4 ms·

Congestion pricing is only a half of the solution. The second half should be the MTA reform. MTA has been a dysfunctional mess and a bottomless money pit for as

• sethhochberg 1y ago
  Regrettably the only source I can find hosting this video is a reddit post, but you might find the remarks by the MTA chair interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/1iyve4d/mta_building_up_inhouse_teams_to_diminish_the_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/1iyve4d/mta_buildi... In short: for decades they’ve been allergic to doing any design or project management in house, which meant brand new teams of consultants and contractors spun up for every single project. Lucrative for the consultants, not an efficient way to use funds for a big organization that is constantly doing design and construction. Seems like the MTA is finally starting to invest in building internal expertise again so they can stop farming everything out
  • const_cast 1y ago
    This is the story of the American public sector. Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector because clearly public organization X sucks. The private sector is greedy and a black box, so they're basically going to bleed the tax payers dry because they have no accountability to anyone. And the added complexity of hops between communication just burns money. And now the military is paying 150 dollars for a shovel. The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
    • dhosek 1y ago
      The other thing is that privatization is old-school patronage on steroids: if you structure it right, you get to channel government money to the recipients in a way that continues even after you lose power.
    • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      The real problem is public corruption. People got tired of public officials getting paid off by a public sector union to create a bunch of makework jobs at taxpayer expense. The theory of privatization is that you put the contract up for bids and then every private company has the incentive to get the contract until the profit margins are low enough, and "low profit margins" are to the public's advantage. But then the contracting process gets corrupted to prevent most companies from bidding and direct the contracts to specific cronies. What you actually need is better ways to stop public officials from screwing the public for personal advantage.
      • CPLX 1y ago
        There wasn’t really a “theory” behind all the privatization. The theory was “if we do this we can get more of the government money in our pocket” and the arguments were backwards construction from there.
        • potato3732842 1y ago
          There wasn't a "theory" because this wasn't some garbage that aloof academics cooked up. At the time thins were privatized (50s through 80s) the misalignment of incentives was plain as day obvious fact. People looked at <shuffles cards> New York City, and said "do not want" and they attempted to break the feedback loop between public agencies and the parties they were making work for and tried to resolve it by putting more of the decisions of what work needed to be done under the umbrella of the agencies doing it. With proper competition, this can work. But people like you have spent the last 70yr erecting barriers to competition and so in an environment where things are only ever getting bid on by the same few players the costs rise and the values go down.
          • chownie 1y ago
            Transport is often a natural monopoly, rails almost always. There's no way to run that as a private market because no one can meaningfully compete.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector Do voters really push for this? I would have suspected it is the consultants and the unions.
    • supertrope 1y ago
      Giving displaced workers some money or offering a free public service is frowned upon so we have to launder it through dummy jobs.
    • xnx 1y ago
      Public or private, this is what happens without competition. Even with a fixed set of tunnels and tracks, there are ways to benefit from competitive market forces.
  • krferriter 1y ago
    Americans have a weird thing with government agencies (or government-owned companies, e.g. Amtrak) simply hiring people to do a thing the government is tasked with doing, or buying things the government needs in order to do that thing. So instead our governments at all levels rely heavily on contracting it out to private companies to do the exact same thing but with higher cost and turnover and no long term expertise built in-house in the government agency which is now tasked with managing and overseeing all this contracting. The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • pfannkuchen 1y ago
      I suspect the theory is that private companies with many clients besides the government are less susceptible to bloat and waste than a government agency is because they are not a singleton entity and will be outcompeted if they are sufficiently inefficient. A problem with this theory is that, I imagine, a lot of such companies basically only have contracts with the government. So it ends up with the same singleton problems, just outsourced.
• nobodyandproud 1y ago
  Largely because a hostile state government is given control over what’s largely a NYC issue.
• passivedonut 1y ago
  Congestion pricing is a regressive tax. It doesn’t actually ‘work.’ As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public. Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result. Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living. If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    it works in places that are already gentrified, like Manhattan or the City (of London). No one is suggesting congestion pricing in Queens.
    • righthand 1y ago
      “Gentrified”, no. “Romanticized” to the extreme, yes
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road Most people in a car in Manhattan don’t need to be in one, and most of those that do are exempted from this charge. (I say this as someone who is commonly in a car in Manhattan.)
  • ethbr1 1y ago
    It would be a regressive tax... if there weren't public transit alternatives. As is, it's a tax on people who drive.
  • CPLX 1y ago
    It’s not a regressive tax, it’s a fee. Taxes and fees are related but distinct. It’s possible for an overall fee based structure to be regressive, but it’s also possible for it to not be. For example a fee for landing private jets at public airports is not regressive. Given the contours of who does and doesn’t drive in Manhattan it’s almost certain that this one has a similar dynamic and is actually progressive.