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!
Well I don't care how the money flows and neither should anyone else. It's a matter of allocating costs as closely to the origin of those costs as possible.
If you do that, it will turn out that buses (etc) are far superior methods of moving people around, but you really don't need to move money directly from one to the other.
> Well I don't care how the money flows and neither should anyone else
Why shouldn't people care how the money flows and why are you the decider of what people should care about? If the money from congestion pricing was for a new stadium for the Yankees, or to build a new heliport for billionaires' row, or it just went into the pocket of the mayor I think that would be concerning for everyone involved.
> 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.
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 non-existent hundreds of thousands of plumbers who can’t afford it.
> 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.
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 that had no public transit option.
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'm not sure if this is a serious question, but: buses, subways, (e-)bikes, working from home, carpooling. I know these aren't an option for everyone in every situation, but congestion pricing areas tend to be set up in places where public transit is good and normal.
Yes, or the train. All of these cities have a mix of public transit modes.
> Cities around the world, including London, Stockholm, Milan, and most recently, New York City (NYC), have adopted congestion pricing, charging drivers a fee to enter high-traffic zones.
Good news! In all the areas where congestion pricing has been implement there are abundant alternatives to driving! Or, you can still drive and simply pay the toll!
Sure! Get a job in your own community or if you want access to the city's jobs, then pay to reduce the negative externalities of your access, or pick a transit method with fewer negative externalities.
while true, this is reliant on company leadership (and their boards/shareholders) to allow for it. there's too much invested in commercial real estate at the moment that every publicly traded company with significant stake from some large investor(s) will be forcing RTO/hybrid. the calculus of 'slightly unhappy workers' vs 'complete collapse for X% of my portfolio' is not a difficult solve
which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society
I exclusively work remote jobs myself, but I wouldn't say just don't ever have or use a personal vehicle. It costs me $20–40 to get up to family in another state and a train ticket would cost twice as much.
And if reputation follows, more people will claim some disability or other of come off their disability much later than normal. If New Yorkers are known for one thing, it’s how to corrupt a system so I would propose having more scrutiny around disability qualifications with more frequent renewals.
The fixed income case is absolutely trivial to solve by just giving them a stipend or discount card, which is obviously what they do in NYC.
The people who drive into a city to work should either pay for access to the city's economy and infrastructure that supports their job (and the entire surrounding region's suburbia), or they can get a job in their own community, or they can take a form of transit with fewer negative externalities on the city. Not that hard to understand.
It's not "absolutely trivial" and it's not "obviously what they do in NYC".
It is a convoluted system of city and state tax credits, partial discounts, etc that you must do every year. Not only do you have to file additional forms as part of your tax return, you must also recertify your disability annually.
And if you are simply low income, you can apply and then you receive a 50% discount after your first 10 trips into the city each month. If you are going into the city 2-3 times a week, you receive no discount.
You seem to be avoiding the point that to get a discount you must travel into the city by car more than ten times a month and those first ten times are full price.
And then you must pay 50% of the price after that. Then, in April, you may get some tax relief.
This is a good system and trivial in your mind? Because the average low income or fixed income person can just float that money for a year and then maybe get some of it back?
And you can't even do it if you've moved recently. If all of your documents don't have the exact same address you are out of luck. If you've moved since you filed your taxes and your address on your car registration is your old address you're out of luck until you file your next taxes and update your registration.
And then you have to mail it all in and just wait until you get a response. And if it's denied you get to start the process again. And then next year you get to do it again.
This isn't "trivial". Trivial is submitting your social security number, VIN, drivers license, and address.
Empirically demonstrated by their continued decision to live outside of the city and commute into it, they believe they are getting more value than they are paying in via whatever tax scheme the locale has in place.
You'll know they're paying their fair share when the arbitrage actually stops, but taxing non-resident earnings so aggressively to stop it produces way more negative side effects and regressive taxation effects than congestion pricing does. That's why congestion pricing is a good idea and 90% taxes on non-resident incomes is not (not to mention the ease of enforcement).
People with families aren't often willing to accept the living conditions they'd need to in order to live in NYC while paying market prices. So they arb and get suburban living conditions with urban employment.
The cost of their decision to do that is mostly borne by the respective communities (home community loses economic productivity and then city community bears increased infrastructure consumption).
We would know there's zero arbitrage when zero people did this. Which again, I don't think is the goal to shoot for. But simply asserting you have some god-given right to make this arb indefinitely at zero cost is a losing argument.
I don't think this should be described as a tax. It's paid access to a scarce resource, no different from a parking garage charging people to park. In this case it just happens to be a government-owned resource, but that doesn't make the price a tax.
If you're worried about poor people, the right move is to price things properly and then give assistance to those who need it, rather than giving away scarce resources to everyone for free.
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.
You have no clue. Low-density suburbs create much more traffic than dense areas, just because you _have_ to travel >5km just to the next supermarket. In dense areas, most people walk.
People love density. What they don't like are some of the consequences of density, such as traffic. This alleviates a major consequence without getting rid of the stuff people like.
If you don't like density, there are plenty of un-dense places you can be, with no congestion pricing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
I am so envious of DC and Chicago for their metro systems. It's always interesting to talk to people who live in those locations and take their mass transit for granted, like a spoiled entitlement. Here if you don't have a car you will quickly become homeless or starve to death.
If Google is right they live in Jacksonville, which aside from being a terrible place to live in general, can't physically or geographically support subways or light rail. So you're basically limited to busses if you want to implement public transportation.
I've only been to Jacksonville a handful of times but I'd rather walk along the side of road in August than ride a bus there. And they don't actually help congestion that much.
Jacksonville (and most of Florida) is extremely low lying with a high water table, so sub-surface construction (basements) and subways are basically impossible.
Structurally, it's a low density, car-based city so light rail (as opposed to busses) requires a lot of up front investment without the land use to justify it. At this point, like many US cities, adding effective transit is a chicken and egg problem with land use.
There are a couple reasons (not the least of which is political will but that's a separate discussion). Jacksonville sits on a coastal plain and is almost entirely fine sand. You simply can't build a subway in that without astronomical cost. As for rail I'm pretty sure Jacksonville already has elevated rail in some places but ground rail would be difficult for the same reasons.
New York has excellent mass transit and high population density, so you have options besides using a car or can walk to meet up for a car pool. These options just don't exist here. So charging people a penalty without providing alternatives is just another unavoidable tax.
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.
"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!
How are they going to do if there's no public transportation available for their commute?
edit: and how about plumbers (and the like) who need a vehicle to carry what they need to work?
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.
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!
A productive way would be to say that congestion pricing should be used to expand bus service.
If you do that, it will turn out that buses (etc) are far superior methods of moving people around, but you really don't need to move money directly from one to the other.
Why shouldn't people care how the money flows and why are you the decider of what people should care about? If the money from congestion pricing was for a new stadium for the Yankees, or to build a new heliport for billionaires' row, or it just went into the pocket of the mayor I think that would be concerning for everyone involved.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
> "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.
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 that had no public transit option.
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.
River crossings into NYC were already not free. Not sure what you're referring to.
Speed cameras and stop cameras are also great and should be virtually everywhere.
What? Don't work? What else is there, the bus?
> Cities around the world, including London, Stockholm, Milan, and most recently, New York City (NYC), have adopted congestion pricing, charging drivers a fee to enter high-traffic zones.
which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society
"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?
The people who drive into a city to work should either pay for access to the city's economy and infrastructure that supports their job (and the entire surrounding region's suburbia), or they can get a job in their own community, or they can take a form of transit with fewer negative externalities on the city. Not that hard to understand.
It is a convoluted system of city and state tax credits, partial discounts, etc that you must do every year. Not only do you have to file additional forms as part of your tax return, you must also recertify your disability annually.
And if you are simply low income, you can apply and then you receive a 50% discount after your first 10 trips into the city each month. If you are going into the city 2-3 times a week, you receive no discount.
https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/tolls/congestion-relief-zon...
Low-income: Show your tax return <$50k/yr or show your enrollment in a public assistance program.
Disability: Get your disability assess annually or show enrollment in the already-existing disabled-people transit assistance programs.
Not sure what you think is non-trivial about either of these?
And then you must pay 50% of the price after that. Then, in April, you may get some tax relief.
This is a good system and trivial in your mind? Because the average low income or fixed income person can just float that money for a year and then maybe get some of it back?
And you can't even do it if you've moved recently. If all of your documents don't have the exact same address you are out of luck. If you've moved since you filed your taxes and your address on your car registration is your old address you're out of luck until you file your next taxes and update your registration.
And then you have to mail it all in and just wait until you get a response. And if it's denied you get to start the process again. And then next year you get to do it again.
This isn't "trivial". Trivial is submitting your social security number, VIN, drivers license, and address.
The standard low-income relief program does not entail any tax credits or fronting any money. It's just a discount attached to your EZPass.
A different relief program gives you a post-facto tax credit.
These are two different systems. One is easier for one group, the other is easier for a different group.
Sure go make it more trivial. No complaints there!
You'll know they're paying their fair share when the arbitrage actually stops, but taxing non-resident earnings so aggressively to stop it produces way more negative side effects and regressive taxation effects than congestion pricing does. That's why congestion pricing is a good idea and 90% taxes on non-resident incomes is not (not to mention the ease of enforcement).
It's not "arbitrage" to commute from a place you can afford to a place you can't. Being middle class isn't an arbitrage play.
People with families aren't often willing to accept the living conditions they'd need to in order to live in NYC while paying market prices. So they arb and get suburban living conditions with urban employment.
The cost of their decision to do that is mostly borne by the respective communities (home community loses economic productivity and then city community bears increased infrastructure consumption).
We would know there's zero arbitrage when zero people did this. Which again, I don't think is the goal to shoot for. But simply asserting you have some god-given right to make this arb indefinitely at zero cost is a losing argument.
If you're worried about poor people, the right move is to price things properly and then give assistance to those who need it, rather than giving away scarce resources to everyone for free.
Didn't the city already charge tolls on the bridges and tunnels in and out?
A road isn't a scarce resource. You can't deplete it.
Land is a scarce resource. Roads require land. Charging money for access to land is extremely common.
If you don't like density, there are plenty of un-dense places you can be, with no congestion pricing.
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.
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.
Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?
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.
Cars are a money sink, everyone would be richer if you don't need them for personal transport.
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”.
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.
I've only been to Jacksonville a handful of times but I'd rather walk along the side of road in August than ride a bus there. And they don't actually help congestion that much.
Why? Genuinely curious, I don't know much about US geography
Structurally, it's a low density, car-based city so light rail (as opposed to busses) requires a lot of up front investment without the land use to justify it. At this point, like many US cities, adding effective transit is a chicken and egg problem with land use.
I guess there are made up reasons not to use public transport there too.
And then imagine if there was offsetting spending.
Has the added benefit of reducing gas prices (less demand) and less greenhouse gas emissions.