Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ferret7446 | Hacker News Reader

The externality is already "priced in" to the traffic. People who can wait in traffic or can't afford not to wait in traffic do so, and people who want to skip out can as well.

Congestion pricing, like many fees and regulations, is a regressive tax, because the overhead seeps into all goods and services and it impacts the poor most of all and the rich not at all.

View on HN

The median income of a household with a car in the city is more than double that of households without cars [1]. In a city where public transport is a viable and relatively cheap alternative, it doesn’t seem obvious that it disproportionately impacts the poor, unlike for instance a flat sales tax on essential goods.

[1] https://blog.tstc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/how-car-fre...

If they only taxed passenger vehicles you'd have a point, but the cost for trucks is actually higher (up to more than double), which means that in the end it is a tax on essential goods, because those goods have to make it into the city somehow and businesses have to pass that cost on to customers. It's reasonable to be afraid that poor customers will see the largest change as a percent of their budget as prices go up to pay for the tax (though obviously we haven't had time to measure whether that to see for sure).

It disproportionately impacts the working lower classes. Poor in NYC likely means homeless. Dual income McDonalds working family is above the CarLess HHI median wage in the reports you linked. That same worker is heavily impacted by congestion pricing vs say a Quant trader

17$/hr * 50hrs/week * 52weeks/year * 2 earners = 88.5k/year

The dual income McDonalds worker was never driving into Manhattan. Though the fixation on “poor people” is fake. 100 studies could come out explaining that congestion pricing is better for poor people and the opponents aren’t going to change their view on it. It’s a fake argument used to launder more selfish opinions.

The externality of noise and smog for people living there is not priced in wait time for drivers.

In the absence of pricing, people who do not want to wait cannot opt out of traffic, so the rebuttal here seems imperfect.

> … the overhead seeps into all goods and services…

We have always paid a congestion tax on goods and services, it’s just been in the form of paying workers to sit in traffic.

traffic is a crappy externality that harms everyone, drivers, non-drivers. non-drivers are harmed by pollution, slower buses and cabs, noise, slower emergency response times. drivers are harmed by all those things as well plus the stress and inconvenience of extreme traffic. the point of congestion pricing is to reduce the so-called "traffic tax" that everyone pays into one that is just a toll, that only drivers pay. reducing traffic is a direct goal of the toll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com