Congestion pricing is one of the few policy ideas that's so overwhelmingly positive that even the people who try to argue against it end up strengthening the argument. Love it.
"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!
Cambridge in the UK tried it. They promised to improve the bus service only after introducing the charge.
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.
> and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
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!
Always the plumber who can afford every other toll but not the very low priced congestion pricing. No other occupation ever gets mentioned so we must think of the hundreds thousands of plumbers.
My counter point is very few people have those requirements beyond plumbers. That’s why everyone always uses the plumbers as an example. And as you stated someone else's point is that since there are very few plumbers they would benefit. So my point is that those people aren’t a large enough group to matter in the decision of implementing congestion pricing because their negatives from it are nonexistent or over-exaggerated.
> very few people have those requirements beyond plumbers.
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...
and taking into account a minority that will have no choice but to interact with the new regulation (unlike service or white collar worker for whom it would be easier to take public transportation) seems like a good idea, no?
They were taken into account and the result is that the negative effects to them were negligible to the gains. They ultimately don’t matter in the end game. Sorry! But not sorry!
The MTA did a 10 year long study. It wasn’t something that appeared out of the blue.
> edit: and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
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.
Definitely, 20 minutes of an electrician in a truck costs me about $45 ($135/hr cost). Probably closer to $170-180/hr in NYC which would be close to $60 if it saved 20 minutes.
What I don't like about congestion pricing is that the people asking for money are the ones who are responsible for the congestion. They are always making cities denser and denser, bigger and bigger, which no resident asks for.
San Francisco wasted millions on congestion pricing research that ironically totally solved by Covid.
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.
> Congestion pricing is one of the few policy ideas that's so overwhelmingly positive that even the people who try to argue against it end up strengthening the argument. Love it.
> "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.
No. People should not expect to free-ride on an adjacent city's economy while inflicting severe negative externalities on the local community and its infrastructure.
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.
Simpler idea that will get 90% of the benefit: amplify congestion pricing based on KBB value of the car. Zero enforcement complexity. Yes rich people could drive a shittier car to save their $5k per year or whatever, but most won't, and the few ultra-cost insensitive people will pay for vast numbers of the most cost sensitive.
Imperfect but much better than existing implementations. Really, though, the goal ought to be not only to reduce congestion, but to fairly distribute the net gain of utility among those affected.
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 main problem with that scheme is that its imprecision falls exactly where I think we need the highest precision: The ultra-rich. If they're just a passenger in their driver's black SUV (maybe $100k KBB tops), they're not paying anywhere close to a commensurate share of their income on congestion fees. The upper middle class BMW driver, on the other hand, gets screwed (relatively speaking).
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.
Avoiding a policy that makes life better for nearly everyone because it doesn't make life bad enough for the top 0.0001% is so absurd that I honestly can't believe it's the source of your real opposition.
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.
Good, because it's not. The inevitably unfair distribution of utility gains and losses is why I think congestion charges are bad policy. The fact that your proposal leaves a giant loophole for those whose utility gains are the largest is, I think, quite a reasonable objection.
> 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.
What ideal, exactly? A fair (re-)distribution of utility?
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.
> People should not expect to free-ride on an adjacent city's economy while inflicting severe negative externalities on the local community and its infrastructure.
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.
Why stop your argument at rent? The cost of living is higher for everything in the city! Food, concerts, clothes all higher! That doesn't make free-riders out of everyone not paying NYC prices.
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.
The cost of everything being higher is principally due to rent (in particular land rents). Food, concerts, clothes, coffee, all of them have a "land upon which this was retailed and sold + land upon which the person behind the counter lives" line item. In high-COL areas, this invisible line item makes up a gigantic portion of any bill you pay anywhere.
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. 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 kind of have it backwards. Cities that overbuild commercial space and underbuild housing get to reap the sales taxes without having to provide the same level of services.
And then the residents complain that people keep commuting to work in the offices they zoned for instead of housing towers.
Yeah, I know, I agree with all this. I'm still saying that if your entire argument for the absolutely giant section of society that drives into cities for work, which includes the rich, the poor, the disabled, those with large families, etc etc is "lol just don't do that stupid" don't be surprised when you find it hard to win support.
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.
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.
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 neither work in a coffee shop or supermarket, or work in the office buildings 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.
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.
Subsidized roads creates an arbitrage that allows people to live away from their jobs. This concentrates commercial activity. 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.
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.
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”.
Not really. It's just a tolling overlay that changes the deal and perpetuates bad engineering. Just as traffic grows to fill a road, budgets grow to spend revenue.
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.
I think you overestimate the number of people that can work from home. For society to function the majority of us have to actually go to a physical place and do something real with our hands and our time.
My city is growing at about 25,000 people per year. Just take a second to run some numbers in your head to let that sink in. In 1990 this city was the 29th largest city in the US and now it is the 10th. By 2050 it is projected to be the 9th largest city in the US surpassing Dallas in population.
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.
67 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] thread"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?
How are they going to do if there's no public transportation available for their commute?
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.
"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?
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.
> "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.
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.
People who live in NY pay NY taxes and NY rent.
Eh I don't think the problem is commuters per se. The problem is cars. But commuters are the primary source of cars.
I could pay rent in the city now as it would be cheaper than my mortgage.
I choose to not live in the city now because I value where I live more now, inclusive of the additional cost.
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.
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. 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.
> Expressing that preference generates negative externalities on the people who do live in the city...
...by choice. Everyone who lives in the city chose to live in the city BEFORE the congestion pricing and therefore ACCEPTED all those externalities.
This is a pure cash grab, retroactively justified.
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.
Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?
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. 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.
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”.
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.
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.
What's the issue?