[torpidor]

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.

[beefman]

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...

[njarboe]

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.

[amanaplanacanal]

Where I live there are a lot more people driving Ford F250s than Mazda 3s. I bet that 58 cents a mile doesn't pay for their driving.