Comment by ryan_lane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan_lane | Hacker News Reader

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Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.

In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.

Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.

Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?

> Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation.

Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

See also Dutch suburbs:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo

We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.

I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.

I disagree with that take generally. What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas? The commuter rail station really. UK suburbs are similarly labyrinthine. But actually, the dallas suburbs have great bones for a potential transit network. Even though the residential streets themselves look like they were laid out by wandering livestock just like they were in the UK, they have the great advantage of being rigidly bounded by generally 1x1 mile square, cardinal, arterial road networks which are very wide public right of ways. One could just lay a network of brt or lrt or heavy commuter rail on top of this space without even needing to acquire any property at all. And if the stations were say on each 1x1 mile intersecting node, everyone in the inner residential portion would theoretically only be a half mile or closer from their nearest transit stop, as the crow flies at least.

The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.

> What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas?

The ability to do stuff without needing a car.

> Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride

In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?

> car owners get to use the infrastructure for free

Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.

> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?

Quite a few areas have their public transit fully funded by users and some even make a substantial profit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio)

The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.

> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.

Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)

Fuel tax doesn’t often cover everything. LA metro actually spends an appreciable fraction of its budget on highway and road expansion for example.

Sure, I wouldn't expect fuel tax to cover everything. Local roads are quite useful to people who do not drive at all, and major roads and interstates are disproportionately worn by commercial vehicles that also benefit many people who do not drive private vehicles.

Indeed. After all, roads predate the car by thousands of years. But still, often roads are overbuilt and their potential capacity is never close to being reached. The bog standard suburban design we see in america for example is generally severely overbuilt. Plenty of arterials nowhere close to being used to their theoretical throughput limits. If your experience of suburbia is mostly american centric, if you look at say english suburbia where major roads only offer a single lane per direction you'd wonder how society there functions at all. But it does, because those single lane per direction have enough capacity to serve a generally denser version of suburbia than what we might see on the fringes of Dallas, where giant empty roads such as this (1; note how there are barely any cars in frame) are found on standardized 1 mile square grids out of routine more than anything really. Compare with (2) which feels much more right sized for the road demand in this generally denser suburban area on smaller lots with attached housing.

1. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1890836,-96.7504787,3a,75y,1...

2. https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3698269,-0.1403251,3a,89.7y,...

> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?

Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.

If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.

> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads

For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.

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