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.
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.
Agreed, the negative effects of air pollution, noise pollution and car dependency are mostly borne by the poor.
Increasingly inequality is of course something we should be mindful of when designing policy though.
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.
> 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.
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...
Paying cash isn’t even an option anymore.
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).
"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. :)
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 ...
“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.
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.
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.
Calling it a platitude doesn't address that critical issue; it does suggest you don't know how else to address it?
Paved roads are required when there is a lot of traffic, but all the uses you named are a fraction of road uses.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Because we live in a society.
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.
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.
The only thing ride sharing reduces is parking requirements, unless the ride sharing is truly carpooling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
why is that bullshit, it might create artificial scarcity of taxi services but it helps prevent the kind of congestion that this article discusses.
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.
If it was set up as an yearly auction, that would work okay.
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.
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.
No idea why you are getting downvoted!
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.
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.
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...).
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?
Public transport? Works really well in a lot of cities.
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.
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 not if they’re conducting business?