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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

The roads will be so gridlocked no one will drive on them anymore /s.

Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem.

DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs, robotaxis will primarily rely on fast charging.

Also don’t forget about how much traffic flow will improve because self driving cars don’t get impatient and tailgate.

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Car traffic has very different physics than that of people walking in a popular area.

The flux of the number of vehicles, as you increase the number of vehicles on the road, starts out going up as one would expect. But at a certain point, adding more cars on a road starts slowing down the movement. And then as more cars come on the road, the flux goes down, there is less road capacity as it get more crowded. This is the fundamental diagram of traffic flow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...

So once cars on the road exceed that peak amount of flux, there's a phase change and cars start backing up.

So with cars, gridlock really does mean that far far fewer people get serviced by a chunk of road. Whereas with people in a busy area, there really are more people there.

> Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem.

Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.

It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and congestion will go away very quickly.

There are societal reasons why this won’t be accepted by the public. It’s sort of analogous to allowing the rich to pay for a higher spot on an organ donor waitlist, in theory it is economically efficient but in practice it is unfair and will cause outrage.

Lots of good discussion on this idea here: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-traffic/

Yes, the political challenge of getting massive wealth redistribution passed in conjunction with public opposition to giving up the luxury of personal cars means the probability of the US ever getting its transit situation in order is very low until energy prices rise high enough to force a change.

It also means energy prices will not rise high enough until the government becomes incapable of subsidizing them, if you (s your argument does) neglect the possibility of political shifts.

I want some of those subsidies. Aside from a few particular oil-rich nations (and some very poor ones), where are these fuel subsidies I keep hearing about? A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.

> Aside from a few particular oil-rich nations (and some very poor ones), where are these fuel subsidies I keep hearing about?

Flowing from the US to oil-rich nations in form of security assistance to buy policy, or in the form of US military going to enforce policy preferences, as well as:

> A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.

Accepting negative externalities without internalizing them (whether through direct liability for externalized harms or pigovian taxes) is a forced subsidy to the activity creating those externalities by the rest of society.

Perhaps we can peg it to income? Progressive taxes are wonderful

Reducing the congestion isn't the goal though. Increasing throughput is. Cars simply have worse throughput than a train, or a bus for that matter. Simple as that. Charging more money would be counterproductive unless that money served to build out transit since you would increase the congestion on the non-toll roads.

It is one and the same.

There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit.

Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.

in practice this doesn't make sense since people are broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well, actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess.

this is already the status quo.

Make use fees explicitly progressive: pay a fee to use the road, and then at the end of the month, the bottom 25% get back 150% of the average fee, middle 50% get 100%, top 25% get 50% back.

Drive less than average and you're making a profit regardless of where you are on the scale.

This retort always comes up, and the answer is that different problems have different solutions.

Solving each problem directly and in the simplest way possible results in the fewest unintended consequences.

Problem is congestion, aka too many cars in x location at y time? Make it more expensive.

Problem is some people are too poor? Redistribute wealth via progressive taxation.

the retort comes up because charging egregiously to use public roads that they're all paying for with their tax money makes no sense.

> the retort comes up because charging egregiously to use public roads that they're all paying for with their tax money makes no sense.

So, stop paying for the roads with tax money. Fully internalize the costs with user fees, directing tax spending elsewhere, and the argument about fairness of tax spending goes away. In fact, raise the user fees high enough that the road users are subsidizing other public projects, specifically mass transit, as well as paying the full cost of the roads.

The idea that a single person is paying a specific part of infrastructure makes no sense. My taxes do not pay for a specific road, they pay for the operations for society as a whole.

Sometimes, that would mean my taxes are going to pay for something which hurts me in the short term, if I want to get to a future where individual cars are not used as much and walking/bicycling/public transit are possible.

The problem is this is just some leftist fantasy and the idea that to solve all of the consequences is to just do wealth distribution is not surprising. You would need to reform the government into a dictatorship to keep these legislations in place. And this is to solve “gridlock”? People already experience gridlock and are not clamoring for a Maoist state.

It is not to solve “gridlock”. It is to change infrastructure to better use society’s resources so that people spend less time in cars and more time living life.

The solutions that worked when there were x number of people living in an area, with y number of miles traveled in z number of individual cars simply might not work if you double or triple x, y, and z given the hard boundary conditions of the world such as space, pollutions, and supply of materials and energy.

I'd rather work in a slow car than be crammed into a full bus. You miss how self driving is changing the economics. A major component of the appeal of public transportation has been that you can do other things while using it. This made up for its (sometimes extreme) inefficiencies with regards to the time it takes you to get to your destination. In fact self driving cars will have an advantage there because you won't have to switch vehicles.

you will simply kill the businesses and housing for anyone living nearby as a side effect. It's not an effective solution because it ignores actual second order effects. Just like toll roads, it will push traffic to other paths while making people who rely on that stretch of road end up paying more.

I live in a city where they decided parking downtown was too cheap because people were parking for too long. The effect was massive drop in business EVERYWHERE downtown. Why would I travel there to pay $25 to park while I shop? I'll just go shop elsewhere, where parking is free, and too bad so sad to the shops that go out of business because policy makers don't understand second order effects.

Now downtown is filled with empty parking and empty stores.

OK, so how do you keep the politicians in office that enact such legislation and if you say you want to create a Maoist state either how is this preferable or how do you stop rebellion?

This actually sounds really great for those who can afford it

I love express lanes, they cost so little and everyone stays out of them leading to a great experience for only 5-10 $

Wealth inequality is a separate problem with separate solutions. It is possible to simultaneously redistribute wealth, and implement measures to curb personal car usage (which is basically the cause of congestion).

Your solutions if they totally resolved gridlock seem like they would sew the seeds of riots.

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