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Urban Congestion Pricing and the Response Times of Emergency Medical Services
- game_the0ry 1mo agoYou know what would also help traffic congestion? Allowing people to work from home. Has the added benefit of reducing gas prices (less demand) and less greenhouse gas emissions.
- justonceokay 1mo agoI think you overestimate the number of people that can work from home. For society to function the majority of us have to actually go to a physical place and do something real with our hands and our time.
- estearum 1mo agoCongestion pricing is one of the few policy ideas that's so overwhelmingly positive that even the people who try to argue against it end up strengthening the argument. Love it. "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't! "What about the delivery people who need to bring this into the city?" They should be able to get in and out much faster, and their cargo makes it easy to amortize the cost! "What about people who need to drive due to mobility issues?" Look, now they can park near their destination too!
- LoganDark 1mo ago> "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't! What? Don't work? What else is there, the bus?
- mc32 1mo agoAnd if reputation follows, more people will claim some disability or other of come off their disability much later than normal. If New Yorkers are known for one thing, it’s how to corrupt a system so I would propose having more scrutiny around disability qualifications with more frequent renewals.
- apercu 1mo agoA significant portion of modern professional jobs can be done remotely and this has been true for decades.
- strictnein 1mo agoThis is a subjective observation, not an argument for congestion pricing.
- paimapi 1mo agowhile true, this is reliant on company leadership (and their boards/shareholders) to allow for it. there's too much invested in commercial real estate at the moment that every publicly traded company with significant stake from some large investor(s) will be forcing RTO/hybrid. the calculus of 'slightly unhappy workers' vs 'complete collapse for X% of my portfolio' is not a difficult solve which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society
- LoganDark 1mo agoI exclusively work remote jobs myself, but I wouldn't say just don't ever have or use a personal vehicle. It costs me $20–40 to get up to family in another state and a train ticket (one-way) in my area would cost twice as much.
- monitron 1mo agoI'm not sure if this is a serious question, but: buses, subways, (e-)bikes, working from home, carpooling. I know these aren't an option for everyone in every situation, but congestion pricing areas tend to be set up in places where public transit is good and normal.
- DiggyJohnson 1mo agoTelling people not to drive to work without viable alternatives does not seem like a solution.
- baggy_trough 1mo agoIf they do not want to cover their externalities, then it is in fact a very good solution.
- michaelmrose 1mo ago[dead]
- fckgw 1mo agoGood news! In all the areas where congestion pricing has been implement there are abundant alternatives to driving! Or, you can still drive and simply pay the toll!
- smelendez 1mo agoYes, or the train. All of these cities have a mix of public transit modes. > Cities around the world, including London, Stockholm, Milan, and most recently, New York City (NYC), have adopted congestion pricing, charging drivers a fee to enter high-traffic zones.
- estearum 1mo agoSure! Get a job in your own community or if you want access to the city's jobs, then pay to reduce the negative externalities of your access, or pick a transit method with fewer negative externalities.
- baud147258 1mo ago> "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" How are they going to do if there's no public transportation available for their commute? edit: and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
- estearum 1mo agoGiven the increased road availability, we should invent trains that drive on roads.
- strictnein 1mo agoSnark isn't actually a productive way to discuss a topic. A productive way would be to say that congestion pricing should be used to expand bus service.
- estearum 1mo agoWell I don't care how the money flows and neither should anyone else. It's a matter of allocating costs as closely to the origin of those costs as possible. If you do that, it will turn out that buses (etc) are far superior methods of moving people around, but you really don't need to move money directly from one to the other.
- strictnein 1mo ago> Well I don't care how the money flows and neither should anyone else Why shouldn't people care how the money flows and why are you the decider of what people should care about? If the money from congestion pricing was for a new stadium for the Yankees, or to build a new heliport for billionaires' row, or it just went into the pocket of the mayor I think that would be concerning for everyone involved.
- estearum 1mo agoEven if we took the money and lit it on fire each year, congestion pricing would still be a very, very good policy.
- strictnein 1mo agoI mean, sure, if you set up poor arguments like that, they're easy to knock down. "What about people who need to drive due to mobility issues?" vs "What about people on a fixed income who need to drive due to mobility issues?" Regressive taxes are still regressive, even if you like what they do. I'm also not quite sure how this is a winning argument either: > "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't! Huh?
- estearum 1mo agoThe fixed income case is absolutely trivial to solve by just giving them a stipend or discount card, which is obviously what they do in NYC. The people who drive into a city to work should either pay for access to the city's economy and infrastructure that supports their job (and the entire surrounding region's suburbia), or they can get a job in their own community, or they can take a form of transit with fewer negative externalities on the city. Not that hard to understand.
- jtbayly 1mo agoThey already pay substantial taxes out of their income to the city they work, in most places. They already are paying for access.
- estearum 1mo agoEmpirically demonstrated by their continued decision to live outside of the city and commute into it, they believe they are getting more value than they are paying in via whatever tax scheme the locale has in place. You'll know they're paying their fair share when the arbitrage actually stops, but taxing non-resident earnings so aggressively to stop it produces way more negative side effects and regressive taxation effects than congestion pricing does. That's why congestion pricing is a good idea and 90% taxes on non-resident incomes is not (not to mention the ease of enforcement).
- strictnein 1mo ago
- arnoooooo 1mo agoWhat I don't like about congestion pricing is that the people asking for money are the ones who are responsible for the congestion. They are always making cities denser and denser, bigger and bigger, which no resident asks for.
- estearum 1mo ago"Asking for money?" Who are you referring to?
- wat10000 1mo agoPeople love density. What they don't like are some of the consequences of density, such as traffic. This alleviates a major consequence without getting rid of the stuff people like. If you don't like density, there are plenty of un-dense places you can be, with no congestion pricing.
- unglaublich 1mo agoYou have no clue. Low-density suburbs create much more traffic than dense areas, just because you _have_ to travel >5km just to the next supermarket. In dense areas, most people walk.
- tsunamifury 1mo agoSan Francisco wasted millions on congestion pricing research that ironically totally solved by Covid. Now work from home has essentially destroyed the downtown but also left it with very little traffic compared to 2019. That being said the primary argument against it was that for residents who lived in S.F. it was an insanely bad proposal that had you paying to drop your kids at school, go to the grocery store and do average everyday things that had no public transit option.
- ipdashc 1mo ago> Congestion pricing is one of the few policy ideas that's so overwhelmingly positive that even the people who try to argue against it end up strengthening the argument. Love it. > "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't! ... Look man, I'm in favor of the policy too, but this reads like straight satire. Please tell me you're trolling.
- estearum 1mo agoNo. People should not expect to free-ride on an adjacent city's economy while inflicting severe negative externalities on the local community and its infrastructure. The entire point of the policy is to reduce the number of people driving into cities. "Well how am I going to drive into the city?!" is the position that's indistinguishable from satire.
- kyboren 1mo agoI'm not disputing the negative externalities from traffic, nor the laudable goal of reducing the number of vehicles entering cities. I'm not even disputing the effectiveness of congestion pricing at achieving that goal. But the mechanism here is highly unfair. It's obvious why rich people support congestion charges--they're rich! They don't give a shit about the $20 or whatever, and it clears the roads of those dirty poors making traffic. Bring it on! Meanwhile the poor--already struggling with affordability and cost of living--are the ones who bear the burden. They can't afford the congestion fee, so they're forced to find some alternative way to get into the city. But that comes at an obvious utility cost; if that alternative was the best way for them to get into the city, they'd already be using it! And poor people are the ones with no time to spare, so choosing between spending $20 they don't have or spending 30 more minutes that they don't have is a Hobson's choice. Here's my proposal: Every vehicle gets 60 free days per year with no congestion charges at all. Days 61-100 have a $1,000,000 congestion charge. Days 101-365 have a $10,000,000 congestion charge. Congestion charges will be reduced, however, to 0.1% of the driver's AGI (for days 61-100) and 1% of the driver's AGI (for days 101-365) upon application. Now even hedge fund managers in Connecticut will be inconvenienced in just the same way as poor people. Yet somehow I believe that if that were how congestion pricing was implemented, all these Econ professors would magically discover what a bad policy congestion pricing really is!
- clickety_clack 1mo agoThis shows a total lack of empathy for people without the wealth to live wherever they want. “You can sit on a bus for an hour and a half, dummy” is a terrible argument. I’m glad we all have great work situations, for many of us working from home whenever we want even. Most people are just a job loss away from having to commute to a job far away from the house near their kids’ school or their partner’s work. People don’t get jobs with a commute by choice to begin with, and this just punishes people for that. Edit: I haven’t had a car since 2018, but before that I had one because I needed it, and I hated that commute. The alternative to a 25- to 35-minute drive was 1:45 on 2 trains. You shouldn’t have to literally experience things in the world yourself to recognize that people are in situations that you are not in yourself.
- estearum 1mo agoNo, quite the contrary. Unlimited free road consumption has created the conditions under which jobs get super-concentrated into commercial centers and away from communities, which centralizes land values and urban vitality into the few neighborhoods the wealthy can live in.
- strictnein 1mo agoHow can you argue here that it is "free road consumption" while in another comment you point out that there were already tolls? Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?
- estearum 1mo agoIn another comment thread I was talking about New York City in particular. This comment thread is talking about the general dynamics of commutes. Unlimited free or near-free road consumption is the norm across the entire US. NYC in particular has always been ahead of the curve in mitigating this. The bridge tolls are obviously not priced anywhere close to the value of crossing the bridge, or else land values would be the same on both sides of the bridge. I suspect this isn't actually hard to follow and you're just getting irritated for some reason.
- Spooky23 1mo agoNot really. It's just a tolling overlay that changes the deal and perpetuates bad engineering. Just as traffic grows to fill a road, budgets grow to spend revenue. The positivity of it varies dramatically based on the type of jurisdiction and what entity has what power. Manhattan and London have an existing chokepoint arrangement where you won't be able to really assess it's benefit/detraction for a long time. Proponents of the Manhattan congestion pricing tend to ignore where alot growth is happening - Hoboken and Jersey City are in some ways more vital. Most of the benefit could have been realized by tolling the free river crossings, as alot of the traffic reduction was eliminating toll-avoidance trips. In other places, you can see part of the downside with speed cameras which are starting to pick up. My city adopted them and traffic dropped noticeably, immediately. We also saw a pretty immediate effect on retail and restaurants. My wife works for a restaurant group -- RFPs for large events basically say "not in <city>", because the city's brand is toxified by tolling.
- estearum 1mo agoI don't care about the revenue or what it's spent on. I care that people internalize the costs of their own decisions. River crossings into NYC were already not free. Not sure what you're referring to. Speed cameras and stop cameras are also great and should be virtually everywhere.
- Spooky23 1mo ago> I don't care about the revenue or what it's spent on. I care that people internalize the costs of their own decisions. Cool, you're demonstrating that you have no understanding of the issue. > River crossings into NYC were already not free. Not sure what you're referring to. They sure are. Trips that originate from Brooklyn, Queens or Long Island to New Jersey would go <origin> to Brooklyn/Manhattan/Williamsburg/Queenboro bridges. The outbound Hudson River crossings are all free. Trips that originate from Brooklyn, Queens or Long Island to Westchester and points north or east would go <origin> to Brooklyn/Manhattan/Williamsburg/Queenboro bridges. You take the FDR drive/East Side highway to one of the free east river crossings to the bronx, then take the Deegan to one of the many parkways. You can take the Taconic all the way to Albany for $0. BTW, the Westside of Manhattan around the tunnel crossings is now just as much of a shitshow as it was. They are just slurping up more revenue for the MTA to set aflame. > Speed cameras and stop cameras are also great and should be virtually everywhere. They are fine if they are everywhere. You'll feel differently when you get a $25 fine + $50 contractor fee when you drive through a 20mph school zone in the middle of August in some random town.
- austin-cheney 1mo agoMy city is growing at about 25,000 people per year. Just take a second to run some numbers in your head to let that sink in. In 1990 this city was the 29th largest city in the US and now it is the 10th. By 2050 it is projected to be the 9th largest city in the US surpassing Dallas in population. We have congestion everywhere and few transportation options. I cannot imagine the consequences of congestion pricing here. Sometimes it could take 30 minutes to get to the freeway 1.5 miles away during morning rush hour. I suspect congestion pricing here would motivate many people to simply abandon their employment if in a job where work from home is a disallowed viable possibility. In my case I am currently unemployed and am turning down interview offers in locations I used to commute to just a few years back, because now the costs of commute are another form of wage depreciation that gets factored into the compensation rate.
- usrnm 1mo agoLet me introduce you to this very new invention called public transport
- austin-cheney 1mo agoI am so envious of DC and Chicago for their metro systems. It's always interesting to talk to people who live in those locations and take their mass transit for granted, like a spoiled entitlement. Here if you don't have a car you will quickly become homeless or starve to death.
- pc86 1mo agoIf Google is right they live in Jacksonville, which aside from being a terrible place to live in general, can't physically or geographically support subways or light rail. So you're basically limited to busses if you want to implement public transportation. I've only been to Jacksonville a handful of times but I'd rather walk along the side of road in August than ride a bus there. And they don't actually help congestion that much.
- usrnm 1mo ago
- danking00 1mo agohttps://www.nber.org/sites/default/files/2026-08/sep26_0.pdf https://www.nber.org/sites/default/files/2026-08/sep26_0.pdf