the vehicle, so depending on how expensive/big/powerful etc your new car would be, you'd pay more or less tax. For public transportation, more and more networks are getting dedicated lanes or even dedicated roads, so buses for example are not affected by what the cars happen to be doing at that time.

avar 8y ago
Yeah much of it doesn't transfer, but on the subject of the taxes in The Netherlands a lot of it is nonsensical: 1. You pay tax per weight of the vehicle, and that's a (mostly?) linear relationship. Whereas a 10 ton vehicle causes much more than 10x the wear & tear to roadways than a 1 ton vehicle. 2. Even if it were adjusted for the wear it shouldn't be a fixed fee, but based on actual usage. Paying it for a combination of the weight and mileage/yr would still not reflect reality, but would be closer. 3. There's no tax for vehicle size, just weight (the two don't always closely follow each other), which produces an externality on small Dutch roadways.
- oneplane 8y ago
  That tax is not the only one paying for the roads; the normal tax on fuel and the fuel-specific tax on top of that (which also differs per type of fuel) offsets the heavier engines or heavier users. At the same time, a project people abandoned a few times (mostly because or scare tactics) is in the works to see if we can lower or abandon some of the taxes in favour of usage-based taxes measured by vehicle kilometers on-road. So if you drive more, you pay more. At the same time, I don't think it makes sense to make all tax super dependant on what you drive, where you drive it, and what money you make. We already have some specific systems in place to deal with the discrepancy between high income and low income (and the gradient in the middle), so instead of making the tax system more complex by adding yet more variables to existing rules, a rule with a highly specific target is simpler and reaches more of the people it applies to. Basically, if you are poor, or simply don't make enough money to save or invest, a lot of the taxes no longer apply. At the same time, if your income is so low you are getting towards the edge of not surviving (depending on where you are I guess) you get money for rent and healthcare. And on top of that: if you don't have a lot of money, it makes no sense to own a car anyway. I don't think a true per-use system that only relies on what the current usage of anything is will work, simply because we cannot predict what we will need or use in the future and it disables all paths to investments or building infrastructure because it is a lifeline to certain areas. After all, it's not a for-profit corporate system we're talking about, it's a country or a government. While sensible decisions are of course needed, and adjustments to how some things are paid for can be very sensible, making a very tight integration between what is available and what it currently used is a very bad idea for humans.

Tade0 8y ago

let’s ask what it takes to create an overall system that is fair to all, considering all aspects of how the system is paid for, who benefits, and who bears the external costs Here's a crazy idea: instead of pricing congestion, let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction. Puts a hard limit on the number of cars that enter the zone and applies both to the rich and poor equally. Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more - although I don't think many would be willing to go to such lenghts.

anticensor 8y ago
> Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more This workaround would be made moot by adding a rule saying you can use at most the square root (or any other sublinear function) of number of your cars.
- pas 8y ago
  Lease it, rent it, gift it, borrow it, legal technology.
zozbot123 8y ago
> Here's a crazy idea: instead of pricing congestion, let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction. Good idea. Then make these points tradable, and you'll reach the same optimality as a congestion tax, but retain a system that doesn't exclude low-income folks.
ddebernardy 8y ago
> let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction. [...] Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more - although I don't think many would be willing to go to such lengths. During pollution spikes in Paris, the city occasionally alternates each day between forbidding odd or even ending car plates from circulating downtown. The rich do precisely what you say: buy an extra car and make sure the license plates are so they can drive any day regardless of restrictions.

leemailll 8y ago

And then how about those can’t even afford a car?

oneplane 8y ago
They shouldn't live in the US I guess, because that place is designed for cars and nothing else.
- sampo 8y ago
  There are places with lower car ownership in the US. Most notably New York City, where 45% of households own a car.
  - oneplane 8y ago
    I suppose that makes sense, there would be areas where the amount of cars, buildings and people per square meter is so high its usability implodes on itself. I imagine there must be areas with higher usage of public transportation, higher usage of bicycles or simply having everything for day-to-day life in walking distance.
robertAngst 8y ago
Stop doing drugs? Get roommates? Stop working part time? (used) Cars are 1-3k per year. Not exactly affordable if you are making 15-20k/yr.
lkbm 8y ago
See #2.

buzzdenver 8y ago

The way I conceptually see it is that people with lower income pay less once a year, during tax time, and save a lot of money then. All other times it's just much simpler if prices/fees/whatnot are based on actual usage. Can you imagine owning a gas station or running a parking lot and having to deal with income verification from all your clients, and then dealing with the government to get reimbursed because Joe Schmo is low income and got a 25% discount? That would be a recipe for wasteful bureaucracy, black market activities like low income people using their gas cards to fill up others' cars, and generally just tons of inefficiencies.

bhickey 8y ago
The author isn't suggesting that gas taxes should vary with income. His point is that they're a flat tax and flat taxes are regressive.
- coredog64 8y ago
  I’ve made similar comments in other discussions, but there’s an element of redlining to this. Upper middle class people push for ever higher safety standards in new motor vehicles. This pushes the retail price higher for new cars, but also has the follow on effect of raising the price of newer used cars. As a result, vehicle consumers at the bottom of the economic ladder wind up with cars that are less safe, less efficient, and less reliable.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I drive a Kia Rio. It's one of the cheapest cars on the market and it's efficient and reliable. I don't know about safety. There are good cars available on the lower end of the market. I wish there were options with less power available to be even cheaper.
zdragnar 8y ago
I was approached twice on the same day at a cub foods once by people offering to buy my groceries with their food stamps in exchange for a lesser amount of cash. I still think the program is valuable, but damn it hurts to see it be abused (especially since one of the guys had his little kid with him). A discount card or whatever that works on the spot is practically guaranteed to be abused as an easy money maker for people, and the net effect ends up being counter to the purpose od the program and many others.

mberning 8y ago

I really take exception with their point on insurance. They try to insidiously suggest that the poor and urban population pays more for insurance than other populations due to... Well they don’t say, but I do take their inference. The fact of the matter is that the auto insurance industry is highly regulated and cannot discriminate on many factors. Their rate books are reviewed by regulators. The fact that poor and urban residents pay more has to do with the risk to the vehicle. The chance of damage, theft, the type of car, the experience and record of the driver, etc. all factor in. It may be unfortunate, but it is it not some grand conspiracy or inherent bias to hold these people down. I wish other types of insurance (like health) were as easy to shop for as auto insurance. You can easily shop multiple insurers and compare prices from the comfort of your home and pick what works best for you. It’s really incredible when you think about it.

robertAngst 8y ago
>I wish other types of insurance (like health) were as easy to shop for as auto insurance. You can easily shop multiple insurers and compare prices from the comfort of your home and pick what works best for you. Libertarian here, healthcare.gov is this. Its great. well, its about as great as heavily bribed government sectors can be. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s
- mberning 8y ago
  Yeah, I wish they would do more to open up competition nationwide and unsaddle health insurance from employment. How ridiculous would it be if I needed to change car insurance every time I changed jobs. Stupid.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    Exactly. Once we remove health insurance from employment, I think everyone will be a lot happier. One of the biggest stressors in changing jobs is health insurance. If employees didn't have to worry about that, choosing a new job would be less of a problem (or quitting altogether to work on a business idea). Once the majority of people are buying their own health insurance, the market for doing so will improve, and we could see private alternatives to healthcare.gov, as well as more brokers willing to take that on. If I could change one thing about history, it would be wage and price controls during WW2 that got us into the situation of employers offering health insurance, and if I could change anything now, it would be eliminating that. I ran the math, and _most_ of our employees would've been better off buying from the market (e.g. through the subsidies they don't qualify for because our company offers insurance). I presented this to my boss, and he rejected it on the grounds that people expect the company to provide it. We need to kill that culture before we can seriously consider changing health insurance/care again.

robertAngst 8y ago

For the people who believe this is fair and just- Should engineers and programmers pay more money for the same laptop as an art student? I'm unsure if this pricing should only exist in the public sector or should extend to private services. Looking to hear your rationale. I'm one of those, treat everyone equal, types. Would like to hear your reason.

mberning 8y ago
Their point on registering vehicles by weight is the only sane way of doing it. You pay commensurate with the wear and tear your vehicle puts on the road. Doing it based on income or vehicle value is ridiculous. You already get dinged when you pay tax, now they want to double ding you? What a load of crap.
SweetLlamaMyth 8y ago
Many manufacturers DO have discounted student pricing (not that it's publicly mandated).
- astura 8y ago
  Student discounts, military/veteran + family discounts, employee discounts (negotiated pricing), bulk purchase discounts, preferred customer discounts, subscription discounts (like Amazon Prime), senior discounts, promotional discounts, price matching, negotiated pricing, courtesy discounts, employee discounts, retired employee+family discounts, low income subsidies, certain tax exemptions for certain populations, etc. The idea we all pay the exact same for the same product/service is... not accurate.
oftenwrong 8y ago
In the US, the idea of fairness is basically divided on political lines. On the "right", people think fairness is equality. On the "left", people think fairness is equity. Helpful graphic: http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads...

adolph 8y ago

The three major themes of the article seem to be: micro transactions, variable pricing, and unbundling. I think that one of the unintended consequences of the first two is that doing them well requires a lot of information about the consumer at the transaction point. I can see some risks in that and I’m sure more devious minds than my own can think of more.

pas 8y ago
Alas license plate tracking is already pretty widespread, adding a toll gate with contactless payment doesn't make much of a difference now. In car transponders of course would make the privacy problem worse.

bradleyjg 8y ago

I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context. Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Manhattan or they'd rather take commuter rail than sit in traffic. To the extent the latter take ubers or similar such services already pay congestion charges and there isn't too much fuss (except from the drives who don't have much political muscle). The bulk of car commuters into Manhattan are instead those with de jure or de facto free parking. That's largely government workers (e.g. teachers, cops, firefighters) and members of the trades (i.e. construction workers). For those with de jure free parking congestion pricing isn't a big deal, whatever authority is setting aside parking will either pay the congestion charge or get it waived. It's the beneficiaries of police and traffic control refusal to enforce the law with respect to certain favored populations that are up in arms about congestion charges. Because a congestion charge is likely to be enforced by an automated mechanism which, unlike parking control, will not engage in public corruption on their behalf. And these groups, unlike the uber drivers, do have a great deal of political muscle. +At least the ordinary rich, hecto-millionaires and billionaires might be a different story

airstrike 8y ago
"Nobody drives a car in Manhattan cause traffic is just terrible!"
- gthaman 8y ago
  All kinds of excuses will be made to increase the taxes in this system where NO amount of money will add up to enough for this government. New York City in particular has a MEDICAL ONLY section of its pension benefits for city employees that adds up to $100 Billion. Medical, only. Not including pension payouts. Puerto Rico defaulted on $71 Billion worth of debt, which was all of it, just recently. This reckoning that is on its way is going to be epic. Nothing in NYC government makes a profit or operates properly without gigantic losses and pathetic performance in every metric when compared to the past city performance. This will be the Olympics of Mental Gymnastics.

raverbashing 8y ago

I "love" those kind of articles, though this one is a bit different. But it boils down to "let's make car owners pay a lot of money - (and this article) except if they're poor, then they can't afford being fleeced for wanting to drive" (really Capt. Obvious? so maybe fleecing drivers is not the way to go) There's a balance between preferring other types of transportation and hating cars. Not to mention this article is US centric and seems to ignore how it's done elsewhere. "Not pricing roads, which results in slower bus speeds. " there's an answer for that: bus lanes. Exists in several countries. "Poor people pay more for parking than the rich" Really? (Oh by the way, they don't because of convenience and you might prefer the parking that's further and doesn't have a cover for your old car while the rich might favour the valet parking one next to their office) I don't think there's much secret to it. Gas taxes are, in the end, a carbon tax. Use more gas pay more for it.

sampo 8y ago

> 5. Gasoline and gas taxes. Are they suggesting progressive gas tax? The price of gas you pay at the pump would depend on your salary?

lkbm 8y ago
I think they're suggesting that if you oppose decry congestion pricing because it's a not progressive, you should also oppose gasoline cost and gas taxes because they're not progressive. Their thesis is that congestion pricing shouldn't be dismissed on grounds X, not that all these other things should be dismissed on grounds X. It's pointing out the inconsistency of supporting a bunch of inequitable policies while rejecting another simply because "it's inequitable".

maxsilver 8y ago

Author uses a really backwards definition of equitable. Equability is not about making every price defined as percentage of income. Equability is about making things so cheap that everyone can easily afford them, regardless of income. In perfect equitably, everything would be free. Public Schools are equitable, because every child can attend public school, there are no barriers to attendance. Public Water utility systems are equitable, because every resident gets an identical cheapest possible rate for drinking water, so that the barrier to access to water is as low as possible. Public Libraries are equitable, because every resident gets identical access to the contents of the library, as cheap (or usually free) a price as possible. --- Urbanists attack the roads from the opposite angle. They are trying to invent as many barriers as possible to their use. (i.e., additional taxes, additional congestion charges, etc). Congestion prices can never be equitable, because the idea itself is intentionally inequal -- it's an attempt to punish people for using a public good (and more accurately, an attempt to maximally-punish each person as equally as possible). This is the exact opposite of true equability, which is all about delivering as much public good as possible, as cheaply as possible.

paganel 8y ago
I think one of the main sub-texts of this type of articles is that roads are not “public goods”, or at least that they shouldn’t be reguarded as “public goods” anymore, but that instead road-users should be made aware that using those roads is a “privilege” (for lack of a better word) which they should pay dearly for.
sokoloff 8y ago
> Public Schools are equitable, because every child can attend public school, there are no barriers to attendance. My experience of seeing/evaluating/considering public schools in rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods suggests that public schooling in the US is far from equitable.

lsc 8y ago

it seems to me that the right way to solve the regressive nature of pigovian taxes like congestion fees or gas taxes is to implement them with subsidies so that they are largely revenue neutral. The idea being to give everyone a tax credit equivalent to what they are probably going to spend on usage fees. The incentive structure remains, as they get to keep the money if you aren't contributing to the negative externality, and on average nobody is any worse off than before.

adolph 8y ago
”A Pigovian (Pigouvian) tax is a liquid waste, or effluent, fee which is assessed against private individuals or businesses for engaging in activities that create adverse side effects. Adverse side effects are those costs which are not included as a part of the product's market price.” Source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp
- lsc 8y ago
  my understanding is that it's any tax used to price in an externality. An effluent fee would be just one example. wikipedia supports my usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax "A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of such externalities are environmental pollution, and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption."
jabl 8y ago
Basically what many economists are recommending for dealing with climate change, namely a carbon tax + dividend scheme. That is, a (rising) carbon tax sufficient to reduce carbon emissions quickly enough, and proceeds from said tax paid out in equal amounts to each citizen.

jonstewart 8y ago

In Northern Virginia outside DC, I-66 had been subject to directional rush hour restrictions on single occupancy vehicles. It was illegal to drive a car with just yourself for a few hours every weekday and you risked a ticket if you were caught. People put blow up dolls in their passenger seats. Last year they rolled out automatic congestion pricing for SOVs. All the news stories were about how the toll could hit a ridiculous-seeming price of $40+, but that was usually only for a few minutes in the morning rush. Buried in the articles several paragraphs in would be a note that, oh yeah, it had been illegal to drive alone. Now a year later, peoples’ habits have changed and the toll has done its job. Commuters have effectively time-shifted, alleviating and smoothing congestion. It has been so effective that the length of I-66 subject to this treatment will be extended. I’m a smalltime neighborhood elected official in DC and I really hope I can convince DDOT to roll out bus lanes faster.

hedora 8y ago
In the Bay Area, when they added the ability to pay a toll to use the HOV lane, and also extended the HOV lane hours to end at 10AM instead of 9AM, it immediately added 30-45 minutes to the 880 -> 237 commute from East Bay. Extending congestion hours by lowering road throughput is counterproductive, so saying “it smoothed congestion” is applying the wrong metric. At this point in time, we can measure door-to-door time of commuters, and also the number of trips per hour. Instead traffic engineers use metrics that seem to be designed by NIMBY’s that want to increase the cost of commuting into high property value areas. The bus lanes you propose are likely to have the same problem. Since you have the ability to improve the success criteria for transit projects, please consider using better metrics.
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  I don't think that is a very good example because that particular "HOV" lane is 100% Teslas with a single occupant, and because the HOV lane ends abruptly in the middle of 237 before anyone exits. The real lesson of these projects is that the EV sticker program was a failure and the cost to drive down 237 at rush hour should have been $50 instead of whatever it is.

tgb 8y ago

I think most of the comments here are misunderstanding the article. It seems to be saying "Don't say congestion pricing is inequitable without also saying that these are things that we already have are inequitable." It's meant as a counter-argument to people saying "but congestion pricing is regressive against poor people therefore we shouldn't have it." So if you think that gas pricing should not have to be based on one's income, you aren't refuting the article since you presumably also don't think equitability concerns apply to congestion pricing either.

DataWorker 8y ago
Gas taxes and congestion prices are different. If you can’t grasp that then you probably don’t see the foolishness of the original article and probably are as confused as the articles author about what critics of congestion pricing think and why.
- graeme 8y ago
  Why? In both cases the user of gas and roads is creating negative externalities for others. Taxing them compensates for the externalities. The externalities aren't dependent on income, so an income based tax doesn't seem appropriate. Externalities are: * Wear and tear on roads * Congestion * Cost of policing roads * Road deaths and accidents * urban pollution * co2 increase The latter two don't apply to electric cars, and urban pollution doesn't apply to a gas tax on rural drivers. Otherwise they both seems to be things either a gas tax or congestion charge could make up for.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    I drive an electric car. It is CO2 free only at the (hypothetical) tailpipe, not across the entire generation cycle. My car emits CO2 for every mile driven, just not right in the urban center.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      That CO2 emission is (or should be) taxed for its externalities at the power generation side, same as any other electricity, and doesn't need to be taxed again at the car level like petroleum-fueled vehicles must be. Plus, depending on where you're filling up, you may actually be using 100% renewable energy anyway, so you're not emitting CO2. There are states that are close to majority-renewable now, and will be in a few years.

tomasien 8y ago

The electric vehicles item here is disingenuous without including how massively subsidized their oil-based competitors are. I understand why urban transit people target electric cars to counter the "electric cars will save the world!" narrative but it falls flat to me in an otherwise compelling list.

zaroth 8y ago

I agree with TFA’s premise, but some of the specific arguments present are faulty. Flat vehicle registration fees Excise tax is not flat, and sometimes a luxury tax on top even makes it progressive. These are registration fees paid to the town instead of the state. The storm sewer subsidy The complaint here is that pollution is contributed by commuters / travelers but cleanup is paid by locals. The travelers polluting city storm water sewers are paying taxes in the city when they do business in the city, which is why they are using the roads. If there was no reason to come to the city, there would be a lot less stormwater pollution but also a lot less commerce and the city would be worse off. Insurance rates The fact that everyone pays for their own insurance means that is it not a tax. If we subsidized insurance based on income, then insurance would effectively be an income tax. Which, by the way, is true for health insurance. Gasoline and gas taxes Are meant to cover (part of) the externalities of driving. The same as the congestion tax the article is supporting. By covering the externality we discourage the polluting activity, which is equitable to be done for everyone who is polluting, regardless of income. EV tax credits If we want these (cheaper, more economical, cleaner, safer) cars to become available in the mass market, there is a multi-billion dollar R&D hill to climb. Economies of scale for li-ion and electric drivetrains do not materialize overnight. Getting rich people to spend $60-$100k on a new toy to fund this endeavor, by providing a $7500 carrot, benefits the poor and middle class in the long run. Hell, it benefits the whole planet in the long run. The rich people are putting up a lot more capital than the Federal government in this equation to make mass scale EV a reality. This is a huge win and to say it is inequitable totally misses the point of the subsidy.

CydeWeys 8y ago
And clearly gasoline taxes aren't high enough if trucks and SUVs are the best-selling vehicles in the US. The effect of higher gasoline taxes wouldn't be higher taxes overall in many cases, it would simply mean people driving smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.
reitzensteinm 8y ago
Converting a single gas car to a plug in hybrid has three times the impact of converting a hybrid to pure BEV, and the former is cheaper. All of the economies of scale you get from BEVs you get from hybrids. If every car were a hybrid, an immense amount of lithium batteries would be required, vastly more than we use today. It's hard to see the $7500 tax credit as little more than a gift to the rich, who can buy a Tesla because it's cool and virtue signal about being environmental. It's certainly not an example of thoughtful legislation. I live in Australia, where I use public transport almost exclusively (Ubers filling the gaps). We don't subsidize Teslas here, which I've heard friends bemoan, but it makes me happy. The money is better off being spent elsewhere. https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-emissions-tool https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-e...

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OtterCoder 8y ago

Can I just mention how mind-bogglingly stupid a milage tax on car registration would be? No matter how efficient your new car is, it's less polluting to repair the old one and keep it on the road, than to manufacture a new car.

cptskippy 8y ago
I think you're missing the point. The tax goes towards infrastructure maintenance. All vehicles damage infrastructure and the amount of damage a single car imposes is a function of their weight and miles driven. From an environmental view, the tax would be for cleaning storm water run off which contains contamination from the vehicle itself (e.g. oil, brake dust). From that perspective an older car is more likely to polute storm water than a new car.

jedberg 8y ago

> Gasoline and gas taxes This seems like a legacy problem that will soon go away. Gas taxes were done because they were a good proxy for both miles driven, when most cars got roughly the same milage. But now you have cars that get a few miles to the gallon while another car that might be heavier is getting 35mpg. And of course electric cars. I suspect gas taxes will switch to milage taxes in the next few years as more and more electric cars are adopted. In California they've already started charging electric cars an extra fee on the annual registration to make up for the lack of gas taxes.

cptskippy 8y ago
In Georgia there's an Alternative Fuel Vehicle fee charged on any vehicle that doesn't pay a fuel tax, or any AFV that does but chooses the AFV vanity plate. The AFV vanity plate entitles you to drive for free in all Toll lanes. All zero emissions vehicles are also allowed in HOV lanes regardless of occupancy since the HOV lanes were introduced to curb emissions in Metro Atlanta.
- frankydp 8y ago
  Not directly related but Georgia also has a pay to carpool/alternative commute program. http://gacommuteoptions.com/ http://gacommuteoptions.com/

hopler 8y ago

Decrying everything that doesn't have a low-income subsidy as "inequity" is disingenuous and undermines your better justified claims. It's OK if poor people pay the same price as rich people for the same service and it's OK to have broad income subsidies or progressive income/wealth tax to help poor people. It's not reasonable to claim that every fee for service is "inequitable".

lazyjones 8y ago

Why does this political subject get posted every week on HN, why does it always result in ideological discussions sprinkled with personal anecdotes and why is everyone asking for the defeatist solution of taxation (to reduce the appeal of individual transport) instead of at least treating the underlying technical problems (logistics, pollution) as an engineering challenge? It‘s disheartening...