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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Well, that would work in a perfect system. In our current system, however, roads are "free". So, if you make driving a cab free and unlimited on those free roads, you just end up with a tragedy of the commons. Medallions solve that, but so would an appropriate gas tax (hint, many times higher than it is now) or some other kind of per-mile payment for road use.

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Roads are not free, they are paid for via gas taxes. To support your claim that an appropriate gas tax would be large, do you have numbers suggesting how much road spending costs compared to revenue raised from gas taxes?

Medallions don't come close to solving the issue of people free-riding on roads - most of the cars on NYC roads are neither taxis nor ubers.

> do you have numbers suggesting how much road spending costs compared to revenue raised from gas taxes?

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/05/debunking-the-myth-th...

In addition we live on a (mostly) 2-dimensional plane so we can't scale transportation capacity indefinitely, which means even if the roads were owned privately it's nearly impossible for a market to form that would force them to compete with each other.

Why? You can't build a close competitor to 9th Avenue (making up a street name) because A) there are buildings in the way beside it and B) building above it is prohibitively expensive. If these are one-way streets as is common in urban areas 9th Avenue's closest competitors are 11th and 7th and after that competition falls off quickly. Five competitors doesn't make a healthy market - it makes an oligopoly.

One reason to prefer the Medallion system is that both of the latter two options end up disproportionately impacting low-income people.

The goal is to limit the number of cabs on the road without creating unreasonable barriers to other economic activity using the roadways. This can be done without Medallions, though. Cities could just require a license for taxis, like they do for many other businesses. If that license cheap enough that anyone can afford it (perhaps with a small business loan) but expensive enough to slightly deter entry, then it solves the commons problem without leading to cronyism.

By this logic private cars should be issued medallions too. There are much more private cars on the road, than taxis. And private cars use more resources per drive, because they are taking parking space, unlike taxis.

Private cars don't make money when they drive more.

And how is it relevant? If taxis drive more, they move more people too (who would use a private car otherwise).

If too many cabs start running because it seems lucrative, it'll very rapidly become less lucrative. There are only so many people who want a ride, and taxis are only profitable if they handle a certain number of those rides per day, so there's already a natural limit on the number of taxis.

Yeah, but that limit doesn't take into account the full costs to the system.

Your argument is like saying that common grazing land is okay because there's a natural limit to how many cows can be on it; the number of cows that can fit, or that can be watched by the available farmers, or any other limit that doesn't take into account how many cows the field can actually handle.

A gas tax effectively exempts vehicles that don't use gasoline (eg. fuel-cell or battery backed electric vehicles).

A daily "vehicle fee" to have a vehicle within the city might solve your problem.

In London, we call it a 'congestion charge':

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge

Although, as a matter of policy, ultra-low emission vehicles like electric cars didn't have to pay it.

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