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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

Well its pretty regressive as far as taxes go. Plus, now even if gentrification doesn't price you out of your own neighborhood you might get priced out of your own road if you happen to be between residential and commercial zones.

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1. It's not a tax any more than buying a ticket for your local government run public transport system is a tax.

2. Why do people always jump to thinking road pricing will be extremely expensive? Outside of rush hours, it would probably still be free almost everywhere, and it should offset other road financing costs motorist - rich and poor - currently pay.

I'm not sure it's been studied, but I'd wager that every tax dollar spent on subsidizing public transit (or possibly even making it free) would deliver several dollars of gain. Physical mobility is one of the best predictors of economic mobility[0], and I imagine the poor would be able to find better jobs with fewer economic hurdles put in front of them.

[0] http://www.nascsp.org/data/files/csbg_publications/issue_bri...

Depends on where. In NYC, almost zero low-income commuters travel by car. Wealthier households are more likely to own cars and to commute by private automobile. Here, congestion pricing would be a progressive tax. I imagine the opposite might be the case in LA.

NYC is also a better example of bus lanes -- the Lincoln Tunnel has the XBL traveling eastbound in the morning, and it cuts my commute time by about 20 minutes vs. driving in.

I wonder how well it would work to price it based on income? I love the idea of doing that with speeding fines and the like. Perhaps doing it for the roads wouldn't be bad either. Call it value-based pricing.

Once you adjust everything for income, you obviate the entire purpose of having an income. If a raise doesn't actually get you anything because your expense are pegged to your income, you don't have an incentive to get a raise. Society runs on incentives for performance.

Well OP isn't suggesting adjusting everything for income - just this one thing.

Definitely. One criterion I'd use is necessity vs luxury. In many places, having a car to get to work is necessity.

And I'd add that I think the notion that society runs on incentives for performance is a very narrow view. How many people here picked software as a profession because it would maximize lifetime income, versus it being a thing that they really loved? It's always some of both, surely. And more.

So is a gas tax if you assume the only way to move around is petroleum based. Likewise this assumption of yours is based on the fact that people can't get around except via vehicles.

However, it could be done such that residents are exempt and even strayers will only get charged after X trips.

The appropriate tax for funding roads ought to be miles driven times weight of vehicle and is progressive as weight increases (the heavier a vehicle is the more wear and tear they cause to roads... and the wear and tear is not linear to weight). This type of tax would also prevent electric vehicles from avoiding taxes to fund roads.

Edit: Funding road maintenance. Perhaps there should be another way to determine who pays for and funds new roads.

Yet the usefulness to society of a vehicle is usually tied directly to its size/weight.

An 18-wheeler isn't on a sightseeing trip; it's transporting something of value somewhere that can't get from A to B otherwise.

Any given sedan on the other hand is typically transporting a single person that can either use different modes of transportation or simply opt not to go from A to B.

Why should the 18-wheeler be taxed progressively higher? It ultimately generates more tax revenue already than the sedan, and there are no realistic alternatives at this point in time.

There is nothing altruistic about commercial shipping, it typically serves the needs of consumers. They could just as easily choose not to consume as they choose not to take a sightseeing trip from points A to B. It is most sensible to charge road users based on the wear and tear they cause to the road, and this means trucks would get charged quite a lot. Good. It's a business, and the cost of those roads absolutely should be communicated back to the wallet of the consumer benefiting from the ability to quickly ship product.

Charge by a multiple of the number of unoccupied seats in the car. 2 seater with 1 person? 1x fee. SUV that seats 7 with one person? 6x fee. Motorcycle is free!

I am not entirely comfortable with that. There are legitimate reasons someone may be driving a larger vehicle by themselves, and what you suggest seems a lot like trying to make it a moral punishment, assuming that everyone who has unoccupied seats is unnecessarily luxurious.

Ultimately I like the idea of using weight. We have weigh-in-motion scales already, and the relationship between weight and road damage is well understood.

The price is there to reduce congestion, not road damage per se. You want to charge by congestion causes, which is probably proportional to vehicle size, not weight.

More broadly, trying to figure out a priori what is and is not useful for society is pointless. Moralizing economic decisions never works.

Just charge people for the costs they incur and the optimally beneficial configuration will emerge on its own.

The overhead and transaction costs to calculate and collect the tax can't be overly burdensome. Once a year, at tab renewal time, the vehicle should be brought in for an odometer reading and the miles put one over the previous year should then be multiplied by it's weight or maximum rated hauling weight (or some formula using both) to determine the amount of tax owed.

With multiple people in the car you get to split the cost.

All user fees are regressive --- yet we don't seem to have a problem with the rich and the poor paying the same for a beer or a gallon of milk.

The kind of thinking that concludes that it's somehow wrong to charge two people with differing incomes the same amount of money for the same good is the kind of thinking that taken to its logical conclusion leads us to forcible leveling of material wealth and central economic planning. The experience of the 20th century demonstrates that this approach does not work.

> All user fees are regressive --- yet we don't seem to have a problem with the rich and the poor paying the same for a beer or a gallon of milk.

It's almost like some purchases function differently than others, and reasonable people might choose situationally varying models/incentives when considering social policy decisions.

>gallon of milk.

What? We subsidize food all the time.

We do, and I can imagine subsidizing road miles for the needy too. But the price remains the same and we apply the subsidy to the supply side!

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