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The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain

273 points by resalisbury 8y ago

donatj 8y ago
I mean infrastructure is what everyone points to when one asks “what am I even paying taxes for?” Often even the short hand of “roads”.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  Bad infrastructure causes people to ask "what am I even paying taxes for?" The actual answer is "An insurance company with an army"
- sgift 8y ago
  Police, fire departments, emergency services, public transportation, ..
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    While I agree these are services people pay taxes for, Police mostly target the poor, fire departments are stationed closest to the wealthier neighborhoods, emergency services are generally better in wealthier areas, and public transportation in most of the US is generally poor, airline travel being the only thing worse. It's hard to convince someone who isn't of means that raising taxes on them is somehow of benefit to them. We'd be far better forcing companies to pay and freeing up the market for more people to work from home. That would actually solve the congestion issues without punishing the people who can't afford it.
dannyw 8y ago
It's sad to see congestion pricing in America. I had hoped that the long-lived cultural freedom of driving would keep it at bay for longer, but I guess not anymore. I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip. Public transport is not a suitable option. Instead of 45 minutes one way, the combined trip time balloons to 2 hours (4 hours to and back) due to poor proximity to train stations, and bus connections that require waiting. Every time I drive, I feel less free to move around my city. I feel less free to visit my friends and family. 'Freedom of movement' isn't some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.
- larrymyers 8y ago
  That sounds like a rough commute, I sympathize. What I'm hearing is that Sydney needs to be funneling more of the toll revenue into the transit budget so that trains and buses would be a real option for you. As a resident of Chicago, I would be in favor of congestion pricing within a few miles of the loop. The traffic congestion doesn't just affect other drivers, but those of us walking, biking, and using public transit. I would welcome a far quieter city with less road noise more priority given to multi-modal transit. Due to Chicago's budget issues I'm not sure how to do that beyond providing direct incentives to do something besides drive.
- idlewords 8y ago
  You seem to be describing congestion pricing working as intended. To go by the shortest, least congested route, you have to pay the tolls. If the tolls weren't there, it would not take you 45 minutes to make this trip. The real problem, as you point out, is the absence of adequate public transit.
  - lloydde 8y ago
    Bizarre, that this response is downvoted. As this response deals most directly with the Math of the situation.
- tarr11 8y ago
  “freedom of movement” should be free as in speech, not free as in beer.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    "Free as in speech" is very, very close to "free as in beer". For all practical purposes it doesn't cost me anything more than my time to exercise my free speech rights. Something that's nominally "free" from direct government control but the government gets to dictate the monetary cost of using it is not free by either definition. Anything that increases the monetary cost of freedom of movement (time is not such a big deal because rich and poor alike have 24 hours in the day, hence I don't see traffic jams and crowded subway platforms being that big a deal) is a bad thing, even if the increase is a trivial amount to the upper classes. Mass transit (not the same thing as public transit though the sets intersect) should not be like a restaurant where you pay $50 for a $20 meal because that keeps the poors out and that is exactly what congestion fees and tolls are designed to do.
dec0dedab0de 8y ago
When I worked in a major city I would go on a half-joke rant anytime someone brought up traffic, parking,or obesity. If I were somehow the king of a major city, I would have a giant parking lot on the outside, and ban all cars. You could buy day passes if you need access to the roads to move or something, but it would be discouraged. People would walk more, and be healthier, The air would be higher quality, and most importantly you wouldn't have to wait to cross the street when you're walking to lunch.
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  Also, there wouldn't be many lunch options because delivery services wouldn't be able to use cars and trucks.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    No food delivery in New York uses cars and trucks. They all use ebikes. (Which were illegal for years, but that stopped nobody from using them.)
    - GuiA 8y ago
      How do the ingredients get to the restaurant for preparation?
      - tom_ 8y ago
        There are probably different rules for wholesale or commercial deliveries.
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        During special hours of the night when delivery trucks are allowed to use the street.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    And all the restaurants would have to be on the outside of the city to get their deliveries.
bjourne 8y ago
I wonder if we (as a society) in the not too distant future can make driving embarrassing? My hope is that if someone sits alone in their big SUV stuck in traffic, pedestrians, cyclists and others will look at that person disparagingly. Like how people look at dog owners not picking up their dogs feces, cigarette smokers or how they look at obese people buying ice cream... Or how hypochondriacs who go to the doctor when they don't need to are shamed in countries with socialized health care. Maybe it is not nice to use shame as a weapon, but it is a powerful one. We have about ten years to completely change how our societies work before it is to late. All options should be on the table.
- nathanvanfleet 8y ago
  > Or how hypochondriacs who go to the doctor when they don't need to are shamed in countries with socialized health care. I am from Canada and I have no idea what you're talking about.
  - bjourne 8y ago
    That's odd. I'm from Sweden and it costs 30€ to go to the doctor (of course the fee doesn't cover the full cost of the service) but the shame is still very common. For example, if you go to an emergency waiting room, people will stare at the patients without visible ailments. It is also a major part of the Anti-immigration people's rhetoric: "Those damn immigrant families overuse health services so we regular Swedes have to wait!" Among older people the embarrassment of visiting the doctor is even more prevalent. They often wait far to long with having their problems checked so it ends up costing society more than if they had gone to the doctor in a timely fashion.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Shame me all you want, I'm not biking my commute in 90/20 degree weather with a backpack full of stuff including a laptop and no reasonable way to listen to music when I have such a comfortable SUV-type car.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
angstrom 8y ago
As a NYC resident for 11 years now I see this as a necessary transition. The streets aren't getting any wider unless we do away with street parking. I don't hear anyone rushing to suggest that option, although it's easy to forget there was a time when the streets weren't lined with cars - but horse shit. So we trade one inconvenience for a slightly less inconvenient sight (I own and park my car on the street dealing with the inconvenience of alternate side parking twice weekly). The focus really needs to be on improving the efficiency of the MTA, reducing distance between trains with more efficient switching is big part of that. The inefficiencies of the trains and improved efficiencies of app based rideshare dispatch is what is pulling ridership from the trains the most.
mattigames 8y ago
This is all kinds of wrong, the problem could be tackled much better, for example most companies have no incentives to hire workers near their premises (or relocating them to make it so), meaning they get no benefit if they emplooyes have a 10 minute commute over a 2 hour commute; car companies have no incentive to build smaller cars, small single-person cars should be far more common but instead we are stuck with hundreads of people buying the biggest car they can get a loan for.
- nathanvanfleet 8y ago
  That doesn't really seem true to me. Car companies make products that can sell. People vote with their feet. People make decisions to buy bigger vehicles so that's what is manufactured. If there is increased demand for compact cars the manufacturers will make more (like they do outside of the US). Companies might not seek to hire people nearby but they might put their offices in a more convenient location. Either way you seem to completely miss the idea that alternative methods of transportation like mass transit or bicycles etc might expand in use. Which can cause those things to expand (better mass transit coverage, better and more protected bike paths). Again there are examples all over the world outside of the US.
  - mattigames 8y ago
    > People vote with their feet. People make decisions to buy bigger vehicles so that's what is manufactured. If there is increased demand for compact cars the manufacturers will make more (like they do outside of the US) Yeah and people are irrational and wrong, that's why the right incentives must exist so they are more incentived to buy smaller cars such as single-person or 2 person cars. > Either way you seem to completely miss the idea that alternative methods of transportation like mass transit I did not, of course better transportation its the solution in long term but in the short one we need viable solutions as well.
- lloydde 8y ago
  This is a novel idea, but introduces worse problems of discrimination. You should not use candidates address or commute as criteria in hiring. I do see companies set up satellite or second offices. I do wonder if an companies of scale use proximities and travel time to influence renewing leases or moving office buildings. What do these formulas look like? What data do they use?
Jorge1o1 8y ago
The streets were never free. We paid for it with our tax money. (Not to mention our 22 trillion dollar public debt) I don’t think people expect streets to be free in the same way you don’t expect the police department to be free, the fire department to be free, public schools, etc. In any case, my point is, we paid for the streets with our tax money and our debt, so don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” where the people are FINALLY going to have to pay for those roads the government’s been giving away for free for so long. Because that’s just not true.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” In New York, low-income New Yorkers who own a car (or live in the zone) will be eligible for a waiver [1]. People with disabilities, too, will probably be eligible for a waiver. (Some carve-outs are still being pinned down.) Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab. (Crowded streets have all kinds of nasty externalities. I live in the zone. Crowded streets mean lots of honking at all hours of the day and night. It means the constant smell of brake pads at street level. When I look out of the window and see a stranded ambulance, it's a reminder of the risk my loved ones and I will face when the day comes when we need an ambulance. Et cetera.) [1] https://710wor.iheart.com/content/2019-04-01-congestion-pricing-budget-approved-by-new-york-state/ https://710wor.iheart.com/content/2019-04-01-congestion-pric...
  - hourislate 8y ago
    How do people feel on a congestion fee for sidewalks. Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable. If you want to walk on a sidewalk during the busiest times you should pay a congestion fee. Why would we stop at just roads?
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable One, pedestrian congestion doesn't exhibit traffic congestion's negative externalities. (You have to get to trampling-risk densities before that occurs.) Two, "sidewalk passes" have no precedent. Congestion pricing has lots of precedent [1]. Three, this is a problem getting attention [2]. America has spent decades throwing lanes at traffic. Not all of that was a waste. Similar effort has yet to broadly benefit pedestrians. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing [2] https://www.thevillager.com/2019/04/grassroots-group-calls-for-shared-streets/ https://www.thevillager.com/2019/04/grassroots-group-calls-f...
zacharyautin11 8y ago
I am impressed with the good title. Article speaks to unspoken history of purposefully hidden transportation costs that promote car sales and urban sprawl to this day. Bring back the electric streetcar
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  I think we have something great here where you can travel nice countryside settings in a car and it would be a terrible shame to give that up or price the poor out of it.
DFXLuna 8y ago
It's weird to see someone calling roads free when I give the government 25% of my paycheck every month to pay for things like roads. We can't even pass a tax in my town to give necessary funds for road repairs beyond the most basic. I wonder how something like that would fair.
- Ancalagon 8y ago
  Yes but that 25% is for social security and the bloated healthcare system, roads are extra.
sek 8y ago
This will be absolutely necessary when cars are self-driving. Instead of parking they will just drift around the block when you buy something for example. Also there will be empty Uber cars drifting around to be close if somebody needs it. On top you won't worry so much about traffic if you can sleep in you car or do something else. Driving was always limited by the costs of somebody sitting behind the wheel. Look how congested many cities of third world countries are, low labor costs for cab drivers are a factor there.
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  I think midtown manhattan is a pretty good example of what self driving cars will look like. Most of the vehicles are taxis, ride shares, or delivery trucks. Very few of them ever park longer than to drop something off.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >low labor costs for cab drivers It's not just cab drivers in particular. Having a driver is quite common for even middle class people or a sales person making the rounds during the day. I personally believe that self-driving in congested cities is a long way off. But it will absolutely be the case that if driving around empty is cheaper than parking that's what will happen.
- ibm5100 8y ago
  I would be shocked if the city council didn't ban the commercial use of self driving vehicles. Too many unemployed, would breed a Paris riot situation.
stevespang 8y ago
I predicted this a year ago.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Congestion pricing is an admission that the fuel taxes are being used for other purposes than roads.
- vidro3 8y ago
  or that the taxes are far too low to support the cost of road maintainance
  - mshkreli 8y ago
    Doubtful - we're talking about New York, after all.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    New York's problem is that its fuel consumption has been flat for 50 years because of increasing fuel efficiency and low population growth. Meanwhile, everything else is more expensive to maintain so it must make up the difference with other funding sources or higher taxes. The latter is is difficult political issue when they are already near the top for state fuel taxation.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    I don't think fuel taxes are enough to pay for road maintenance anywhere in the US. It's always supplemented by some amount of general fund dollars.
- gipp 8y ago
  Road maintenance and expansion is not really the point. It's not like midtown has a bunch of extra room to build new roads. It's more of an admission that eventually you're just gonna bump into hard physical constraints that no amount of money in the world is gonna help you get past.
- francisofascii 8y ago
  It is more an admission that fuel taxes are way too low to make any meaningful difference in changing behavior.
l1ambda 8y ago
I post something like this every time the congestion pricing subject comes up. We have congestion pricing in Minneapolis / St Paul and it just works. If I'm in a hurry, I have the option to choose to use the priced lane. We're rolling it out to all of the major highways (it's on 3 of them so far). I wish we had it on more lanes on all highways already, because what is the point of having a 60mph road if most of the time you are barely going 20mph, or trip lengths are otherwise completely unpredictable? It's also particularly important to people who might have to travel to multiple jobs, or people with children in school/day care, when consistency in travel time is extremely valuable to them. There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. You just have to have the price mechanism in place to signal it. People will figure it out and adapt once you have implemented congestion pricing. Practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems. Importantly, you have to resist the temptation to set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change and basically a bad tax. (E.g., the true cost of congestion spurs demand for apartments and transit options near the city center, which in turn reduces traffic congestion.) Also important that it is purely congestion pricing and not resulting in crony government. Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur subsequently. I am excited for NYC to pilot this and hope it becomes a success for that city.
- pif 8y ago
  > We have congestion pricing ... and it just works. Please, could you explain with a bit more detail what you mean with "it just works"?
  - ocschwar 8y ago
    Boston has a proxy to congestion pricing: parking spaces are heavily regulated. Inside Boston proper they are effectively capped. Outside of the Seaport, you cannot build new parking. The rationale is that if you build more parking, people will drive to reach the parking spots, and it will cause more traffic congestion. What this translates to is parking being really, really expensive. You can drive downtown any time, and there WILL be a parking spot waiting for you. But will cost you $15 for the first hour at minimum. So nobody does it if they don't need to. If you're, say, a hotshot surgeon and need a parking spot by your nice apartment, you can buy one. They're called deeded parking spots: plots of land sized for parking, which you can buy and sell. You have to pay property tax on them. The cheapest one in Boston recently sold for $60K. Others have sold for $250K. For 12 feet by 20 feet of land. We have a road system. It's congested, but not insanely so. And everyone knows not to use it if you can avoid it. But when you do need it, it's there. I would never drive to work, but if I need to go to Mass General Hospital, I can just budget $40 for parking and get in the car.
zelon88 8y ago
> Local laws require off-street parking from businesses and housing developers, who pass on the construction cost of it to tenants and customers who may not drive at all. I'd love to see the tenents stay in business with a dirt road out front. Or a pasture that no cars can pass through. They're not doing us any favors. They're keeping themselves in business.
DINKDINK 8y ago
All markets have congestion controls, they're called prices. The only reason roads and traffic don't function well is because they don't have prices. Traffic on roads* is the 21st equivalent of Soviet breadlines. *(particularly in the US where they are cross subsidized the most)
- zach_garwood 8y ago
  Wow, I never thought of it that way, but it's a great point.
wallacoloo 8y ago
We already have a kind of congestion pricing, in some sense. If you plan a trip during peak hours, it costs you more time. It’s pretty typical, then, to plan leisure trips into or out of the city based around when traffic will be light. It’s just that this cost in time isn’t distributed nearly as ideally as it could be. It costs an individual the same amount whether they take a bus or a car with four people or four cars with one person each. If we tax per-vehicle instead, that pushes people not only to shape their travel times more ideally, but to also use more efficient forms of transportation. So long as this is used as a means to shape travel to be more efficient and not just as a way to gobble up revenue, it might be alright. I think toll bridges/roads are mostly this way, where they’re free in the dead of night when few are on the roads, so I’m hopeful.
- clairity 8y ago
  > "We already have a kind of congestion pricing, in some sense. If you plan a trip during peak hours, it costs you more time." this is an underappreciated point, as it underlies the popularity of congestion pricing among wealthier folks, whatever their politics (left-leaners ostensibly would otherwise support more egalitarian/progressive policies). currently everyone pays with their time, whether rich or poor. you can't buy your way out of the problem just for yourself. irksomely, money is of no advantage. but with congestion pricing, you could, and that's really appealing to wealthy folks. i'm not arguing against congestion pricing, just noting a less-visible motivation. a progressive pricing scheme (pay more if you have higher income/net worth), for example, would still reduce congestion while providing more egalitarian access.
ellard 8y ago
I'm disappointed that motorcycles/scooters and lane splitting aren't brought into the conversation more when discussions about traffic congestion come up. It feels like a win/win for nearly everyone to promote two wheeled transportation and allow them to split lanes or filter through traffic. Those who do not want to ever ride on two wheels still get the benefit of others doing so and essentially taking themselves out of the traffic queue. There's also been studies about how allowing lane splitting/filtering are ultimately safer for the riders too.
- bhupy 8y ago
  Do you have links to some of these studies? Asking as a motorcyclist...
  - ellard 8y ago
    The study that I remember off the top of my head is the one that came out of UC Berkeley. News article: https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/29/motorcycle-lanesplitting-report/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/29/motorcycle-lanesplittin... There's been a couple of others that I remember seeing, but I don't remember them or which sources I saw them at.
jaxbot 8y ago
I think about this a lot when considering China's extensive High-Speed Rail network. China's government operates it at a loss, and the capital expense must have been enormous, even with their wages. But the government had enough social good and political reasons to bite the cost. The USA and our interstate system are the same way. The cost was enormous, the maintenance burden continues to outpace the money we make on gas tax and registration, yet we had political and social good reasons for building it. The interstate was a massive investment, and investments of similar scale could give us a HSR network at least on major corridors. But for some reason, we have a social good attitude towards highways and a social waste attitude towards subsidizing rail.
novaleaf 8y ago
A wild idea already decades past it's prime: in addition to the odometer, include a chronometer: something like "hours driving above 5mph". Then tax on a combination of those. That seems like it would have been be able to implicitly price congestion into a progressive use-based tax.
test6554 8y ago
Traffic itself is a symptom of roads being free in the first place. Charge drivers exactly what it costs to maintain them plus a small profit and suddenly there will be little traffic and no major potholes. Taxpayers will get all that money back too, and they can either spend it on driving fees or they can save the money if they use roads less.
yonran 8y ago
I think Emily Badger sort of misses the point. A scarcity tax is completely different from a user benefit fee for road maintenance. For public goods, it’s a good thing for the government to subsidize the fixed costs of the public good. But where there is traffic, the road is not entirely a public good anymore and we are already paying the cost of congestion, but the price is in the form of time and inconvenience rather than dollars. A congestion charge converts the time price into a monetary price. It makes sense to charge a congestion charge because it is merely harnessing a price that drivers already pay and using it to improve the city. The same is true for land value taxes. Tenants pay the scarcity price for land anyway (in the form of land rent) regardless of the level of tax, so the government might as well harness that energy and use it to benefit all the people instead of a few.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  This assumes that either: 1. People can arbitrarily convert time into money, ie, there’s not a reason they’d prefer to pay some expenses in time. 2. People are free to change their travel times, and aren’t being coerced into traveling at a particular time. If travel time is a monopsony, then this is mere rent extraction because people can’t adjust behavior in response to economic pressures.
  - yonran 8y ago
    Yes, and in my opinion those are both valid assumptions to make. 1. You’re right, congestion pricing forces drivers to reveal the marginal price for time. In a congested road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a specific time? Because he knows that it will take too much time due to traffic (or because he is simply forced to queue). In a toll road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a given time? Because he knows it will cost too much money. At the margin, congestion pricing turns a time cost into a monetary cost. For those individuals whose value of time is lower than the marginal driver (i.e., people who would rather have a traffic jam than pay the toll), congestion pricing itself can make them worse off, but when the proceeds are reinvested in transit I think it’s probable that congestion pricing will generally benefit lower-income people. 2. Congested roads already force people to change their travel time. If you try to cross a congested bridge at a specific time, you will be queued until all the people in front of you have passed. So I suppose you could say the road already is extracting rent and throwing it away. Congestion pricing harnesses the value (of all the drivers whose value of time is above the marginal driver) instead of discarding it.
tzs 8y ago
A few comments have mentioned different levels or road damage caused by different vehicles, with heavier vehicles causing more damage. How much does tire pressure matter in that? If two vehicles have the same weight and number of tires taking the load, evenly distributed among the tires, but one of them runs with higher tire pressure, it will have a proportionately smaller contact area, and so a proportionately higher ground pressure. In general, a tire supporting weight W at pressure P will have a contact area A such that P x A = W. I'd expect total road damage to depend on both area and pressure. Pressure would determine whether you are going to damage the surface, and area would determine how big an area will damaged. For causing cracks that lead to potholes, I'm not sure area matters as much as the pressure, so am curious about lighter vehicles with high pressure tires. My car has a pressure of 32 psi. Back when I was a regular bike commuter [1] my bike had a pressure of 110 psi. Wikipedia has a nice table of the ground pressure of several things [2]. Some excerpts, in psi: 4 Diedrich D-50 T2 drilling rig 8 Human male 15 M1 Abrams tank 25 1993 Toyota 4Runner 25 Adult horse 30 Passenger car 40 Mountain bike 90 Road racing bike 470 Stiletto heel A bit of Googling suggests delivery trucks are between 85 and 110 psi for most fleets, and around 110 seems to be normal for big rig trucks, too. So...trucks being more damaging than cars is quite believable. More interesting is different kinds of passenger cars. Honda's recommended tire pressure for a Civic and a CR-V, e.g., are largely the same range. Does this mean a CR-V is not much more damaging than a Civic? And where do bikes with high psi fit in? The have the pressure of a delivery truck, but have a much smaller contact area. Is there some minimal area needed before even high pressure damages the road, so bikes are OK? Or is it just that because the areas is smaller it takes longer to cause enough cumulative damage for people in cars to notice? [1] when I lived in flat Cupertino. That died when I move to Seattle and found that fat people on bikes don't get along well with hills. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  My guess (since I really know nothing about the physics) is that it is not strictly PSI, and that there is some lower limit of weight where it doesn't apply. I know that the folks who actually do this work calculate weight per axle rather than weight per square inch. Why they do it that way I don't know.
wtdata 8y ago
It's interesting that Americans (as we see in most of the comments) feel so entitled to let taxes pay for their right to take their car everywhere, but feel so strongly against having taxes pay for universal healthcare. In Europe, we do the opposite.
Jerry2 8y ago
The thing that this article doesn't discuss is the fact that Uber spent $2M on lobbying to help push through congestion pricing. [0] >“Over the past several years, we’ve been proud to work with a diverse coalition to fight for comprehensive congestion pricing, and we’re excited to see Albany take action to reduce congestion and invest in mass transit,” said Harry Hartfeld, an Uber spokesman. >Roughly $1 million went to some of the top city lobbyists, including Stu Loeser, a onetime senior aide to former Mayor Mike Bloomberg. >Another $700,000 went to fund the Fix Our Transit coalition’s ad campaign that targeted undecided Albany politicians. [0] https://nypost.com/2019/04/03/uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-through-congestion-pricing/ https://nypost.com/2019/04/03/uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-thr...
ibm5100 8y ago
Just a few points. Congestion pricing seems like it will most negatively affect middle income people. Most low income residents use mass transit, making an exception for them moot. The wealthy have the means to pay $15-$25 without being a burden. A more fair system would exempt NYC residents who have lived here for a minimum of 15 years. I believe the burden should be shifted to new transplants. The real problem that we don't acknowledge around is that a sq mile can only hold a certain amount of people. NYC is grossly overpopulated (lived here all my life). I think the city should have a cap on residents significantly lower than the current population.
williesleg 8y ago
Thanks for making the streets in Manhattan with all those bike Lanes, then manufacturing this crisis.
drak0n1c 8y ago
In Tokyo, there is no congestion pricing, but instead there is a ban on larger trucks loading/unloading during many hours of the day. Everyone from the businesses to the truckers and retail workers tolerate it and work night shifts (often without overtime) because the culture (for better or worse) emphasizes the needs of society over the individual. Would such a policy work well if brought over to the states? Given the amount of tangentially connected regulations and special interests such a strict ban may just increase prices and make things worse.
superkuh 8y ago
This is understandable for high density urban areas but makes no sense for most of the country.
simplesleeper 8y ago
Congestion does not necessarily mean a shortage of roads. Sometimes roads make congestion worse. Braess' Paradox has shown to occur as often as not.
Proven 8y ago
If the streets aren't free, then even congestion plans can't justly distribute the cost of building and maintaining them. If the author was concerned about just cost allocation of infrastructure, he'd be arguing for private roads and privatization of existing public roads. Congestion pricing doesn't "finally" make that clear. Private roads existed before and still do, and don't cost anything those who don't use them. A distributionist will of course argue for public roads (with or without congestion pricing) because private roads don't give them a way to distort cost allocation to benefit their re-election chances and ideological goals.

273 points by resalisbury 8y ago

I mean infrastructure is what everyone points to when one asks “what am I even paying taxes for?” Often even the short hand of “roads”.

kerbalspacepro 8y ago
Bad infrastructure causes people to ask "what am I even paying taxes for?" The actual answer is "An insurance company with an army"
sgift 8y ago
Police, fire departments, emergency services, public transportation, ..
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  While I agree these are services people pay taxes for, Police mostly target the poor, fire departments are stationed closest to the wealthier neighborhoods, emergency services are generally better in wealthier areas, and public transportation in most of the US is generally poor, airline travel being the only thing worse. It's hard to convince someone who isn't of means that raising taxes on them is somehow of benefit to them. We'd be far better forcing companies to pay and freeing up the market for more people to work from home. That would actually solve the congestion issues without punishing the people who can't afford it.

dannyw 8y ago

It's sad to see congestion pricing in America. I had hoped that the long-lived cultural freedom of driving would keep it at bay for longer, but I guess not anymore. I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip. Public transport is not a suitable option. Instead of 45 minutes one way, the combined trip time balloons to 2 hours (4 hours to and back) due to poor proximity to train stations, and bus connections that require waiting. Every time I drive, I feel less free to move around my city. I feel less free to visit my friends and family. 'Freedom of movement' isn't some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.

larrymyers 8y ago
That sounds like a rough commute, I sympathize. What I'm hearing is that Sydney needs to be funneling more of the toll revenue into the transit budget so that trains and buses would be a real option for you. As a resident of Chicago, I would be in favor of congestion pricing within a few miles of the loop. The traffic congestion doesn't just affect other drivers, but those of us walking, biking, and using public transit. I would welcome a far quieter city with less road noise more priority given to multi-modal transit. Due to Chicago's budget issues I'm not sure how to do that beyond providing direct incentives to do something besides drive.
idlewords 8y ago
You seem to be describing congestion pricing working as intended. To go by the shortest, least congested route, you have to pay the tolls. If the tolls weren't there, it would not take you 45 minutes to make this trip. The real problem, as you point out, is the absence of adequate public transit.
- lloydde 8y ago
  Bizarre, that this response is downvoted. As this response deals most directly with the Math of the situation.
tarr11 8y ago
“freedom of movement” should be free as in speech, not free as in beer.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  "Free as in speech" is very, very close to "free as in beer". For all practical purposes it doesn't cost me anything more than my time to exercise my free speech rights. Something that's nominally "free" from direct government control but the government gets to dictate the monetary cost of using it is not free by either definition. Anything that increases the monetary cost of freedom of movement (time is not such a big deal because rich and poor alike have 24 hours in the day, hence I don't see traffic jams and crowded subway platforms being that big a deal) is a bad thing, even if the increase is a trivial amount to the upper classes. Mass transit (not the same thing as public transit though the sets intersect) should not be like a restaurant where you pay $50 for a $20 meal because that keeps the poors out and that is exactly what congestion fees and tolls are designed to do.

dec0dedab0de 8y ago

When I worked in a major city I would go on a half-joke rant anytime someone brought up traffic, parking,or obesity. If I were somehow the king of a major city, I would have a giant parking lot on the outside, and ban all cars. You could buy day passes if you need access to the roads to move or something, but it would be discouraged. People would walk more, and be healthier, The air would be higher quality, and most importantly you wouldn't have to wait to cross the street when you're walking to lunch.

i_am_proteus 8y ago
Also, there wouldn't be many lunch options because delivery services wouldn't be able to use cars and trucks.
- jrockway 8y ago
  No food delivery in New York uses cars and trucks. They all use ebikes. (Which were illegal for years, but that stopped nobody from using them.)
  - GuiA 8y ago
    How do the ingredients get to the restaurant for preparation?
    - tom_ 8y ago
      There are probably different rules for wholesale or commercial deliveries.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      During special hours of the night when delivery trucks are allowed to use the street.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  And all the restaurants would have to be on the outside of the city to get their deliveries.

bjourne 8y ago

I wonder if we (as a society) in the not too distant future can make driving embarrassing? My hope is that if someone sits alone in their big SUV stuck in traffic, pedestrians, cyclists and others will look at that person disparagingly. Like how people look at dog owners not picking up their dogs feces, cigarette smokers or how they look at obese people buying ice cream... Or how hypochondriacs who go to the doctor when they don't need to are shamed in countries with socialized health care. Maybe it is not nice to use shame as a weapon, but it is a powerful one. We have about ten years to completely change how our societies work before it is to late. All options should be on the table.

nathanvanfleet 8y ago
> Or how hypochondriacs who go to the doctor when they don't need to are shamed in countries with socialized health care. I am from Canada and I have no idea what you're talking about.
- bjourne 8y ago
  That's odd. I'm from Sweden and it costs 30€ to go to the doctor (of course the fee doesn't cover the full cost of the service) but the shame is still very common. For example, if you go to an emergency waiting room, people will stare at the patients without visible ailments. It is also a major part of the Anti-immigration people's rhetoric: "Those damn immigrant families overuse health services so we regular Swedes have to wait!" Among older people the embarrassment of visiting the doctor is even more prevalent. They often wait far to long with having their problems checked so it ends up costing society more than if they had gone to the doctor in a timely fashion.
jimmaswell 8y ago
Shame me all you want, I'm not biking my commute in 90/20 degree weather with a backpack full of stuff including a laptop and no reasonable way to listen to music when I have such a comfortable SUV-type car.
- crooked-v 8y ago

angstrom 8y ago

As a NYC resident for 11 years now I see this as a necessary transition. The streets aren't getting any wider unless we do away with street parking. I don't hear anyone rushing to suggest that option, although it's easy to forget there was a time when the streets weren't lined with cars - but horse shit. So we trade one inconvenience for a slightly less inconvenient sight (I own and park my car on the street dealing with the inconvenience of alternate side parking twice weekly). The focus really needs to be on improving the efficiency of the MTA, reducing distance between trains with more efficient switching is big part of that. The inefficiencies of the trains and improved efficiencies of app based rideshare dispatch is what is pulling ridership from the trains the most.

mattigames 8y ago

This is all kinds of wrong, the problem could be tackled much better, for example most companies have no incentives to hire workers near their premises (or relocating them to make it so), meaning they get no benefit if they emplooyes have a 10 minute commute over a 2 hour commute; car companies have no incentive to build smaller cars, small single-person cars should be far more common but instead we are stuck with hundreads of people buying the biggest car they can get a loan for.

nathanvanfleet 8y ago
That doesn't really seem true to me. Car companies make products that can sell. People vote with their feet. People make decisions to buy bigger vehicles so that's what is manufactured. If there is increased demand for compact cars the manufacturers will make more (like they do outside of the US). Companies might not seek to hire people nearby but they might put their offices in a more convenient location. Either way you seem to completely miss the idea that alternative methods of transportation like mass transit or bicycles etc might expand in use. Which can cause those things to expand (better mass transit coverage, better and more protected bike paths). Again there are examples all over the world outside of the US.
- mattigames 8y ago
  > People vote with their feet. People make decisions to buy bigger vehicles so that's what is manufactured. If there is increased demand for compact cars the manufacturers will make more (like they do outside of the US) Yeah and people are irrational and wrong, that's why the right incentives must exist so they are more incentived to buy smaller cars such as single-person or 2 person cars. > Either way you seem to completely miss the idea that alternative methods of transportation like mass transit I did not, of course better transportation its the solution in long term but in the short one we need viable solutions as well.
lloydde 8y ago
This is a novel idea, but introduces worse problems of discrimination. You should not use candidates address or commute as criteria in hiring. I do see companies set up satellite or second offices. I do wonder if an companies of scale use proximities and travel time to influence renewing leases or moving office buildings. What do these formulas look like? What data do they use?

Jorge1o1 8y ago

The streets were never free. We paid for it with our tax money. (Not to mention our 22 trillion dollar public debt) I don’t think people expect streets to be free in the same way you don’t expect the police department to be free, the fire department to be free, public schools, etc. In any case, my point is, we paid for the streets with our tax money and our debt, so don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” where the people are FINALLY going to have to pay for those roads the government’s been giving away for free for so long. Because that’s just not true.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” In New York, low-income New Yorkers who own a car (or live in the zone) will be eligible for a waiver [1]. People with disabilities, too, will probably be eligible for a waiver. (Some carve-outs are still being pinned down.) Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab. (Crowded streets have all kinds of nasty externalities. I live in the zone. Crowded streets mean lots of honking at all hours of the day and night. It means the constant smell of brake pads at street level. When I look out of the window and see a stranded ambulance, it's a reminder of the risk my loved ones and I will face when the day comes when we need an ambulance. Et cetera.) [1] https://710wor.iheart.com/content/2019-04-01-congestion-pricing-budget-approved-by-new-york-state/ https://710wor.iheart.com/content/2019-04-01-congestion-pric...
- hourislate 8y ago
  How do people feel on a congestion fee for sidewalks. Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable. If you want to walk on a sidewalk during the busiest times you should pay a congestion fee. Why would we stop at just roads?
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > Too many people on sidewalks in NYC making them almost unusable One, pedestrian congestion doesn't exhibit traffic congestion's negative externalities. (You have to get to trampling-risk densities before that occurs.) Two, "sidewalk passes" have no precedent. Congestion pricing has lots of precedent [1]. Three, this is a problem getting attention [2]. America has spent decades throwing lanes at traffic. Not all of that was a waste. Similar effort has yet to broadly benefit pedestrians. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing [2] https://www.thevillager.com/2019/04/grassroots-group-calls-for-shared-streets/ https://www.thevillager.com/2019/04/grassroots-group-calls-f...

zacharyautin11 8y ago

I am impressed with the good title. Article speaks to unspoken history of purposefully hidden transportation costs that promote car sales and urban sprawl to this day. Bring back the electric streetcar

jimmaswell 8y ago
I think we have something great here where you can travel nice countryside settings in a car and it would be a terrible shame to give that up or price the poor out of it.

DFXLuna 8y ago

It's weird to see someone calling roads free when I give the government 25% of my paycheck every month to pay for things like roads. We can't even pass a tax in my town to give necessary funds for road repairs beyond the most basic. I wonder how something like that would fair.

Ancalagon 8y ago
Yes but that 25% is for social security and the bloated healthcare system, roads are extra.

sek 8y ago

This will be absolutely necessary when cars are self-driving. Instead of parking they will just drift around the block when you buy something for example. Also there will be empty Uber cars drifting around to be close if somebody needs it. On top you won't worry so much about traffic if you can sleep in you car or do something else. Driving was always limited by the costs of somebody sitting behind the wheel. Look how congested many cities of third world countries are, low labor costs for cab drivers are a factor there.

RandallBrown 8y ago
I think midtown manhattan is a pretty good example of what self driving cars will look like. Most of the vehicles are taxis, ride shares, or delivery trucks. Very few of them ever park longer than to drop something off.
ghaff 8y ago
>low labor costs for cab drivers It's not just cab drivers in particular. Having a driver is quite common for even middle class people or a sales person making the rounds during the day. I personally believe that self-driving in congested cities is a long way off. But it will absolutely be the case that if driving around empty is cheaper than parking that's what will happen.
ibm5100 8y ago
I would be shocked if the city council didn't ban the commercial use of self driving vehicles. Too many unemployed, would breed a Paris riot situation.

stevespang 8y ago

I predicted this a year ago.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

Congestion pricing is an admission that the fuel taxes are being used for other purposes than roads.

vidro3 8y ago
or that the taxes are far too low to support the cost of road maintainance
- mshkreli 8y ago
  Doubtful - we're talking about New York, after all.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  New York's problem is that its fuel consumption has been flat for 50 years because of increasing fuel efficiency and low population growth. Meanwhile, everything else is more expensive to maintain so it must make up the difference with other funding sources or higher taxes. The latter is is difficult political issue when they are already near the top for state fuel taxation.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I don't think fuel taxes are enough to pay for road maintenance anywhere in the US. It's always supplemented by some amount of general fund dollars.
gipp 8y ago
Road maintenance and expansion is not really the point. It's not like midtown has a bunch of extra room to build new roads. It's more of an admission that eventually you're just gonna bump into hard physical constraints that no amount of money in the world is gonna help you get past.
francisofascii 8y ago
It is more an admission that fuel taxes are way too low to make any meaningful difference in changing behavior.

l1ambda 8y ago

I post something like this every time the congestion pricing subject comes up. We have congestion pricing in Minneapolis / St Paul and it just works. If I'm in a hurry, I have the option to choose to use the priced lane. We're rolling it out to all of the major highways (it's on 3 of them so far). I wish we had it on more lanes on all highways already, because what is the point of having a 60mph road if most of the time you are barely going 20mph, or trip lengths are otherwise completely unpredictable? It's also particularly important to people who might have to travel to multiple jobs, or people with children in school/day care, when consistency in travel time is extremely valuable to them. There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. You just have to have the price mechanism in place to signal it. People will figure it out and adapt once you have implemented congestion pricing. Practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems. Importantly, you have to resist the temptation to set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change and basically a bad tax. (E.g., the true cost of congestion spurs demand for apartments and transit options near the city center, which in turn reduces traffic congestion.) Also important that it is purely congestion pricing and not resulting in crony government. Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur subsequently. I am excited for NYC to pilot this and hope it becomes a success for that city.

pif 8y ago
> We have congestion pricing ... and it just works. Please, could you explain with a bit more detail what you mean with "it just works"?
- ocschwar 8y ago
  Boston has a proxy to congestion pricing: parking spaces are heavily regulated. Inside Boston proper they are effectively capped. Outside of the Seaport, you cannot build new parking. The rationale is that if you build more parking, people will drive to reach the parking spots, and it will cause more traffic congestion. What this translates to is parking being really, really expensive. You can drive downtown any time, and there WILL be a parking spot waiting for you. But will cost you $15 for the first hour at minimum. So nobody does it if they don't need to. If you're, say, a hotshot surgeon and need a parking spot by your nice apartment, you can buy one. They're called deeded parking spots: plots of land sized for parking, which you can buy and sell. You have to pay property tax on them. The cheapest one in Boston recently sold for $60K. Others have sold for $250K. For 12 feet by 20 feet of land. We have a road system. It's congested, but not insanely so. And everyone knows not to use it if you can avoid it. But when you do need it, it's there. I would never drive to work, but if I need to go to Mass General Hospital, I can just budget $40 for parking and get in the car.

zelon88 8y ago

> Local laws require off-street parking from businesses and housing developers, who pass on the construction cost of it to tenants and customers who may not drive at all. I'd love to see the tenents stay in business with a dirt road out front. Or a pasture that no cars can pass through. They're not doing us any favors. They're keeping themselves in business.

DINKDINK 8y ago

All markets have congestion controls, they're called prices. The only reason roads and traffic don't function well is because they don't have prices. Traffic on roads* is the 21st equivalent of Soviet breadlines. *(particularly in the US where they are cross subsidized the most)

zach_garwood 8y ago
Wow, I never thought of it that way, but it's a great point.

wallacoloo 8y ago

We already have a kind of congestion pricing, in some sense. If you plan a trip during peak hours, it costs you more time. It’s pretty typical, then, to plan leisure trips into or out of the city based around when traffic will be light. It’s just that this cost in time isn’t distributed nearly as ideally as it could be. It costs an individual the same amount whether they take a bus or a car with four people or four cars with one person each. If we tax per-vehicle instead, that pushes people not only to shape their travel times more ideally, but to also use more efficient forms of transportation. So long as this is used as a means to shape travel to be more efficient and not just as a way to gobble up revenue, it might be alright. I think toll bridges/roads are mostly this way, where they’re free in the dead of night when few are on the roads, so I’m hopeful.

clairity 8y ago
> "We already have a kind of congestion pricing, in some sense. If you plan a trip during peak hours, it costs you more time." this is an underappreciated point, as it underlies the popularity of congestion pricing among wealthier folks, whatever their politics (left-leaners ostensibly would otherwise support more egalitarian/progressive policies). currently everyone pays with their time, whether rich or poor. you can't buy your way out of the problem just for yourself. irksomely, money is of no advantage. but with congestion pricing, you could, and that's really appealing to wealthy folks. i'm not arguing against congestion pricing, just noting a less-visible motivation. a progressive pricing scheme (pay more if you have higher income/net worth), for example, would still reduce congestion while providing more egalitarian access.

ellard 8y ago

I'm disappointed that motorcycles/scooters and lane splitting aren't brought into the conversation more when discussions about traffic congestion come up. It feels like a win/win for nearly everyone to promote two wheeled transportation and allow them to split lanes or filter through traffic. Those who do not want to ever ride on two wheels still get the benefit of others doing so and essentially taking themselves out of the traffic queue. There's also been studies about how allowing lane splitting/filtering are ultimately safer for the riders too.

bhupy 8y ago
Do you have links to some of these studies? Asking as a motorcyclist...
- ellard 8y ago
  The study that I remember off the top of my head is the one that came out of UC Berkeley. News article: https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/29/motorcycle-lanesplitting-report/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/29/motorcycle-lanesplittin... There's been a couple of others that I remember seeing, but I don't remember them or which sources I saw them at.

jaxbot 8y ago

I think about this a lot when considering China's extensive High-Speed Rail network. China's government operates it at a loss, and the capital expense must have been enormous, even with their wages. But the government had enough social good and political reasons to bite the cost. The USA and our interstate system are the same way. The cost was enormous, the maintenance burden continues to outpace the money we make on gas tax and registration, yet we had political and social good reasons for building it. The interstate was a massive investment, and investments of similar scale could give us a HSR network at least on major corridors. But for some reason, we have a social good attitude towards highways and a social waste attitude towards subsidizing rail.

novaleaf 8y ago

A wild idea already decades past it's prime: in addition to the odometer, include a chronometer: something like "hours driving above 5mph". Then tax on a combination of those. That seems like it would have been be able to implicitly price congestion into a progressive use-based tax.

test6554 8y ago

Traffic itself is a symptom of roads being free in the first place. Charge drivers exactly what it costs to maintain them plus a small profit and suddenly there will be little traffic and no major potholes. Taxpayers will get all that money back too, and they can either spend it on driving fees or they can save the money if they use roads less.

yonran 8y ago

I think Emily Badger sort of misses the point. A scarcity tax is completely different from a user benefit fee for road maintenance. For public goods, it’s a good thing for the government to subsidize the fixed costs of the public good. But where there is traffic, the road is not entirely a public good anymore and we are already paying the cost of congestion, but the price is in the form of time and inconvenience rather than dollars. A congestion charge converts the time price into a monetary price. It makes sense to charge a congestion charge because it is merely harnessing a price that drivers already pay and using it to improve the city. The same is true for land value taxes. Tenants pay the scarcity price for land anyway (in the form of land rent) regardless of the level of tax, so the government might as well harness that energy and use it to benefit all the people instead of a few.

FakeComments 8y ago
This assumes that either: 1. People can arbitrarily convert time into money, ie, there’s not a reason they’d prefer to pay some expenses in time. 2. People are free to change their travel times, and aren’t being coerced into traveling at a particular time. If travel time is a monopsony, then this is mere rent extraction because people can’t adjust behavior in response to economic pressures.
- yonran 8y ago
  Yes, and in my opinion those are both valid assumptions to make. 1. You’re right, congestion pricing forces drivers to reveal the marginal price for time. In a congested road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a specific time? Because he knows that it will take too much time due to traffic (or because he is simply forced to queue). In a toll road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a given time? Because he knows it will cost too much money. At the margin, congestion pricing turns a time cost into a monetary cost. For those individuals whose value of time is lower than the marginal driver (i.e., people who would rather have a traffic jam than pay the toll), congestion pricing itself can make them worse off, but when the proceeds are reinvested in transit I think it’s probable that congestion pricing will generally benefit lower-income people. 2. Congested roads already force people to change their travel time. If you try to cross a congested bridge at a specific time, you will be queued until all the people in front of you have passed. So I suppose you could say the road already is extracting rent and throwing it away. Congestion pricing harnesses the value (of all the drivers whose value of time is above the marginal driver) instead of discarding it.

tzs 8y ago

A few comments have mentioned different levels or road damage caused by different vehicles, with heavier vehicles causing more damage. How much does tire pressure matter in that? If two vehicles have the same weight and number of tires taking the load, evenly distributed among the tires, but one of them runs with higher tire pressure, it will have a proportionately smaller contact area, and so a proportionately higher ground pressure. In general, a tire supporting weight W at pressure P will have a contact area A such that P x A = W. I'd expect total road damage to depend on both area and pressure. Pressure would determine whether you are going to damage the surface, and area would determine how big an area will damaged. For causing cracks that lead to potholes, I'm not sure area matters as much as the pressure, so am curious about lighter vehicles with high pressure tires. My car has a pressure of 32 psi. Back when I was a regular bike commuter [1] my bike had a pressure of 110 psi. Wikipedia has a nice table of the ground pressure of several things [2]. Some excerpts, in psi: 4 Diedrich D-50 T2 drilling rig 8 Human male 15 M1 Abrams tank 25 1993 Toyota 4Runner 25 Adult horse 30 Passenger car 40 Mountain bike 90 Road racing bike 470 Stiletto heel A bit of Googling suggests delivery trucks are between 85 and 110 psi for most fleets, and around 110 seems to be normal for big rig trucks, too. So...trucks being more damaging than cars is quite believable. More interesting is different kinds of passenger cars. Honda's recommended tire pressure for a Civic and a CR-V, e.g., are largely the same range. Does this mean a CR-V is not much more damaging than a Civic? And where do bikes with high psi fit in? The have the pressure of a delivery truck, but have a much smaller contact area. Is there some minimal area needed before even high pressure damages the road, so bikes are OK? Or is it just that because the areas is smaller it takes longer to cause enough cumulative damage for people in cars to notice? [1] when I lived in flat Cupertino. That died when I move to Seattle and found that fat people on bikes don't get along well with hills. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
My guess (since I really know nothing about the physics) is that it is not strictly PSI, and that there is some lower limit of weight where it doesn't apply. I know that the folks who actually do this work calculate weight per axle rather than weight per square inch. Why they do it that way I don't know.

wtdata 8y ago

It's interesting that Americans (as we see in most of the comments) feel so entitled to let taxes pay for their right to take their car everywhere, but feel so strongly against having taxes pay for universal healthcare. In Europe, we do the opposite.

Jerry2 8y ago

The thing that this article doesn't discuss is the fact that Uber spent $2M on lobbying to help push through congestion pricing. [0] >“Over the past several years, we’ve been proud to work with a diverse coalition to fight for comprehensive congestion pricing, and we’re excited to see Albany take action to reduce congestion and invest in mass transit,” said Harry Hartfeld, an Uber spokesman. >Roughly $1 million went to some of the top city lobbyists, including Stu Loeser, a onetime senior aide to former Mayor Mike Bloomberg. >Another $700,000 went to fund the Fix Our Transit coalition’s ad campaign that targeted undecided Albany politicians. [0] https://nypost.com/2019/04/03/uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-through-congestion-pricing/ https://nypost.com/2019/04/03/uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-thr...

ibm5100 8y ago

Just a few points. Congestion pricing seems like it will most negatively affect middle income people. Most low income residents use mass transit, making an exception for them moot. The wealthy have the means to pay $15-$25 without being a burden. A more fair system would exempt NYC residents who have lived here for a minimum of 15 years. I believe the burden should be shifted to new transplants. The real problem that we don't acknowledge around is that a sq mile can only hold a certain amount of people. NYC is grossly overpopulated (lived here all my life). I think the city should have a cap on residents significantly lower than the current population.

williesleg 8y ago

Thanks for making the streets in Manhattan with all those bike Lanes, then manufacturing this crisis.

drak0n1c 8y ago

In Tokyo, there is no congestion pricing, but instead there is a ban on larger trucks loading/unloading during many hours of the day. Everyone from the businesses to the truckers and retail workers tolerate it and work night shifts (often without overtime) because the culture (for better or worse) emphasizes the needs of society over the individual. Would such a policy work well if brought over to the states? Given the amount of tangentially connected regulations and special interests such a strict ban may just increase prices and make things worse.

superkuh 8y ago

This is understandable for high density urban areas but makes no sense for most of the country.

simplesleeper 8y ago

Congestion does not necessarily mean a shortage of roads. Sometimes roads make congestion worse. Braess' Paradox has shown to occur as often as not.

Proven 8y ago

If the streets aren't free, then even congestion plans can't justly distribute the cost of building and maintaining them. If the author was concerned about just cost allocation of infrastructure, he'd be arguing for private roads and privatization of existing public roads. Congestion pricing doesn't "finally" make that clear. Private roads existed before and still do, and don't cost anything those who don't use them. A distributionist will of course argue for public roads (with or without congestion pricing) because private roads don't give them a way to distort cost allocation to benefit their re-election chances and ideological goals.