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I personally would not have expected the level of changes noted in the article I would have expected car usage to be inelastic and for this to basically just b
by jncfhnb 2y ago
I personally would not have expected the level of changes noted in the article
I would have expected car usage to be inelastic and for this to basically just become a tax on commuters
- estebank 2y agoHad you looked into the effects of similar policies elsewhere? The effect have universally been the same shown in the post.
- jncfhnb 2y agoNope These policies don’t affect me
- jeffbee 2y agoDriving is highly elastic and among economists this is well-known and beyond serious dispute. A regularly updated review of the literature is available at https://www.vtpi.org/elasticities.pdf https://www.vtpi.org/elasticities.pdf
- jncfhnb 2y agoI mean sure? I’m just voicing my intuition from before seeing data as someone who does not live in New York or in a congestion pricing affected area.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoYeah I'm sorry you're being downvoted because your intuition is shared by a lot of people but is actually a pretty common fallacy (and one I believed before I started reading about transit policies a while ago now.) There's a long-tail of driving demand which is very elastic and the only reason why it exists is because the US underprices driving and builds expensive road infrastructure to lower LOS areas than most of the world. When he was a bit younger, my dad was the type to often just "go out for a drive" and drive in circles for a while just to clear his head. On its face that seems fine, like going out for a walk, but then you realize that my dad was just taking up a limited throughput resource for a very low-value use. My partner's family who actually lives close to NYC used to take drives to Manhattan "for fun" for years actually.
- jeffbee 2y ago> a very low-value use That's the crazy thing. Driving into lower Manhattan costs society hundreds of dollars, but to an apparently huge fraction of drivers it wasn't even worth nine lousy dollars.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoYeah I know. I was shocked when I learned my partner's family drove to Lower Manhattan "because why not?" But there just is a lot of long tail behavior like this.
- alexpotato 2y agoMy favorite quote about this was: "The improvements lead us to believe that a large number of the cars in NYC were driving around with no particular reason" Effectively, people were spending time in their cars that they DID NOT VALUE at $9.