>dynamic, fair toll for road use could reduce congestion.
In addition to the explicit imprecision, in a significant range, demand will be inelastic and simply result in higher tolls without commensurate reduction in traffic and will end up hurting those of lesser means.
Yep. Toll roads hit poorer people harder. Maybe there could be a credit limit that everyone (or just people of lesser means) gets by default and you only pay when you start going over it.
It's not possible to build good public transportation after people have already chosen where to live, work, and build buildings based on the non-public-transit infrastructure.
It took a while for the suburban model to take hold of the United States, clearly it would take a while to re-densify metropolitan areas. I think you go too far by saying it is impossible.
To use an Americentric, and worse, SV-centric example, consider when SF's BART was built. They trenched Market Street
through almost all of downtown! Building transit even in dense urban areas is clearly doable with enough political will.
Maybe I'm doing the typical HN thing and assuming that lots of people are like me, but I've been moving around the SF bay area, and being close to transit is a massive consideration.
At the moment, everyone pays the same for roads, regardless of whether or not they use them.
Charging only those people who possess the means to drive, AND those people who choose to drive, sounds like it could reduce the harms to those of lesser means.
Right now, if I cannot afford to own a car and use my bicycle to get around town, I pay for someone else to use roads, because my taxes subsidize those roads.
So, if we paid for roads not out of general taxes, but out of tolls, it seems like it could be cheaper for those who don't drive.
Also, for what reasons do you suppose that demand is inelastic? I'm not sure what mechanism you're assuming is not sensitive to price.
> At the moment, everyone pays the same for roads, regardless of whether or not they use them.
> Charging only those people who possess the means to drive, AND those people who choose to drive, sounds like it could reduce the harms to those of lesser means.
> Right now, if I cannot afford to own a car and use my bicycle to get around town, I pay for someone else to use roads, because my taxes subsidize those roads.
> So, if we paid for roads not out of general taxes, but out of tolls, it seems like it could be cheaper for those who don't drive.
> Also, for what reasons do you suppose that demand is inelastic? I'm not sure what mechanism you're assuming is not sensitive to price.
Most people would be hard pressed to up and leave their jobs if tomorrow the cost of their commute doubled.
This is wrong. Tax is already tiered by income so people in lower brackets pay less for roads right now and richer people pay more.
By narrowing the focus to people who have to drive on the roads and doing it in a flat way using tolls will hurt poor people the most if they have to drive to work. Having to drive to and from a job at a certain time is relatively inelastic especially for lower paying service jobs.
With tolls the same money will be spread over fewer people in a flatter way.
> At the moment, everyone pays the same for roads, regardless of whether or not they use them.
No, everyone doesn't. Even leaving aside toll roads, which exist and are becoming more common, roads are often paid for out of license fees (vehicle and driver) and gas taxes, which are all related to road use.
And if they were paid purely out of general taxes, well, every doesn't pay the same for those, either, though tax payments probably aren't closely correlated with road use. Though, almost certainly they are positively correlated with total, including induced, road use, since total consumption is positively correlated with income, and more consumption is linked to more direct (e.g., travel) and induced (e.g., for shipping goods) road use.
So you don't bike on the road with your bike? I sure hope you don't bike on the sidewalk like some people ... Unless you're biking on trails only, FYI, you're still using the road.
In my area for smaller companies it's a matter of culture really. My sister is currently fighting to be able to do just that. Her supervisor has this need to keep tabs on people - this is an attitude I've seen in many other places.
Hell, there are proverbs predating any notion of a modern workplace that suggest you should do so as a business owner.
I on the other hand am employed as a contractor for a large company which noticed the profitability in having people working remotely - at least the contractors. I guess it boils down to the size of risks a business can afford.
We have this in northern Virginia on 66 going into the city. We’ve had tolls as high as $50 on some days, but usually it tops out below $20. It does seem to have helped congestion.
For people who can’t afford the toll, it’s free if you have a second rider in the car.
Toll roads increase the value of land closer to where jobs are at the expense of land further out. Guess where the rich and powerful live (and own land) and guess where the poor and marginalised live.
The solution to this problem is to upzone that land so that more people can live there. If more people wind up living close to their jobs, that's a good thing. Commutes are bad for workers and bad for society.
You explicitly mention SF in your other comment; I agree that proper zoning and getting people to live near to where they work is a better solution (or, better mass transit in lieu or in addition to that), but attempting to convince SF and the Bay Area that has been an uphill, losing battle thus far.
But that upzoning is a better solution doesn't negate the argument that congestion pricing hurts the wrong set of people.
If the Boring Company is successful, the tolls for using the first tunnels will be used to build more and eventually everyone will have a low-cost toll tunnels to use.
This is not a new idea, it's called congestion pricing, and it's already in use in London.
No matter what we do, a road is a limited resource. Only so many vehicles can use it per hour. We allocate that resource to those most willing to pay for it, but right now that payment doesn't take the form of money, it takes the form of time, frustration, of the amount of pain drivers are willing to endure to use the road. The trouble with this sort of payment is that it's not a transfer, it's just a loss. The time and energy these drivers use to get through the traffic jam is simply destroyed. In short: a traffic jam is a bread line. By measuring willingness to pay in dollars rather than in hours, we avoid that loss. The money collected can be used. It can be used to maintain the roads, to build transit, or simply redistributed to users in the form of tax cuts.
The important thing about congestion pricing is that it makes mass transit competitive. There are buses you can take out of San Francisco into Oakland/Berkeley/El Cerrito right now, but they have to wait in the same traffic as everyone else, they suffer huge delays, and they're a miserable experience. With congestion pricing, those buses can move faster. With congestion pricing, you don't have buses with 50 people on them waiting behind a line of cars and SUVs each carrying a single driver.
A normal toll road might support a cash option. I feel like the kind of dynamic pricing here would be really onerous to handle if it was implemented with toll booths; that is, this type of pricing would require a transponder.
And, AFAIK, no transponder offers the ability to load cash onto it. (That is, transponder manufacturers/operators require an incursion of one's privacy, despite there being no technical or legal requirement for it. I'm in America, YMMV.)
Further, they have been shown to be used in spying (essentially) by cities[1] and even in political attacks[2].
Transponders are also a right PITA for anyone traveling. Boston, for example, has some really lightly marked toll roads now that are all transponder/camera-only; if you mistakenly drive a rental through those without realizing it (which is really easy), the rental car company charges ~$25 for the "service".
You can purchase a New York EZPass in cash at places like Costco, and reload it with cash at any 7-11 or other Visa ReadyLink merchant.
You are required to register the EZPass to get a reload card in order to do this (which just requires you giving them your name and address, which they already have by taking a photo of your license plate), but if you are really averse to registration, you can just keep buying new EZPasses at retail, I guess.
It need not: the toll module could contain "cash" (a cash-like analogue, like credit tokens you refill at 7-11) instead of an account number. Somehow such systems never get deployed though :-(.
People have become quite tolerant of it, too: they routinely drive around with vehicles bearing unique serial numbers and permit their driving licenses to have tons of unnecessary info (all that's really needed is a photo or fingerprint, what class of license you have, and possibly an expiration date).
But it's easy to design systems that don't leak secrets. I wonder if GDPR could be used as a cudgel for system design?
A dangerous thing about congestion pricing is that it incentivized government to run as a business that caters to its paying customers -- making premium product to serve only the wealthy, and ignore the working classes
With modern systems it is possible to have variable pricing based on traffic flow. Mandate that the price is the lowest possible that still keeps the traffic moving at a certain rate. Even free in slack hours. That way you don't get almost empty toll roads with super high prices like I have seen in Mexico, Italy, etc. Hopefully we can try out some new systems to get rid of traffic jams and normalize travel times and not just always assume the system will be corrupted to serve a few.
Even that incentive may be good for society overall though. Efficient transportation is not a zero-sum game. There are currently people sitting in traffic who are willing & able to pay more not to sit in traffic.
By building systems which allow those people to pay more, then reinvesting that revenue in transportation improvements, everyone can benefit.
Of course we need to be careful not to create a premium-only product, but some balance should be achievable.
There's no economically rational incentive to spend congestion pricing revenue on measures that reduce congestion. To maintain a constant revenue stream, congestion pricing has to rise as congestion decreases...like cigarette taxes congestion pricing is a tax scheme incentivized to become increasingly regressive.
That assumes your area has mass transit that's usable. In many areas, this is simply not the case. And no, taking three buses for three hours to go ten miles is not usable mass transit.
Tolls are a way of allowing wealthier people to drive with less traffic. You may be ok with the regressive nature of that, but in a place without good public transit it feels wrong.
I have an even better idea. Make all cars run on "soft" (embed sensors or emitters on roads to guide self-driving cars) tracks or completely self driving, and have them all run at max speed, zipping through intersections without colliding because each car is aware of the whole system state at the intersection and can avoid each other without slowing down. We have the tech, just not the will to do this.
This won't fix things. If you look at maximum road capacity for a highway lane it's pretty pitifully in the hundreds. Maximum capacity being exact speed limit driving with minimum safe distance between cars. Obviously, city streets have an even lower capacity even if you exclude pedestrian and bicycle traffic Ultimately cars can't be the only solution in dense urban environments.
"If you look at maximum road capacity for a highway lane it's pretty pitifully in the hundreds."
You need some units for this sentence to have meaning.
If a vehicle and its space buffer takes up 52.8 feet and goes 60mph one gets 100 vehicles/minute or 6000 per hour. With two people per vehicle, that is 12000 people per hour. Use mini-buses with 10 people each you can get 60,000 people per hour. This rate is about what BART does when completely full at rush hour.
Another cool thing about a road is that one can mix high capacity vehicles (buses) with lower capacity ones (cars) with cargo vehicles (trucks). You can even use them for tanks, ambulances, fire trucks, Humvees, etc.
You’re right that cars can never compete with mass transit in density and bandwidth, and mass transit already operates pretty close to the ideals that I proposed for motor vehicles. If anything it’s an example of why we should implement trains on tracks rather than self driving cars.
But your calculation would be off because there would not be any inefficiencies associated with human driving. Cars would have reduced safe distance, increased max speeds, and would not have to slow down for stops, intersections (assuming walkways are built over intersections for pedestrians), as all cars would be part of the same computer system, and essentially one harmonious unit.
Even if cars are low density and roads are narrow, the increased throughout would be massive.
The scheme creates the perverse incentive of traffic jams as a source of government revenue -- incentives similar to speed traps. Even better it's able to scale to hundreds or thousands of imposed charges per hour, doesn't require staff, and individual drivers can't challenge it in court as would be the case with a traffic ticket. As a public policy proposal, it's a regressive tax designed to keep those without financial means out of the way of those for whom congestion pricing is but a trifle. Starting the sentence with "scientists" doesn't make it science. It is there to create an undeserved aura of inevitability to ordinary horseshit.
Exactly the same thing applies to the gas tax. This has the benefit of increasing the efficiency of vehicle commuting, which means less pollution, and less time and gas wasted sitting in traffic. Carpoolers will be taxed significantly less than single occupancy vehicles. Electric vehicles will be taxed just as much gasoline-powered ones. It is tax that charges people for the scarce public resource they use, rather than charging them for use of a private resource that acts as a proxy for use of that public resource.
The biggest concern I have with it is privacy, but that could be addressed by consciously designing it to not disclose personally identifiable information (this could be done with zero-knowledge proofs).
A better idea is giving businesses tax incentives for each remote employee living within X miles. That way you can support more rural communities too.
Their solution just trades time stuck in traffic for time stuck on public transit and that's if where you live has adequate public transit. The people who need to drive will still drive and these tolls will displace the traffic elsewhere. It's silly.
There is a more accurate and cheaper way to do this, just double the price of gas with extra taxes. It will have the same dumb effect, make commuting harder for poorer people.
> The scientists do not believe that the toll would disadvantage people who cannot afford the tolls.
With thinking like that, the whole plan is dubious. What exactly is a fair toll when you make $7.25 an hour as such a huge percentage of the population makes in the US? In Seattle, where they have a bit of such a system, you can easily spend that on the way to work. Double when you return. So now instead of getting paid for 8 hours, one gets paid for 6 at minimum wage. Yeah, that's fucking fair.
I think mandatory self driving mode in highly congested areas is the more sure fire way to defeat traffic jams. The reason why traffic jams exist in the first place is because of issues that arise from the limitations a human driver poses.
For example, imagine a scenario where somebody from Southern California who has never been to San Francisco is driving up 101 to visit a cousin who just moved to the city. Neither have GPS or phones and are having to get to their destination using a printed out Google Maps sheet.
Now imagine that this driver is on the highway and is in a hurry because they are running late. They don't know where they are really going and all of a sudden they spot that the exit they need to take is in 1/2 mile. And let's assume they made the bigger mistake of thinking it was a good idea to try and get into the city at 5 AM.
So they are now in heavy congestion, but most people are used to this traffic and have no issue maintaining the speed limit. However, the tourist driver needs to catch their exit. So what does she do? Start merging right, right, right, right. And guess what they are in a hurry, so while she is merging right she is having to cut other people off. Otherwise they will miss their exit and be even more screwed.
And therefore she is a contributing force when it comes to the underlying conditions that result in stand still traffic.
There is nothing you can really do about this dilemma. Everybody on the road heading to San Francisco during it's most congested hours are doing so because they have jobs.
It's not like a Carbon Tax is all of a sudden going to cut down on traffic when people need to drive to work in order to make a living. Most people who are on the road, aren't driving without some sort of living necessity in mind at the other end of their destination.
Taxation doesn't promote better behavior. Rather it further penalizes those who can barely afford to drive as it is. And it just further taxes the wealthy which if you add up every last cent the top 50% (because all of that 1% of 1% babble is just a scapegoat to distract who we are really talking about when discussing taxation) already is obligated to pay, it becomes something around 35-50% of all non capital gains earned income. And let's not forget that if you are religious there is often a tithe obligation to tack on to that.
I just don't understand why taxation is always deemed the magical solution to try and curb these kind of issues. The only reason why we should ever have to spend a cent over a universal 15% flat tax, is so the government can use that revenue to start buying back our debt before we are faced with the dilemma that we need to borrow more than we could ever hope to pay the interest on.
I think a system of points per registered car would be fairer. You get a set of points per annum and info how many of them you need to spend to enter the zone for a given day. You could buy additional points, but that would be expensive.
Drivers of cars not in the database (e.g. tourists) pay a fee.
54 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 99.9 ms ] threadIn addition to the explicit imprecision, in a significant range, demand will be inelastic and simply result in higher tolls without commensurate reduction in traffic and will end up hurting those of lesser means.
Or maybe just build better public transportation.
To use an Americentric, and worse, SV-centric example, consider when SF's BART was built. They trenched Market Street through almost all of downtown! Building transit even in dense urban areas is clearly doable with enough political will.
Maybe I'm doing the typical HN thing and assuming that lots of people are like me, but I've been moving around the SF bay area, and being close to transit is a massive consideration.
Charging only those people who possess the means to drive, AND those people who choose to drive, sounds like it could reduce the harms to those of lesser means.
Right now, if I cannot afford to own a car and use my bicycle to get around town, I pay for someone else to use roads, because my taxes subsidize those roads.
So, if we paid for roads not out of general taxes, but out of tolls, it seems like it could be cheaper for those who don't drive.
Also, for what reasons do you suppose that demand is inelastic? I'm not sure what mechanism you're assuming is not sensitive to price.
> Charging only those people who possess the means to drive, AND those people who choose to drive, sounds like it could reduce the harms to those of lesser means.
> Right now, if I cannot afford to own a car and use my bicycle to get around town, I pay for someone else to use roads, because my taxes subsidize those roads.
> So, if we paid for roads not out of general taxes, but out of tolls, it seems like it could be cheaper for those who don't drive.
> Also, for what reasons do you suppose that demand is inelastic? I'm not sure what mechanism you're assuming is not sensitive to price.
Most people would be hard pressed to up and leave their jobs if tomorrow the cost of their commute doubled.
By narrowing the focus to people who have to drive on the roads and doing it in a flat way using tolls will hurt poor people the most if they have to drive to work. Having to drive to and from a job at a certain time is relatively inelastic especially for lower paying service jobs.
With tolls the same money will be spread over fewer people in a flatter way.
Not in all jurisdictions. Sales taxes and gas taxes and license fees are not tiered by income. Property taxes are vaguely tiered by income.
No, everyone doesn't. Even leaving aside toll roads, which exist and are becoming more common, roads are often paid for out of license fees (vehicle and driver) and gas taxes, which are all related to road use.
And if they were paid purely out of general taxes, well, every doesn't pay the same for those, either, though tax payments probably aren't closely correlated with road use. Though, almost certainly they are positively correlated with total, including induced, road use, since total consumption is positively correlated with income, and more consumption is linked to more direct (e.g., travel) and induced (e.g., for shipping goods) road use.
Hell, there are proverbs predating any notion of a modern workplace that suggest you should do so as a business owner.
I on the other hand am employed as a contractor for a large company which noticed the profitability in having people working remotely - at least the contractors. I guess it boils down to the size of risks a business can afford.
For people who can’t afford the toll, it’s free if you have a second rider in the car.
But that upzoning is a better solution doesn't negate the argument that congestion pricing hurts the wrong set of people.
No matter what we do, a road is a limited resource. Only so many vehicles can use it per hour. We allocate that resource to those most willing to pay for it, but right now that payment doesn't take the form of money, it takes the form of time, frustration, of the amount of pain drivers are willing to endure to use the road. The trouble with this sort of payment is that it's not a transfer, it's just a loss. The time and energy these drivers use to get through the traffic jam is simply destroyed. In short: a traffic jam is a bread line. By measuring willingness to pay in dollars rather than in hours, we avoid that loss. The money collected can be used. It can be used to maintain the roads, to build transit, or simply redistributed to users in the form of tax cuts.
Off topic, but does anybody know the name of that interchange? GIS isn't turning up anything and it's not properly attributed.
[0] https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/transport-minister-d...
The other important thing about congestion pricing (as described in the article) is that it completely destroys privacy.
And, AFAIK, no transponder offers the ability to load cash onto it. (That is, transponder manufacturers/operators require an incursion of one's privacy, despite there being no technical or legal requirement for it. I'm in America, YMMV.)
Further, they have been shown to be used in spying (essentially) by cities[1] and even in political attacks[2].
Transponders are also a right PITA for anyone traveling. Boston, for example, has some really lightly marked toll roads now that are all transponder/camera-only; if you mistakenly drive a rental through those without realizing it (which is really easy), the rental car company charges ~$25 for the "service".
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/location-tracki...
[2]: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/christie-use-tollbooth...
You are required to register the EZPass to get a reload card in order to do this (which just requires you giving them your name and address, which they already have by taking a photo of your license plate), but if you are really averse to registration, you can just keep buying new EZPasses at retail, I guess.
It need not: the toll module could contain "cash" (a cash-like analogue, like credit tokens you refill at 7-11) instead of an account number. Somehow such systems never get deployed though :-(.
People have become quite tolerant of it, too: they routinely drive around with vehicles bearing unique serial numbers and permit their driving licenses to have tons of unnecessary info (all that's really needed is a photo or fingerprint, what class of license you have, and possibly an expiration date).
But it's easy to design systems that don't leak secrets. I wonder if GDPR could be used as a cudgel for system design?
It is very much a case of those who can afford it pay while those that can't hit the back streets.
By building systems which allow those people to pay more, then reinvesting that revenue in transportation improvements, everyone can benefit.
Of course we need to be careful not to create a premium-only product, but some balance should be achievable.
You need some units for this sentence to have meaning.
If a vehicle and its space buffer takes up 52.8 feet and goes 60mph one gets 100 vehicles/minute or 6000 per hour. With two people per vehicle, that is 12000 people per hour. Use mini-buses with 10 people each you can get 60,000 people per hour. This rate is about what BART does when completely full at rush hour.
Another cool thing about a road is that one can mix high capacity vehicles (buses) with lower capacity ones (cars) with cargo vehicles (trucks). You can even use them for tanks, ambulances, fire trucks, Humvees, etc.
But your calculation would be off because there would not be any inefficiencies associated with human driving. Cars would have reduced safe distance, increased max speeds, and would not have to slow down for stops, intersections (assuming walkways are built over intersections for pedestrians), as all cars would be part of the same computer system, and essentially one harmonious unit.
Even if cars are low density and roads are narrow, the increased throughout would be massive.
The biggest concern I have with it is privacy, but that could be addressed by consciously designing it to not disclose personally identifiable information (this could be done with zero-knowledge proofs).
Their solution just trades time stuck in traffic for time stuck on public transit and that's if where you live has adequate public transit. The people who need to drive will still drive and these tolls will displace the traffic elsewhere. It's silly.
There is a more accurate and cheaper way to do this, just double the price of gas with extra taxes. It will have the same dumb effect, make commuting harder for poorer people.
http://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-traffic/
With thinking like that, the whole plan is dubious. What exactly is a fair toll when you make $7.25 an hour as such a huge percentage of the population makes in the US? In Seattle, where they have a bit of such a system, you can easily spend that on the way to work. Double when you return. So now instead of getting paid for 8 hours, one gets paid for 6 at minimum wage. Yeah, that's fucking fair.
For example, imagine a scenario where somebody from Southern California who has never been to San Francisco is driving up 101 to visit a cousin who just moved to the city. Neither have GPS or phones and are having to get to their destination using a printed out Google Maps sheet.
Now imagine that this driver is on the highway and is in a hurry because they are running late. They don't know where they are really going and all of a sudden they spot that the exit they need to take is in 1/2 mile. And let's assume they made the bigger mistake of thinking it was a good idea to try and get into the city at 5 AM.
So they are now in heavy congestion, but most people are used to this traffic and have no issue maintaining the speed limit. However, the tourist driver needs to catch their exit. So what does she do? Start merging right, right, right, right. And guess what they are in a hurry, so while she is merging right she is having to cut other people off. Otherwise they will miss their exit and be even more screwed.
And therefore she is a contributing force when it comes to the underlying conditions that result in stand still traffic.
There is nothing you can really do about this dilemma. Everybody on the road heading to San Francisco during it's most congested hours are doing so because they have jobs.
It's not like a Carbon Tax is all of a sudden going to cut down on traffic when people need to drive to work in order to make a living. Most people who are on the road, aren't driving without some sort of living necessity in mind at the other end of their destination.
Taxation doesn't promote better behavior. Rather it further penalizes those who can barely afford to drive as it is. And it just further taxes the wealthy which if you add up every last cent the top 50% (because all of that 1% of 1% babble is just a scapegoat to distract who we are really talking about when discussing taxation) already is obligated to pay, it becomes something around 35-50% of all non capital gains earned income. And let's not forget that if you are religious there is often a tithe obligation to tack on to that.
I just don't understand why taxation is always deemed the magical solution to try and curb these kind of issues. The only reason why we should ever have to spend a cent over a universal 15% flat tax, is so the government can use that revenue to start buying back our debt before we are faced with the dilemma that we need to borrow more than we could ever hope to pay the interest on.
Drivers of cars not in the database (e.g. tourists) pay a fee.