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Comment by f7fg_u-_h | Hacker News Reader

One thing that the author misses is that a dollar spent on congestion charges doesn't matter the same to everyone. A fancy lawyer probably doesn't even think about a $10 toll but a grocery cashier probably would drive an extremely inefficient route to avoid that toll.

I think we need to find a way to "charge" people in a way that matters equally to everyone. I usually advocate for things in terms of time (community service hours) because that perfectly hedges against the person's wage level. Although I suppose given their tax receipts we could just adjust the monetary charge for their observed hourly wage.

Any other ideas for adjusting "charges" to have equal importance for different people?

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We don’t price much of anything like this, though? There are subsidies for low-income people, sure. But we don’t really do sliding scale payments for food, or public transit, or cars, etc etc etc.

Why does scarce road space in highly-congested (and well-connected) CBDs require a sliding scale when little else does?

> But we don’t really do sliding scale payments for food

But we do! When I was a poor student, I usually bought the bottom-shelf store-brand cheap pasta. Today, I look at a higher shelf and often get the organic high-protein stuff with fancier shapes.

It costs about the same per unit weight to make, but the latter costs much more to purchase. This is exactly a sliding scale that allows people who are more price sensitive to buy practically the same stuff except at a much lower price.

(Why do companies do this? It lets them expand their target market without getting total profits too close to the floor.)

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This is also why we have region locks on electronics and export controls on medicine: companies are selling literally the exact same stuff with different profit margins in different regions, based on their collective disposable income.

That’s an interesting take. And probably true. The pasta that cost three times as much probably isn’t three times better. But if you really want that 5% improvement in quality, you can get it by paying three times the price.

It’s different than grocery stores and plumbers I think because roads are seen as a public good, and if they’re using space in a crowded city, that space was/is also a public resource. Since everyone contributes their individual sovereignty equally, there’s a sense that govt should serve everyone’s interests equal, as best it can.

That's illogical. If there is congestion the problem is that the method of transportation is too inefficient. Smaller vehicles like bicycles are more efficient at slow speeds, during congestion speed is low to begin with. The right answer is to tax inefficient vehicles more and efficient vehicles less.

Or you take year's congestion charge revenue and split it equally across the residents.

The goal should be shifting traffic away from inefficient uses of the infrastructure's capacity.

That should provide the economics for actual ride sharing (I don't mean single-passenger taxi rides, but car pooling and busses) which would allow dynamic networks where passengers need to switch between vehicles on low-throughout links. Think a hybrid between taxi service and bus lines.

Such a network would be able to use incremental addition of fixed line public transit without today's issue of no car-grade last-mile solution for commuter rail services.

Also, public transit gets better when more people use it, due to e.g. busses needing to run more often for capacity and thus automatically/accidentally providing nice latency.

A dividend is the right idea.

Yes there is a simple way to do this that has universal applicability: users get charged equally, per use, the total revenues are uniformly refunded to everyone (not just users) and the refund is taxable income. At least, this is how it fits best with an American tax system.

Think about how this would work for a gas/carbon tax, for example.

Why would that be good? Nothing else is priced that way.

Also it greatly increases enforcement costs so not only would it have to be better, it would have to be a lot better.

Moreover, I know a lot of very wealthy people that are very frugal and actually care more about $10 than I do.

Car registration effectively works this way in a lot of places, with age and value being a substantial factor to registration fees. The idea being that the rich guy driving a brand new Audi every couple years pays a lot more for his license plate than the person driving a 20yo Corolla.

I guess they could read the plate and charge a toll based on the car, and in no-stop tollways that already rely on plate scanners or transponders, it’d not be that hard to enforce.

Flattening economic inequality should probably not happen at the level of individual places where people spend money, but rather as a general principle across all of society. Most of the economic thought around capitalism assumes that actors have roughly equivalent economic power, in order to get the most benefits of effective capital allocation. E.g. If only a few, select people are allowed to launch new firms because they were born into the right amount of wealth, then we are greatly limiting our ability to improve the economy.

So instead these sorts of equalizations should happen with high progressive taxation and redistribution through something like UBI. In particular, taxing economic rents is something that economists of all political stripes agree is good. And many vast individual fortunes are built on economic rents rather than productive economic activity.

Another way would be to link the toll to your average monthly earnings.

This, absolutely. The moral failing of neoliberalism and neoliberal solutions (e.g., externality pricing) is that it requires an honest belief that a $1 delta means the same thing to everyone everywhere, which is just absurd.

This is a generic problem that applies to a number of scenarios, including traffic congestion.

If there are fewer resources than there are users, a queue forms. People in the queue can be prioritised by sorting the queue by some agreed property and then admitting the people from the head of the queue as resources become available.

Sorting by the willingness and ability to pay in money is a very common property. Housing is notably discriminated by the money people can put on the table. Wealthy get the best spots, poorer people have to live further away in less desirable spots. Could this apply to traffic congestion as well? People with money drive when they want, poorer people drive when they can afford it. Money does a good job in discriminating between people in a huge number of services, possessions, and abilities.

If that sounds unfair somehow, I theoretically like the idea of a time tax. Everyone has the same amount of time each day regardless of if they make a million each day or over their whole lifetime. It's all very equal and it's up to each individual how they choose to spend those hours, whether it's waiting in traffic or doing something that is more profitable than car trips.

The way to implement this is curb down road capacity which also has the benefit of allocating less space for roads and more space for people. Useless trips get cancelled and transferable trips are moved to less congested times, and only if your trip is really important it's worth the wait in congestion. In many ways this is a more equal way of distributing access to limited resources. On the other hand, it's not very useful for anyone to sit in traffic whether you're poor or rich. Especially people whose time cost is close to zero could sit all their day in traffic if they wanted to while people whose time is very profitable couldn't do anything extra, couldn't pay anything extra or make any amends anywhere to get through their trip faster. This may be more equal among individuals but not necessarily the best use of time collectively, to the society as whole.

In communist countries short supply and high demand were resolved by queueing, to not much benefit to anyone. In capitalist countries the rich can pay their way through anything while the poor can't often pay anything, much less their way. What other methods are there for sorting the queue to a limited resource that are used in other domains of other societies?

On the other hand building large high-capacity road networks that are free to use is akin to socialism: there's supply without a distinct price which drives endless demand. Roads should be considered a scarce resource because they take space away from housing and business which are useful activies in a society unlike traffic which is just a means to access what is useful. Thus, the cost of using roads should at least mimick market pricing so that money will drive people to make educated, smart tradeoffs regarding the use of those resources and their time. And building more roads and wider roads in the first place should be considered in the light of alternative costs, not as a non-negotiable necessity.

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