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Comment by marlor | Hacker News Reader

The rise in ride-sharing requires a rethink in transportation planning within cities and campuses.

We did a study for a major university after it found a huge increase in traffic volumes within its main entry “plaza”, and an associated logjam that radiated from there. A large proportion of that traffic was due to ride-sharing drivers circulating in and around the plaza waiting for passengers.

The university built a dedicated ride-sharing area nearby and prohibited ride-sharing services from the plaza. This largely solved the problems (although enforcement is an ongoing issue).

Ride-sharing absolutely can cause local increases in congestion if nothing is done to accommodate it. However, it’s a modern reality, so planners who don’t accommodate it aren’t doing their jobs.

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It's something of an aside, and no doubt a losing battle, but I wish we'd stop (ab)using the term "ride-sharing" for services like Uber and Lyft.

Ride-sharing is when I'm intending to drive somewhere, have spare capacity in my vehicle, and offer that space (at a price, potentially) to other people. A high degree of ride-sharing would almost certainly decrease congestion by making more efficient use of vehicle capacity.

Uber and Lyft are essentially app-enabled taxi services. It's not surprising that putting a huge number of extra taxis on the road can increase congestion as drivers congregate in the areas with most potential fares.

This positively ends conversation. The proper 'ride-sharing' you're talking about is very popular in Germany. On daily basis thousands of people drive few miles to a spot near a highway, etc., 'abandon' their cars and ride together downtown. It's been so for years.

Aka car-pooling. At least in Canada, car pool lots are quite common, and are used quite heavily.

Also, proliferation of taxis[0] doesn't immediately change the behavior of people. It takes time for citizens to adjust to improved transport infrastructure and stop using/storing their own cars in the city. Within that lag window, more taxis = more cars.

[0] - As you say, Uber and Lyft, and their predecessors and successors, are just that - a different flavor of taxi services. Slightly leaner, at the cost of worse guarantees for certain service types where old-school taxis were bound by regulations, but otherwise pretty much the same thing.

The only thing taxis reduce is the need for parking. Everything else results in more traffic compared to individual driving.

If I take my own car to work, the car is only on the road between my house and my office. If I take a taxi, at the very least you'll have to add the distance the taxi drove to pick me up, as well as the distance driven to pick the next customer up. There is no way around that, and any argument that taxi services (whether with actual taxis, or by the driver's personal cars) somehow reduce traffic is complete nonsense.

That's not even mentioning the fact that a number of people are now going to take a taxi instead of public transport, further increasing the number of cars.

I don't mean the case of switching from a personal car to a taxi for daily commute. I mean the case of, "I need my car few times a month to run some errands around the city - and since I already have that car, I may as well drive to work instead of using public transport". Availability and reliability of general transport infrastructure - both mass transit and taxis - will drive the decision here. If one can count on always catching fast transportation for those few errands a month, they can retire their car, and that's one less car on the road every day. This does not scale 1:1 with taxis - on a margin, a single extra taxi constantly on the road can tip the decision for several people, removing several cars from the city during rush hours.

I'm a not a traffic planner, so I'm not certain if things play out this way in reality - but it sounds plausible.

A different topic is that taxis unfortunately compete with mass transit too much these days. For example, in my hometown of Kraków - known in Poland for having a very good public transit system - the situation in recent years[0] evolved to a point in which, for 2+ people traveling further than a bus or tram will go in 20 minutes, it's cheaper[1] to travel in one of these VC-subsidized app-taxis! Given the economics of mass transit, I worry this is not the kind of competition that will lead to improvements of service - instead, it'll lead to further degradation of the bus and tram networks, in a positive feedback loop.

[0] - I noticed it around 2019, so it's not a COVID-related phenomenon, though the pandemic did a lot of work to cement it, as well as reversing the ongoing efforts to remove car traffic from the city center.

[1] - Unless you're a citizen/regular, and pay a monthly pass. I'm currently neither.

>[0] - As you say, Uber and Lyft, and their predecessors and successors, are just that - a different flavor of taxi services. Slightly leaner, at the cost of worse guarantees for certain service types where old-school taxis were bound by regulations, but otherwise pretty much the same thing.

And yet, prior to Uber and Lyft, I would hesitate to call a taxi for my worst enemy due to all of them smelling like smoke, being old dumpy cars, and having questionable drivers. After Uber/Lyft, I can remotely order a car for my grandparents who don’t speak English and they can get to me in a nice clean car with no issues.

Taxis outside of urban cores in a few US cities were a terrible experience prior to Uber/Lyft, they clearly brought something to the table.

The obvious solution is to the free-market one: Businesses who want to use a scarce (in the economic sense, i.e., 'limited') public good, road capacity, bid on it.

If I understand correctly, that's what taxi medallions are. Many respond with outrage about anything that limits ride-sharing, but they are taking my road space, which my tax dollars pay for.

Is that the only obvious solution? Wouldn't better public transportation (which benefits from economies of scale unlike private automobiles) be equally if not more obvious? Especially since it has a much more proven track record.

Sorry, good point. I meant, given that ride-sharing exists, this is the solution.

No idea why you are getting downvoted!

I'm not so sure about that track record. In many major cities public transportation has proven miserable, and that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Viscous circle. Cars are slightly more convenient which gets a few to drive taking people away from transit which then has less money and becomes less useful making cars more convenient. ..

It doesn't help that most transit agencies are run by people who drive and so they won't use their limited budget to make something as good as possible.

> they are taking my road space

And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location? A traffic jam of people driving around in circles searching for half an hour for parking spaces to snatch?

> And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location?

Public transport? Works really well in a lot of cities.

I was a big public transit user. Since covid, lockdowns and a lack of seasonal flus and cold I'm starting to wonder how healthy it is to cram as many people as possible together in a hot closed environment.

We have learned a lot. I hope that means transit upgrades to better ventilation which in turn mitigates those issues.

That and also, many public-transit-heavy countries in Asia have fared quite well since people believe in science (masks, etc.)

Taxi medallions are bullshit because they have decided in advance that taxi’s only get to use X amount.

The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion and charge regardless of vehicle type.

The last thing you want to do is charge ride sharers and not single commuters, which are much worse.

> taxi’s only get to use X amount

Right; road capacity is a scarce resource. There isn't an unlimited amount available.

> The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion

Sure, modern tech allows more flexible pricing than periodic capacity auctions. However, I wonder if it allows long-term investment, given that tomorrow your capacity could effectively disappear.

> and charge regardless of vehicle type

That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot?

> bullshit

Well if you put it that way ...

I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free, but yet be forced to pay a tax when I use (semi-)public transportation?

First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit.

> I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free

That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.

Also, you do use the roads all the time even if you don't drive yourself. Your hair stylist uses them to get to work, your groceries get to the store, your customers come to your store, etc. etc. Imagine your situation if there were no roads.

> (semi-)public transportation

It's a private, for-profit company.

> First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is.

I am forced to pay taxes for the roads since you can't possibly fund all of the rodes solely by taxing ride-sharing companies.

> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true.

Eh. Economics is not an exact science so there is no way for me to prove it to you. If you don't believe in that (and have another reason why iPhones are more expensive in higher taxed countries) then let's leave that.

> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.

Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).

> Your hair stylist uses them to get to work [...] Imagine your situation if there were no roads.

There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.

> It's a private, for-profit company.

Taxis are private and for profit, yet they are considered public transportation.

>> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.

> Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).

OK, why or why not? Are you proposing something?

> There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.

They do pay, via their taxes, which is the generally appropriate way to fund public goods.

I was responding to your proposal that businesses pay extra, via medallions to use the roads, while private drivers use the road for free (ie. no extra). Rather, I am saying that every user of the road should par for it.

Roads are paided for with taxes on gas. So whoever buys gas pays for road repair. Licenses, fees, etc also go towards that system.

No, they aren’t. There isn’t enough money from the gas tax to cover all of the roads. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-15/gas-ta...

> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit.

This isn't quite true. If Uber charged more to increase profit, they would lose more customers to competitors who didn't increase their prices.

Taxes can increase costs for (some of) those competitors as well. In that scenario, prices could rise to absorb the tax and there would be less relative change between competitors.

This is important for incentivising 'societal values', e.g. reducing pollution, increasing public health, etc.; either directly by discouraging people from choosing single-occupier taxis like Uber in favour of e.g. trains and buses; or indirectly by causing companies to compete on reducing their harm (and thereby avoiding the tax).

I don't have specific examples to hand, but I recall some companies advocating for such taxes (e.g. a carbon tax), since they want to make bigger improvements, but doing so individually would make them uncompetitive.

> First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true

It absolutely is in the long run. Reduced margin means fewer competitors and subsequently higher sustained costs for riders. There is little barrier to entry in the “rideshare” market so as long as high margins exist competitors will keep entering with cheaper prices to eat at the margin.

There is no scenario in a competitive market where an input cost is not reflected in the output cost of a good/service.

idk. I’ve yet to see an industry that doesn’t concentrate to fewer and fewer operators with time, regardless of taxation.

A natural law of wealth accumulation dictates that as trade continues the players with more wealth already, are increasingly more likely to get even more wealth at the cost of those with less. At time of hardship you would expect the less wealthy players to loose the business which eventually concentrates the industry to 2-5 players through acquisition or bankruptcy. Taxation is actually a way to counter this phenomena by means of redistribution.

EDIT: To clarify the above is only true if industries are competing for customers against each other. While a market is growing the growth of one player does not necessarily come at the cost of another. However at some point the market will be saturated and businesses new customers are exponentially more likely to come from a competitor rather then new to the market. At this point the premise holds true.

Why should people pay any tax for any public good that they don't use personally? Schools, healthcare, parks & rec, homeless shelters, space exploration, national defense, fire fighters, vaccine development.

Because we live in a society.

Yes, in principle. Frustratingly, for a goal like 'moving around cheaply, conveniently and safely, with minimal environmental impact', then subsidising driving is a worse investment than public transport.

The person I was replying to was not complaining about how revenue is distributed, they were complaining about revenue being spent at all on a public good that they don't use.

I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to rebalance the equations on how we spend money on roads, public transit, and various forms of energy subsidies. But all else being equal, getting that balance "right" is not going to make personal transit just go away. Some will shift to public transit, but you will always have a case of "your tax money" going to pay for roads used by private transit.

Personal transportation isn't like the things you mentioned. It has -by itself- value to the individual, but not to society. Having no fire fighters quickly becomes an obvious problem. Not having people drive their personal cars all over the city does not.

"Value to society" is the summation of "value to individuals". Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.

> "Value to society" is the summation of "value to individuals".

I disagree, not necessarily, and probably not in the case of unnecessary personal transportation (which is most of it). Everyone in society profits from fire fighters or hospitals, even when they don't need either just this instance. That's not the same for some luxury that some/most people enjoy and want everyone to fund.

> Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.

And we do, and we don't consider that an issue. People shouldn't have personal nuclear bombs, even though some would like to. Also, few people are arguing that personal transportation shouldn't exist, just that the required infrastructure should be funded differently.

Agreed. But if you analyse things then it's likely people use those facilities at a secondary level - eg you get something done for you by people who used schools to enable them, someone who provides value to your life used the healthcare services.

Yes, that was my point.

You in particular don't pay for permits, parking, tolls, fuel and sales taxes, licensing, registrations, etc. You do, however, get to enjoy all of the benefits of living in a society with ubiquitous transportation and democratized access to roads and infrastructure.

None of the minor fees you mention gets anywhere near to the cost of road maintenance, not to mention the effects on the health of people near roads, all the people killed in traffic, the environmental damage, etc etc

Do you purchase goods which were moved by road? Where does your food come from and how does it get to you? How do you generate your income and does any of that rely on transportation?

All of that could be done on gravel roads which are a lot cheaper than paved roads. Or trains once we are beyond the last mile.

Paved roads are required when there is a lot of traffic, but all the uses you named are a fraction of road uses.

This is why diesel has a higher tax.

This would be a good argument if the road network was sized for transporting goods primarily. As it stands, road networks in population centres are largely sized to accommodate private motoring.

The company that transports goods should pay for their use of roads. I pay for that through proper pricing of said goods.

Exactly; if the roads are subsidized (as in GP's concern), then some of that subsidy is showing up as a reduced price of goods.

> That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot?

There are two separate problems. One is insufficient road capacity at time X for Y number of vehicles of size Z. You can adjust X, Y, or Z, all with the use of variable tolling.

Platitudes such as “public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay” will not solve congestion.

A second problem might be there are too many people in society too poor to be able to make use of a fair amount of limited resources, such as road capacity. This is a separate problem, and can be solved by giving poorer people money so they can pay to use the roads at peak times.

> Platitudes such as “public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay” will not solve congestion.

Calling it a platitude doesn't address that critical issue; it does suggest you don't know how else to address it?

It’s an issue that exists now. How exactly is it that you think a poor person without a car is able to make use of the interstate?

By purchasing anything that requires the interstate to move product. So literally everything.

I did offer a solution to address it. It’s a platitude for the purposes of solving congestion, which I specifically identified as a separate issue from poverty.

> That ends up being regressive taxation.

“Regressive taxation” is a term for people paying what something costs. Carbon taxes are also a “regressive taxation” as well as sales tax, alcohol tax, etc.

Public resources are public goods, but they are rivalrous. If you don’t make people pay in a fair manner, you’ve just implemented government rations which incentivize all kinds of stupid shit (illegal taxi services for one).

> and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood?

If they can’t afford it then they don’t drive. It’s that simple.

The complexity only comes from trying to solve poverty (“oh, but that’s regressive”) at the same time as trying to solve a specific issue. Just give poor people cash stipends for transportation if transporting the poor is the problem you want to tackle. Then they can choose if they want to spend it on bus fares or use it towards ride shares, biking, whatever.

Prescriptive “there shall be 10 taxis for the people and they will enjoy them and no more” laws have basically never had good outcomes. Hedge funds paying millions of dollars to analysts with mountains of data have difficulty predicting market demand trends, there isn’t a chance in hell some bureaucrat is going to correctly balance a market.

This is a common pattern, poorest member M of society Y is not well off enough to do X, the cost of X is lowered for everyone until M can afford X. Except the members of Society Y that do X primarily consists of rich people, it looks fair because everyone is treated equally, in practice the support didn't solve the problem at all, and in the process a bunch of people got a free gift so they don't mind the damage.

The reason why politics doesn't work is that people aren't interested in solving the problem, they just want some kickbacks. The end result is a "fair" but dysfunctional society.

Car infrastructure is not a public good.

It's 2021. We should be minting exclusive rights to operate for taxi owners in the form of NFTs.

Can't tell if this is sarcasm.

If the person you're "sharing a ride" with is just going to keep driving around after they drop you off it's not entirely clear to me that single commuters are much worse.

I think ride "sharers" with a single rider are strictly worse. That driver is going to drive a non-zero amount of miles to pick up his next passenger. Those miles are traffic that wouldn't exist if the two passengers drove themselves.

The only thing ride sharing reduces is parking requirements, unless the ride sharing is truly carpooling.

Dynamic tolling is such an obvious solution, easily implemented with license plate scanners.

As someone who has been working on ways for people to self-report driving habits in a privacy-respecting way:

People in the US absolutely loathe the idea of being taxed based on license plate scanners. The combination of automation, surveillance, and taxation is basically toxic across the political spectrum.

License plate scanners exist everywhere on the east coast at all the toll booths, and probably elsewhere too. They probably exist at every toll booth, and who knows where else.

I’ve seen cop cars outfitted on all corners with license plate scanners driving around. I even saw parking enforcement cars outfitted with them to track which cars were spending too much time parked in spots with time limits.

I understand that. It doesn't mean people know or think about it on a regular basis, and it's not used to send them bills every month.

People are used to surveillance in law enforcement to some extent. Once you tell them it's a tax agency, they lose their minds. I have participated in large-scale, state-funded studies that have shown this.

I see. I found it very convenient to drive in Canada and not worry about having a specific toll system transponder. It seems so archaic. I even got the bill in the mail in the US.

Gasoline taxes at European levels of $4/gallon is a far more obvious (and effective) solution without additional infrastructure costs.

Has as little chance as dynamic tolling because there's a loud swing vote who wants their road trips and commutes paid from the public coffers.

Dynamic tolling is to reduce congestion on specific roads at specific times. Gas tax does not address everyone going to work at 7AM to 9AM and causing congestion then.

Living in Europe --

No, it's not. Maybe at 8/gal. But cars still expand to fill all available road space, parking on the sidewalks, and generally demanding that their needs are accounted for first.

Over here in civilization we have electric cars that are making “tax gas” a bad solution.

Note that most tolls are regressive taxes. Poor people pay a larger proportion of their income and wealth on such tolls. Also transport costs - or, more specifically, commute times - interact with house prices. Poor people often have to travel longer and further for work, increasing the tax they have to pay even on an absolute basis.

Not to mention it can cost quite a bit of money to collect these tolls/taxes!

In places like Texas it’s mostly a solved problem, everyone either has a toll transponder on their windshield or uses Pay By Mail, which just reads your plates as you drive through the gate. No stopping, no slowing down at all. You can go through these gates at 120mph and it’ll still catch you (and won’t even write you a speeding ticket).

Paying cash isn’t even an option anymore.

It’s solved even better in Canada. All toll plazas are reading license plates, regardless of a transponder. Just send a bill to the owner of the license plate. No need for a transponder.

I think most technically do that here, the transponder is more as a backup. With one exception— the DFW airport will only read NTTA tolltags for some reason last I heard.

There’s also some interoperability- my Texas TollTag works in Oklahoma and one or two other states so it’s all consolidated with the lower rate. Those with TollTag accounts pay a lower rate on toll roads as it acts more like a gift card than a bill, it just autoreloads each time your balance gets low.

Another cool thing is that some parking garages can read your TollTag if you let them to open the gate for you. It doesn’t bill you, it just acts as an access card if you have a standing agreement with the garage owner (you can see this at UT Austin for permit holders).

That’s... worse. Why should the person who gets the toll bill be locked to the license plate registration?

There really isn't a way around that. There are vastly more poor people than rich people, and the difference between emissions of cars typically owned by rich people and poor people is marginal if anything. If you want to make an impact on emissions and congestion, you are going to have to change the behavior of large numbers of people. If you want to ameliorate the effects of this on poor people, you can invest the money into decent public transit options.

I don’t think we should expect road policy to also solve inequality. Equally, we shouldn’t let an unequal society prevent us from solving congestion.

Agreed, the negative effects of air pollution, noise pollution and car dependency are mostly borne by the poor.

We should definitely expect road policy to not introduce extra inequality.

This sounds reasonable on the face of it, but actually it’s not. I can’t think of many policies that might not introduce some inequality somewhere in society. That’s an unrealistic standard.

Increasingly inequality is of course something we should be mindful of when designing policy though.

I beg to differ. I see ensuring a level playing field while preventing abuse, as pretty much the only valid reason for any (internal) policy at all. Everything else is just history being written by the winners.

This is not always the case, especially in urban areas, as was shown during the recent debates over congestion pricing in New York.

Car commuters into the central business districts are a much smaller, wealthier group. Free roads act more as a subsidy for this group, while the masses, including almost all poor people, cram onto insufficient public transport. A bus carrying 240 people being stuck behind a line of wealthy car commuters alone in their vehicles is not a picture of equity.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/10/24/de-blasios-wrong-poor...

Taxes on car use is not at all regressive, but actually very progressive. At least here in Norway.

"True" progressives here would prefer to ban cars in the inner cites completely (or at least the non-electric ones), but most of the moderately progressive and liberal are content to put a high tax on roads and petrol (and new cars too).

Cars fueled by fossils are seen as symbols of anti-environmentalism, pro americanized consumerism and an unnecessary luxery (for the non-disabled), and particularily so in the cities. Car lovers are almost as bad as Trump supporters, in the eyes of progressives here.

Here is one of the most iconic progressives in the country posing with her electic cargo bicycle (with the kid inside), in a news story promoting massive increases in parking taxes in Oslo:

https://e24.no/privatoekonomi/i/X8w2zg/mdg-lan-og-oslobyraad...

People are expected to take the train/tram/subway/bus when they can, and if necessary, park at the train station after delivering the kids to school/daycare. (If they cannot use an electric bike, as in the story above).

In order to ensure there is no regressive aspect, disabled (including many elderly) are subsidised. Also, electric cars are not taxed, and 53% of new cars sold last year were electric. (Teslas are everywhere).

So if you want to show everyone you are a good progressive, you should support toll roads, and if you can, take the bus. :)

Every tax that isn’t based on income is regressive (sales being the major one).

> Poor people pay a larger proportion of their income and wealth on such tolls

And every other basic good. This doesn’t mean much.

> Also transport costs - or, more specifically, commute times - interact with house prices.

Yes, but as it stands the cheap road use is subsidizing mega commutes, which is broken.

> Poor people often have to travel longer and further for work, increasing the tax they have to pay even on an absolute basis.

And they often don’t too. We don’t need to be subsidizing mega commutes as a society. It shouldn’t make sense to travel for 90 minutes each way for a $20/hr job.

Making these jobs more expensive for the employer is a good thing. Either they will raise the wage because they lost all employees or they will just hire locals instead which is better for the environment.

>> Poor people pay a larger proportion of their income and wealth on such tolls.

If you want to charge for use of a resource, to discourage over-use, and only to raise enough to fund production of more of that resource, it's entirely irrelevant that it's "regressive" (which is a very loaded term), because it is not the main source of government revenue, and people benefit from the expenditure of the funds raised by the tax directly in proportion to how much they are taxed.

If the objective is to use the tax as a proxy to tax general utilization of public infrastructure and services, then yes, it would be inappropriate to choose a tax on an activity that is a poor proxy, e.g. an activity that the poor engage in out of proportion to their general use of public infrastructure and services.

The other reason is medallions are very open to corruption - especially in the USA where until relatively recently major cities ran machine systems where spoils where handed out to people on your side.

>The last thing you want to do is charge ride sharers and not single commuters, which are much worse.

Are they? They only drive in one direction park and then drive the same route back. No need to go from customer to customer, no need to "circulate" waiting for a customer. The only miles a commuter drives is the miles he has to drive, not a single mile more. I always thought the "your car is idle 99% of the time" statistics are meaningless, yes it's idle, it's idle exactly where and when I want it, there is zero waste.

Of course there are problems with cars, but they also apply to "ridesharing" as well.

>Taxi medallions are bullshit because they have decided in advance that taxi’s only get to use X amount.

why is that bullshit, it might create artificial scarcity of taxi services but it helps prevent the kind of congestion that this article discusses.

Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t. That’s a targeted market intervention, and couldn’t reasonably be described as a free market solution. A general user pays model would be more free market, but then of course you start to economically disenfranchise the poor.

However, constraining productive economic activity as a plan for dealing with inadequate infrastructure development is a fundamentally stupid idea that would impact the prosperity of everybody in the area, whether their business or employment is directly related to transport or not.

> Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t.

There's an essential reason: Businesses are not human beings. They don't have rights and we generally don't provide them with public goods. If a person loses everything and is on the street, that's a tragedy and we try to help them; if they are ill, they are guaranteed medical care (depending on some factors); if they die, it's a serious matter involving grief, sometimes crime, etc. If a business loses everything or is ailing or 'dies', it's just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. I can kill your business and be congratulated. People own the roads and the city - they democratically decide what happens with them - and businesses don't.

It's not so simplistic, of course, but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors.

> but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors.

But not if they’re conducting business?

The natural conclusion to that line of thinking is that all cars bid for using the road. This would certainly help lower traffic, but it would also prevent poor people from using public infrastructure. I think it's very difficult to strike a good balance here.

One of the big problems with taxi medallions (at least how they're handled now) is that you pay once, and then get access to them forever, which turns them into an asset and the value of the future cash flow is capitalized into the asset value. Allowing people to buy and own a monopoly isn't a great system.

If it was set up as an yearly auction, that would work okay.

While I can see the drawback you describe, isn't that basic capitalism, in regard to any asset? If someone else wants to buy they medallion, they are welcome to make an offer at any time, not just annually.

No, that's basic feudalism. In which you trade privileges for infinite time spans and inherit them across generations. Infini-time auctions are a symptom. Corrupt anti-monopoly office another.

Free Market Capitalism actually designs markets for optimal allocation. Can be recognized by operating anti-monopoly yearly or so auctions.

When people complain about today's capitalism, they actually complain about feudalism. Yet the aristocratic rentiers they actually hate hide behind the productive capitalists, which leaves people confused. The real parasite successfully conceals its presence.

This sound interesting, do you have any reading to recommend on this subject?

Henry George's philosophy extended from land monopoly to general monopoly.

The land ownership model has already been considered a failure for centuries, the medallion system is just it's younger brother. The medallions should be leased from the government.

Doesn’t make any sense, the ride share driver and passenger are just as entitled to the roads as you are.

Being a car owner really warps the mind in a bizarre way in terms of the entitlement most people seem to feel about their own use of public space and how they justify deserving to use it more than others.

Free market enthusiasts like to move the goalpost wherever they see fit. A true free market solution would be that private operators would build and maintain the infrastructure and then lease the usage. I.e. the roads, parking and other ride share accommodations would be owned by a third party company which the ride share company would pay to be allowed to use.

This is obviously a terrible idea, and everybody can see why there is no city that operates roads this way. But it demonstrates that there exists problems which the free market is ill equipped to solve. Road congestion is one of them. A better solution has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread: Congestion taxes + public transportation.

Your tax dollars pay for roads the same way the tip jar at your coffee shop pays for the barista's college tuition... true in a sense, but ultimately meaningless.

Where I am from - Bulgaria, we don't have a limit on taxis AFAIK. They operate on a sort of franchising system - the taxi companies vet drivers and make sure they follow all regulations, in return the driver gets to put the company's logo on their car and gets connected to the company's order system. It's almost exactly like Uber, but with quality control and regulations. Drivers are also not restricted to using only the company's ordering system, there is at least one app that is entirely independent that drivers can opt to use in parallel with their company's system.

As long as you use a taxi from a well known established company you can expect a high level of service. On the whole taxis are plentiful and cheap.

Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).

The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.

And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648

> The university built a dedicated ride-sharing area nearby and prohibited ride-sharing services from the plaza. This largely solved the problems (although enforcement is an ongoing issue).

I hate it when you realize the ride-sharing area is in some offsite parking lot when there's a pick-up area right at the door.

Driver should only enter the plaza with a confirmed pick-up (go wait in the designated area), not lazily relocating every ride-share.

This reminds me of all the nearby school parking lots at ~8am and ~3pm every day

(well, pre-covid)

Even though most of the kids walked, many were not allowed to walk and there were logjams of cars down the block and through the parking lot with plenty of idiocy.

"Ride sharing can cause problems unless people who do not benefit from the ride sharing dedicate land and money to alleviating those problems" is a long way of saying "ride sharing causes problems".

No one said the quoted bit (your "long way of saying"). Please don't make up quotes (at all), but especially please do not make one up if the only intent is to dump on how bad an idea it would be for someone to actually say it.

I said it. The second set of quote marks here do not mark a quotation from someone else, they mark my paraphrase of the first quote.

No worry has been directed at the second set of quotation marks. It's "the first quote"—which is not a quote, because it's something pulled out of thin air—that is the problem. It's also against the rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789

Reply on news.ycombinator.com