I think congestion pricing is popular on HN, but only because the user base skews to towards wealthy. IMO congestion pricing forces the burden of reducing usage onto poor people while letting the wealthy keep on doing whatever they want even though wealthy people already consume more per capita than poor people..
The price will determine how poor you have to be to get forced to do without so the wealthy can benefit from an increase in quality of life. In this article, a 1h trip dropping to 15m means a certain portion of people got priced out of the market. Is is the bottom 10%, 20%, 50%?
It's great if you're in the top percentage of income earners, but what happens when wealthy people want to cut another 5 minutes from their commute? Do they dial up the congestion pricing to push out a few more people?
I work every day at an honest job and pay taxes, but don't make a ton of money. Why should my taxes get used to build infrastructure that's going to be subjected to congestion pricing that prices me out of using that infrastructure?
IMO, the reality is the rich haven't been forced to pay their fair share for a half century, infrastructure has been massively underfunded, and now the solution is to force poor people to suffer the consequences for a system that's benefited the rich and increased wealth inequality to the point where it's going to break the system.
I'm not young, but I understand why millennials and younger don't want to work. They're not getting their fair share of infrastructure and productivity gains relative to what they're contributing. Who would want to participate in a system that's set up to cheat you for your entire life?
> The price will determine how poor you have to be to get forced to do without so the wealthy can benefit from an increase in quality of life.
Doesn't that basically describe access to all scarce resources?
If you don't like the idea of money being used as a way to allocate scarce resources then another way to look at it is forcing people to pay for negative externalities (traffic, pollution). And I don't see why poor people should have to pay less for creating the same negative externalities.
> Why should my taxes get used to build infrastructure that's going to be subjected to congestion pricing that prices me out of using that infrastructure?
I think the arguments here are
1. Rich people pay a much higher percentage of the cost of the infrastructure. If you're so poor then you might not be paying for any of it anyway.
2. You still benefit from the infrastructure - fire trucks, police cars and deliveries are all using the roads to your benefit, even if you don't even drive on them
3. This is very similar to someone saying "why should I pay for roads when I don't own a car?"
4. It's also similar to "why should I pay for schools when I don't have a kid?" These things better society as a whole even if you don't use them directly*
I can agree with a lot of that, but part of what I don't like is when I pay for luxury things I can't use. For example, if the city decides to subsidize a stadium, but I can't afford tickets to any events, how do I benefit from paying for part of that via property taxes?
Or another example would be post-secondary education. Where I live it's partially subsidized, so my taxes go towards it even if I can't afford to attend. Sure, there's an overall benefit to having an educated population, but I'm being forced to subsidize other peoples' educations and they benefit directly in the form of increased earning potential which translates into a better standard of living.
I don't have kids and I don't have a problem paying taxes for fully subsidized K-12 education where everyone gets access no matter what.
> For example, if the city decides to subsidize a stadium, but I can't afford tickets to any events, how do I benefit from paying for part of that via property taxes?
I suspect the economic benefits for this kind of thing may not actually hold up, but the argument there would be that you benefit from the new stadium because it creates jobs and attracts spending in your city, which results in a bunch of benefits that you do get to appreciate (new restaurants, more tax revenue, more job opportunities etc) even if you never attend an event at the stadium.
As with single-payer healthcare, this is a much better post before we have the evidence in. "Can't be done!" loses a lot of oomph when it… gets done, in large scale and with great success.
The improvements extend to more than the high-income folks. It's making mass transit more efficient. Per the article:
> Buses are travelling so much faster that their drivers are having to stop and wait to keep to their schedules.
The health benefits of lower traffic (noise, pollution, etc.) should be considered here, too.
> Buses are travelling so much faster that their drivers are having to stop and wait to keep to their schedules.
This makes sense to me as long as that infrastructure exists and is kept up. There needs to be a balance where taking public transit is a practical option. The city I live in (in Canada) has pretty brutal public transit. It's 1-1.5h on the bus for something that takes 20-30m by car and the busses are already full because of the price of parking.
If you introduced congestion pricing where I live, commute times for people driving cars might go down even more as people are priced out of driving, but there aren't enough buses so you would simply be left with no viable options.
>If you introduced congestion pricing where I live, commute times for people driving cars might go down even more as people are priced out of driving, but there aren't enough buses so you would simply be left with no viable options.
What evidence do you have that there physically aren't enough buses?
Here in Toronto, it often happens that the buses move too slowly, because they aren't prioritized over other traffic. They keep a slow, irregular schedule which allows too many new passengers to accumulate at a bus stop in between, a positive feedback loop.
Extra buses don't help as much in this situation as might naively be expected. The first bus gets overloaded while the second nearly tailgates behind, with far fewer passengers. The second bus should be able to overtake and pick up the passengers for the next stop (or the first one should bypass it if nobody's disembarking there), but this can be hard to arrange with cars in the way and passengers on the first bus already getting impatient.
But if the existing service is only every half hour or something like that, then yes of course that adds quite a bit to mean transit time. And yes you probably do fix that mainly by adding more buses and carrot-and-sticking people out of their cars. The neat thing about congestion pricing is that you can use it to fund those buses.
If implemented as in NYC, the congestion charge flows into the coffers of the transit system, allowing your city to finally fix the "not enough buses" problem.
This is a myth. There have been extensive studies done for a decade. If you’re poor and can’t afford $10-15 toll then how did you get your car even close to nyc without paying higher tolls? If you’re poor you’ll use your brain and pay the $2.95 to ride the train, not die in your car waiting in traffic and spending all your money for food on cp tolls.
You want to charge the wealthy for infrastructure, you tax their income.
$10-15/per day adds up real quick especially for people who travels to work daily.
> If you’re poor you’ll use your brain and pay the $2.95 to ride the train
I hope you do understand this is only viable for people who live or travel near train stations.
Anyone who live far from rail network would have to rely on bus/cab/ride-share to complete their journey and end up spending almost as much as one would on a car but without the flexibility.
> this is only viable for people who live or travel near train stations
There is plenty of parking at NJTransit, Metro-North and LIRR hubs outside the congestion zone. The people who drive private cars in Manhattan are comparably wealthy.
> If you’re poor you’ll use your brain and pay the $2.95 to ride the train, not die in your car waiting in traffic and spending all your money for food on cp tolls.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what op is saying, isn't it? The toll forces poorer people to change their behavior while letting rich people continue to do what they've always done with a barely noticeable dent in their wealth.
That's right. And it's the same thing for a lot of consumption based services. Our city switched to a garbage system where you pay based on the size of your garbage can (small, medium, large). They did that in lieu of a property tax increase which is a progressive tax since rich people with big homes pay more property taxes.
Instead it's now a consumption tax which is regressive. All the rich neighbourhoods have large bins and it costs them less than a property tax increase would have while the poor neighbourhoods all have to "budget" their trash to fit it into a small bin.
It's all a way of forcing the poor and middle class to bear the burden of dwindling resources and infrastructure while the rich get to maintain unfairly luxurious lifestyles.
The standard mechanism for turning ensuring a flat tax into a progressive tax is to spend the proceeds of the tax a way that benefits people equally.
For example a VAT is regressive, but is usually accompanied by a rebate that sends a cheque to everybody for an amount that a typical poor person would spend on VAT. The congestion charge goes to the MTA, which benefits everybody.
For your example, where are the proceeds spent? If the charges are spent to improve everybody's garbage service, the rich people paying the surcharge are paying to improve the service for everybody; the rich are subsidizing the poor.
> turning ensuring a flat tax into a progressive tax is to spend the proceeds of the tax a way that benefits people equally.
How does the math on this work? If a regressive tax affects poor people disproportionately over rich people and you then turn around and spend the proceeds on something that benefits everyone equally, you've just done wealth redistribution from poor to rich, no?
In order to counterbalance the effect of a regressive tax you would need to spend the proceeds on something that benefits poor people more than rich people so the disproportionate negative impact is balanced by a disproportionate positive impact.
Arguably paying for the MTA may count as doing that, given that poorer folks are more likely to be using it than rich folks (especially now post-congestion tax). The congestion tax becomes a tax on what is now a luxury (driving a car in Manhattan) that is used to pay for a staple (public transit).
Rich people pay more on flat taxes than poor people do. For the VAT, they buy more stuff. For the OP's example, they pay for a higher class of garbage disposal. For the congestion charge, they pay it more often.
But they're still regressive taxes. Poor people spend a higher percentage of their income on stuff than rich people do. It's less in absolute terms, but more in relative terms.
In the cases we're discussing rich people pay more for increased access, so they're still exchanging money for something of value, not just paying more into the system for the sake of it. They get opportunities and benefits out of the toll/fee system that are not available to people who cannot afford to pay.
If the taxes earned from these transactions are then spent on things that also benefit the wealthy just as much as they do the poor, then the rich are double-dipping and poor people still end up net behind the wealthy. They lose access to something that previously was paid for out of property taxes in exchange for more revenue funding services that the wealthy are just as likely to use.
This model at least doesn't further exacerbate the regressiveness of the tax by only funding things used by the rich, but it doesn't restore balance.
That's why I say that the only way that you flip the tax to be progressive is if the proceeds benefit the poor disproportionately rather than benefiting everyone equally.
I hear you, but people with lower incomes who had to commute into Manhattan were far less likely to drive even before congestion pricing. Most of these folks are taking buses or trains.
When it comes to taxes, this is just one more use tax. If you drive in the NY area, you also pay tolls on roads your taxes paid for, and there's local tax on gasoline. Congestion pricing is not an especially unusual tax.
If poor people aren’t driving in then it means that they are not a source of the reduction in traffic. On the other hand, if only the wealthy drive in then are we saying the wealthy are price sensitive? That seems very unlikely! Someone is not driving in as much.
There's a very large lower-middle to upper-middle class that is going to be price sensitive.
And that's the point. Maybe I'm pretty well off but $15/day is still painful for me to drive in every day. But! Occasionally I REALLY need to drive my car in to the city, so instead of driving in five times/week I just drive in once/week. That's 80% fewer trips, a huge reduction.
The people who aren't driving as much is the large group of well-connected assholes who have been abusing the city's parking placard program for decades.
You'd sort of have to live in NYC and observe it first hand to know this, since for curious "reasons" (like the existence of NYP plates) the NYC media doesn't cover it this way either, but it's true.
The other group not driving as much is the people who are semi-indifferent to driving versus transit but the money tips them one way instead of the other. Which is tons of people.
I think your explanation makes the most sense. getting the slack out of the system and reducing corruption plus driving some marginally middleclass to opt for commuter rail because $50/week puts them under.
For many commuters, though, it would suck if you're used to driving in but now have to take the LIRR (and xfer at Jamaica or whatever) or now drive to the PATH station and take the commuter rail in.
Sure, but that's because you can "squeeze" the price on people. You can't squeeze the price on something where there is no negotiation or haggling.
If you can get your plumber to do the 400 job for 250, are you gonna say, nah, here man, take 500? Who would do that, only lonely people looking for some company. (pool boy/wealthy lady, waitress/guy with too much money)
Rich people will be able to drive anyways under “more equitable” systems like plate lottery. A family I know of in Beijing has 3 Mercedes with different number plates to be able to drive every day, for example.
Drivers already pay for their externalities via vehicle registration fees and gas taxes. And buses that aren't zero-emission should all be banned then, since their pollution enters my property otherwise.
- roads definitely count. > 90% of traffic on roads are private cars. Without that roads would be a lot smaller, require less maintenance, et cetera. They might not cost 90% less, but would cost a substantial fraction of that 90% less.
- parking is a massive subsidy. 30% of a typical American city is parking. This is a multi thousand dollar per year subsidy for car owners.
- gasoline infrastructure is subsidized, mostly indirectly.
The true cost of parking is about $300-$500/month across the ~5 parking spots per car that cities have. If you're not paying that, you're being subsidised. It wouldn't be so bad if each car only had 1 spot, but you need parking at home, at work, and at all of the businesses and entertainment venues cars frequent.
Crude oil contains more kerosene and diesel than gasoline, but we use more gasoline so refineries crack the kerosene to get more gasoline out of a barrel. With less gasoline demand, diesel would be cheaper.
It's rare to find city parking that's less than $3/hour. At $3/hour, if you work full-time in the office, you'll pay $500/month just for your office parking spot. So even if the rest of the ~5 parking spots you mentioned were all free, parking still isn't subsidized.
> The price will determine how poor you have to be to get forced to do without so the wealthy can benefit from an increase in quality of life.
Why should going without a car feel like it's being "forced" upon one?
Why should taking public transit represent a decline in QoL?
> but what happens when wealthy people want to cut another 5 minutes from their commute?
Why so cynical?
> Why should my taxes get used to build infrastructure that's going to be subjected to congestion pricing that prices me out of using that infrastructure?
From Wikipedia:
> The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) estimates $15 billion in available capital will be generated by bonding revenues from the tolls, which will be available to fund repairs and improvements to the subway, bus, and commuter rail systems.
Why would any city implement congestion pricing with the goal of funding more roads?
The price will determine how poor you have to be to get forced to do without so the wealthy can benefit from an increase in quality of life. In this article, a 1h trip dropping to 15m means a certain portion of people got priced out of the market. Is is the bottom 10%, 20%, 50%?
It's great if you're in the top percentage of income earners, but what happens when wealthy people want to cut another 5 minutes from their commute? Do they dial up the congestion pricing to push out a few more people?
I work every day at an honest job and pay taxes, but don't make a ton of money. Why should my taxes get used to build infrastructure that's going to be subjected to congestion pricing that prices me out of using that infrastructure?
IMO, the reality is the rich haven't been forced to pay their fair share for a half century, infrastructure has been massively underfunded, and now the solution is to force poor people to suffer the consequences for a system that's benefited the rich and increased wealth inequality to the point where it's going to break the system.
I'm not young, but I understand why millennials and younger don't want to work. They're not getting their fair share of infrastructure and productivity gains relative to what they're contributing. Who would want to participate in a system that's set up to cheat you for your entire life?