Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

The main problem with central planners (and I believe most transportation planner would classify as one) is that they believe they must know the answer to everything from a centralized standing point.

Indeed cruising for a little bit while the driver does a quick errant might be better than parking when it's pricey. We do that all times when there is more than a driver in the car.

However, it feels arrogant to me to decide that when self-driving is a thing the cars will just clog the roads cruising while the drivers aren't there.

This ignores a bunch of things. Here is an unexhaustive list: a. The risk of collisions is greater driving than parked. b. Autonomous ride-sharing services would probably be a thing in this scenario (be it running some errands while the owner is busy or just deployed full-time like this). c. There might cheaper denser far away garages that the vehicle could just immediately head to thanks to availability awareness. d. It is very unlikely that the auto sector would program vehicles to clog traffic like this on purpose (though someone hacking their car to keep running nearby might happen). e. Parking in San Francisco is very expensive. However, San Francisco is not the only city in the world and cities are vasty different from one another. Usually, for example, they are not islands and vehicles could drive, say, 10min to a parking lot on the nearest city (maybe giving a ride to someone else in the way).

I'm not saying that we should not consider doom scenarios, but reality has shown it most central planners fear too many things that don't happen often. We all use the Internet today, and it is relatively easy to fire a few threatening messages to people around the power to terrorize them (and get away with it). However, it just barely happens if you count in statistics.

Plus we can just tax empty vehicles that are driving around.

(similar to how we charge a fee to leave an empty vehicle in a public space)

It's bizarre how difficult we choose to make easy problems.

Please don't. Taxing is evil and has unintended consequences.

Just charge for road use instead.

* For reference on unintended consequences of taxation I recommend Frédéric Bastiat's "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen" essay. Link: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html (you can just jump to 'Taxes' or - better - read the whole thing as it is very interesting and not that long).

He's more recognized for the Broken window fallacy/parable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

>Just charge for road use instead.

They do, through taxes. Regional monopolies like inexpensive roads and transportation benefit everyone, even if you're not the one physically driving on it.

But they do not benefit everyone equally. Everyone benefits from inexpensive food; should the government make food tax-funded? If I mainly eat lentils, I would prefer to pay for what I use. If I eat lots of beef steak, I would be very happy to have others subsidise me.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/2/a-thousand-hidd...

1. The cost of a dead-end residential street mainly benefits the people that live there. Everybody else just pays for it.

2. A truck drives down the road hauling cases of beer. Part of the cost of this trip is paid for via general funds. Everybody contributes a small $X to the truck's journey. Person A drinks a case of beer, so they get 1 case of beer per $X. Person B doesn't drink beer, so they get nothing for their $X.

3. Person A commutes by car to their job every week day on Highway H. Person B walks to work and never drives. Both people pay $X for Highway H, but only one of them uses it directly.

These costs are so diffused that people assume taxation is a fair way to slice it up. The real fair way:

1. The people that live on the dead-end street pay for the dead-end street.

2. The cost of the truck's journey gets factored into the price of the beer. Person A will have to pay the inclusive price to buy a case of beer. Person B pays nothing, giving them $X back to spend elsewhere.

3. Person A will have to pay to drive on Highway H. Person B saves $X. Person A thinks maybe it is smarter to not drive so much.

>Everyone benefits from inexpensive food; should the government make food tax-funded?

Yes, and they do. What do you think agricultural tax-subsidies are?

Also the strawman problems you pose just to solve are a bit absurd, for reasons that I mentioned before about the nature of regional monopolies, and the fact that road costs are already covered at different levels of the government.

>What do you think agricultural tax-subsidies are?

A good example of failed policy.

>Also the strawman problems you pose just to solve are a bit absurd, for reasons that I mentioned before about the nature of regional monopolies, and the fact that road costs are already covered at different levels of the government.

Not "strawmen problems" - concrete examples of mismatched cost and use, which you do not address.

> Person A commutes by car to their job every week day on Highway H. Person B walks to work and never drives. Both people pay $X for Highway H, but only one of them uses it directly.

You seem to have completely forgotten about second-order effects. Person B still benefits tremendously from the logistical effects of Highway H on shipping, social mobility, government force projection capability (the original reason for the Interstate Highway System in the US), and many other factors.

Those second-order effects can still exist when the cost-of-use is covered directly.

“Just charge for road use instead.”

I am fine if the road fees are proportional to income. Otherwise we are creating a world where public infrastructure is only available to people with plenty of money.

Road fees should be proportional to the use of the road. If two people eat the same type of hamburger, why should one pay more per calorie than someone else? It’s the same hamburger, providing the same exact nutritional value. It’s obscenely unfair that two citizens of a country are charged differently for the same exact service. It seems that is a distinct violation of the equal protection clause.

That's probably why it's better to finance public roads through taxation. We certainly shouldn't strive towards a world where infrastructure is only affordable to some people.

Isn't that how income taxes work? Two people pay a proportionally different amount based on their income?

I think the earlier poster is stating that an equal % tax is regressive against low income folks (sales tax being the classic regressive tax). Lower income earners pay a higher percentage of their income towards sales taxes than rich folks.

> It’s obscenely unfair that two citizens of a country are charged differently for the same exact service.

I consider "fairness" in government to include optimizing for equity over equality, because even before one considers the moral aspects, a government treating everyone exactly the same is fundamentally bad for social stability.

A tax is just a fee administered by a public agency.

Or correspondingly, a fee is a tax that is administered by a private entity.

In the end, they're the same thing.

A "user pays" model accomplishes price signaling. A tax does not.

No. There is a big, big difference between a economically productive use of the common spaces and this unproductive abuse.

Unproductive abuse is a DDOS attack against the infrastructure that inhibits economically productive use of the space.

Cities should tax unproductive use at a prohibitively high rate to stop this DDOS attack.

But who defines “productive?” I might consider someone going to work as “productive,” but someone going to a friend’s house as “unproductive.” Productive is really a matter of opinion unless you want to consider economics; a homeless person riding a bus generates no income for anyone — so should they pay more to ride the bus? Unless they are actually going somewhere to engage in commerce, that would be, by definition, unproductive. Going to a friend’s house is equally unproductive from an economic sense. Who gets to be the arbiter of “productive?” That gets to be a dangerous slippery slope.

The city government.

Governments exist to define and allocate common resources.

> Just charge for road use instead.

Now this would have unintended consequences.

Basically this would make transportation proportionally more expensive for poor people.

Like food and water are?

Yeah, like food and water are, so why add to the burden and make it worse?

Both of those are tax-subsidized. One as agriculture, the other as a regional monopoly, precisely because of the price discrimination that would result without it.

This is certainly something that happen already. I'm driving, SO needs to drop off a letter, or pick up coffee, or some other sub-5 minute task. You can bet I'm going to be circling the block, because making right turns orders of magnitude easier than thinking about looking for parking. I suppose you could do this most existing ride services' non-shared options, but there certainly isn't a 'real' way to do this. before self-driving cars take on this role, we might have to think about how something like this would be handled.

It is very unlikely that the auto sector would program vehicles to clog traffic like this on purpose

I think this is key. There may be a lot of autonomous cars in the future but they will come from a handful of companies who will face public pressure not to program them to allow grossly wasteful or antisocial behavior.

> they will come from a handful of companies who will face public pressure not to program them to allow grossly wasteful or antisocial behavior.

One hopes. But one could also say: they will come from a handful of companies that will endeavor to make it seem that _the things that are most profitable for them and convenient for their customers_ are one and the same as the public interest.

There are already narratives at hand that will make this easier: "40,000 lives a year!", etc.

I've gone from being kind of excited about robot cars to realizing that we will have to be very vigilant.

Being very vigilant is always good, but come on! "40,000 lives a year" is not something we were conditioned to believe is good because if fits someones agenda. It's unambiguously a very large public benefit by almost any moral standard.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that existence (or, it should be said, the possibility) of that very large public benefit is exactly the thing that could be used to shield those companies' business decisions from any constructive criticism or regulation.

"Last year, Senator McClellan caused 40,000 people to die by voting against the Make AV Companies Invulnerable Act"

There are already narratives at hand that will make this easier: "40,000 lives a year!", etc.

That's not a concern, considering that the narrative right now is that self-driving cars are dangerous. Given the number of accidents and fatalities, the entire self-driving car industry would need to go an entire year without a single accident of any kind to even come close to claiming that they are as safe as a bad human driver.

That may be the narrative, but I don't think that's the data.

The data is that currently, self-driving cars are more dangerous than human-driven cars. The data is that there have already been 6 fatalities despite self-driving cars being owned/used primarily by drivers in the lowest-risk populations, in some of the best road conditions for driving. The data is that self-driving cars are far from ready to taking over the roads.

I don't consider Tesla's autopilot to be "self-driving", but rather a limited driver aid.

Uber's crash is the only fatality I'm aware of in a truly self-driving car.

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