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Comment by eweise | Hacker News Reader

HOV lanes in the bay area are terrible. We pay to build these lanes and then the government makes us pay to use them? Seems terribly unfair. Its also unfair to make the poorer people spend more of their time commuting than the wealthy.

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You don’t have to be wealthy to pay to use them, you just have to value the time savings more than others. Imagine a “poor” person late for their job where they will get fired, they might value the lane more than a “rich” person just cruising around for fun. Whereas if it weren’t an option at all the poor person in this scenario loses their job and is strictly worse off.

I feel like you dont live in the bay area. In peak traffic time, those lanes cost like $20+ to drive in.

Your assumption that rich people spend less for fun than poor people can afford to spend to survive is not something I think I'm confident enough in to trust it as the basis for policy like this.

Also isn’t it more fair to charge people using the roads than everyone? What if someone doesn’t even drive should they have to pay taxes for roads?

And in the absence of these congestion fees we’d likely have to take taxes overall. That would probably be even worse for poor people.

Who doesn't use the roads? How would you get anywhere without taking a road? Even if you didn't drive, whatever transport you're using except maybe a helicopter, would use the road.

Not everyone uses the roads the same amount. It would disincentivize having a job with a 40 mile commute.

Also trains/subways are obviously another non-road transport option.

i don’t agree with the notion that everything provided by the government must be free at point of use, seems like a childish and foolish way of running a society with real resource constraints.

Childish and foolish? That's the way these roads have been utilized for decades before someone figured out a way to extract more tax dollars from the public.

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