Urban Congestion Pricing and the Response Times of Emergency Medical Services
nber.org
nber.org
"What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't!
"What about the delivery people who need to bring this into the city?" They should be able to get in and out much faster, and their cargo makes it easy to amortize the cost!
"What about people who need to drive due to mobility issues?" Look, now they can park near their destination too!
What? Don't work? What else is there, the bus?
which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society
> Cities around the world, including London, Stockholm, Milan, and most recently, New York City (NYC), have adopted congestion pricing, charging drivers a fee to enter high-traffic zones.
How are they going to do if there's no public transportation available for their commute?
edit: and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
A productive way would be to say that congestion pricing should be used to expand bus service.
If you do that, it will turn out that buses (etc) are far superior methods of moving people around, but you really don't need to move money directly from one to the other.
Why shouldn't people care how the money flows and why are you the decider of what people should care about? If the money from congestion pricing was for a new stadium for the Yankees, or to build a new heliport for billionaires' row, or it just went into the pocket of the mayor I think that would be concerning for everyone involved.
is there any city anywhere that has implemented congestion pricing without having public transit available?
It didn’t go over well.
And even for a small city like Cambridge it is a huge lift to go from an already inadequate public transport infrastructure and set of services to infrastructure and services suitable for a city where cars have been largely eliminated.
The irony of course is that bus services, specifically the guided busway, will be cut again soon due to ongoing lack of use. But the lack of use has been caused by long-running and poorly managed maintenance on the busway disrupting services to the point of unusability, rather than because of any real lack of demand.
Some people didn’t trust that promises would be delivered on public transport when it came to the congestion charge. Obviously cuts like this add fuel to that fire.
On a more positive note we have, over the past 10 years or so, gained two new railway stations, and that’s good. But we haven’t gained new rail lines and rail routes so they haven’t done anything really to improve the transport and congestion situations around the city. It’s easier and more convenient to get to London though, depending on where you are.
It is quite likely to be tried again in future.
This is literally addressed by the comment you are replying to:
"What about the delivery people who need to bring this into the city?" They should be able to get in and out much faster, and their cargo makes it easy to amortize the cost!
I'd say everyone who's working in the various home improvements/renovations, so carpenters, tillers, HVAC/boilers installers and maintainers, roofers, painters, kitchen designers, those who install plancher or carpets...
The MTA did a 10 year long study. It wasn’t something that appeared out of the blue.
You charge the customer for the congestion charge and use it to pay the fee, just like anything else. I bid construction work and would include congestion fees into my bid or T&M rates if needed.
How do you think construction vehicles pay for parking? They charge the customer for it and use the money to pay for parking.
They pay the fee and pass on the cost to their customers. And now they can find parking near where they work so they'll save some time.
"What about people who need to drive due to mobility issues?"
vs
"What about people on a fixed income who need to drive due to mobility issues?"
Regressive taxes are still regressive, even if you like what they do.
I'm also not quite sure how this is a winning argument either:
> "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't!
Huh?
The people who drive into a city to work should either pay for access to the city's economy and infrastructure that supports their job (and the entire surrounding region's suburbia), or they can get a job in their own community, or they can take a form of transit with fewer negative externalities on the city. Not that hard to understand.
You'll know they're paying their fair share when the arbitrage actually stops, but taxing non-resident earnings so aggressively to stop it produces way more negative side effects and regressive taxation effects than congestion pricing does. That's why congestion pricing is a good idea and 90% taxes on non-resident incomes is not (not to mention the ease of enforcement).
It's not "arbitrage" to commute from a place you can afford to a place you can't. Being middle class isn't an arbitrage play.
People with families aren't often willing to accept the living conditions they'd need to in order to live in NYC while paying market prices. So they arb and get suburban living conditions with urban employment.
The cost of their decision to do that is mostly borne by the respective communities (home community loses economic productivity and then city community bears increased infrastructure consumption).
We would know there's zero arbitrage when zero people did this. Which again, I don't think is the goal to shoot for. But simply asserting you have some god-given right to make this arb indefinitely at zero cost is a losing argument.
You didn’t say they should pay as much as they are willing to pay. You said they should pay.
They are paying!
Your new goal is that nobody can afford to work in the city except residents, but that is an objectively dumb idea, and certainly has nothing to do with a “fair share.”
First, in most cities people don't pay income taxes to the cities they work in but do not reside in. At least in the US this is not typical.
Second, the position that people should pay to reduce their negative externalities does not necessarily imply the view that they pay nothing today. It implies they ought to pay more.
If someone pays for entry to Disneyland, steals a t-shirt, is a valid defense that "they paid" when they bought the ticket? No, obviously not. Does demanding that they pay for the t-shirt imply that they did not pay for a ticket? No, obviously not.
Nevertheless, NYC is the only city I’m aware of in the USA that has congestion pricing, and I’m shocked to find that non-residents who work there do not pay income tax to the city. I live in OH and have to pay an income tax to the small city I work in even though I’m not a resident of said city. I thought it was more common.
I, as a realist, believe in systems with flex. As our very own patio11 put it: the optimal amount of fraud is nonzero. Here, the optimal amount of unfairness is nonzero. Or stated another way: the cost of eliminating all unfairness would not be worth it.
The assumptive jumps are not necessary here!
So now I’m honestly asking, are you or are you not arguing that the general goal is to end people "not paying their fair share” (which you equate to living outside of the city you work in)?
Also can you please explain why you believe that “fair” is measurable in this way? Can you give another example of something where a common person would use a similar definition of fair? I think that your definition of fair means stores without dynamic pricing are unfair, which seems crazy to me.
It is a convoluted system of city and state tax credits, partial discounts, etc that you must do every year. Not only do you have to file additional forms as part of your tax return, you must also recertify your disability annually.
And if you are simply low income, you can apply and then you receive a 50% discount after your first 10 trips into the city each month. If you are going into the city 2-3 times a week, you receive no discount.
https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/tolls/congestion-relief-zon...
Low-income: Show your tax return <$50k/yr or show your enrollment in a public assistance program.
Disability: Get your disability assess annually or show enrollment in the already-existing disabled-people transit assistance programs.
Not sure what you think is non-trivial about either of these?
And then you must pay 50% of the price after that. Then, in April, you may get some tax relief.
This is a good system and trivial in your mind? Because the average low income or fixed income person can just float that money for a year and then maybe get some of it back?
And you can't even do it if you've moved recently. If all of your documents don't have the exact same address you are out of luck. If you've moved since you filed your taxes and your address on your car registration is your old address you're out of luck until you file your next taxes and update your registration.
And then you have to mail it all in and just wait until you get a response. And if it's denied you get to start the process again. And then next year you get to do it again.
This isn't "trivial". Trivial is submitting your social security number, VIN, drivers license, and address.
The standard low-income relief program does not entail any tax credits or fronting any money. It does not require a disability assessment. It's just a discount attached to your EZPass and you can get it if you're already enrolled in a federal or local public assistance program.
A different relief program gives you a post-facto tax credit.
These are two different systems. One is easier for one group, the other is easier for a different group.
Sure go make it more trivial. No complaints there!
If you're worried about poor people, the right move is to price things properly and then give assistance to those who need it, rather than giving away scarce resources to everyone for free.
Didn't the city already charge tolls on the bridges and tunnels in and out?
A road isn't a scarce resource. You can't deplete it.
Land is a scarce resource. Roads require land. Charging money for access to land is extremely common.
If you don't like density, there are plenty of un-dense places you can be, with no congestion pricing.
Now work from home has essentially destroyed the downtown but also left it with very little traffic compared to 2019.
That being said the primary argument against it was that for residents who lived in S.F. it was an insanely bad proposal that had you paying to drop your kids at school, go to the grocery store and do average everyday things that had no public transit option.
> "What about all the people who need to drive into the city for work?" Uhh... don't!
... Look man, I'm in favor of the policy too, but this reads like straight satire. Please tell me you're trolling.
The entire point of the policy is to reduce the number of people driving into cities. "Well how am I going to drive into the city?!" is the position that's indistinguishable from satire.
But the mechanism here is highly unfair. It's obvious why rich people support congestion charges--they're rich! They don't give a shit about the $20 or whatever, and it clears the roads of those dirty poors making traffic. Bring it on!
Meanwhile the poor--already struggling with affordability and cost of living--are the ones who bear the burden. They can't afford the congestion fee, so they're forced to find some alternative way to get into the city. But that comes at an obvious utility cost; if that alternative was the best way for them to get into the city, they'd already be using it! And poor people are the ones with no time to spare, so choosing between spending $20 they don't have or spending 30 more minutes that they don't have is a Hobson's choice.
Here's my proposal: Every vehicle gets 60 free days per year with no congestion charges at all. Days 61-100 have a $1,000,000 congestion charge. Days 101-365 have a $10,000,000 congestion charge. Congestion charges will be reduced, however, to 0.1% of the driver's AGI (for days 61-100) and 1% of the driver's AGI (for days 101-365) upon application. Now even hedge fund managers in Connecticut will be inconvenienced in just the same way as poor people.
Yet somehow I believe that if that were how congestion pricing was implemented, all these Econ professors would magically discover what a bad policy congestion pricing really is!
A marginal $20 has very little utility to rich people, but 15 minutes saved in traffic has large utility. Congestion pricing results in large utility gains to the rich.
A marginal $20 has tangible utility to poor people, and 15 minutes spent finding alternative transport also has tangible utility. Congestion pricing results in large utility losses to the poor.
KBB values are an imperfect proxy for individual monetary utility but could definitely be used to more fairly distribute the utility gains from congestion pricing.
The congestion charge should reach each person using that infrastructure in a way that fairly impacts their available individual utility. The impracticality of achieving this goal is why, in my opinion, congestion charges are bad policy.
Given the extreme wealth disparity in this country, there will be virtually no policies at all that achieve your platonic policy-making ideal. Should we just have no laws at all?
If you really care to deal with the extreme high-end, there are other mechanisms that are easier to do at small n, such as having a superlinear vehicle registration tax.
> If you really care to deal with the extreme high-end, there are other mechanisms that are easier to do at small n, such as having a superlinear vehicle registration tax.
The extreme high end don't register super fancy vehicles, and if they do, even superlinear registration taxes would be a much smaller marginal utility hit than would be fair--and once again, would be an unfairly large marginal utility hit to the upper middle class.
How about "free" school lunches?
Progressive income taxes come close, though ideally they'd have more brackets with higher rates and the brackets would be graduated by both wealth and income.
The "gas guzzler" tax in California seems pretty fair to me, as does the "polluter pays" principle in general.
Specifically traffic-related: I like how California does HOV/FasTrak lanes. There is a separate lane (or even a separate segregated roadway) with free access for "high occupancy vehicles" (2+ occupants, rarely 3+). However, individual commuters can pay (with FasTrak) for access to the lane. The cost is set dynamically depending on traffic conditions; it's a realtime market for spare capacity unused by actual HOVs. (It could still be improved, though, with an AGI coefficient, but I digress). Anyway, the most important part is there are always cost-free freeway lanes available; there's always an option just to sit and wait without additional payment.
Are you kidding me? Free riding?
I pay the same taxes on my NY income as if I lived in NY plus congestion pricing atop that. Your transportation in the city free rides on me after NY/NYC do their voodoo transfers.
You shut down soooo many lanes then pretend the problem is the commuters.
Consider: "Broad"-way is effectively 1 lane southbound in the southern part of Manhattan.
People who live in NY pay NY taxes and NY rent. The reason you do not live in the city is because you prefer to arbitrage the difference in rents. The reason this arbitrage exists is because the costs incurred by e.g. taxes and congestion tolls are not sufficiently high to fully eliminate the free-riding.
I don't think taxes and tolls should be high enough to fully eliminate the arbitrage, but the existence of the arbitrage is an existence proof of the gap internalized and externalized costs.
I also don't think the problem is commuters per se. The problem is cars. But commuters are the primary source of cars.
Even if I could afford my house+land smack dab in the middle of Tribeca I would choose to live where I am now.
Once, years ago, I preferred the city. The reason I do not live in the city today is because I now prefer not to. Rent has nothing to do with that preference changing over time.
And, for the record, nothing wrong with the city.
I'm not sure what the rest of your comment is about? That's fine if you have that preference. Expressing that preference generates negative externalities on the people who do live in the city, and you should have to internalize those costs to whatever degree possible.
Your rents, by the way, do not just pay for your house and land. Your rent pays principally for location. So the idea that you're not engaging in rent arbitrage because you wouldn't want to pay the same amount to have the same unit in Tribeca is nonsense. The question is: would you pay more to have the same house, land, surroundings, and also have immediate access to city amenities and jobs.
The answer to that is already empirically yes. Because you pay the cost you do for your current house, land, surroundings, then you pay an additional cost (an insufficiently internalized one) to commute into the city. Time, tolls, stress, vehicle ownership, parking, etc. So obviously the exact same set of facts minus the commute, despite being physically impossible, would be a more preferable product.
Or to put it another way: would you pay more than $0 to have a teleportation portal from your home in the suburbs to your work in the city. My suspicion is yes.
You said I live where I live to arb rent. I said, no I simply prefer where I live.
> Would you pay more to have the same house, land, surroundings, and also have immediate access to city amenities and jobs.
No. I prefer the collective surroundings and amenities of the 'burbs over those of the city. It's why I left during early Covid--- right about the time Rick Moranis was sucker-punched.
> Or to put it another way: would you pay more than $0 to have a teleportation portal from your home in the suburbs to your work in the city. My suspicion is yes.
Sure, who doesn't love a portal? But I would pay more than $0 for a portal to anywhere on the planet. Can my portals be like the ACME-brand black circles from Looney Tunes, the ones you throw on the wall?
> Expressing that preference generates negative externalities on the people who do live in the city...
...by choice. Most everyone who lives in the city chose to live in the city BEFORE the congestion pricing and therefore ACCEPTED all those externalities. You really didn't expect traffic when you chose to live in Manhattan?
Congestion pricing is a pure cash grab from NJ residents, retroactively justified by making me an other-ed villain. The tri-state is a powerhouse because we all cooperate through the free market, not because of punative transportation barriers.
Congestion will gradually return and the city will be just as much a traffic snarl in 20 years as it was before. In the long run the city will still be traffic-y (because it's a city!), the MTA will still be underfunded because its fares are irrationally low, and we will all be poorer for this frictional government intervention.
Until that certain eventually, enjoy the crosstown busses running faster. When's the last time you personally took one? I haven't since Moranis took that hit to the face.
---
Thank you for the discussion. I am going to cut it off here because, as you can tell, it makes me stupid angry when someone tells me that I free ride on NY given what I pay in taxes+fees to this state in which I do not live.
And then the residents complain that people keep commuting to work in the offices they zoned for instead of housing towers.
I’m glad we all have great work situations, for many of us working from home whenever we want even. Most people are just a job loss away from having to commute to a job far away from the house near their kids’ school or their partner’s work. People don’t get jobs with a commute by choice to begin with, and this just punishes people for that.
Edit: I haven’t had a car since 2018, but before that I had one because I needed it, and I hated that commute. The alternative to a 25- to 35-minute drive was 1:45 on 2 trains. You shouldn’t have to literally experience things in the world yourself to recognize that people are in situations that you are not in yourself.
Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?
This comment thread is talking about the general dynamics of commutes.
Unlimited free or near-free road consumption is the norm across the entire US. NYC in particular has always been ahead of the curve in mitigating this. The bridge tolls are obviously not priced anywhere close to the value of crossing the bridge, or else land values would be the same on both sides of the bridge.
I suspect this isn't actually hard to follow and you're just getting irritated for some reason.
Roads are funded with taxes. How does that make them free? The main source of road funding in the US are property taxes and gas taxes, followed by things like license plate tabs (mine were ~$2500 last year).
> The bridge tolls are obviously not priced anywhere close to the value of crossing the bridge, or else land values would be the same on both sides of the bridge
Nothing about that is obvious, nor does your explanation make any sense. We should only invest in infrastructure if the costs to utilize it are equivalent to its benefits? That's not what we do with anything. Why build a bridge that provides no positive benefit to the people using it?
Road creation and maintenance are funded by taxes. Road consumption is generally free or near-free. These are distinct concepts.
> Nothing about that is obvious, nor does your explanation make any sense.
A simple case of disequilibrium doesn't make sense to you? The two sides are clearly of unequal value. If the act of crossing them costed as much as that difference, then the two sides would equalize.
> We should only invest in infrastructure if the costs to utilize it are equivalent to its benefits? That's not what we do with anything. Why build a bridge that provides no positive benefit to the people using it?
Nope! Not sure how you got from a description of how prices work and clear empirical evidence of price imbalances to a normative argument about what we should do. As I've stated explicitly elsewhere in the thread, the goal is not to completely eliminate the imbalance. I'm saying the existence of price differences and the arbitrage between the two sides of the bridges are clear evidence there is an imbalance.
In essence, the "unlimited free road consumption" created the disaggregation of decentralized, low-density suburban regions from the high-density commercial districts, which predates that concept by several decades.
Subsidized roads creates an arbitrage that allows people to live away from their jobs. This concentrates commercial activity, i.e. it creates commercial-only zones and residential-only zones that are far away from each other. Prior to that, people lived and worked in the same area. These were very dense areas, but the economic activity of the region wouldn't be described as concentrated because there was no gradient to low-activity surroundings.
Obviously actual zoning policies play a (significant) role here as well.
Transportation allows people to live far from where they work, but that's everything from horses to bullet trains.
Free roads allow for dispersed uses but doesn't affect how dense of segregated they are. Beyond the cost and space requirements to park everyone's cars. Zoning is doing almost all the work you're describing - even with the presence of cars and subsidized highways, the built environment would look very different without zoning and with more market forces.
And no, cost of land and ease of transit is a far more powerful force than zoning. Look at Houston.
Nobody wants to commute either by bus or by car, so the reason that they are doing it to start with is that they must do it. It’s not like people think to themselves “I’d love to find a job an hour away from my house”.
Cars are a money sink, everyone would be richer if you don't need them for personal transport.
The positivity of it varies dramatically based on the type of jurisdiction and what entity has what power. Manhattan and London have an existing chokepoint arrangement where you won't be able to really assess it's benefit/detraction for a long time. Proponents of the Manhattan congestion pricing tend to ignore where alot growth is happening - Hoboken and Jersey City are in some ways more vital. Most of the benefit could have been realized by tolling the free river crossings, as alot of the traffic reduction was eliminating toll-avoidance trips.
In other places, you can see part of the downside with speed cameras which are starting to pick up. My city adopted them and traffic dropped noticeably, immediately. We also saw a pretty immediate effect on retail and restaurants. My wife works for a restaurant group -- RFPs for large events basically say "not in <city>", because the city's brand is toxified by tolling.
River crossings into NYC were already not free. Not sure what you're referring to.
Speed cameras and stop cameras are also great and should be virtually everywhere.
Cool, you're demonstrating that you have no understanding of the issue.
> River crossings into NYC were already not free. Not sure what you're referring to.
They sure are.
Trips that originate from Brooklyn, Queens or Long Island to New Jersey would go <origin> to Brooklyn/Manhattan/Williamsburg/Queenboro bridges. The outbound Hudson River crossings are all free.
Trips that originate from Brooklyn, Queens or Long Island to Westchester and points north or east would go <origin> to Brooklyn/Manhattan/Williamsburg/Queenboro bridges. You take the FDR drive/East Side highway to one of the free east river crossings to the bronx, then take the Deegan to one of the many parkways. You can take the Taconic all the way to Albany for $0.
BTW, the Westside of Manhattan around the tunnel crossings is now just as much of a shitshow as it was. They are just slurping up more revenue for the MTA to set aflame.
> Speed cameras and stop cameras are also great and should be virtually everywhere.
They are fine if they are everywhere. You'll feel differently when you get a $25 fine + $50 contractor fee when you drive through a 20mph school zone in the middle of August in some random town.
How so?
You're talking about trips within New York City (Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are part of New York City) or out of New York City.
These are not river-crossings INTO New York City.
> Westside of Manhattan around the tunnel crossings is now just as much of a shitshow as it was
This is just objectively not true. https://www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com/
> You'll feel differently when you get a $25 fine + $50 contractor fee when you drive through a 20mph school zone in the middle of August in some random town.
... why would I feel differently once getting penalized for breaking the law? I want every person who speeds through my child's school zone to get ticketed. If I'm the one doing the speeding, I should get ticketed.
People of Long Island, which is not part of NYC, go to great lengths to avoid tolls to the mainland. You only need a few thousand cars to make a huge impact. That's the congestion that was eliminated. You can, and people do, the same from Westchester north. There is no free route from New Jersey.
> This is just objectively not true. https://www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com/
Compare your data, to what I said, not to what you are upset about. It's still a shitshow, just a shorter wait.
The routes used to avoid river tolls from Long Island (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queenboro Bridges) dropped. Crosstown traffic dropped.
FDR Drive, Battery tunnel, Queens Midtown Tunnel remained the same or marginally dropped.
Fine by me!
Has the added benefit of reducing gas prices (less demand) and less greenhouse gas emissions.
We have congestion everywhere and few transportation options. I cannot imagine the consequences of congestion pricing here. Sometimes it could take 30 minutes to get to the freeway 1.5 miles away during morning rush hour. I suspect congestion pricing here would motivate many people to simply abandon their employment if in a job where work from home is a disallowed viable possibility.
In my case I am currently unemployed and am turning down interview offers in locations I used to commute to just a few years back, because now the costs of commute are another form of wage depreciation that gets factored into the compensation rate.
I've only been to Jacksonville a handful of times but I'd rather walk along the side of road in August than ride a bus there. And they don't actually help congestion that much.
Why? Genuinely curious, I don't know much about US geography
Structurally, it's a low density, car-based city so light rail (as opposed to busses) requires a lot of up front investment without the land use to justify it. At this point, like many US cities, adding effective transit is a chicken and egg problem with land use.
I guess there are made up reasons not to use public transport there too.
And then imagine if there was offsetting spending.
Charging fees for things that are scarce certainly isn't perfect, but it's often better then simply leaving everyone to suffer.
What's the issue?