> "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.
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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.