[jdanp]

Why not just let the market sort it out without a congestion fee? Surely there's a point at which there is so much traffic that people will stop taking uber/lyft and prefer to take the subway. Why should the government set an arbitrary bar to that?

[steego]

> Why not just let the market sort it out without a congestion fee?

You realize that the roads are property right? They're owned by the city. They're funded by the tax payers. Are you telling me they are obligated to share their roads for free?

I simply cannot fathom how someone who is advocating a "free market" solution doesn't understand the important role that property rights play in a market system.

I realize you want free access to the roads, but who says you're entitled to free access? You don't own the roads. I don't care if your tax dollars pay for them, you're not entitled to drive on them just like you're not entitled to roam around on a military base.

If I owned the roads, you bet your ass I'd charge you an arm and a leg to ride on my roads. I would do whatever I could to maximize revenue. This means getting as many paying customers on my roads as possible.

Let's say I owned 10th, 6th and 3rd Avenues and series of cross streets. I could be a conventional thinker and simply turn them into premium express lanes for car services and the wealthy, but that's peanuts.

I could make a lot more money if I turned them into efficient roadways for a fast bus service that's competitive with the MTA. I'd try to make my roadways the fastest and most efficient way to get around the city so I could charge as much as I could to make a profit. For less capital investment, I could get better coverage of the city at a fraction of the price of the subway system.

Who gives a shit if cabbies and people from New Jersey can't drive on my road for free? It's my road! Why should I let your crappy car drive on my roads when I can pack far more customers in my driver-less buses?

If you want a free market solution, then let companies buy/lease the roads. Your solution is not a free market solution. It gives away access to the roads at the tax payer's expense, so taxi/car companies can leach off it. You've socialized the costs and privatized the gains.

Stop telling tax payers what they can and can't do with their roads. It's their roads and they don't owe you shit.

[freeone3000]

Congestion fees are usually levied on all road users. The 2017 New York City congestion charge would have been levied essentially as a bridge toll.

The problem is, this affects poor people disproportionately. Your starbucks barista in Manhattan likely does not live in Manhattan. As a cool map by citylab[1] shows, people in low-rent areas that work in Manhattan overwhelmingly drive. Save some miracle involving housing prices, it's hard to levy a consumption-based tax that isn't regressive based on income.

Really, the best solution here would be provide alternatives that suck less than driving 2 hours in New York City traffic - then people would stop driving all on their own.

[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/09/manhattan-com...

[steego]

You're reading way too much into that map if you think people in low rent areas drive into Manhattan. Driving into Manhatten is slow, expensive and finding free parking is a pain in the ass.

Most of the red dots on that map are in Bergen and Rockland county. The concentration of red dots just above the George Washington bridge is where Chris Rock lives. My friend's hockey teammate lives there too. He owns a hedge fund and has his own hockey rink in his backyard.

I'm not saying everyone driving into the city is a millionaire, but they're not working at Starbucks. You'll need a much better job to afford living in Bergen and Rockland county.

> Really, the best solution here would be provide alternatives that suck less than driving 2 hours in New York City traffic - then people would stop driving all on their own.

We have those alternatives. They work pretty well, and the result has been that most people don't drive into the city. This is old news here. You don't have to sell people on not driving into the city, most abhor the idea. Look at the map again. Most use trains and buses.

In the map, you'll sometimes see clusters of red squares where people normally take buses. Some neighborhoods are more likely to use dollar vans and other unofficial shuttles.

If you are taking the bus from New Jersey, you're not sitting in the same traffic as the cars. In the morning, a long parade of buses flow into the Port Authority terminal in their own lanes.

Like most people here, I'm all about expanding mass transit whether it be trains or buses. People shouldn't have to rely on car services like taxis or Uber/Lyft when buses and shuttles could be a fast & cheaper alternative.

The bottom line is metro areas should take control of their roads and put them to more efficient use. Getting around on the subway is pretty good, but buses could be a fast alternative if certain streets and avenues were marked transit only.

[et2o]

I agree. It's extremely unlikely a large number of lower income individuals commute by car into Manhattan. Parking alone in Manhattan often costs more than minimum wage per hour and street parking wouldn't be reliable enough.

[dragonwriter]

> Save some miracle involving housing prices, it's hard to levy a consumption-based tax that isn't regressive based on income.

You could allow income-based discounts, either retroactively by refund (with receipts + tax return) or prospectively (if you have pre-registered accounts) or by a combination (e.g., if your income for the year qualified you for a higher discount than the advance registration info indicated, you can file for a refund.)

This is obviously potentially operationally more expensive in the general case, but for a congestion charge you are going to want to push people to personal accounts and toll tags anyway to minimize toll delays, so most of the infrastructure will already be there to support both prospective and retrospective discounts.

[Daishiman]

Because there's this thing called the Nash Equilibrium, and in a complex system like streets the equilibria are not optimal.

Individually, humans are really bad at judging these things and you cannot have optimal traffic and congestion control without some measure of centralized management of incentives.

Nobody wins when all car traffic is slower than optimal and driving just becomes an objectively worse experience for everyone on the road.