Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBlume | Hacker News Reader

The important thing about congestion pricing is that it makes mass transit competitive. There are buses you can take out of San Francisco into Oakland/Berkeley/El Cerrito right now, but they have to wait in the same traffic as everyone else, they suffer huge delays, and they're a miserable experience. With congestion pricing, those buses can move faster. With congestion pricing, you don't have buses with 50 people on them waiting behind a line of cars and SUVs each carrying a single driver.

View on HN

A dangerous thing about congestion pricing is that it incentivized government to run as a business that caters to its paying customers -- making premium product to serve only the wealthy, and ignore the working classes

Or they outsource the infrastructure development to private enterprise such as Transurban who then collects tolls for the next 20-30 years.

It is very much a case of those who can afford it pay while those that can't hit the back streets.

With modern systems it is possible to have variable pricing based on traffic flow. Mandate that the price is the lowest possible that still keeps the traffic moving at a certain rate. Even free in slack hours. That way you don't get almost empty toll roads with super high prices like I have seen in Mexico, Italy, etc. Hopefully we can try out some new systems to get rid of traffic jams and normalize travel times and not just always assume the system will be corrupted to serve a few.

Even that incentive may be good for society overall though. Efficient transportation is not a zero-sum game. There are currently people sitting in traffic who are willing & able to pay more not to sit in traffic.

By building systems which allow those people to pay more, then reinvesting that revenue in transportation improvements, everyone can benefit.

Of course we need to be careful not to create a premium-only product, but some balance should be achievable.

The issue is that any revenue generated by congestion pricing will be spent on unfunded pension liabilities, not transportation improvements.

There's no economically rational incentive to spend congestion pricing revenue on measures that reduce congestion. To maintain a constant revenue stream, congestion pricing has to rise as congestion decreases...like cigarette taxes congestion pricing is a tax scheme incentivized to become increasingly regressive.

That assumes your area has mass transit that's usable. In many areas, this is simply not the case. And no, taking three buses for three hours to go ten miles is not usable mass transit.

>The important thing about congestion pricing is that it makes mass transit competitive.

The other important thing about congestion pricing (as described in the article) is that it completely destroys privacy.

Can we save the hyperbole? It is no more privacy invasive than using toll roads or using a credit card anywhere.

A normal toll road might support a cash option. I feel like the kind of dynamic pricing here would be really onerous to handle if it was implemented with toll booths; that is, this type of pricing would require a transponder.

And, AFAIK, no transponder offers the ability to load cash onto it. (That is, transponder manufacturers/operators require an incursion of one's privacy, despite there being no technical or legal requirement for it. I'm in America, YMMV.)

Further, they have been shown to be used in spying (essentially) by cities[1] and even in political attacks[2].

Transponders are also a right PITA for anyone traveling. Boston, for example, has some really lightly marked toll roads now that are all transponder/camera-only; if you mistakenly drive a rental through those without realizing it (which is really easy), the rental car company charges ~$25 for the "service".

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/location-tracki...

[2]: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/christie-use-tollbooth...

You can purchase a New York EZPass in cash at places like Costco, and reload it with cash at any 7-11 or other Visa ReadyLink merchant.

You are required to register the EZPass to get a reload card in order to do this (which just requires you giving them your name and address, which they already have by taking a photo of your license plate), but if you are really averse to registration, you can just keep buying new EZPasses at retail, I guess.

> congestion pricing ... completely destroys privacy.

It need not: the toll module could contain "cash" (a cash-like analogue, like credit tokens you refill at 7-11) instead of an account number. Somehow such systems never get deployed though :-(.

People have become quite tolerant of it, too: they routinely drive around with vehicles bearing unique serial numbers and permit their driving licenses to have tons of unnecessary info (all that's really needed is a photo or fingerprint, what class of license you have, and possibly an expiration date).

But it's easy to design systems that don't leak secrets. I wonder if GDPR could be used as a cudgel for system design?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com