Study says Uber and Lyft generate 70% more pollution than the trips they replace
theverge.com
theverge.com
You need the political will to tax the externalities you care about, e.g.
- if you use taxes to triple the price of gas, then there's more incentive to cycle instead of driving
- if you charge vehicles for using congested roads, and the charge is proportional to the vehicle's footprint, then buses become much more attractive than cars
Optionally, you can use the additional tax revenue to subsidise buses or whatever.
> Lyft rolled out a multimillion-dollar investment to become a completely carbon-neutral transportation service through the purchase of carbon offsets
If this is true, Lyft has already priced in the climate externality, and there's really nothing to complain about there.
- the price of carbon offsets may not be high enough (particularly if you care about types of pollution other than CO2, and/or you believe that pollution near/at population centres is more damaging than pollution elsewhere)
- carbon offsets do nothing to address the other issue (congestion)
To decrease congestion (as well as localized pollution like smog), my ideal solution would be a floating per-minute rate (based on congestion levels at that instant) for square feet of road uses. (I'd probably do the same for street parking.) Since that sounds challenging and involves possibly dystopian levels of surveillance, I'd settle for more traditional congestion pricing .
if they reached carbon neutrality?
Example: there are stewards of old-growth forests who are selling carbon credits based on "if we cut these down, X carbon would be released", even if they cannot do so anyway by law or deed. The Headwaters forest in CA is one.
Unless you know the exact basis for claimed credits, it essentially breaks down to a media/P.R. bribe.
EDIT: the above is a theoretical point. masonic included an example in a sibling comment.
On your second point:
- we can measure road usage using cameras at a much more granular level than that used by traditional congestion pricing schemes
- the traditional scheme with which I'm most familiar (London) has a flat fee for the whole day; so, once a vehicle has entered the zone once in the day, there is no incentive to limit distance. And vehicle-miles (not # vehicles) is what causes congestion. So I wouldn't want to settle for that type of design.
I don't think the London style congestion pricing is ideal, but what would be better?
The infrastructure for the London Congestion Zone includes cameras at every entry/exit point. So the operators of the scheme can trivially know which vehicles are within the zone at any point in time. The size of each vehicle is known to the DVLA. With these pieces of information, it would be easy to implement a charge based on the amount of time spent in the zone, and the footprint of the vehicle.
The above may not be optimal, but it could be done with data that is already being collected. No need for additional infrastructure, except for changing some signage.
- markets are an efficient way to allocate resources between competing ends
- many activities cause negative externalities (costs that are borne by neighbours/society in general, and not by the entity that benefits from the activity)
For people who believe the above, taxes on externalities (e.g. a price paid per unit of pollution generated) are a way to improve the overall outcome for society by ensuring that, e.g. polluting activities are only undertaken if the added value exceeds the cost to society.
"Taxes make it so only the rich can have certain privileges the rest can't."
In the children's book 'The Lorax', a man becomes rich and, in the process, destroys a local habitat for fish and other wildlife. If his polluting activities had been taxed:
- he may have produced less
- he may have been incentivised to find less polluting methods to make his products
- he may have done the same, but the government could have used the taxes on finding a new habitat for the fish/whatever
In the story, the man and his family became rich. It was the ordinary people and animals that lost out.
> In the children's book 'The Lorax', a man becomes rich and, in the process, destroys a local habitat for fish and other wildlife. If his polluting activities had been taxed
Did you seriously just cite a fictional book as evidence to your point?
Even if we cannot put precise figures on externalities, that doesn't mean we can't improve market efficiency and societal outcomes by taxing them based on reasonable estimates.
"and who is to say your vices shouldn't be taxed over mine?"
I'm not talking about taxing vices (e.g. taxes on activities that do self-harm). I'm talking about taxing externalities.
"Did you seriously just cite a fictional book as evidence to your point?"
I didn't cite it as evidence. I used the context from the book as an example of a situation where taxes could help drive better outcomes.
>Taxes make it so only the rich can have certain privileges the rest can't.
what privileges would the rich have due to this type of taxation that the poor wouldn't? gas already costs money.
and if say, a poor person has to commute on bike instead of car, while a rich person could continue to commute in car, isn't that the free market doing it's job? this seems like the ideal situation to prevent the tragedy of the commons: if the costs of a rich person being taxed on their ride are outweighed by the benefits (and vice versa for a poor person), doesn't that mean that society is "allocating pollution" in a more efficient manner than if they both had to commute on bike (based on the economic value generated between these people)?
>Taxes shouldn't be a means of controlling behavior in a free society. Pass a law or leave it alone.
why should it be this way? I am curious why you would think this way. I've heard these kinds of arguments with respect to parking, and I still disagreed with them
Because what right do you have to determine what behavior is tax worthy over me in a free country where we are all equal? And if you say the solution is to vote on it, then my response is that there is a reason we are a republic and not a democracy.
I thought you would present an argument for this method of taxation being more authoritarian than using environmental regulation (i.e. just banning cars with bad fuel economy, or setting CO2 limits on households) instead. (I find the latter more oppressive in my opinion)
Lyft and Uber are just filling a need. The first thing the cities need to do is fix the public transportation system. We can then criticize Lyft and Uber.
What about the cars that aren't purchased, upgraded or discarded? The land that isn't given over to parking? The waiting areas that aren't required at public transit stops? The dynamic pricing that encourages people to commute out of popular hours therefore smoothing traffic for everyone? This study is too simplistic to take at face value.
PS. If it were easier to get halfway decent bikes around in most cities I would just cycle everywhere. The last bike shop I went in to in Sydney wanted AUD$3-10K (USD$3-7K) for a road bike: before extras.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756945/uber-lyft-tnc-vmt...
Taking an Uber has a price, and if people are paying for it then it has value.