S.F. is considering downtown 'congestion pricing' | Hacker News Reader

S.F. is considering downtown 'congestion pricing'

sfchronicle.com

37 pointslsllc81 comments

I am not at all a fan of surge pricing or toll roads.

The janitor (or journeyman plumber, if you want to be pedantic) has every right to sit in gridlock beside the stock broker.

There will never be meaningful accumulation of political capital to address public transit issues so long as the wealthy can avoid it with a trivial fee ($6.50 in this case, with unspecified income discounts).

If you read the article, the janitor probably wouldn't be paying the congestion fee since it's income-based.

46k is low enough I bet some janitors would be included

Maybe some but not most https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-janitor-sal...

That depends on how wealthy you need to be to not care. If only billionaires can ignore the costs, then there will be plenty of demand for transit (or more likely to get rid of the fees...). While if the fee is so low most people choose to just pay it, then it won't make a difference.

Of course the people who most need to ignore it are those like plumbers who have a job that can't be done via transit.

For plumbers and the like, it's another cost of business and will be passed on to customers. They'll adapt, and no one will go out of business because everyone has to pay the tax.

Except the ones that do go out of business and aren't talked about.

If every business's costs go up by the same amount, and they're all passing the costs on to customers, why are any of them going out of business?

Are some businesses able to plan better and reduce the amount they pay in tolls? Do some choose not to pass costs on? Definitely. But you can say that about any cost of doing business - labor, materials, licensing, insurance.

Because not all business costs go up by the same relative amount and not all of them are able to easily pass the costs onto customers.

I think I addressed both of those points already.

No, you didn't.

Weirdly thus seems to hit just above the average skilled union worker pay in San Francisco. This means that A Lot of the workers will, basically, just be taxed to work as there's no reasonable way for them to take public transportation into the job (though they often car pool).

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Union-Worker-Salary-in...

There are some interesting proposals out there that are ostensibly more equitable - for example, plate based restrictions (see bogota[0] and beijing[1]), although these can still be avoided by owning multiple cars.

Maybe the most fair would be like one of these systems except person-based rather than plate-based, however that's not something that can or should be implemented because it would require identifying every driver on the road.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_y_placa

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1098345.shtml

I am not sure congestion pricing will have the desired effect in SF, people will need an alternative means to travel downtown - currently BART or Muni or Street Cars. If SF had an egalitarian public transport system - as found in NYC and London - then congestion charging would be beneficial to SF society. Since there is no genuine fit-for-purpose alternative, congestion charges are another Tax. And how will SF spend those tax dollars - "solving" city's more pressing problems. Typical SF behavior, we can't fix what we need to fix, so lets "fix" something else.

> Since there is no genuine fit-for-purpose alternative

Asking as someone who doesn't live there - in what ways are BART / muni / street cars not fit-for-purpose?

Bart doesn’t go to Marin, only has a few stops in downtown (so you might be walking a ways to your destination), was very crowded already with poor scheduling. Muni / street cars are a mess, taking forever to get anywhere unless you happen to live right on a direct path with zero transfers… and even then they don’t run that often.

SF, for all its money and values, has terrible public transit and has never gotten serious about it. We need a change of the guard to implement anything — specifically need something like Paris or Tokyo to come in, fire everyone, and rebuild the entire system with a different ethic and mindset.

About what I was going to write. I know a couple who live in SF without a car--and they're actually quite near a street car line. But my observation is that they depend heavily on Zipcar/Uber/regular rentals.

Yes, the Rapid 38 Muni takes 30 minutes to go downtown from my nearest stop while the regular 38 Muni does it in 32 minutes from a stop that is 2 minutes closer to my house. And that is on a route with dedicated bus lanes. Crazy that the Rapid 38 is only 2 minutes faster.

If congestion pricing is not pegged on income or value of the car (both are tricky to implement), it is most likely a regressive tax. A flat low fee of 5-10 dollars will just remove low-income drivers from the street, making it more complicated for them to earn their necessary income to survive while having no impact on behavior of the higher income drivers.

It sounds like it's somewhat pegged to income, but not a lot of detail in the article:

> There would be a base fee of $6.50 to enter the congestion pricing zone with eligible discounts based on income level. If you make more than $100,000 a year, you’d pay the full amount. Commuters who make less than $46,000 would not pay a fee.

Though if there is good public transit that doesn't matter, as it drives those people into the transit where they won't look back.

Good is key here. Good means if you can drive there in half an hour (with traffic), then no matter when you leave your front door you can be there in 40 minutes or less. SF only has a few areas of good transit.

Even for cities with fairly good public transit, once you start making people driving into the city park on the outskirts somewhere and take one or two modes of public transit in to wherever they're going, many are just going to stop bothering if they can. (Though this mostly applies to non-commuting hours.)

I do generally favor better pedestrian etc. experiences in city cores, but there is some tradeoff with making it more difficult for anyone who doesn't live near there.

In general people are will willing commute up to half an hour each way to work. Some people do more of course, but the average person considered anything more than that unreasonable. So your point is wrong only because you are using a different definition of good public transit from me.

The key to congestion pricing is to simultaneously increase your alternatives.

If you're not killing off public parking, improving bus & bike lanes, or generally improving mobility citywide then you're just dinging drivers who have no choice.

The goal of a congestion tax is to reduce congestion. That doesn't work if there's no other option.

Yeah I'm conflicted on the value of congestion pricing (which feels like a regressive tax on people who don't have the flexibiltiy to bike to work or live in a city center) versus pedestrianizing streets, increasing public transit, etc. to reverse induced demand. If we keep throwing money at giving more space to cars, people will keep choosing cars, and the cycle continues.

Aren't most low income drivers already removed from the street due to the price of parking + overhead of vehicle ownership?

Depends what the alternatives are. If the alternative to owning a clunker is not working, they'll probably find a way to manage a car somehow. (Certainly outside of a city core.)

Aren't people taking public transit potentially low income drivers? Most people would own a car if they could afford it.

In the US, outside of (some) fairly dense cities public transit isn't really a good option--at least not for everything--especially if you can't afford high rents.\

There certainly are US cities where I take transit rather than driving when I have the option. But not many of them.

>A flat low fee of 5-10 dollars will just remove low-income drivers from the street, making it more complicated for them to earn their necessary income to survive while having no impact on behavior of the higher income drivers.move low-income drivers from the street

To most of the people making the decisions on this sort of thing the incentive you've described is a highly desirable side benefit if not directly the point.

From the article:

There would be a base fee of $6.50 to enter the congestion pricing zone with eligible discounts based on income level. If you make more than $100,000 a year, you’d pay the full amount. Commuters who make less than $46,000 would not pay a fee.

Wish granted.

Why should we subsidize the food service industry so their workers can continue to live far away and drive to work - so non-poor people continue to pay more for other companies' workers?

It's not like the majority of poor people driving around SF are joy-riding. They are mostly getting to and from low paying jobs (by definition of being poor, they are not driving to high paying jobs).

So their companies can either pay them more and raise their prices accordingly - and the cost is paid by the people who use the service - or non-poor people can pay a higher congestion tax and we can socialize the cost on privatize the gains to the companies.

Non-poor people don't take up more space, cause more noise, or pollute more.

It's OK to have individual regressive taxes as long as the result is net progressive.

This doesn't incentive poorer people (including rideshare drivers??) at all from driving downtown which is fucked. NYC's congestion pricing won't have this guilty-liberal nonsense.

A good example of getting this right is a Carbon Dividend. Fuck the poor over with fuel prices but shower them with cash even more. None of the poor net hurt then, and those that move near transit can come out extra ahead. As everyone does that, the payout shrinks but that's fine because the gas tax doesn't.

I live in NYC, and lived in SF. NYC can have a congestion fee because car travel is essentially a luxury. All train lines within the affected area of the city run every 15 minutes or so overnight, and less than 10 during the day. The bus service is also extremely extensive. SF has nothing comparable. There are ~4 subway stops in downtown SF, vs 151 in manhattan (probably around 120-130 in the affected area). SF needs to right with density and transit to even begin considering something like this.

Simply out of curiosity, I counted 91 stations in Manhattan in the proposed congestion pricing area below 60th street. (More precisely, I counted 60 stations outside the area.)

More relevantly, congestion pricing has been proposed since (at least) 2007, and there are actually currently 0 stations in Manhattan in the congestion pricing area ... because there is no congestion pricing.

Well first of all, there are busses. Congestion pricing should make the buses run absolutely better, and even more relatively better compared to cars. Maybe have some extra busses that turn around at the congestion zone border too for extra frequency.

In the medium term, SF should be extending it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahn. The central subways is behind schedule as usual for bay area infra. They should dig the Geary subway cut and cover.

Every time public transit improves, crank up the congestion pricing and expand the area it covers.

Seems like a reasonable way to do it and my understanding is that congestion pricing is generally effective at improving air quality and reducing the number of private vehicles.

I do wonder how it'll be enforced by income level.

I've noticed SF has been getting more and more hostile to cars, narrowing the roads, making the lights more restrictive (more red arrow to turn right), shutting down Market for traffic, etc. I often sit at an empty intersection with noone in sight waiting for the pedestrian light, then for the bikers' light, but in most places (outside a few spots downtown) there are no bikers or pedestrians, especially later in the day. I'm sure whoever did this thinks it's "progressive" and "good".

Charge the cars whatever you want, but please build a functioning public transportation first. My hometown added 59 subway stations in the last 10 years, that's more than the entire BART system in its history. Nothing about public transportation in San Francisco makes any sense. If you want to go to SFO, you can wait for a stinky BART train for 15+ minutes, then do a weird back and forth 30 minute trip, or you can just Uber in 20 minutes.

I used to Caltrain into SF until I couldn't stand it anymore, it doubles the commute time, and the train stinks. Projects like the Central Subway (or even the Salesforce Terminal - what is that pompous-looking building used for??? Greyhound?) are an embarrassing joke compared to the cities that actually build useful public transit systems.

Until then, you are just extorting money from people who cannot spend 2x the time on a stinky crumbling train that goes nowhere near work.

I'm not convinced congestion pricing will actually fix the problem. Once public transit exists and is more useful than your own car, people will use it.

I consistently notice this when visiting larger cities in Germany. Good public transit => I'll take the bus/tram/subway every day. Slow or unreliable => I'll gladly take an Uber or buy my own car.

Maybe surge pricing could be use to finance investments into public transit. Just make it a function of the horsepower-to-people ratio. Anything below 90HP/person is free. If you can afford a nice car with lots of power and don't carpool, pay up.

I don't know much about SF specifically, but I think it's generally a good idea to promote a strong system of public transit and then charge those who wish to drive instead of using the system. It allows a metropolitan region to scale up population density without eternal gridlock on the streets.

That said the bay area isn't particularly ramping up housing or transit either, from my understanding. Congestion pricing is one piece of a never-to-be-completed puzzle.

Couldn't they have like a toll tag sticker provided by a business working downtown if you're an employee or resident? If you work downtown you're free to get in. If you're just trying to pass thru you pay a fee? I don't understand how if the manager of the place of business makes more money he has to pay more than someone who also works there with the same need to go to work?

From https://investopedia.com/terms/r/regressivetax.asp:

"User Fees ...

...if two families travel to the Grand Canyon National Park and pay a $30 admission fee, the family with the higher income pays a lower percentage of its income to access the park, while the family with the lower-income pays a higher percentage. Although the fee is the same amount, it constitutes a more significant burden on the family with the lower income, again making it a regressive tax."

That being said I agree, if you work downtown you shouldn't have to pay.

Downvoters: I'm seeing a pattern in my posts. I don't care about HN points, if you have a problem with what I'm posting you should respond instead of turning this place into Reddit.

I don't know about SF in particular, but for major downtowns "just trying to pass through" just isn't being done in peak hours (when congestion matters the most), the peak traffic consists from the daily commutes to/from work, so the whole point of downtown congestion pricing generally is to push people who commute to their work by car towards some other means of transport. Of coarse, there needs to be some reasonable alternative, otherwise that's meaningless as an incentive.

Yeah, maybe they can push to stagger commutes somehow. Incentivize business opening at different hours other than peak times I don't know. It's a hard problem to solve but making people pay to commute just doesn't seem like the right way to do it.

The congestion is largely due to the bay bridge. People working downtown leaving to go to the East will always clog up that pathway which then ripples. You could force others who also want to get to the East bay to take earlier on-ramps, but the slow traffic to the bridge will continue the slow traffic to get to the bridge downtown, so there’s no good way to avoid that other than have East bay folks take Bart or a bus.

You're on vacation from out of state and decided to make a road-trip out of it, so you are in your private vehicle. You enter SF during one of the fine times.

Since the toll is income based and California doesn't have your info (I assume), it seems like this law would require you to provide a copy of your taxes in order to know whether to charge you the full $6.50.

Or only local residents are eligible for the discount, and there are specific mechanisms to apply for them.

Can someone explain to me what's attractive about living in SF at all? This seems like one of the last places in the US I'd choose to live but something must be bringing people in since it's so crowded.

Is it just the though that you'll get to be part of Silicon Valley?

Despite all its problems, SF is still among the more attractive cities to live in the region, which is full of desolate, charmless suburbs.

Tech moving out of the Bay is happening, but many workers will still be stuck with living in the region in the near term.

It has many issues, especially in recent years. However, in terms of most of the metrics you'd measure a city against--culture, cuisine, architecture, green space, natural beauty, diversity, etc. it's got a lot going for it. And cool grey fog aside, it's got a far better than average climate. I've never lived there but have visited many many times and definitely see the attraction.

I'll also note that, if you're there on business and never stray too far from the Moscone, you're seeing one of the least interesting parts of the city.

I've driven the PCH and I get it but it just doesn't seem worth it with all the other cons it has.

I'd prefer living in some low col anywhere else over renting a closet sized apartment for thousands and putting up with the ever increasing homeless/drug problems SF has.

All those things you listed exist in plenty of other more affordable places. I think people have just been sold this false idea that only CA has this stuff.

I don't live in CA and don't even live in a city. But I understand why someone might want to live in a city and, given that, for me SF has many attractions--though, as you say, the other side of the ledger is increasingly long. Personally, if I had to live in the Bay Area somewhere and had the money, it's unlikely I'd live in the city. But I have no real interest in living in the area generally. I can always visit.

Is this even a problem anymore? Market St has been closed to cars for over a year. The city's population has decreased significantly. Most companies are still in work from home mode. Why is this even a thing? Do they need the money to pay for those $20k trash cans?

How does $6.50 make someone making over $100k bat an eyelash at parking? If anything this will just make traffic more congested because lower income people now will be more likely to drive thus making more traffic.

100k isn’t that much in the Bay Area.

Are you speaking from experience? From what I see on apartments.com, there are plenty of sub $3,000 apartments that you could get there. Even if you get net 60% after taxes on your paycheck, is still more than enough to live on.

Many people like to exaggerate the minimum cost of living to justify extravagant lifestyles. It's not necessary to eat out multiple times per week, have a new/recent car, subscribe to a long list of services like Netflix or Peloton, spend dozens/hundreds of dollars on eating or drinking out, keeping up with trends in clothing and commodities. But a lot of people don't have the self control to live simply, so instead they say that that's just the basic cost of living.

I agree wholeheartedly. So many people tell me the same thing about NYC but if that's the case, how are people able to live there making sub $60k? So my mind just jumps to affluenza stricken people that have FOMO so bad they must spend every single dime on a high quality lifestyle.

I think that's more common than people admit. Another good one is when people act as if it's impossible to raise kids with less than 1 bedroom and car per kid, as well as family trips every year and extracurricular lessons throughout their lives. Meanwhile oblivious to the fact that millions of families live in tiny apartments, have no extracurriculars or travel, and still end up fine.

If you’re making 60k post tax and paying 3k/mo, that’s over half your income going to rent. That’s a very high percentage. There isn’t a whole lot left over for other basic expenses (food isn’t cheap), let alone saving money for the future or supporting a family.

The 30% rule is for gross, not net. Also, food is cheap. Even in a HCOL SF, you can make meals less than $3/meal. And eat healthily. You just have high standards of living. Eat more rice and chicken, less name brand organic food and going out to eat.

The article quote to figure $46,000 a year, does anyone make that in San Francisco? And if so, where the hell do they live?!

They didn't pull that number out of thin air. Tons of people make that or less. Retail employees, non-profit workers, restaurant workers, gig workers etc. They live with roommates, with spouses, in rent-controlled units or have unenviable commutes. Even the new $16.32/hr minimum wage is just under $34k/yr and that is assuming people can actually get 40hrs/wk.

Tax the poor and the middle, express lanes for the rich.

How about not letting people who vote who do not pay taxes.

> By charging a fee to drivers who can afford it and providing discounts and exemptions for those who can't, we can get traffic moving and improve transit, bike and pedestrian options.

Why should only those who "can afford it" (in whose opinion?) pay?

Are you running a congestion management program or racket on the very people who paid for the roads (middle class and above)?

> And by prioritizing travel, safety, and clean air improvements for the people who need them the most, we can advance equity in our transportation system.

If you charge low income people less or nothing, you subsidize pollution and don't "prioritize clean air improvements".

Just looking at the list of busybodies who took part in devising that nonsense plan makes me sick. You don't even have to see the details to know it's going to be another gem.

> Why should only those who "can afford it" (in whose opinion?) pay?

This is simply the kind of thinking that many people have nowadays. It's essentially dragging everybody down to the lowest common denominator.

This is how the upper classes gentrify the middle classes. They know most <$46k people already can't afford cars in a major city, so this isn't geared towards them at all. Simply slap a forced tax that's meaningless to the rich, and all of a sudden they get to drive around in a traffic-free city.

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