Gee, such rich ground for elitism.  Tax a good or opportunity or service, so that only the rich and elite will be able to partake.  Squeeze out the riff-raff.  Real smart, if that is what you want.  Otherwise it is disastrously unexamined and ill-considered.  

Set up a lottery in which anyone can participate for periodic (daily, weekly, etc.) access to the area.  Be fair.  Reduce your access and cut congestion without excluding people on the basis of economics.  

Lottery no good?  Then, think of something!  Otherwise, this is just more elitism--convenience for the rich.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Although it has mostly gone unstated, the congestion charge rests on ironclad economic logic: street space, being both coveted and finite, has a value; hence, our failure to charge a price for its use in effect substitutes rationing by waiting, for rationing by pricing -- which is why New York, Los Angeles, and every city in between have traffic jams.

Accordingly, a congestion charge that confronts those of us who would drive with the cost of traffic delays we impose on each other isn't just one means of reducing congestion -- it's the only way to do so.

Rationing by charging a user fee for publicly held assets built with taxes from all sectors of the population and already maintained, however inadequately, with user taxes and fees in the form of vehicle registrations and fuel taxes is certainly not the only alternative to rationing by waiting.  For instance, vehicles or drivers could be assigned peak times at which they can and cannot drive in congested areas with enforcement relying upon electronic transponders of the sort used to automatically assess toll bridge and road charges.  Or the city could invest in an impressive fleet of buses and vans--using taxes and/or fares to pay for them--to move people in congested areas without waiting or fees indexed to the level of congestion.  Another possibility is that drivers could be paid to give up what is now their right to use the roads whenever they please, which would provided money for them to make alternative arrangements, such as telecommuting, to handle the chores, duties, and pleasures that now motivate them to sit in traffic.  Requiring car pooling (with individual transponders as an enforcement option) is yet another way to ration road space during peak usage hours.  Yet another idea is to delegate rights of passage based upon personal need and social good, such as favoring workers or residents in a given area, as is commonly done when divvying up scarce on-street parking spaces during peak hours.  There are still more options but I trust that sampling of ideas is sufficient to establish that congestion pricing is not the only--I would say, not the best--way to approach the problem of inadequate public resources to meet the public needs and desires at any particular time of day.

In addition to the tunnel vision through which the range of policy responses are seen, the article ignores several key issues that underly a proper analysis of the issue.  For instance, what is to be done with the money collected and is that the best use of the funds from a social welfare perspective.  Good use of public funds collected by whatever means are critical to improving transportation options as well as air pollution impacts but, mysteriously, no mention of what to do with congestion pricing revenue is made.  Is the money going to improve transportation options and carbon reductions, will it mostly swell the coffers of contractors and business interests with strong ties to the governor, or, perhaps, will the money go to purposes that have nothing at all to do with air pollution or transportation?  We don't know.  But in order to evaluate the proposal, we must know.

Similarly, one must question whether pricing is the most effective mechanism for altering the propensity to drive private vehicles.  The price elasticity of demand for motor fuel is about 0.2, which means for every 100% increase in the cost of gasoline or diesel there is only about a 20% reduction in miles driven.  I don't know what the price elasticity of demand for road use is, but based on the long lines at toll booths in my area that do not seem to drop off when the tolls are jacked every couple of years, I don't get the idea that it is much greater than the price elasticity of demand for fuel.  Regulatory restrictions or public investment in alternative transportation may be much more effective means of shifting behavior.

This brings us to equity and the public good.  As it now stands, being able to get from one distant place to another is not merely a luxury or diversion, it is an economic necessity for workers, merchants, and the overall functioning of civic and economic activities that not only impact the good of society as a whole but touch on individual rights and responsibilities as well.  Is it then appropriate, let alone wise, to effectively disenfranchise the great number of poor workers, parents, patients, etc., from getting where they need to be when they need to be there while making it easier for shrinking ranks of the ever more wealthy to do so?  That is, after all, the net effect of charging a premium for use of public road resources sufficient to push people off the roads.  The poorest will be the first to go while the most wealthy will easily absorb the cost in return for the luxury of zooming through town at prime time.  The article, like the mayor, is mute on this essential consideration.

The obvious, first-order, unmediated choices that will reduce congestion and carbon are things that no one can make money from -- things like fewer and shorter trips, smaller homes, turning stuff off.

Not to mince words, but I think that is just wrong.  Those are not the obvious or first order choices.  People will not choose to replace their housing or change their commuting patterns to a great degree until we substantially alter the technological and infrastructure environment to promote new and appropriate customs.  (Furthermore, it is much less costly and resource intensive to simply seal, insulate, shade, and downsize the HVAC systems of existing buildings than to tear them down and replace them with smaller versions in the near to medium term.)  So long as we rely on an economy built around happy motoring to and from the suburbs, people will do their damnedest to keep on truckin'.

Throwing up economic roadblocks in the form of higher taxes and fees that don't fund the needs of those most in need, as opposed to investing as a society in the infrastructure and planning that is most appropriate to the current and foreseeable needs of the people will only encourage creative and socially costly ways of cheating and defying the system on the one hand, and failing to address basic needs on the other.  A good example of this that is gaining considerable attention at the moment is the failed American health care system, which also relies heavily on demand pricing in the context of private and (increasingly fewer) public resources.  No thanks!

I think your complaint is somewhat ameliorated by diverting the fees paid by "the elite" into public transit infrastructure. This can potentially improve everyone's lot.

This idea can also be applied to the national carbon tax concept. There is much talk among carbon tax proponents of using these revenues, in part, to offset other regressive taxes.

My other suggestion is, class warfare aside, it is rightly pointed out that we need some stronger medicine if we are to have any chance to cure our climate/carbon sickness. It only makes sense that the vast majority will have to make sacrifices in order to realize any improvement in the warming scenario. I realize full well the unfairness inherent in that. I don't like it. But that may well be the reality we must face.

It only makes sense that the vast majority will have to make sacrifices in order to realize any improvement in the warming scenario.

It doesn't make sense at all since the "vast majority" only own and use 16% of the Earth's resources -- the rest is owned by the top 3%.

It makes far more sense to treat the elites as "ecological criminals" who operate outside the bounds of common decency for using so much resource per person.   A bunch of WalMart workers turning their thermostat down a notch -- even on a mass scale -- won't make a dent while Ted Turn uses up the whole Eastern Half of Montana.

As such Grist is the FDR of ecology -- it lets the elites buy their way into Green sainthood but drags its feet on real change or targeting the biggest wasters, the hypocrites and obvious sources of the problem.


Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

About 20% of the people in the world have access to an automobile, and 80% don't.  Of those who do have autos, Americans drive far more than others: Americans consume almost as much gasoline as the rest of the world combined.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that global warming will cause hundreds of millions of deaths in Africa and Asia, unless we act dramatically to slow it.

Congestion pricing is one of the only effective ways of reducing the amount that people drive, controlling a major source of CO2 emissions. The options that Rune lists are just pipe dreams that will not happen, and in this case, the perfect is an enemy of the good.  (Rune also apparently does not know the widely publicized fact that Bloomberg plans to spend the revenues on public transportion.)

If you oppose congestion pricing as elitist, then you are using egalitarian rhetoric to defend the privileges of American consumers at the expense of the great majority of the people of the world.

You could use exactly the same argument to oppose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade: the rich would be able to pay the extra cost of emissions, and only the middle-class would be affected.  

The argument from elitism makes it impossible to deal effectively with global warming - until you realize that the middle-class consumers you are defending are themselves the most dangerous elitists.

It seems fair to assume that most commuters do not actually enjoy the commute, however they do it.  And they compare the relative disadvantages of all means available to them, choosing the one that seems to have the fewest.  For that matter it also seems fair to assume that many, if not most, choose where in the suburbs they will live with some thought to how they are to commute into the city.  In view of that, the congestion fee is not likely to function as a social divider, separating a hypothetical class of poor commuters from rich ones.  It will be just another of many disadvantages, which the Mayor hopes will in many cases be enough to shift the calculus of commuters from driving to taking public transit.  Only those who strongly prefer to drive, for reasons of their own not necessarily having anything to do with their personal affluence, will come up with the fee.

That is probably what has happened in London, where the congestion fee experiment seems to have worked fairly well.  Some of those who regularly drove into the designated central area would have paid the fee and continued to do so -- and would be grateful for the reduced congestion.  And some others would have switched to public transit.  But more important -- and this would be true of NYC too -- , many non-commuting drivers, without regular or urgent business in central London, would have got an incentive to travel there some other way, if they really wanted to go there.

We ourselves, i.e. the residents of Manhattan, tend not to own cars at all; or if we do, we use them for traveling outside the city, not for traveling between two points within it.  This is one of very few places in the US, possibly the only one in fact, where teenagers do not spontaneously learn to drive and get licenses, there being no need for that.

Within the city we travel mostly by subway, by bus -- but bus rides can take forever, so you do not choose that if you are in a hurry -- , and, if you have some folding money in your pocket, by taxi.  But even taxis can get caught in congestion, especially midtown and downtown; often the north-south avenues are smooth sailing, but going crosstown, east and west, can be like the way the Russians took Grozny.

And so it must be remembered that one of the Mayor's principal concerns is the quality of our life.  He is concerned with air quality, and with the convenience of traveling around in the city.  And while such improvements would be nice for visitors, it certainly would affect us most directly.

And I would add -- though I am not sure that this is too much on the Mayor's mind -- , our neighborhoods are where we shop for food and run other errands, on foot.  E.g., here on the Upper West Side, Broadway is as the Nile, the giver of life.  But crossing it, to go from one place to another, can often involve an inconvenient delay till the traffic passes, the drivers being mostly people who are just passing through and do not live here.  It can be dangerous, too, needless to say.  I can never forget the time I saw an old woman, crossing with the light, struck and killed by a speeding delivery truck.  It was amazing, and horrifying, how much blood there was.  Practically, some of this traffic will always be necessary, as things are (ideally, I would ban all private cars from the city, and put fleets of hybrid cabs, bicycle rickshaws and rental bikes at the access points, but that is not going to happen any time soon).  Still, if the flow can be reduced, that would be a real improvement.

I am not competent to comment on the more specialized remarks of Charles Komanoff, Thomas Friedman and Rune.  The question of what to do with the funds raised by the congestion fee is not itself part of the quality-of-life issues, but Charles's effort to relate them is very interesting.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The options that Rune lists are just pipe dreams that will not happen, and in this case, the perfect is an enemy of the good.  (Rune also apparently does not know the widely publicized fact that Bloomberg plans to spend the revenues on public transportion.)

That comment strikes me as so thoroughly off the mark I am not sure where to begin.  I threw out a few examples of alternatives to congestion pricing merely as a way of demonstrating that the original article rests upon a false choice that comes down to charging for and investing in improvements to the status quo through price rationing of road space or continuing the neglect and crumbling of the status quo by doing nothing new.  I should think anyone with half the imagination of your average schoolchild should be able to make the case that there are many choices beyond this dichotomy, many of them more appealing that congestion pricing, at least to citizens living outside Bloomberg's bubble.

Which brings me to the next point in this rebuttals.  The examples I provided were not pipe dreams.  Most of them have the very same quality the mayor clings to when explaining his "bold" plan for transportation: they have been done before and they worked elsewhere.  (So much for bold, huh?)  There is nothing new or unproven about car free downtowns, they have been created and loved in many forms throughout the world.  Similarly, my suggestion of rationing through regulation is nothing new, it is an idea that has been shown to work in several cities with terrible congestion and air pollution problems, such as Athens, Greece.  Nothing about such schemes or others that I did or did not mention are "perfect," nor did I make them out to be so, I just pointed out that there are options, the options can be more democratic than the financially stratified plan put forward by Bloomberg, and that is important to focus on meeting public needs in ways that promotes new ways of doing things (such as telecommuting--another example of a program used in many cities--and car free downtowns) so that you don't keep building a bigger and more costly version of the same old problem that needs to be rebuilt every couple of decades or so, which is what congestion pricing will accomplish in New York, I believe.

As for not being aware of Bloomberg's plan to use the revenues from congestion pricing to fund repairs and expansions of public transportation, I am.  But I am also aware that in the same breath, the mayor says he will be using the money to rebuild roads and related infrastructure to serve motor vehicles.  And what really sticks in my mind, and seems to take up a lot of the mayor's attention, is that his plan is fixated on raising an enormous amount of money (in fact, as he frames the matter, the main problem all along has been not enough money to do more of the same, not a need to actually do something "bold" and new) which is to be handed over to a new bureaucracy, which will devise new rules to hand out gobs of cash to who knows who for a series of one time projects meant to advance half a dozen transportation related objectives of which expanding and repairing public transportation is only one.  This from a man who is telegraphing his plan to leave the city by having left his party in what seems a likely run for the White House.  But, hey, he's a talented politician and his tactic seems to be working inasmuch as people from various walks of life are all hearing what they want to hear in the mayor's jumbled messages.

And so, with that in mind, I did note that the mayor, who seems to be able to speak in considerable and minute detail about the problems with New York's transportation system, seems to be rather vague about how his grand status quo 2.0 plan will actually shake out.  But seeing as he is looking at a run for the presidency, would it really be too surprising if he staff's the SMART bureaucracy with political pals who will see that other political pals are significantly enriched by the while affair, however it actually works out for the public?

As JMG has noted in the carbon offset conversations, meaningful responses to enormous and imminent environmental problems, such as climate destabilization, will require big shifts in public behavior.  And as I mentioned in a follow up to that thought, and will mention again here, such changes typically follow big changes in technology and infrastructure, which yields new ideas about how and what to do in the course of day to day life.  Nothing like that will flow from congestion pricing and spending gobs of money on fixing up roads and expanding existing public transportation systems.

Finally, there is nothing that suggests that a half-step toward privatizing public infrastructure that was once equally available to all has any implications whatsoever for maintaining the public goods of air or water as such and insisting that those who damage those public resources pay what it costs to fix them rather than buying cheap exemptions or even insisting that they be paid off in return for not doing more damage.  And, in that, the primary point of the original article was flawed and foolish, in my opinion, much as I would like for the author to be right about reclaiming the commons.

I want to emphasize I agree with the need to cut down on vehicle congestion, and promote mass transit.  Both are very necessary goals, and both have the benefit of reducing Carbon.  I simply think another way is needed besides simply adding yet another tax, which will have a vastly unfair impact on lower socioeconomic classes.

Beside the intrinsic inequity in a flat tax on a vastly different income range, is the claim that the tax will be used to improve the transit system.  Fine in theory, but we all know that with the current state of governance, it is simply a joke.

Just as an example, look at the newest installment in Katrina news.  Ice that was purchased for the use of survivors of New Orleans almost 2 years ago now is now being disposed of, having been declared unsafe.  $36 million wasted.  Anyone guess what seasonal weather season for which we are reaching the normal peak of activity?  Or consider SAIC, a Federal contractor closely associated with the Weapons of Mass Destruction fraud, and a major beneficiary of no-bid military and CIA contracts.  What about another major transit project--The Big Dig in Boston?  Speaking of Iraq--how about the contractors paying civilian  soldiers 20x what actual military personnel receive?  What about the billions of dollars on pallets which disappeared en route to Iraq?  What about Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay?  Ted Stevens' bridge to nowhere?  Duke Cunningham?  And these are just a few of those I could think of off the top of my head, a sample that is a small portion of what is in the news, and given the corporate news, on a small sample of the actual corruption.  

So how much of the congestion tax will actually improve the transit system?  After all the overhead, profit, graft, contractors hiring subs hiring subs, overruns, incompetence, blah blah blah, how much does anyone think will actually improve mass transit?  Government, as it is now structured, is a great means for rich politicians and business people to steal money from the public.  Until accountability is restored, and politics is changed, and the term "public servant" is restored to life, none of them deserve a dime.    

Set up a lottery, or a alternate day system, or some mechanism to reduce congestion.  Tax the rich to build the subways.  Reach the goals.  We can do better.  We must do better.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!
 

Natural evolution applies to more than animal life.  The principle of natural selection for the development of new species can also be applied to things like cities.  In its own time any city evolves into a place its own people determine to be  convenient for many purposes - residence, employment, leisure, education, etc. - and co-operatively alter these purposes as required by internal and external influences.

Emergency situations which cannot wait for time's slow pace - years or even centuries - to effect change can also destroy cities which have allowed themselves to become stolid and unresponsive.  Global Warming is just such a threatening situation which can't be met with traffic re-arrangement, public transportation or solutions to graft and political influence.  

Some species never are able to adjust to change and become extinct. I trust New Yorkers are resilient and resourceful and that they can save their city.

Des Emery

Seattle downtown is a lot like Manhattan -- a long narrow stretch of land with a concentration of skyscrapers in its midTown, a lofty Soho (called Sodo) in its lower part, an elitist upscale Fifth Avenue-y part that eventually gives way to the bedroom communities.   To the east and south are Bellevue, Renton and Kent, our Connecticut, Brookyn and Queens...I guess that leaves the Olympic Penninsula to be New Jersey, but they might argue with that.

Anyway, the problems are the same -- getting people through the central bottlenecks.  Solution: don't have a bottleneck.  Spawl, glorious, spread out, multi-point growth, where jobs, housing and retail are all dispersed, is the answer.  

The downtown of smaller cities and towns across America was rightfully replaced by the Wal*Marts so their could be breathing room, but not in New York and Seattle -- which hold on to the 19th century city model like aged dowagers not ready to part with their current life and savings.

Seattle (and New York) need to stop dragging their feet and bringing the rest of the country to a grinding halt.    The new motto for both cities: Los Angeles...Alki!

Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

Rune, I am afraid that your ideas are pipe dreams.  There are small car-free areas in many cities, but nothing on the scale that is needed to reduce congestion in New York; are you really suggesting a car-free area in all of Manhattan below 86th st?  City planners generally agree that license-plate based rationing has failed to reduce congestion significantly when it has been tried: people get a second car to get around the rationing. In fact, this sort of plan actually increased driving in Mexico City; see http://www.tstc.org/bulletin/index.html#article01 for info about the failure of this and of other alternatives to Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan.

If I may mix metaphors, these pipe dreams are red herrings distracting us from a method of reducing congestion that has worked very well and has been very popular where it has been tried, in Stockholm and London.  Interestingly, there was widespread oppostion to congestion pricing in both of those cities before it was adopted, but it became verey popular after it was adopted and proved successful, since it made these cities more livable and made it easier for everyone to get around.

Many people here seem to resent the rich so much that their resentment makes them oppose a program that will benefit the great majority of New Yorkers and the environment.  The majority of New Yorkers (54% of all households according to the 2000 census) don't even own cars, and those who do own cars rarely drive them into downtown or mid-town Manhattan.

Finally, no one has addressed the main point of my eariler post, a point that Ivan Illich first made in Energy And Equity.  The real inequity involved here is between the small minority of the world's people who drive and the vast majority who do not drive, who will not be able to drive in the foreseeable future because of ecological constraints, and who will suffer and die in immense numbers because of global warming.  

When people on his board complain about congestion pricing because they do not want to cut down on their own driving, they are perpetuating this inequity.  The rhetoric is egalitarian.  The reality is American consumers defending their own privilege and causing massive suffering among the poor people of the world.  

http://www.freepublictransit.org

Hey, Charles:  You misunderstood, misinterpreted or distorted my comments.  I will leave it to you to sort that out:  
"David, this is not "a tax on lower income groups," who generally use public transportation rather than driving into Manhattan.  It is primarily a tax on suburbanites that will benefit low and moderate income New Yorkers by improving public transportation."

I never said it was "a tax on lower income groups", but as any flat tax, it falls regressively, disproportionately on lower groups, and consequently it has the potential to restrict access and freedom.  And I did not say it was on those who use public transportation.  My last message was titled "Pro-Congestion Relief...".

It has already been pointed out that the tax receipts would be spent on several transportation modes, not just subways, buses and trains.  Still more highways into Manhattan will not solve the problem, nor will it improve public mass transit.

I return to my original opposition on the basis of the inequity of the tax proposed, the gross criminal incompetence of government, government/business interbreeding, no-bid contracts, favoritism, cronyism, the perverse, duplicitous interest to reduce the size of government through privatization, which is all part of the Corporate Oligarchy.  

We need to return to the philosophy of "public servant", which has been replaced by the rapacious mentality of "sucking on the public teat".

Set up a lottery or other random device to distribute a limited number of vehicle access privileges.  Tax the rich to improve the public mass transit system.   With this, you have environmental, social, and tax justice.  And if the transit system is improved using tax money from the rich, maybe they will have a greater interest in its efficient disbursal.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

If you narrow the choices to congestion pricing or do nothing new, you will miss out on the sort of thinking that might actually contribute the shifts in behavior and belief that might actually contribute to meaningful solutions lifestyle issues driven by compartmentalized infrastructure planning, that remains largely sealed off from any appreciation for its contribution to the bigger, more important issue at hand.  Congestion pricing is just a way of getting those who can least afford to drive out of the way while reinvesting in the same lifestyles and social structures (with a perfunctory nod to Olmstead's vision of the importance of green, open spaces).  It does not represent a step forward so much as a reentrenchment of the status quo, which will again be pushed to the limits, leaving it to another generation to think in terms of sustainable, or at least more livable, redevelopment of a heavily populated area.  What is called for, I believe, is retrenchment as a response to the forecast increase in the number of commuters and consumers in New York and in wealthy, highly populated, highly consumptive countries in general.  Congestion pricing simply obscures the real issues that should be of concern on an environmentally oriented site such as Grist.

Rune, I am afraid that your ideas are pipe dreams.  There are small car-free areas in many cities, but nothing on the scale that is needed to reduce congestion in New York; are you really suggesting a car-free area in all of Manhattan below 86th st?

During peak hours of travel, yes--but not without a major investment into workable alternatives.  I am saying that the environmentally sane and forward thinking perspective more or less obligates one to consider that option and what it would take to work.  Quite a few of us already regard the suburban paradigm based on personal cars zipping in and out of the cities is a dead end in the foreseeable future, so why should we not be promoting genuine reinventions of life in and around the cities instead of accepting a massive transfer of wealth aimed at facilitating more of the same?

It may be that investing in highly available, electric public transportation for all, and for goods as well as people, is a much better solution to getting around during peak hours, both on environmental and social equity grounds.  It may be that some rethinking and promotion of new ideas about how much getting around is actually necessary, desirable, and sustainable is in order, especially if considered in the context of people having more time to devote to local self sufficiency activities instead of spending so much of their lives in a series of transactions punctuated by much needed distractions spread around town.  But so long as the supposed environmentally minded leaders are lining up with the message that "you're either with us or against us" on congestion pricing being the only possible alternative to doing nothing new, the important and creative thinking necessary to bring real and lasting improvements to city life that are in line with pressing regional and global environmental considerations are unlikely to be explored and refined into genuinely environmentally and socially progressive solutions.

City planners generally agree that license-plate based rationing has failed to reduce congestion significantly when it has been tried: people get a second car to get around the rationing.

Charles, knock yourself out with efforts to turn back any new thinking, but it just won't work.  First of all, I linked to a report from Athens showing that they were able to make license plate restrictions pay off there.  Second, I already pointed out the potential to use existing technology to inexpensively circumvent the potential for the most likely form of cheating, which you have noted after the fact.  By simply requiring a transponder of the sort used to charge tolls for bridges and roads automatically, it would be possible immediately identify if the owner of one or more cars was making more than his or her allotted shares of trips into the city--no license plate checking necessary.  Those who rarely travel into the city and do not have transponders could pay a toll or, perhaps, electronic cameras could capture the license plates of cars that are not equipped with transponders and, using optical character recognition, if they are flagged for making too many trips into the city, a fined is levied, just as is done for those who fail to pay bridge tolls.  The point is, with just a tiny bit of creativity, the red herrings you and others towing the mayors line about congestion pricing being the one and only true choice can be solved at least as well as his loose plan promises to address some immediate issues while it mostly ignores larger, longer term matters that will crop up again and again until they are resolved or become catastrophic.

Finally, no one has addressed the main point of my eariler post, a point that Ivan Illich first made in Energy And Equity.  The real inequity involved here is between the small minority of the world's people who drive and the vast majority who do not drive, who will not be able to drive in the foreseeable future because of ecological constraints, and who will suffer and die in immense numbers because of global warming.

Actually, that is what I am driving at (no pun intended).  And I am charging that it is the blind trust in and promotion of congestion pricing as a "solution" that actually avoids the bigger issues to be solved and the creativity necessary to reach a better outcome than you have described.  You yourself, however, have not come up with anything that advances the matter.  Care to try?  Or is it just to risky to have a dream and see what can be made of it if you share it with others for them to improve upon?

Now the charge is that pricing is not radical enough, will not reduce driving enough. So we must hold out until we can just ban personal cars entirely (a dream of mine, too). Well that's a good way to do nothing to reduce driving. As is proposing rationing systems that aren't going to happen in the United States. I understand it's many people's eco-disaster fantasy that something dramatic will happen to finally convince the masses to make big steps towards sustainability, and also somehow Marxism, but waiting for (and hoping for) that disaster is traitorous to the very idea of ecological protection.

One foreseeable problem with rationing is it would stagnate. Once implemented and car trips are reduced, there would be no governmental incentive to further reduce car trips and reclaim streets for use by people. To the contrary, it would be a sitting duck: candidates would run campaigns on increasing the allowed driving times, and eliminating the annoying rationing entirely. And the populace, without a tsunami rushing at them in that moment, would fall for them.

Pricing, on the other hand, provides a constant incentive to reduce car trips by raising rates and increasing revenue. Some see a single mother who can no longer afford to drive her imaginary car to Manhattan day care or whatever; I see reduced driving and funds available for public transit and other social goods. And eventually, if driving were reduced to only the truly rich, the electorate just might want to make personal cars flat out illegal. We can get from A to B, but we can not get there in one big jump (without that tidal wave I hope people aren't really hoping for).

Something jumped out at me from David's argument:

I return to my original opposition on the basis of the inequity of the tax proposed, the gross criminal incompetence of government...

If this is the David who's been raving on Streetsblog that "neoliberals have caused an overwhelming lack of faith in government," then I am cracking up. Very similar arguments, other than that contradiction.

Rune, your three posts, in toto, are triple the length of mine. But you seem to be responding largely to things I didn't say.

You write, "Throwing up economic roadblocks in the form of higher taxes and fees that don't fund the needs of those most in need, as opposed to investing as a society in the infrastructure and planning that is most appropriate to the current and foreseeable needs of the people ..." Yet the congestion fee revenues would have gone to improve and expand the mass transit system that is, in fact, "most appropriate to the ... needs of the people."

Rune, you also say, "The price elasticity of demand for motor fuel is about 0.2 ... I don't know what the price elasticity of demand for road use is, but based on the long lines at toll booths in my area that do not seem to drop off when the tolls are jacked every couple of years, I don't get the idea that it is much greater than the price elasticity of demand for fuel."

The total-price elasticity of demand to drive into  Manhattan (where total price = tolls + gas + incremental maintenance + parking etc.) appears to be 0.5 or greater, based on my current research, indicating that an $8 toll (which of course is an order of magnitude or more greater than toll increases in your area) would indeed thin out demand considerably.

You then say, "Regulatory restrictions or public investment in alternative transportation may be much more effective means of shifting behavior."

Really? On what basis? I alluded to the alt-investment fallacy in my post, pointing out that without pricing, the road space freed by switching to improved alt's is quickly filled by new trips currently discouraged by congestion. As for reg restrictions, I and many colleagues have combed the globe for decades and found no such successful model -- not in Athens, not anywhere -- except for auto-free streets, which we all have campaigned for (I brought the Auto-Free NY Committee within the orbit of Transportation Alternatives, as TA prez many years ago), but which is just not on the political horizon.

Rune, you decry "privatizing public infrastructure that was once equally available to all ..." You might more accurately have written, "... equally available to all with a motor vehicle," or even "... equally available to all with the financial wherewithal to own and keep a motor vehicle." As a lifelong daily bicyclist here (NYC), I find highly ironic the idea that the road network is equally available to all.

Last, Rune, you argue that "Traffic congestion is hardly the defining challenge of our time." What kind of straw man is that? Who said that only "defining issues" (or one defining issue) are worthy of social agitation. OTOH, the usurpation of the Earth's resources and humanity's lives, legs, lungs and souls by automobiles -- outrageously subsidized automobiles -- is a defining issue of our time. And road pricing is an indispensable lever for bringing automobiles under some modicum of social governance. Which made the Bloomberg plan -- a veritable nose under the camel's tent of "free" motoring -- well worth fighting for, even beyond its capacity to improve the livability of NYC.

David -- I'm running out of time (and space) so I'll just say that what appears to be a bedrock premise in your arguments -- that the Bloomberg congestion proposal was regressive -- is factually incorrect. Let me know if you'd like to see the evidence.


Charles www.komanoff.net

It appears as if your argument against use fees is one the basis of paying twice, once in taxes, and once in usage.  It's flawed because it's not as if you're paying double.  Part of the funds comes from taxes, which unfortunately, even those who don't use the roads pay for.  Another part comes from the users, which is much better aligned than the original taxes.  If you really can't grasp two partial payments being distinctively different from two full payments, you should abolish the use of tax dollars on road instead, though I expect that would work just about as well as abolishing the use of tax dollars on public transportation.

You may question whether pricing is the most effective mechanism, but I don't see any statistics from you on the elasticity of public transportation dollars, or regulatory costs, so I'm not sure what your analysis is based on.