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In your example:

  * there are about 100 families within a mile or so of you
  * they need to spend an hour or so to drive into the city
  * they can already barely afford a car and "to keep the lights on"

To me, this screams out for car-pooling, or some other shared transportation solution, as it would be better for the environment and cheaper for them.

Also, economies are complex systems. If low income people can't afford to commute into the city, the jobs wouldn't disappear, as the work wouldn't disappear. So someone closer who was previously unemployed might get the job. Or in response to the shortage of workers, the wages of these jobs might be raised.

> To me, this screams out for car-pooling

Didn't someone mention on HN a startup that intends to do for taxis what airbnb is doing for hotels? This could be at least part of a solution.

Poor families like that are probably doing shift work spread across the day, so only a third of them are trying to get into town at any given time (and another third is coming back).

Also, just from a practical standpoint, telling some people "your jobs won't disappear... other people will have them!" is, uh, problematic. At best.

There are cities that have trouble finding workers at the lower wage end of the spectrum because the cost of living for those people is just too high. A good example is Santa Barbara California. The poor are taxed enough already. If you think employers are somehow going to cover this cost, see how anxious they would be to pay for it directly.

Perhaps customers and employees should be treated as a form of pollution, just another toxic resource used by business. Wouldn't that justify business having to pay?? If given only enough wealth to survive, aren't we saying that employees have no function except to work and consume?

How far do we have to tax people before it becomes institutionalized slavery?

Cars have been a part of the American dream for a long time. Unless/until our cities are made where everyone can easily function without them, pricing some people out of them equates to a serious impairment and loss of freedom.

Taxing things that impact society isn't always the answer. Try taxing children and see how far that goes.

The wages of city employees keep going up more than that of the poor in the communities they "serve". What do some cities do to fuel that? Bring in more people, more box stores, tax it all.

Perhaps there is a fundamental conflict of interest in the way some city/county/state/national taxes and spending are handled?

They are living as best they can in their current circumstances. Local maxima. If no free parking meant better public transit, they wouldn't have to struggle to keep the car running.

Of all the many possible subsidies the government could or does provide, do you really think free parking is the most beneficial?

There is NO way you are going to cover every semi-rural and suburban area in the US with public transportation even during business hours (much less during the shift periods of lower wage earners). The cost of free parking is trivial compared to what that would cost.

What do you mean by

>One social engineering event per conversation, please.

Wasn't the central 'event' of the article social engineering?

The central point of the article seemed to be the assertion that people who are that poor and should not be living so far from their place of employ would be better off if we did this. Yes, they would lose their jobs if they stayed where they are.

But the taxes on parking would discourage borderline-poor from owning cars in the city, which in turn would bring down housing costs in the city, making it possible for your neighbors to live more cheaply and healthfully by biking/busing to their now nearby job.

Yes, there would be hardship involved. But the alternative is waiting until fossil fuels rise to such a cost that they can't afford to drive to the city anyway. We've then destroyed their chance of earning a livelihood by chasing their short-term comfort.

I'm done here, but let me explain.

Too often the pattern in "what do do about problem X" is to write an essay espousing that we do "A"

Usually these essays gloss over, ignore, or belittle side-effects because a discussion of all the edge cases and results doesn't make a good essay (or a good book). In addition, most things in life are complicated, and authors need to make a succinct point, quickly.

The problem is that what makes for good essays, what makes for good political talk, very rarely is as clear-cut as the essayists make out to be. So along comes some schmuck (I volunteer for this role in my story) and points out the half-dozen or so unstated implications of A.

No problem, the supporters say, we'll just add B and C in there. Now, that fixes all your concerns.

Well yes, but are we talking about A, or A, B, and C. You're just adding in more stuff. Because now we need to talk about the implications of B and C, which you probably haven't thought that much about and are probably worse than the ones for A.

"No problem," folks say, because when we do B and C, obviously D, E, and F come along. They're needed to take care of C.

This can continue ad infinitum, with each addition of terms being less and less thought out, and the implications more and more unpleasant.

The thesis of the article, if I understood it, was that the cost to society for parking in the city (and he seemed to be saying the suburbs as well, although I might have misread) outweighs the benefits. A tax, or elimination of some parking would produce more good than bad.

I take issue with that conclusion, although I grant his premise -- costs of stuff keep going up -- to be true. I take issue with it for many reasons: cost to the rural poor and middle-class, cost to the urban poor, view of the problem from an academic standpoint instead of a practical one, using a long-term problem without clear costs (fossil fuel issues) to directly hurt people living today. There are all kinds of reasons I take issue with his thesis. In addition, the premise was trite. Mundane. The conclusion I found supercilious. It was just really bad. I'm sure the author is a great guy and wonderful and all, and I agree with his cause, but that doesn't mean I have to like this essay. I don't.

Some things are really simple. For example, ALL subsidies are economically harmful.

The mortgage tax credit is a great example of this. It promoted an increase in the average home price because people without home mortgages where subsidizing those with them. It also reduced the value of existing homes because they where built before the increase in average size etc etc. It destabilized the economy by promoting excessive borrowing... (why pay down your mortgage with an effective rate of 3.5% when you can invest in other things etc.)

The people that benefited from it loved it. However, if you had just given the same people that money without the subsidy they would have spent it on other things and been happier.

There are times when subsidies seem to create short term benefit, however it's always more effective to tax what you don't like than subsidize what we do like or simply have the government build it outright.

For example, ALL subsidies are economically harmful.

You are overstating your case. In a completely free market, public goods (goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludible) will be under provisioned, since people will have an incentive to freeload of the people who do pay. Subsidies for public goods, or even private goods with a positive external benefit can (if the level is chosen correctly) prevent this under provisioning.

Granted, parking (and owning a home) are private goods, so the point is moot for the purposes of this article and your example.

A true public good (non-rivalrous and non-excludible) would in effect need to be completely subsidized. The closest real world example would be pure research which in the real world is paid for by the government or non profit seeking organizations. IMO, GPL code is close, however it is somewhat rivalrous in that only a few branches will be maintained, and insuring code which best supports your organization is in the main branch has value. EX: Google does not want an add blocker to be installed in Firefox by default.

However, that's not what is generally considered a subsidy. A targeted tax break on wind farms is the the class of activity I am talking about. When governments directly provide services there is little incentive to increase production beyond what is useful and significant incentive to cut back production. However, with farm (food) subsidies there is by definition overproduction which prevents non subsidized actors from competing and distorts consumption.

PS: Thanks, I should have been more clear.

> A true public good (non-rivalrous and non-excludible) would in effect need to be completely subsidized.

Not necessarily. Please see "The private provision of public goods via dominant assurance contracts" ( http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf)

Wait, Assume that all agents are anti free-riders. Whether from moral prohibition or for some other reason none of these agents will ever knowingly free ride on another. Assume, however, that each agent is unaware that the others are anti free-riders.

I am a free rider when possible so his logic falls apart. People make irrational choices all the time so charites are capable of gathering relativly small amounts of money (total from all of them is 2.2% GDP and there are a lot of such orginizations). However, there is a reason expencive things like building ITER are not based on cheritable donations.

Your previous comments provided an interesting (if unnecessarily polemical) counterpoint, but you've lost me with this one. Exploring the potential ramifications of a policy change is the very reason for discussing it, and the point of an article like this is to spur discussion. But in this comment you seem to go beyond criticizing the particular article, to criticizing the very idea of suggesting a policy change. You seem to be saying, "nobody should ever propose changing anything, because whatever change they propose, I can probably think of negative consequences that they didn't mention." Presumably that's not what you meant, but I can't guess what you did mean.

    But the taxes on parking would discourage borderline-poor
    from owning cars in the city, which in turn would bring
    down housing costs in the city, making it possible for
    your neighbors to live more cheaply and healthfully by
    biking/busing to their now nearby job.

This seems a bit backwards to me. If parking costs substantially more in the city, wouldn't some of the people commuting into the city look to relocate closer to their job? Wouldn't this increase in demand result in an increase in the cost of living in the city?

The point isn't to reduce prices, the point is to make sure that prices accurately reflect costs. In this case, prices do not reflect the cost of parking, which lets some people get away with not paying for land in the city, even though they use land in the city.

If this increases prices, that's good, because it lets people more accurately understand the cost of their habitation and transportation.

Alternately, if that's bad, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why inaccurate pricing results in more wealth overall.

One solution used in Britain is park-and-ride schemes: people drive to the edge of the city, park their car, then take a bus/train into the city center.

I think what's more relevant is the fact that the motorized way of living simply cannot continue forever because it's not based on any kind of sustainable economy and given that, the whole thing is going to come down crashing either now and slowly, or later but with a big bang.