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Comment by nosuchthing | Hacker News Reader

..That would just route out of town traffic happening to pass through the freeway onto city streets which would be much worse for local residents.

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Vancouver doesn't have a freeway so all traffic goes through regular city streets.

What actually happens is that the level of traffic basically stays static, and people travel using other means.

The level of automobile traffic moving through the downtown core is unchanged since the 1960s even though the population and amount of people working there has massively increased.

Yeah. That's a good point. I was back in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. I took a taxi from the airport and at one point we were "delayed" for maybe 5 minutes and the driver said, "Ugh. Why is there traffic?"

That was funny considering I'm now living in LA. I was thinking, "You don't know traffic, buddy".

I do admit that the downtown core gets bottlenecked at certain times of the day. But it's better than traffic all the time at most hours of the day, like in LA.

Thank you Downs-Thomson paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox

Seoul actually removed an urban freeway. Result? Less traffic congestion:

http://grist.org/infrastructure/2011-04-04-seoul-korea-tears...

Go figure.

A few years ago, I5 running through Seattle was shut down for major repairs. All the pundits predicted carmageddon.

But when the time came, nothing happened. People adapted.

Vancouver is a much smaller region and has more of a cohesive topology versus the spare conglomeration of Los Angeles, which could be better described as the "downtown" of Southern California.

The majority of people living in Southern California commute via freeway, and generally many people commute 70 mile roundtrips across town or from the valley into LA, and than for nightlife or a trip to a favorite bookstore etc, another ~70 mile round trip across town is totally normal.

Until there's more jobs available near affordable housing, millions of people in LA will continue relying on the freeways. The train is being slightly expanded into downtown Santa Monica, but that's not really a big improvement for LA - what would help the most is better transit lines between the San Fernando Valley and LA.

That's a very good point.

I personally believe that all traffic (including surface streets) should pay congestion tolls when there would otherwise be a traffic jam. Again, spend all that money to subsidize mass transit which would benefit local residents without raising local taxes.

The result of congestion tolls: You still have a traffic jam, but the government just has more money to waste. People have to get to work. They have to drive to get there. Unless you're proposing a 24-hour train that goes to every business and every home in the area, you can't escape cars.

London, New York, Paris and Tokyo can't be replicated anywhere else then?

Those are very densely populated places. Los Angeles is something like 1/6th as dense as NYC. And if LA is anything like the rest of the United States, there are laws on the books preventing it from becoming dense enough to support mass transit like the cities you mention.

> And if LA is anything like the rest of the United States, there are laws on the books preventing it from becoming dense enough to support mass transit like the cities you mention.

Laws can be changed. (Otherwise, congestion tolls wouldn't be an issue, since they could never be imposed.)

I always wondered about this. There must exist a price after which people will take their daily commune into account when negotiating for a job.

This could have multiple outcomes:

- Change the schedule so that not everyone is on the road the same time;

- More remote work;

- Higher salaries when you have to drive in peak hours.

You don't have less vehicules; just less at the same time.

It also makes carpooling more attractive since you can split the cost (or it might be waived).

> - Change the schedule so that not everyone is on the road the same time

This was actually what the former Communist authorities from my Eastern European country did back in the late '70s- the'80s, when public transport in the capital city was like this: http://www.ap-arte.ro/fckupload/82_1632%20april%20Tram_super... and http://jurnalul.ro/thumbs/big/2009/06/05/trasee-interminabil... .

Really, congestion pricing would be a vanishingly small increase to the cost of commuting, given the already-existing costs in terms of money and lost time that goes along with doing it (by car, at least.)

Edit: good read: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...

The price is called your sanity.

Just raise the tolls until the traffic jam goes away. If the revenue is used to build better public transit, most people won't need a car to get to work.

A "24-hour train that goes to every business and every home in the area" is not necessary to achieve this. It is very easy to live without a car in many of the cities which implement congestion tolls, and they don't have 24-hour train service straight to everyone's front door. Trains or buses within walking distance of most people's homes and workplaces, which operate from say 5AM to midnight, would be sufficient, and that is exactly what most great cities in the world have.

If you put high congestion tolls on the freeways, people will just move their commutes to the smaller arterial roads that go between cities and jam them up. If you put congestion tolls on those, people will commute through residential areas. If you put congestion tolls on every street in the 500 square mile surface area of Los Angeles, you'll be voted out of office.

If you widen the roads or add lanes, making commutes less miserable, people will move farther from work where it's cheaper and maintain their previous misery level. In other words, traffic volume (demand) will always rise to meet the available amount of road (supply).

That's only true if driving is the only way to get to work. If people can get to work on public transit, and it costs less than paying the congestion charge, they will use public transit.

In other words, the congestion charge is a constraint on traffic volume, just as road supply is, because it changes the equilibrium of supply and demand.

It isn't like this is a hypothetical experiment that hasn't been tried. It is a fact that people take public transit when it is easier or cheaper than driving. It has happened in cities around the world.

Choice where I live: (1) Live in inner city with high taxes, high crime, poor schools, and nonfunctional govt, but have access to mass transit that doesn't go anywhere useful and takes an hour to get there. (2) Live in the burbs with lower taxes, good schools, low crime, and (sorta) functional govt but no mass transit. At least with choice #2 I can easily get wherever I typically need to within 30 minutes in my car.

Expanding mass transit isn't going to fix the reasons why people aren't interested in living in the cities hereabouts. It will just add to the subsidies already flowing in to prop them up.

This isn't a convincing argument because not every city is like yours.

High tolls just turn roads into empty streches of wasted infrastructure.

So don't raise the tolls that high. Just raise them high enough that they're moderately congested, but not excessively.

Then the wasted infrastructure can turned into something useful

Most people do not have a choice as to when they work. They don't have flexible hours. So now you're just slapping an extra tax on them for no reason.

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