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The whole game in 21st-century American governance is selling obvious solutions to unwilling bad-faith deniers. It doesn't really matter that is was obvious all

The whole game in 21st-century American governance is selling obvious solutions to unwilling bad-faith deniers. It doesn't really matter that is was obvious all along that congestion pricing was going to work. It doesn't matter that building homes obviously solves homelessness.

jampekka 2y ago
There are many quite obvious alternatives to congestion pricing. E.g. banning (private) vehicles from roads, or having fewer parking spaces or decreasing speed limits. These would also affect people quite equally regardless of how much money they have. With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough.
- jakelazaroff 2y ago
  The same constituencies that oppose congestion pricing also oppose the things you're describing. When the Adams administration effectively ended curbside dining, they were the people telling us that it was an improvement to replace tables for a dozen people with a parking spot for one SUV. The only way we were even able to get congestion pricing passed was by tying it to MTA funding.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    You can oppose congestion pricing but still support restricting driving. Funding MTA more in no way requires congestion pricing. The earmark is mostly a sharade.
    - jakelazaroff 2y ago
      Of course it's possible to hold both of those views. I'm just telling you what happens in practice.
  - 7speter 2y ago
    Have you paid for dining in Manhattan lately? The people who can afford dining in Manhattan and the people who want street parking for their 100k SUV are different sides of the same cohort, generally.
    - jakelazaroff 2y ago
      My wife and I recently went to Hamburger America for less than $20 each, including tip. We had rice rolls at this hole in the wall in Chinatown for probably $15 between us. Obviously the average meal is on the pricier side but there are tons of great options that don’t break the bank.
- foxyv 2y ago
  > With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough. Driving in New York is for the wealthy. Who has money to pay for parking in New York?
  - jampekka 2y ago
    Now it's for even wealthier. And with less congestion.
  - Jcowell 2y ago
    This is not true. Not all neighborhoods in the city (Basically harlem and up) have wealthy residents, and street parking is free. Anyone who lives in New York knows this.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
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AnthonyMouse 2y ago
I don't think those alternatives are comparable. People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible for a million people to each own a home in an area where there are only 650,000 homes which is why the price increases until a third of them can't; there is no other solution than building more housing. The people opposed to this are opposed simply because they already own property and want housing prices to remain high and then come up with various excuses to rationalize their avarice. Congestion pricing is a trade off. The proponents will point out that it "works" in the sense that high taxes deter use, but that's ignoring the other side of the ledger. There are many other ways to reduce congestion than deterring use through taxation. One of them is to build more housing, for example, so that people can live closer to work and have shorter commutes. Another is to eliminate the fares for mass transit, so its relative cost advantage increases but the difference is created by using ordinary general purpose progressive taxes to fund the system instead of imposing a regressive tax on anyone with an unavoidable need to drive a vehicle. The latter also improves privacy for both drivers and riders by removing both mass surveillance systems that tie everyone's movements to them through the payments system, and increase government efficiency because revenue collection through general taxes has much lower overhead than transit collections infrastructure. There are actually reasons to oppose congestion pricing because there are alternatives to it that achieve the same goal more efficiently with fewer negative externalities.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  None of your supposed alternatives were actually on the table. Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. If your solutions are politically impossible or predicated on a revolution, they aren't legitimate alternatives. In this sense, the connection with housing/homelessness discourse is completed: many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there. Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston. > many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first. There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever. The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.

jampekka 2y ago

There are many quite obvious alternatives to congestion pricing. E.g. banning (private) vehicles from roads, or having fewer parking spaces or decreasing speed limits. These would also affect people quite equally regardless of how much money they have. With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough.

jakelazaroff 2y ago
The same constituencies that oppose congestion pricing also oppose the things you're describing. When the Adams administration effectively ended curbside dining, they were the people telling us that it was an improvement to replace tables for a dozen people with a parking spot for one SUV. The only way we were even able to get congestion pricing passed was by tying it to MTA funding.
- jampekka 2y ago
  You can oppose congestion pricing but still support restricting driving. Funding MTA more in no way requires congestion pricing. The earmark is mostly a sharade.
  - jakelazaroff 2y ago
    Of course it's possible to hold both of those views. I'm just telling you what happens in practice.
- 7speter 2y ago
  Have you paid for dining in Manhattan lately? The people who can afford dining in Manhattan and the people who want street parking for their 100k SUV are different sides of the same cohort, generally.
  - jakelazaroff 2y ago
    My wife and I recently went to Hamburger America for less than $20 each, including tip. We had rice rolls at this hole in the wall in Chinatown for probably $15 between us. Obviously the average meal is on the pricier side but there are tons of great options that don’t break the bank.
foxyv 2y ago
> With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough. Driving in New York is for the wealthy. Who has money to pay for parking in New York?
- jampekka 2y ago
  Now it's for even wealthier. And with less congestion.
- Jcowell 2y ago
  This is not true. Not all neighborhoods in the city (Basically harlem and up) have wealthy residents, and street parking is free. Anyone who lives in New York knows this.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

I don't think those alternatives are comparable. People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible for a million people to each own a home in an area where there are only 650,000 homes which is why the price increases until a third of them can't; there is no other solution than building more housing. The people opposed to this are opposed simply because they already own property and want housing prices to remain high and then come up with various excuses to rationalize their avarice. Congestion pricing is a trade off. The proponents will point out that it "works" in the sense that high taxes deter use, but that's ignoring the other side of the ledger. There are many other ways to reduce congestion than deterring use through taxation. One of them is to build more housing, for example, so that people can live closer to work and have shorter commutes. Another is to eliminate the fares for mass transit, so its relative cost advantage increases but the difference is created by using ordinary general purpose progressive taxes to fund the system instead of imposing a regressive tax on anyone with an unavoidable need to drive a vehicle. The latter also improves privacy for both drivers and riders by removing both mass surveillance systems that tie everyone's movements to them through the payments system, and increase government efficiency because revenue collection through general taxes has much lower overhead than transit collections infrastructure. There are actually reasons to oppose congestion pricing because there are alternatives to it that achieve the same goal more efficiently with fewer negative externalities.

jeffbee 2y ago
None of your supposed alternatives were actually on the table. Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. If your solutions are politically impossible or predicated on a revolution, they aren't legitimate alternatives. In this sense, the connection with housing/homelessness discourse is completed: many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there. Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston. > many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first. There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever. The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.