5 ms·
By riffraff you mean cars? Or are you trying to be cute and suggest something else?
by rcpt 2y ago
By riffraff you mean cars? Or are you trying to be cute and suggest something else?
- jampekka 2y agoI mean in general introducing and ramping up fees for basic public services to get poor people to use them less, and getting thus better service for us better off. Imagine how nice e.g. libraries would be with loitering pricing. I don't own, or plan to own, a car, but I still oppose congestion charges based on the marketization of basic public goods.
- trial3 2y agowith all due respect: i admire your confidence, but this is a at best a purposefully uninformed and at worst a child's understanding of what congestion pricing, tolls, and taxes are. i invite you to actually read about what congestion pricing is, how it has been enacted, and how the tolling actually works.
- jampekka 2y agoI think I know the basics. In the NYC implementation entering the toll area is $9 a pop during certain hours, and cheaper outside them. $9 maximum once a day. Low income residents get 50% off. In general the primary purpose of these pricings is to discourage people from using the priced thing, revenue from the fees is a bonus. The price naturally is more painful to pay the less you have money, so the less you have the more you are discouraged.
- bobthepanda 2y agoFunding public transit is for the rich?
- jampekka 2y agoThere are other ways to fund public transit than congestion fees. E.g. taxing (the rich).
- bobthepanda 2y agoBy and large, poor households in the NYC metro area do not even own cars. That fact alone means that pricing road entry is progressive.
- baq 2y agoA car is not a public good, it’s a privilege. A public road might as well be paid for by everyone except municipal services. It’s free because it started this way, ideology of public = free is retconned into roads.
- jampekka 2y agoThe underlying question indeed is what should be public goods for wider public and what should be privileges for the well off.
- BurningFrog 2y agoA "public good" is something like clean air, national defense, or street lighting which is freely available to everyone and where one person's usage doesn't reduce availability for others. It's unfortunately mutated from the Economics definition to a more loose "good for the public" in public discourse, confusing everyone. Street space in Manhattan is not a public good, because with enough cars using it, it becomes more and more useless. To fix that you have to make fewer people want to drive there some way. There are other methods than pricing, but they have problems of their own.
- jampekka 2y agoYes, I meant the more general concept of goods that can be used without fees, for which there doesn't seem to be a great term. Very widely used methods are e.g. reducing lanes, reducing speed limits, banning (private) cars on some roads and decreasing parking space. These are used a lot more widely, and probably a lot more succesfully, than pricing systems. Notably these all are about as discouraging regadless of how much money you have.
- affinepplan 2y agoso somehow roadways are "basic public services" but railways are not? this kinda just exposes the depth of car-centric bias. to any competent urban designer, in a place like Manhattan, public transit is the "basic public service" and cars & roadways are a LUXURY.