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Congestion pricing is good insofar as it deters driving. We do need to get our heads out of our asses with respect to the logistics of converting dollars to tra

Congestion pricing is good insofar as it deters driving. We do need to get our heads out of our asses with respect to the logistics of converting dollars to transit infrastructure, but that's basically independent. Congestion pricing revenue could be given to your favorite charity, redistributed as a citizen's dividend, or lit on fire. The important thing is that as the marginal driver the amount you have to part with is painful enough to you to change your behavior. In any other US metro area, there is perhaps a realist argument that roads work fine for 98% of trips and trains are too much of a boondoggle for their marginal contribution to capacity. But this is Manhattan. Forget for a moment about urbanism, environmentalism, etc. If the MTA melted down tomorrow, no appreciable portion of its riders could fall back on driving, as a matter of geometry.

nayuki 3y ago
You're right. Congestion pricing affects the psychology of the driver, regardless of where the money goes - even if it's set on fire (thus causing a minuscule amount of deflation). To assign the congestion money to a specific project, like public transit, is an act of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting . I would say that putting the money into the city's general fund is the least bad solution. This is because if congestion monies were put to a specific program like public transit / subsidies for the poor / etc., it becomes more complicated to ensure that those programs receive enough funding but also not too much.
philwelch 3y ago
I’d go a little further than that. If you enact a Pigovian tax (i.e. a tax intended to reduce some unwanted behavior), there’s a conflict of interest in relying on that revenue for anything because then there is an incentive to try and keep the tax rates lower in order to protect the revenue source.
- closeparen 3y ago
  Exactly. ”A tax on drivers” as the parent put it is actually a failure scenario here. Everybody gets low-grade immiserated by the tax but congestion is not reduced enough to improve quality of life.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    My general concern with the whole thing is it's basically not thinking BIG enough. We're gonna raise the cost of driving into the city so that we have less people drive into the city and then.... ?! and then.. !? Presumably that will put more load on transit infrastructure that is under built and 10x reasonable cost to build. We can fund transit but we can't build it. The MTA has already borrowed 15 years of projected congestion pricing revenue with the revenue as collateral. Great, so what does $15B get us? If we want less drivers why don't we go HARD - announce one of the Hudson tunnels will now be 100% bus. Or we are going to retrofit it for a new train line. Or a new Brooklyn/Queens North/South line for less Manhattan oriented transit? Even our most ambitious 20 year plans are like "maybe we can finally finish more of the 2nd ave line / prevent the Hudson tubes from flooding / add one more Hudson tube" and that's basically it for the entire city. If you don't live in NJ or the east side of Manhattan, too bad, no new transit for you. The scale of transit investment you see in say London or Tokyo should make every NYer embarrassed and radicalize you on permitting/environmental study shenanigans/cost management/everyone having a veto on building anything.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > MTA has already borrowed 15 years of projected congestion pricing revenue with the revenue as collateral. Great, so what does $15B get us Signal modernization, station accessibility, new subway cars (last 2x longer), escalator and elevator repairs, new tracks and the 2nd Avenue Subway's Phase II (taking it to 125th street) [1]. [1] https://new.mta.info/document/10641 https://new.mta.info/document/10641
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        I think slide 7 also paints an interesting picture - +50% ridership in last 20 years, -8% capital capital investment years MTA-wide over 20 years in constant dollars. I can't put an exact date on it, but somewhere around 2010/2012 it started feeling like the transit system was getting consistently worse, year over year. Mostly in terms of delays, headways, etc. I have some cousins in the industry, and one of the problems they point to aside from work rules is that city/state agencies have basically no expertise in house for infrastructure. This is despite the fact that there has been a steady stream of some amount of work for decades. That means everything from project design, planning, management, accounting... literally everything is outsourced. All the MTA does is essentially ask for designs & bids, picks one, and then bleeds money to contractors.

nayuki 3y ago

You're right. Congestion pricing affects the psychology of the driver, regardless of where the money goes - even if it's set on fire (thus causing a minuscule amount of deflation). To assign the congestion money to a specific project, like public transit, is an act of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting . I would say that putting the money into the city's general fund is the least bad solution. This is because if congestion monies were put to a specific program like public transit / subsidies for the poor / etc., it becomes more complicated to ensure that those programs receive enough funding but also not too much.

philwelch 3y ago

I’d go a little further than that. If you enact a Pigovian tax (i.e. a tax intended to reduce some unwanted behavior), there’s a conflict of interest in relying on that revenue for anything because then there is an incentive to try and keep the tax rates lower in order to protect the revenue source.

closeparen 3y ago
Exactly. ”A tax on drivers” as the parent put it is actually a failure scenario here. Everybody gets low-grade immiserated by the tax but congestion is not reduced enough to improve quality of life.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  My general concern with the whole thing is it's basically not thinking BIG enough. We're gonna raise the cost of driving into the city so that we have less people drive into the city and then.... ?! and then.. !? Presumably that will put more load on transit infrastructure that is under built and 10x reasonable cost to build. We can fund transit but we can't build it. The MTA has already borrowed 15 years of projected congestion pricing revenue with the revenue as collateral. Great, so what does $15B get us? If we want less drivers why don't we go HARD - announce one of the Hudson tunnels will now be 100% bus. Or we are going to retrofit it for a new train line. Or a new Brooklyn/Queens North/South line for less Manhattan oriented transit? Even our most ambitious 20 year plans are like "maybe we can finally finish more of the 2nd ave line / prevent the Hudson tubes from flooding / add one more Hudson tube" and that's basically it for the entire city. If you don't live in NJ or the east side of Manhattan, too bad, no new transit for you. The scale of transit investment you see in say London or Tokyo should make every NYer embarrassed and radicalize you on permitting/environmental study shenanigans/cost management/everyone having a veto on building anything.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > MTA has already borrowed 15 years of projected congestion pricing revenue with the revenue as collateral. Great, so what does $15B get us Signal modernization, station accessibility, new subway cars (last 2x longer), escalator and elevator repairs, new tracks and the 2nd Avenue Subway's Phase II (taking it to 125th street) [1]. [1] https://new.mta.info/document/10641 https://new.mta.info/document/10641
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      I think slide 7 also paints an interesting picture - +50% ridership in last 20 years, -8% capital capital investment years MTA-wide over 20 years in constant dollars. I can't put an exact date on it, but somewhere around 2010/2012 it started feeling like the transit system was getting consistently worse, year over year. Mostly in terms of delays, headways, etc. I have some cousins in the industry, and one of the problems they point to aside from work rules is that city/state agencies have basically no expertise in house for infrastructure. This is despite the fact that there has been a steady stream of some amount of work for decades. That means everything from project design, planning, management, accounting... literally everything is outsourced. All the MTA does is essentially ask for designs & bids, picks one, and then bleeds money to contractors.