It's sad to see congestion pricing in America. I had hoped that the long-lived cultural freedom of driving would keep it at bay for longer, but I guess not anymore.
I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip.
Public transport is not a suitable option. Instead of 45 minutes one way, the combined trip time balloons to 2 hours (4 hours to and back) due to poor proximity to train stations, and bus connections that require waiting.
Every time I drive, I feel less free to move around my city. I feel less free to visit my friends and family. 'Freedom of movement' isn't some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.
Your freedom to drive where ever you choose on the fastest route infringes on freedoms of others, for example:
* their freedom to drive on the fastest route possible
* their freedom not to have a large road in front of their home
* their freedom not to have their taxes invested in a road infrastructure ballooned to a level that they might not need
* their freedom to live in a world that is not inflicted by global warming
Freedom to move does not mean you can do so at any cost to the freedom of others.
I'd encourage everyone to guesstimate how much distance could be taken out of their commute or drive to the city by removing parking lots, huge highways and tens-of-foodball-fields interchanges, large set-backs and front lawns to keep people away from unpleasant roads, and so on, then check whether they could bike that distance in what it takes to drive.
When I encountered the idea that cars being common causes them to lose all benefit for most people while also causing them to become necessary, I initially thought it overblown. Then I ran the numbers. Well. Crap.
[EDIT] and don't forget to factor in minutes or hours per day spent working to pay for car+maintenance+gas.
There’s the concept of “effective speed” that encapsulates that idea. Here’s (1) a sample calculation that someone did for himself and under his assumptions, the effective speed for him using a car is about 2km/h. That’s about half as fast as walking.
On top of the distance taken out of commutes, think about the space taken up in terms of real estate. In Munich, which is a fairly dense city, the estimated share of parking space of the city area is about 12.5%. If you include space for moving vehicles, that estimate approaches 50%. That’s a substantial driver of real estate prices and rents.
I don't think your examples really count as freedoms. I agree with your point, but I don't think you need to stretch the definition of a word to make it.
My parent made that stretch. I explicitly included other people’s freedom to do the same thing as they want to do in the list of freedoms that their freedom collides with. So call them out.
I agree with your more general point though: framing the entire matter in terms of freedom is detrimental to the debate. However, it’s almost always initially done by the side that wants to retain the status quo.
Because it is told from the perspective of the activity that is allowed. Now they could have technically been stated as the freedom from {Annoying/Harmful thing}* but thats still weak. The only reason to it is to take away power from the original argument by watering down the language it used. I'm sure the op didn't mean anything by it, I just happened to be listening to a conference call with a lot of corporate speak and was particular sensitive to how words are (mis)used
The actual point is that freedoms should be curtailed when they cause harm to others.
In this case unchecked freedom of movement can cause harm to society in different ways, so some forms of movement are restricted. Which is already true, we have signs, lights walls, fences, licenses, etc to restrict our movement. So the argument is really about how much more should they be restricted.
* EDIT, Zarath already called me out on that, but I still think it's a stretch
> Your freedom to drive where ever you choose on the fastest route infringes on freedoms of others
Another example: ambulances. The traffic in Manhattan means ambulances take a really long time to get to and from their patients. Those minutes cost lives.
The average traffic speed in Sydney is 55kph, so a 45 minute drive covers a distance of 25 miles. Taking the IRS standard deduction for gas and depreciation, you pay about $1 in operational costs for every $1 you spend in tolls.
I understand that you would rather pay x than 2x, but this is not “cultural freedom”, it is haggling over a price. But the fact that we ignore the $1 in wear on the drive belt because that won’t be a problem for three years, but we are annoyed about $1 to use a road right now, says a lot about human psychology.
Given climate change, and that sitting in traffic is not very nice, it seems a superior system to me to leverage psychology to bill at the point of use rather than squirreling the costs away in oil changes and in the fine print of financing paperwork and in making pedestrians walk longer between places through parking lots. It may be the case that transit is impractical for this route but the only real way to determine that is to have a functioning price mechanism. I mean it is probably faster to visit your family by helicopter, and helicopters do exist so there is a usecase for them. But we have the good sense to charge about what they cost.
The standard deduction ($0.58/mi) is very high. The marginal cost of driving depends on how much you drive. Driving the US average 15,000mi/yr, you can buy a nicely-equipped Mazda 3, insure it, fuel it (at CA gas prices), and throw it away when the standard warranty expires every 5 years for $0.53/mi.
This cost is dominated by the production of the car and goes down almost linearly to something like $0.25/mi before maintenance would even be an issue.
This is cheaper than almost any other form of transport.
The road system is essentially free at this scale.
There are no significant subsidies that make this possible. It's just that cheap. And most of the cost is production – a positive-sum activity.
A congestion charge is a transfer payment (zero-sum). In general these should not be expected to significantly impact the value of civilization.
For one thing, the economy tends to route around them. A mortgage interest tax deduction causes house price inflation, for example. It's not clear there should be any long-run sensitivity of commuting times to commuting taxes. People are already paying their hourly wage to commute, and they will pay any tax on it also with that wage...
I think most people these days highly undervalue a system of roads that allows anyone to go to one place to another for the low cost of road construction/maintenance. Before paved roads and trucking, railroads basically charged monopoly rates to farmers, business, etc and extracted all extra money from the system. Unless water transportation was available. In that case competition kept railroad rates in check.
That said, I would say that congestion pricing could be a good thing for road building as it gives a value on building new ones. Hopefully the Boring Company can have some success and get tunneling prices down. Then with some idea of how much people will pay to not sit in traffic, we can get some tunnels built and start enjoying life again instead of sitting on congested freeways.
With enough high-speed tunnels one could convert all surface roads to max 25 mph mixed use and return the earth to the people like all those anti-car people dream of. Work for the win-win outcome.
What jumped to my attention from your comment is that tolls seem to bother you more than public transportation not being a suitable option.
I live in Madrid, which has a metropolitan population of 6.5 million (compared to Sydney's 5.2m). I can get pretty much everywhere from anywhere in about 1 hour, combining metro and buses.
So when I want to visit a friend, I just go out the door, and walk to the metro station. If I had to drive a car just to do that I would feel I have less freedom of movement than I have now.
Exactly. I'm still waiting for a day I see a full-throated defense of a car-centric system that frankly doest rely on myopia about the second-order effects of the system. Sure, given that you're in a city designed around owning cars, owning a car has advantages: that's almost tautological. But policy needs to think at the societal level, which includes all the effects that you take for granted as part of the background. Without the criminal waste of valuable urban space that cars entail, the odds that GP would be taking a 45 minute trip would be far lower.
The ubiquity of this kind of myopia makes me worry about transit policy, and I've seen little evidence that voters are capable of or willing to engage in second-order thinking, especially when their incentives are involved. Though I suppose it's not like our transit policy could get much worse....
They definitely won't engage in that level of abstract thinking, given so many of them have cars that are already too expensive for their take-home. The number of 72 month terms on fancy cars, unbelievable to me.
Congestion pricing is essentially a usage fee, and is highly efficient from an economic perspective. Without charging drivers for roads they get paid for out of general funds. There’s nothing free about non-drivers subsidizing private transportation.
Furthermore, at artificially low prices, more people drive until congestion is unmanageable. Without that pricing your 45 minute drive might balloon to twice that amount of time. Congestion is so bad in NYC that interferes with city services, like busses.
> Congestion pricing is essentially a usage fee, and is highly efficient from an economic perspective.
While I agree in principle, congestion pricing is generally a monopoly and not subject to the ordinary pressures of supply and demand, which means there's little to stop the price from being too low or too high.
Adding to this: Non-drivers who cause others to drive on their behalf such as a pizza delivery do pay for the roads indirectly. They pay the company which pays the usage fee.
So nobody can say they benefit indirectly without paying.
Everything has to be paid for at the end of the day. Personally I think all transit (regardless of who owns the rolling stock and whether the tires are rubber or steel) should come out of the general fund because everyone benefits from a robust transit network.
Congestion is not a big deal. People willing to put up with it will put up with it. People not willing to will use the resource at different times. You will never have a system that does not get congested at peak times. The more capacity you have the less time the system will run at peak capacity (compare rush hour start/end times across cities to see this). Think of it like dumping a 5gal bucket into the sink and system capacity being the drain size. This statement applies to road, rail and everything else.
Congestion is not a big deal to drivers willing to spend their time in traffic.
It is a big deal to people waiting on services like fire trucks and ambulances. It is a big deal to people breathing air near roads. It is a big deal to public transit users whose needs often get de prioritized in favor of private cars.
So your family member is across the city, I'm assuming there will be a minimum amount of time that you would take to visit them even if there was no traffic. Presumably, when you originally made whatever living arrangements you are in now, you factored that minimum time and was probably okay with that. That is, you essentially curbed your own freedom of movement based on some physical limits and other priorities.
Presumably, that limit is a function of the way the roads were designed, and a straight road directly from your apartment to your loved ones would have been faster. Though you probably didn't complain then how the city wasn't designed to enable your freedom of movement.
How is this new congestion pricing any different? Did it discriminate against you personally in any way? In fact, it probably reduced your commute time, by making you pay more. Im guessing that Sydney probably has some assistance for people who actually can't afford this price, which you probably didn't qualify for (guessing since you're here at HN), so I'm really struggling to sympathize with your argument of how it curbs your freedom of movement (unless you're poor and there's no assistance from the government for you).
We all have many freedoms but almost none of them are free. In fact they all come at great costs. 30 dollars doesn't actually sound that high all things considered.
Cities are valuable in part for the high variety of interactions possible with so many different people. We should figure out how to do fast point-to-point individual transportation for cities. If you live in a city and meet someone interesting, you should be able to be friends with them without one of you having to move.
The US should spend some money researching this possibility. There used to be ideas of moving sidewalks, jet packs, flying cars, etc. These probably won't work but small, high-speed, electric pods in tunnels might.
> 'Freedom of movement' isn't some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.
Your being able to drive for free comes at the expense of my being able to walk about town freely. I have to worry about being struck by vehicles and about all the soot I breathe in, and I have to take less favorable routes because some road crossings are just too dangerous. You're arguing your own peculiar interests here rather than what's good for everybody, or what's good for our country overall.
You’re arguing against congestion pricing in lower Manhattan by citing the inadequacy of public transport in Sydney?
In any case: in high density environments such as NY and, yes, Sydney, public transport is the obviously superior option. In Manhattan it is so de facto: current subway trouble nonewithstanding, it is still superior to taking your car into the center. Car traffic in MH moves at about pedestrian streets on average. Economically, parking is unaffordable, and no amount of freedom-loving can change the particular part of physical law that prevents multiple objects from occupying the same coordinates in space and time.
If Sydney is worse, that’s a collective failure to act, and it is having an impact on your quality of life. That should be the subject of you anger.
In Paris, Tokyo, London, and Berlin, investment bankers take the subway. I use that specific group because they are not known to easily succumb to financial pressure or readily defer to some idea of collective benefit in lieu of selfish interests. If they make that choice, it is because it is better even in terms of narrowly defined personal comfort and efficiency.
If you introduce high enough congestion charging (to significantly reduce congestion), those rich bankers will get back in their cars and small businesses relying on the roads will be forced to close.
We really do risk heading into a ‘roads are for the richest’ future. We need to accept that the car isn’t going away, that public transport cannot work well in many situations, and build more road capacity for an electric and maybe self-driving future.
And encourage personal light electric vehicles (electric bikes/scooters/skateboards) instead of fearing/banning them!
Building more road capacity to fix congestion never works. Ever. This is highway planning 101: more roads/lanes creates induced demand until travel times are exactly what they were before construction, and so you just spent a billion dollars to go nowhere.
For an illustrative example, look at what Houston did to the I-10: they thought like you did and decided to just build and build until the traffic went away. There’s a stretch of I-10 outside Houston that is now twenty-six lanes wide, and it didn’t work: within a few years of completion, travel times returned to what they were before the buildout. Exactly how many lanes do you think will fix the problem if 26 won’t?
(And even if it did, there’s no more room in Manhattan for more roads. There is no way to increase supply even if we wanted to.)
Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. Everybody has some unconscious limit of how long they are willing for their commute to be. Am I willing to commute for 30 minutes? Probably. What if it was two hours? No way. I'd either find a closer job or move closer to work.
Average that over the whole population, each with their own individual unconscious time limit. The result is: if commuting is faster, people are willing to live farther from their jobs. If commuting is slower, people live closer to their jobs. Adding more capacity doesn't change this.
On the contrary, congestion pricing cannot come soon enough. Something needs to counter the rampant culture of entitlement that characterizes the majority of drivers. We've rationalized tens of thousands of deaths annually as "this is how it is". We've accepted the gradual and seemingly inevitable decline of quality of our environment (air and noise to mention the obvious ones). The costs have been distributed unfairly across all, and it is time to make it EXPENSIVE to wheel about.
That sounds like a rough commute, I sympathize. What I'm hearing is that Sydney needs to be funneling more of the toll revenue into the transit budget so that trains and buses would be a real option for you.
As a resident of Chicago, I would be in favor of congestion pricing within a few miles of the loop. The traffic congestion doesn't just affect other drivers, but those of us walking, biking, and using public transit. I would welcome a far quieter city with less road noise more priority given to multi-modal transit.
Due to Chicago's budget issues I'm not sure how to do that beyond providing direct incentives to do something besides drive.
I think you're mixing up two meanings of "free" here. Sure, your drive is not free as in beer, but it's still free as in speech. The whole point of the OP is that your drive was never free as in beer. Somebody has always been paying for it. It might not make sense for every road to be a toll road, but it makes even less sense for none to be.
It's funny how many people think the relationship between prices, supply, and demand is just the bee's knees ... until it comes to use taxes or fees that directly affect their own behavior.
My favorite example was the blind rage with which almost everyone I know reacted to airlines starting to charge for bags. Even the most libertarian, "taxes are theft" people I talked to would sputter to come up with some insane rationalization when bagless flyers like myself should be subsidizing their baggage.
I don’t know the situation in Sydney as I’ve never been there. But in NYC, which is what the article is about, the funds will go to transportation improvements that make it easier for people to get around. There’ll be more freedom of choice because the subways will be better (and hopefully they’ll add more bike lanes and wider sidewalks).
Any new money for public spending is typically used to pay down the ballooning public pension liabilities. And if it doesn’t go towards pensions, it’s diverted away to other welfare projects, or education.
Point is these new funds won’t make transportation better in any significant way.
Budget will go to capital construction costs [0], particularly for MTA, buses, and underserved areas of NYC. This was layout in the NYS 2020 budget place.
Then you simply take a loan out from the MTA fund. The same way our lottery monies are allocated towards education, but find their way to fund various pension funds.
Perhaps this new fee will be used to fund MTA’s pension liabilities, and the current spending on pensions gets allocated to food stamps.
New money never goes to where it’s said it’s supposed to go. That’s because government funding is a Ponzi scheme.
Does it truly do? Or does it go towards MTA the same way lottery and gambling revenue goes towards education budget, i.e. not really except as an accounting trick?
I have immediate family that is a minimum 15-20 hour drive away in 3 different directions, but I have the option to fly and get there much faster for a price. If flying was free, how long do you think the lines would be to board planes?
The same principle applies here. Do you have an option to drive there and avoid toll roads? If so, how much extra time would it take you? Surely not 15-20 hours like it takes to see my family.
There are costs associated with congestion, and those costs are not necessarily incurred by the person generating that cost. It's only fair that these costs are explicitly priced out and charged to those that cause the cost.
"Free as in speech" is very, very close to "free as in beer".
For all practical purposes it doesn't cost me anything more than my time to exercise my free speech rights.
Something that's nominally "free" from direct government control but the government gets to dictate the monetary cost of using it is not free by either definition.
Anything that increases the monetary cost of freedom of movement (time is not such a big deal because rich and poor alike have 24 hours in the day, hence I don't see traffic jams and crowded subway platforms being that big a deal) is a bad thing, even if the increase is a trivial amount to the upper classes. Mass transit (not the same thing as public transit though the sets intersect) should not be like a restaurant where you pay $50 for a $20 meal because that keeps the poors out and that is exactly what congestion fees and tolls are designed to do.
You seem to be describing congestion pricing working as intended. To go by the shortest, least congested route, you have to pay the tolls. If the tolls weren't there, it would not take you 45 minutes to make this trip. The real problem, as you point out, is the absence of adequate public transit.
In Sydney you're paying use-charges, rather than congestion pricing (unless you use the Sydney Harbour Bridge / tunnel, which does have congestion pricing, approximated by time-of-day pricing).
As the NYTimes article says, everyone ends up paying one way or another, whether in taxes, or use-charges, or congestion prices, or delay. The question is how the total cost should be shared.
Australia is too car dependent, these tolls will slowly help wean us off that and will eventually result in good public transport for all. When you live in a city where the balance has shifted from cars to public transport, your life gets better.
The "cultural freedom of driving" in America means a majority of Americans need a license form the government just to leave their homes and return with a gallon of milk.
It's going to die. Urbanists have killed this freedom, it's only a matter of time. Everyone has forgotten all the benefits cars provide, and has focused solely on the drawbacks, just as cars became advanced enough to eliminate all of their problems in the first place.
Today, in 2019, I drive a car that generates absolutely no pollution, makes no noise, is powered entirely by renewable wind electricity, and can drive itself in many (but not quite all) situations. This should be the best thing ever. This is the cleanest, safest, most reliable, most convenient, and cheapest public transit that has ever been invented. There should be cities filled with skyscrapers full of these things.
But instead, urbanists have convinced everyone that 19th century Europe was the pinnacle of humanity, and they are attempting (and succeeding) at removing/eliminating all of our best public transportation infrastructure. Gone are public parking structures, gone are public freeways. Gone is clean affordable housing. Gone are inclusive communities. The lessons we learned and progress we've made is all being lost.
Now you should take a tram or bus, wait 80% longer on every trip, always deal with weather directly, have to plan every trip on routes and timetables, and only live/work in the (super expensive) places their routes allow for it. They want all transportation to be long, frustrating, and limited. Because that was good enough for your great-grandfather, it should be good enough for you too.
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I get why it's happening. If you limit transportation and freedom, you can further artificially inflate property values, and further monopolize people's finances. (They have less options on where to live, less options on where to shop, less options on where to send children to school, less options to simply consume less and spend less on anything at all).
But it's so incredibly frustrating because there is not a single valid reason for it, and it's so disheartening to see such huge regressions happening throughout our cities today. To the extreme that cities today are basically not even for real people anymore, just capital.
> This is the cleanest, safest, most reliable, most convenient, and cheapest public transit that has ever been invented.
But it's not public transit. It's private transit, because it's your car. Actual public transit will either not be subject to the congestion fees (buses) or will be able to split the fee across enough riders to make its effects negligible (taxis, Uber).
You own your shirt and shoes, does that make a Bus "private transit"?
Cars are a form of public transportation whenever the public drives them on public roads and freeways. Public infrastructure does not become "private", just because a private individual is in it.
> Today, in 2019, I drive a car that generates absolutely no pollution,
Break and tire dust are still environmental pollutants.
There is also a one time environmental cost to manufacture your car.
And when it comes to affordable housing, car infrastructure makes it very hard. Underground parking stalls in a major urban city can cost up to $30k each to build! And above ground parking lots in cities take up land that could be used for housing.
Not to mention wider streets are needed for cars, that is space that could be used for more housing and more commercial activity. If you visit the dense parts of London or Tokyo that are served by mass transit, you can see how smaller streets closer together leads to more livable cities.
> Now you should take a tram or bus, wait 80% longer on every trip
Depends on how well built out the infrastructure is. In cities with top tier public transit, subway cars are coming every 3 - 4 minutes, traveling underground, avoiding all traffic.
My car shows me the average speed of my trips. If I am driving through a city, I am lucky to average out 20mph. During bad traffic I can easily be at 10 or 12mph.
Mass transit doesn't have that problem. An underground line is always going to travel at the same speed. During rush hour it may be more cramped, but the travel time isn't any greater, unless the subway is full and you have to take the next one. Which comes in three minutes. Which is less time than I have waited at a single stoplight to make a left turn!
Newer cities have horrible designs. They streets are too wide, so there is less land, and housing costs more. They often have laws on the books about minimum parking requirements, so housing costs more to construct. They have requirements about parking for commercial businesses, so more of the city is devoted to places to park than actual business!
Strip malls are the worst possible example of this!
And if you start building low enough density, cities actually start losing money. Property taxes on parking lots are next to nothing, especially if they are free parking for businesses. But the city still has to run infrastructure to those parking lots, pay for maintenance on the surrounding streets, and pay for all the externalities of having more cars on the roads.
> They have less options on where to live, less options on where to shop, less options on where to send children to school, less options to simply consume less and spend less on anything at all).
If I can hop on a subway and get anywhere in a city in 30 minutes, I now have more choices of where to live! More choices of where to shop! As for schooling, look at Tokyo, where children regularly take the subway to school.
In a city without mass transit, if I am in one part of the city and I want to go to a shop in another, I have to decide if I really want to suffer through:
1. Walking back to my car
2. Navigating through traffic to my next destination
3. Finding parking there (possibly paying, and hoping there is parking!)
4. Walking from parking to my destination
5. Getting back to my car
6. Driving through more traffic to get home, or to my next destination
It sucks. In contrast, even a city like Boston with good but not great public transit[1], when I'm visiting Boston and some friends call me up and ask if I want to go see a movie, so long as the theater is on a transit line, the answer is sure! In a city without transit I have to worry about if I can get there given traffic at that time of day, in a city with mass transit, I know I can go.
[1] Compared to Seattle, Boston has great public transit, but whenever I talk to anyone from Boston they complain about it, so I'll avoid calling it "great" even though from my perspective I love using it when I'm there!
The major difference here being that congestion pricing is only going into effect in Manhattan south of the park, where public transport is absolutely a suitable option.
I live in Sydney. It takes a 45 minute drive to visit a family member, who is sick and homebound. To do so in the shortest and least congested route, I must pay 3 tolls: $14.85 total, one way; $30 dollars a trip.
Public transport is not a suitable option. Instead of 45 minutes one way, the combined trip time balloons to 2 hours (4 hours to and back) due to poor proximity to train stations, and bus connections that require waiting.
Every time I drive, I feel less free to move around my city. I feel less free to visit my friends and family. 'Freedom of movement' isn't some crazy lunatic idea. It is an important part of living for many people.