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Comment by clickety_clack | Hacker News Reader

This shows a total lack of empathy for people without the wealth to live wherever they want. “You can sit on a bus for an hour and a half, dummy” is a terrible argument.

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.

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No, quite the contrary. Unlimited free road consumption has created the conditions under which jobs get super-concentrated into commercial centers and away from communities, which centralizes land values and urban vitality into the few neighborhoods the wealthy can live in.

How can you argue here that it is "free road consumption" while in another comment you point out that there were already tolls?

Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?

In another comment thread I was talking about New York City in particular.

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.

> Unlimited free or near-free road consumption is the norm across the entire US

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?

> Roads are funded with taxes. How does that make them free?

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.

Transit access is what concentrates jobs and creates urban vitality. Highway access has a similar effect but creates corridors and edge city clusters which also drive up land values and cost but are impossible to effectively serve by transit, requiring every single person to drive.

This is backwards. With public transport you have to be near public transport. With a car you can go from any start point to any end point. Banning cars would mean you either work in a local coffee shop or supermarket or something, or you work in the office buildings and large employers at public transit hubs, which are usually downtown. It increases concentration of jobs into zones, increasing the need to be in a residential area that can access them, increasing demand for those locations, increasing wealth inequality by limiting access to jobs based on where you can afford to live.

Increase public transit density. In Asia like in Seoul or Tokyo I'm not further than a 10 minute walk anywhere to a public transit station.

Job concentration predates the automobile by some amount. The concept of suburbs largely originates from the development of streetcars (very much not free!), although the suburban sprawl associated with US cities nowadays arises from the private automobiles. Note that streetcar suburbs are generally associated with medium-density development: it allowed urban centers to grow larger without having to really pack everyone into high-density tenements (though that still happened in many cases). White flight and the automobile means that post-WW2 suburbs become large low-density suburbs, focused on detached single-family homes.

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.

You're saying the same thing that I'm saying.

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.

I don't think you're saying the same thing.

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.

No free roads create the cost-free arbitrage between cheaper land in the outer areas and more expensive urban core.

And no, cost of land and ease of transit is a far more powerful force than zoning. Look at Houston.

Now that you can't white knight for the people with medical emergencies, you're white knighting for the poor?

Cars are a money sink, everyone would be richer if you don't need them for personal transport.

I never said anything about medical emergencies, and nobody is forcing you to own one today.

As opposed to sitting in their car for an hour and a half?

Seeing as the comparable drive is probably a half hour, if you’ve sat in the car for an hour and a half then you’ve found a great way to spend your time.

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”.

The places that are doing congestion pricing are not the places where your commute is 30 minutes by car but 90 minutes by bus.

Improve public transit then. This is not a good argument to instead allow everyone to have cars.

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