Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

A better solution would be to charge all drivers the exact cost to run their cars including all road maintenance for the roads they use and the cost to the health system and environment that their cars create.

Then provide multiple options such as rail and bike lanes. People will naturally gravitate to the best solution.

I often see complaints about how this will raise the cost of products like food because they need a lot of road and fuel resources. But the thing is you already pay for this cost through other means. By charging the true cost the price of an apple may go up but the price in your tax goes down. And this way the seller of the apple is now incentivized to source the apple locally and reduce the transport costs because its no longer paid for by everyone.

Of course electric presents even bigger problems that many states now have a surcharge on them during registration. It is obvious that fuel taxes are going to be outdated in 10 years or so as EVs become more popular. Real-time tolling has been suggested as an alternative to this problem in Europe, but that probably wouldn't fly in the states.

No, they aren't, at least in California; fuel excise taxes (and diesel, but not gasoline, sales tax) are a part of road funding, but other sources, including general revenue (largely, sales taxes and personal and corporate income tax), are used.

EDIT: Not that taxing ride-sharing is likely to reduce congestion. It plausibly could increase it, if it induces residents of mostly walkable communities (which, sure, LA has fewer of than it should) who might otherwise rely on ride-sharing for occasional car needs to instead keep a personal vehicle, which then tends to encourage additional, less-necessary driving.

Using this logic, they should be taxing all companies that use public roads (food delivery, package delivery, service companies), instead they are specifically cherry picking Uber and Lyft to target. These sort of anti-business policies are causing companies and people in masses to flee California and New York. Perhaps that is the goal.

Even in California, collected gas taxes do not remotely approach the cost of construction and repair of roadways.

Some States do, California does not. The underlying issue is that California roads can infamously cost an order of magnitude more to build and maintain per mile than the same road segment in other States (e.g. interstate highways). It is possible to pay for roads with fuel and use taxes, in some other States it is a constitutional requirement, but the extreme cost of roads in California make it difficult to fund the DoT that way and there is no evidence that California is going to curtail the obvious waste anytime soon.

All of taxes deter productivity from increasing. It is better to tax the land date trees grow on, than to tax the output of the trees themselves.

What kind of stupid.........sigh.

The point of having public roads is that it benefits the city by increasing economic output.

Did he forget that there are PEOPLE in those Uber and Lyft cars? Those same people he is supposed to serve? Or does he think the cars are driving around for no purpose making profit the whole time?

Do Uber and Lyft pay those drivers' fuel costs?

Uber undercuts both public transit and traditional taxi services with prices that are unsustainable and can't provide a living wage for their drivers.

This was OK initially because taxis in many places were benefiting from localized monopolies and also screwing many drivers, but in the long run it means Uber kills all the competition and then just jacks prices back up anyway.

I don't dig the drunk driving fear mongering either. If I hired the homeless $3 a trip to carry drunk people home that doesn't mean my exploitative program should suddenly be free of municipal adjustment.

Imagine if a private company substantially raised the price of its premier product (streaming movies, for example) to build tons of infrastructure for the product that nobody wants (DVD distribution hubs, for example) and neglected to build out the infrastructure required for the product in demand. It'd be gone overnight. This is absolute insanity.

The real solution:

- Tax all road users - most easily accomplished through license/registration taxes (IE, you pay an annual fee for a sticker that gives you permission to drive your car/bus/truck in the taxed area) and fuel taxes - By statute, require the money to be spent to improve/expand the road infrastructure - Where pollution is a problem, (optionally) spend a portion of the tax to build out EV infrastructure, and encourage EV use by charging reduced fees to EV users - Subsidize use of ride-sharing type services for people who would normally use public transit services

This would provide efficient, clean, point-to-point transit services for ALL users. Economically disadvantaged folks could finally stop paying the hidden 'poor people transit tax' (increased transit times).

You can also reduce the need to travel by increasing density, which LA is attempting in certain respects.

  > public will being the primary
  > impediment to progress.

All that does is increase the cost of living.

Either people need to drive or they don't. People don't drive just for the fun of it anymore.

And if you succeed and do manage to reduce travel you also managed to reduce economic activity.

If you goal is to get people to switch, then you have to do it on the other end: Make the alternatives better than driving.

Also, Buses run from downtown to Beverly Hills, and getting from Long Beach to Brentwood can be done entirely by public transportation.

Gangsters have cars and don't rely on public transportation. DTLA homeless can and do use the MTA bus that goes literally from downtown to Beverly Hills.

Care to clarify your comment?

For people who think a congestion tax will improve traffic, it won't. Congestion taxes work if they can shift behaviors to alternate modes of transportation. If there aren't any alternatives, it's just a levy.

The simple fact of the matter is that LA has a serious housing and urban planning crisis with no real solution. The city has already been investing heavily in public transportation for years now with multiple heavy rail lines been under construction (purple and crenshaw) and some already opened (gold) - but the fact of the matter is that until a public transportation system that can replicate the freeway system - meaning a system that can replicate both the breadth and depth of the system (Think a 'good' Euro rail system spread across a 30-60 mile radius) - LA will always be a congested mess - unless a paradigm shift in transportation occurs (hyperloop, Uber Elevate, etc.)

This is obviously somewhat anecdotal, though; it's possible that for some reason my sample is skewed enough that it's different from the population's views in general.

Just a guess but if the route planning models are good then an uberpool with 2 passengers + driver qualifies for 3+ carpools and will be much faster than a car that doesn't qualify for carpool with a single passenger and driver.

Uber and Lyft fares are unsustainably low right now, and at their current prices, they depress public transit interest and ridership. But what happens in 5 years when these ride sharing companies need to turn a profit? Self driving cars is potentially a solution, I suppose, but will it be ready at that scale by then?

Not only that, but in the meantime, they may be causing more environmental harm than good: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/how-uber-and-...

There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. But you have to have the price mechanism first. People will say, what about this, what about that. It doesn't matter. People will figure it out and adapt, but you need to implement congestion pricing right now, because practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems. Importantly, you cannot set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change.

Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur. Given a little bit of time, the emergence of various kinds of social order from a combination of self-interested individuals will occur.

Both are signs that our infrastructure in either form is unable to service the maximal demand society places on it, so people ultimately decide not to go places because of the cost of doing so (in terms not just of cash, but also comfort and time).

I think people will use rideshares only to the point that congestion is precisely miserable enough those who choose to rideshare to tolerate it.

So what might happen is that mass transit remains equally as congested, just more people are taking trips than they were before because the capacity of the whole system has increased.

It's also the case that, unlike self-driving car infrastructure, trains are far more scalable - in places that actually invest in their mass transit infrastructure, I think mass transit can compete pretty well the more the municipality invests in train lines and stuff.

But to assume that self-driving cars will save cities that don't have transit infrastructure—that might be true for very sparsely populated, small cities, but for all the American cities that lack public transit infrastructure, I think the situation will only change marginally.

> [San Francisco Supervisor Aaron] Peskin is drafting a measure for the November election that would levy a 3.25% fee on rides with one passenger, and a 1.5% fee on shared rides.

They put one in near me recently, and all I could think is that compared to a bus it cost a ton more money, took forever to build, and can't be rerouted in case of an issue. Additionally, it doesn't even bypass traffic so it's not any faster.

Why not just buy a few busses to run the exact route they built the street car on instead ?

Uber and Lyft exist because the state didn't build one of those. In fact the state has built a completely inadequate public transit system in LA. Uber and Lyft are widely used because people in LA don't have an alternative.

You mean a bus.

So, to do this, you first need to one:

(1) Develop a means to measure individual experienced utility, and

(2) Develop the correct mechanism for aggregating utility across time and individuals.

Analysis which go beyond purely financial impacts now tend to get around this by only considering a narrow range of non-financial externalities, assigning them dollar values by various means, and just treating them as financial externalities. This provides answers, but as to whether they are “accurate” in any deeper sense other than being exactly what you get when you make the assumptions about value that they do is debatable. (But then, that's true of how we aggregate financial externalities, too, because we treat a $ as having equal utility wherever it is, though we know that not to be the case.)