Research finds Stockholm's congestion pricing may have reduced childhood asthma

It used to be, "you don't like cars driving near you? Live somewhere else."

And it seems most people were fine with that, choosing to move to rural areas, where there were still cars, just less of them.

This localized tax is palatable to me because it is local and not national. But, it is still worth pointing out that the people who penalize behavior by taxing certain daily activities... may more so be in it for the money than for the social good.

If you disagree, that's fine. But when people are dying and having negative quality of living for so many more serious reasons, taxing congestion with a complex technological system is, in my opinion, deck chairs on the Titanic.

I hope that those who are greatly affected by it choose to move and bring their value elsewhere that welcomes them. Maybe Stockholm will feel their absence, maybe not.

Yes, but the point I have been trying to make is that, when we don't do science, we need to say we haven't done the science. Too much public information is pseudoscience without anyone saying to.

> ... but in the mean time -- Kids will stop getting asthma from car exhaust.

I understand that you're not getting this, but any number of times people have gone down the wrong path, let astray by pseudoscience, and calling it science all the while. As it happens, asthma is as likely to be caused by an overly clean environment as a polluted one -- observations support either conclusion.

"Is Cleanliness Among the Causes of Allergies?" : http://www.everydayhealth.com/allergies/cleaning-and-allergi...

Again, we cannot draw a conclusion without doing some science. My only point in bringing this to your attention is so you realize this issue is by no means settled, and no issue can be settled without science.

Environmental pollution is a serious problem, one I happen to think should be aggressively addressed. But if we offer a bogus reason, opponents in industry will use that bogus reason to fight a needed change.

Certainly -- I can name a dozen, each of them demonstrated using scientific methods. Asbestos. Ionizing radiation. Sunlight. Tobacco. And so forth. Each of these can be shown to cause health issues in vitro as well as in vivo -- using properly designed, scientific animal studies.

> So we're always at the mercy of spurious correlations.

Not for a scientifically educated population, which -- if it existed -- would reject this sort of pseudoscience.

A recent example of a shaky correlation that will doubtless shape public policy is this one:

Link: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/01/shootings-us-s...

Title: "Shootings in U.S. schools are linked to increased unemployment"

Quote: "A rigorous Northwestern University study of a quarter-century of data has found that economic insecurity is related to the rate of gun violence at K-12 and postsecondary schools in the United States. When it becomes more difficult for people coming out of school to find jobs, the rate of gun violence at schools increases." (Emphasis added.)

Note the terms/phrases "linked", "is related to" and the tendentious final sentence that tries to nail a nonexistent cause-effect relationship.

Obviously the original study cannot support this conclusion -- it reports a correlation, not a link, not a cause followed by an effect.

This is a practice called "data mining" -- underemployed researchers look for correlations between things, then publish papers describing the correlations, usually but not always with appropriate disclaimers ("Correlation is not causation, much more research is needed"), but irresponsible journalists then turn correlations into cause-effect relationships, as in this case.

In popular articles like this one, the word "linked" is often used to magically turn a correlation into a cause-effect relationship, because it means two things are bound together and move as one. Coincidences become pseudoscience.

> Consider cigarettes ...

Not a good example for your viewpoint. Rigorous, double-blind falsifiable animal studies demonstrate the carcinogenic properties of cigarettes.

> Yet, at some point, the observational evidence starts to pile up and one has to make decisions based on that.

Are you arguing that we should do without science? Without the benefit of science, the U.S. concluded that Eastern Europeans were less intelligent than others, and a resulting changed immigration policy condemned a huge number of Jews and others to death during the Nazi era. Later, more objective intelligence tests came to the opposite conclusion, and Mr. Yerkes, the responsible psychologist, wrote a confessional mea culpa that nearly no one read. This is just one example, there are many.

When we do without science, we should at least acknowledge that we're doing without science, and show an appropriate amount of skepticism about the conclusions we draw.

It's because the issue they're directly trying to tackle is congestion, not pollution (which is only being tackled as a secondary issue). Also, in Britain there are already high petrol taxes, they make up about half the price of fuel. In general it's a good thing, and it does discourage a completely car dependent society - people to live closer to the centre, closer to work, use alternatives like walking, cycling, public transport etc - but it's not a particularly direct way to tackle air pollution, or at least it doesn't tackle the particular spikes in air pollution you get in the cities. In order to tackle air pollution in London using only fuel tax, you'd have to make driving in the countryside ruinously expensive. So you get layered policy - medium fuel tax nationwide, congestion charge for the centre (where it is the biggest issue), and an air pollution charge, or limit, covering the whole city.

I do agree that often politicians are not that great at designing these things (the proposed air pollution charge in London is rather strangely designed for instance), and the complexity is partly incompetence, but it's also partly because the problem is complicated.

Sweden, where the OP example comes from, is a relatively small political entity. 10 million people represented by 349 members of parliament, who are elected through a proportional representation system.

We have high gasoline taxes. Actually a carbondioxide tax and an energy tax. It also attracts VAT. In 2016 the petrol (95) price was 13,02 SEK / litre ($1.50) of what 8,64 SEK ($0.99) was taxes.

However, in Stockholm it wasn't enough to combat emissions and congestion. So rather than penalising all car travel across the relatively sparsely populated country, it seemed to make sense to have a toll at the city borders.

Wouldn't that be the point? Low mpg cars are undesireable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...

City gasoline taxes would make sense, but they don't allow hour by hour control of congestion. I don't work in the city but I can drive in "for free" e.g late in the evening.

Higher tax for gasoline sold inside the city?

A lot of people commute, and would just fuel up outside the city limit. Others would make an extra trip out of the city only for that.