The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain

The streets were never free. We paid for it with our tax money. (Not to mention our 22 trillion dollar public debt)<p>I don’t think people expect streets to be free in the same way you don’t expect the police department to be free, the fire department to be free, public schools, etc.<p>In any case, my point is, we paid for the streets with our tax money and our debt, so don’t masquerade this as some kind of “economic reckoning” where the people are FINALLY going to have to pay for those roads the government’s been giving away for free for so long.<p>Because that’s just not true.

I post something like this every time the congestion pricing subject comes up. We have congestion pricing in Minneapolis &#x2F; St Paul and it just works. If I&#x27;m in a hurry, I have the option to choose to use the priced lane. We&#x27;re rolling it out to all of the major highways (it&#x27;s on 3 of them so far). I wish we had it on more lanes on all highways already, because what is the point of having a 60mph road if most of the time you are barely going 20mph, or trip lengths are otherwise completely unpredictable? It&#x27;s also particularly important to people who might have to travel to multiple jobs, or people with children in school&#x2F;day care, when consistency in travel time is extremely valuable to them.<p>There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. You just have to have the price mechanism in place to signal it. People will figure it out and adapt once you have implemented congestion pricing. Practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems.<p>Importantly, you have to resist the temptation to set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change and basically a bad tax. (E.g., the true cost of congestion spurs demand for apartments and transit options near the city center, which in turn reduces traffic congestion.) Also important that it is purely congestion pricing and not resulting in crony government. Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur subsequently.<p>I am excited for NYC to pilot this and hope it becomes a success for that city.

When I worked in a major city I would go on a half-joke rant anytime someone brought up traffic, parking,or obesity. If I were somehow the king of a major city, I would have a giant parking lot on the outside, and ban all cars. You could buy day passes if you need access to the roads to move or something, but it would be discouraged. People would walk more, and be healthier, The air would be higher quality, and most importantly you wouldn&#x27;t have to wait to cross the street when you&#x27;re walking to lunch.

It&#x27;s sad to see congestion pricing in America. I had hoped that the long-lived cultural freedom of driving would keep it at bay for longer, but I guess not anymore.<p>I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip.<p>Public transport is not a suitable option. Instead of 45 minutes one way, the combined trip time balloons to 2 hours (4 hours to and back) due to poor proximity to train stations, and bus connections that require waiting.<p>Every time I drive, I feel less free to move around my city. I feel less free to visit my friends and family. &#x27;Freedom of movement&#x27; isn&#x27;t some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.

As a NYC resident for 11 years now I see this as a necessary transition. The streets aren&#x27;t getting any wider unless we do away with street parking. I don&#x27;t hear anyone rushing to suggest that option, although it&#x27;s easy to forget there was a time when the streets weren&#x27;t lined with cars - but horse shit. So we trade one inconvenience for a slightly less inconvenient sight (I own and park my car on the street dealing with the inconvenience of alternate side parking twice weekly). The focus really needs to be on improving the efficiency of the MTA, reducing distance between trains with more efficient switching is big part of that. The inefficiencies of the trains and improved efficiencies of app based rideshare dispatch is what is pulling ridership from the trains the most.

I think Emily Badger sort of misses the point. A scarcity tax is completely different from a user benefit fee for road maintenance. For public goods, it’s a <i>good</i> thing for the government to subsidize the fixed costs of the public good. But where there is traffic, the road is not entirely a public good anymore and we are already paying the cost of congestion, but the price is in the form of time and inconvenience rather than dollars. A congestion charge converts the time price into a monetary price. It makes sense to charge a congestion charge because it is merely harnessing a price that drivers already pay and using it to improve the city.<p>The same is true for land value taxes. Tenants pay the scarcity price for land anyway (in the form of land rent) regardless of the level of tax, so the government might as well harness that energy and use it to benefit all the people instead of a few.

All markets have congestion controls, they&#x27;re called prices. The only reason roads and traffic don&#x27;t function well is because they don&#x27;t have prices. Traffic on roads* is the 21st equivalent of Soviet breadlines.<p>*(particularly in the US where they are cross subsidized the most)

We already have a kind of congestion pricing, in some sense. If you plan a trip during peak hours, it costs you more time. It’s pretty typical, then, to plan leisure trips into or out of the city based around when traffic will be light.<p>It’s just that this cost in time isn’t distributed nearly as ideally as it could be. It costs an individual the same amount whether they take a bus or a car with four people or four cars with one person each. If we tax per-vehicle instead, that pushes people not only to shape their travel times more ideally, but to also use more efficient forms of transportation.<p>So long as this is used as a means to shape travel to be more efficient and not just as a way to gobble up revenue, it might be alright. I think toll bridges&#x2F;roads are mostly this way, where they’re free in the dead of night when few are on the roads, so I’m hopeful.

The thing that this article doesn&#x27;t discuss is the fact that Uber spent $2M on lobbying to help push through congestion pricing. [0]<p>&gt;“Over the past several years, we’ve been proud to work with a diverse coalition to fight for comprehensive congestion pricing, and we’re excited to see Albany take action to reduce congestion and invest in mass transit,” said Harry Hartfeld, an Uber spokesman.<p>&gt;Roughly $1 million went to some of the top city lobbyists, including Stu Loeser, a onetime senior aide to former Mayor Mike Bloomberg.<p>&gt;Another $700,000 went to fund the Fix Our Transit coalition’s ad campaign that targeted undecided Albany ­politicians.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-through-congestion-pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;uber-spent-2m-to-help-push-thr...</a>

It&#x27;s weird to see someone calling roads free when I give the government 25% of my paycheck every month to pay for things like roads.<p>We can&#x27;t even pass a tax in my town to give necessary funds for road repairs beyond the most basic. I wonder how something like that would fair.

Traffic itself is a symptom of roads being free in the first place. Charge drivers exactly what it costs to maintain them plus a small profit and suddenly there will be little traffic and no major potholes. Taxpayers will get all that money back too, and they can either spend it on driving fees or they can save the money if they use roads less.

I wonder if we (as a society) in the not too distant future can make driving embarrassing?<p>My hope is that if someone sits alone in their big SUV stuck in traffic, pedestrians, cyclists and others will look at that person disparagingly. Like how people look at dog owners not picking up their dogs feces, cigarette smokers or how they look at obese people buying ice cream... Or how hypochondriacs who go to the doctor when they don&#x27;t need to are shamed in countries with socialized health care.<p>Maybe it is not nice to use shame as a weapon, but it is a powerful one. We have about ten years to completely change how our societies work before it is to late. All options should be on the table.

I&#x27;m disappointed that motorcycles&#x2F;scooters and lane splitting aren&#x27;t brought into the conversation more when discussions about traffic congestion come up. It feels like a win&#x2F;win for nearly everyone to promote two wheeled transportation and allow them to split lanes or filter through traffic. Those who do not want to ever ride on two wheels still get the benefit of others doing so and essentially taking themselves out of the traffic queue. There&#x27;s also been studies about how allowing lane splitting&#x2F;filtering are ultimately safer for the riders too.

This will be absolutely necessary when cars are self-driving. Instead of parking they will just drift around the block when you buy something for example. Also there will be empty Uber cars drifting around to be close if somebody needs it. On top you won&#x27;t worry so much about traffic if you can sleep in you car or do something else.<p>Driving was always limited by the costs of somebody sitting behind the wheel. Look how congested many cities of third world countries are, low labor costs for cab drivers are a factor there.

A few comments have mentioned different levels or road damage caused by different vehicles, with heavier vehicles causing more damage.<p>How much does tire pressure matter in that? If two vehicles have the same weight and number of tires taking the load, evenly distributed among the tires, but one of them runs with higher tire pressure, it will have a proportionately smaller contact area, and so a proportionately higher ground pressure.<p>In general, a tire supporting weight W at pressure P will have a contact area A such that P x A = W.<p>I&#x27;d expect total road damage to depend on both area and pressure. Pressure would determine whether you are going to damage the surface, and area would determine how big an area will damaged.<p>For causing cracks that lead to potholes, I&#x27;m not sure area matters as much as the pressure, so am curious about lighter vehicles with high pressure tires.<p>My car has a pressure of 32 psi. Back when I was a regular bike commuter [1] my bike had a pressure of 110 psi.<p>Wikipedia has a nice table of the ground pressure of several things [2]. Some excerpts, in psi:<p><pre><code> 4 Diedrich D-50 T2 drilling rig 8 Human male 15 M1 Abrams tank 25 1993 Toyota 4Runner 25 Adult horse 30 Passenger car 40 Mountain bike 90 Road racing bike 470 Stiletto heel </code></pre> A bit of Googling suggests delivery trucks are between 85 and 110 psi for most fleets, and around 110 seems to be normal for big rig trucks, too.<p>So...trucks being more damaging than cars is quite believable. More interesting is different kinds of passenger cars. Honda&#x27;s recommended tire pressure for a Civic and a CR-V, e.g., are largely the same range. Does this mean a CR-V is not much more damaging than a Civic?<p>And where do bikes with high psi fit in? The have the pressure of a delivery truck, but have a much smaller contact area. Is there some minimal area needed before even high pressure damages the road, so bikes are OK? Or is it just that because the areas is smaller it takes longer to cause enough cumulative damage for people in cars to notice?<p>[1] when I lived in flat Cupertino. That died when I move to Seattle and found that fat people on bikes don&#x27;t get along well with hills.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ground_pressure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ground_pressure</a>

I think about this a lot when considering China&#x27;s extensive High-Speed Rail network. China&#x27;s government operates it at a loss, and the capital expense must have been enormous, even with their wages. But the government had enough social good and political reasons to bite the cost.<p>The USA and our interstate system are the same way. The cost was enormous, the maintenance burden continues to outpace the money we make on gas tax and registration, yet we had political and social good reasons for building it. The interstate was a massive investment, and investments of similar scale could give us a HSR network at least on major corridors. But for some reason, we have a social good attitude towards highways and a social waste attitude towards subsidizing rail.

I am impressed with the good title. Article speaks to unspoken history of purposefully hidden transportation costs that promote car sales and urban sprawl to this day. Bring back the electric streetcar

I mean infrastructure is what everyone points to when one asks “what am I even paying taxes for?” Often even the short hand of “roads”.

In Tokyo, there is no congestion pricing, but instead there is a ban on larger trucks loading&#x2F;unloading during many hours of the day. Everyone from the businesses to the truckers and retail workers tolerate it and work night shifts (often without overtime) because the culture (for better or worse) emphasizes the needs of society over the individual.<p>Would such a policy work well if brought over to the states? Given the amount of tangentially connected regulations and special interests such a strict ban may just increase prices and make things worse.

&gt; Local laws require off-street parking from businesses and housing developers, who pass on the construction cost of it to tenants and customers who may not drive at all.<p>I&#x27;d love to see the tenents stay in business with a dirt road out front. Or a pasture that no cars can pass through.<p>They&#x27;re not doing us any favors. They&#x27;re keeping themselves in business.

A wild idea already decades past it&#x27;s prime:<p>in addition to the odometer, include a chronometer: something like &quot;hours driving above 5mph&quot;. Then tax on a combination of those.<p>That seems like it would have been be able to implicitly price congestion into a progressive use-based tax.

Congestion does not necessarily mean a shortage of roads. Sometimes roads make congestion worse. Braess&#x27; Paradox has shown to occur as often as not.

This is all kinds of wrong, the problem could be tackled much better, for example most companies have no incentives to hire workers near their premises (or relocating them to make it so), meaning they get no benefit if they emplooyes have a 10 minute commute over a 2 hour commute; car companies have no incentive to build smaller cars, small single-person cars should be far more common but instead we are stuck with hundreads of people buying the biggest car they can get a loan for.

This is understandable for high density urban areas but makes no sense for most of the country.

Congestion pricing is an admission that the fuel taxes are being used for other purposes than roads.

It&#x27;s interesting that Americans (as we see in most of the comments) feel so entitled to let taxes pay for their right to take their car everywhere, but feel so strongly against having taxes pay for universal healthcare.<p>In Europe, we do the opposite.