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Comment by bgirard | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising. The real question is how do we measure the opportunity cost of these measures? Is it a net gain? You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits.

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> You could, at the extreme, ban all motor vehicles but the opportunity cost would outweigh the benefits

We did this in Times Square and on Broadway, and it's honestly been great. I say this as someone who takes cars far more frequently than most New Yorkers and has a place I lived at full time for over a decade off one of those closed-off sections of Broadway.

The point of congestion pricing is to let market mechanisms determine where the optimum is.

Well, the market decides where the optimum is *in response to* the price set by the government. So the government can decide at least approximately where they want things to end up by setting a higher or lower price.

Right. It finds an economic optimum limited to what people are willing to pay and their perceived value from that. That optimum doesn't naturally weight more complex factors like for the trade-off for the smog generated from your travel.

I wouldn't assume your last claim.

It could also be the case that making it viable to drive personal vehicles at all inside a dense city comes with opportunity costs (parking, roads that cut through infrastructure, pollution, noise) that aren't worth it.

And I'd wager that it is the case.

That's a straw man. I didn't say personal vehicles.

You take a walk along a 55-mph stretch of highway, and then you take a walk down Broadway, and you see which one makes you feel better as a human being.

Since this is generating revenue for NYC, you can't consider whether this tax is good or bad in a vacuum though. The alternatives are a different tax with its own effects, or more debt, or less spending. (In this case, the revenue goes to the MTA.) Any opportunity costs due to less traffic are at least partially offset by opportunity costs you aren't having to pay somewhere else.

Dynamic pricing based on congestion would solve this. It would also almost certainly result in higher costs for drivers though.

Try things and ask the people in a year if they like the results, then do the good ones more and the bad ones less.

It's called congestion pricing because you can measure the opportunity cost.

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