[jeffbee]

The whole game in 21st-century American governance is selling obvious solutions to unwilling bad-faith deniers. It doesn't really matter that is was obvious all along that congestion pricing was going to work. It doesn't matter that building homes obviously solves homelessness.

[AnthonyMouse]

I don't think those alternatives are comparable.

People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible for a million people to each own a home in an area where there are only 650,000 homes which is why the price increases until a third of them can't; there is no other solution than building more housing. The people opposed to this are opposed simply because they already own property and want housing prices to remain high and then come up with various excuses to rationalize their avarice.

Congestion pricing is a trade off. The proponents will point out that it "works" in the sense that high taxes deter use, but that's ignoring the other side of the ledger. There are many other ways to reduce congestion than deterring use through taxation. One of them is to build more housing, for example, so that people can live closer to work and have shorter commutes. Another is to eliminate the fares for mass transit, so its relative cost advantage increases but the difference is created by using ordinary general purpose progressive taxes to fund the system instead of imposing a regressive tax on anyone with an unavoidable need to drive a vehicle. The latter also improves privacy for both drivers and riders by removing both mass surveillance systems that tie everyone's movements to them through the payments system, and increase government efficiency because revenue collection through general taxes has much lower overhead than transit collections infrastructure.

There are actually reasons to oppose congestion pricing because there are alternatives to it that achieve the same goal more efficiently with fewer negative externalities.

[jeffbee]

None of your supposed alternatives were actually on the table. Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. If your solutions are politically impossible or predicated on a revolution, they aren't legitimate alternatives. In this sense, the connection with housing/homelessness discourse is completed: many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior.

Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there.

Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston.

> many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.

There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever.

The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.

[bobthepanda]

Removing fares does not actually move people out of cars into public transport because it is already cheaper than driving in most cases.

This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling. https://www.fastcompany.com/90968891/estonias-capital-made-m...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Removing fares does not actually move people out of cars into public transport because it is already cheaper than driving in most cases.

Cheaper is relative. If transit costs $130/month and driving a car you already own costs an incremental $150/month but is $50 more convenient then you value the $50 in convenience over the $20 savings. If you eliminate the fares then the difference is $150 which is more than $50.

Collecting the money via taxes rather than fares also allows the transit budget to be increased relative to the same cost burden on the local population because you don't have to pay for the collections infrastructure, which goes to the article's point about increasing service contributing to the solution as another alternative to congestion pricing.

> This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling.

You're citing a study where the existing mass transit cost was only ~$20/month to begin with. Meanwhile their GDP increased by 50% over the period in question and the area underwent a shift in the location of employment away from the city. Having only a modest increase in car use against that context is evidence that it does work.

[stouset]

People are not frictionless utilitarian spheres that perfectly obey the laws of economics. We have data, and removing public transit fares is not an effective lever to move people out of cars and onto buses, trams, trolleys, and trains.

[bobthepanda]

The average salary in Tallinn is 2415EUR a month before taxes, so that's roughly comparable to the NYC example.

[jakelazaroff]

> Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government.

Is it also “taxation without representation” when NJ Transit charges me a fare to go to New Jersey or to drive on the Turnpike? Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Is it also “taxation without representation” when NJ Transit charges me a fare to go to New Jersey or to drive on the Turnpike?

Is it a tax, i.e. a fee charged by a government? Yes.

Do you have a vote in that government, as a non-resident of New Jersey? No.

It's taxation. Without representation.

This why roads used in interstate travel are one of the few specifically enumerated powers of the federal government (the constitution calls them "post roads"), and funding them from general federal revenue rather than tolls is completely appropriate.

> Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.

Infrastructure is dominated by fixed costs. Amortizing fixed costs per-use is economically inefficient because it deters productive uses whose value exceeds the (negligible) incremental cost but not the (sunk) amortized fixed cost.

This operates to the extreme in the case of mass transit because the incremental cost of mass transit use is negative, since its use remove congestion from the roads. Paying people to use it would be an obvious perverse incentive, but paying for a collections infrastructure in order to deter people from using it instead of just making it free is an obvious own-goal.

[evanelias]

> Is it a tax, i.e. a fee charged by a government? Yes.

That isn't the commonly-held definition of a tax. The key thing about taxes is that they are compulsory. Transit fares are purely usage-based, and therefore optional, as you aren't forced to use transit. Fares are not commonly considered to be "taxes" in anything I've ever read.

[stouset]

> Is it a tax

No, it is a usage fee just like stamps.

[evanelias]

> If you stop constraining housing construction in New York

Given that NYC's population density is already nearly double that of London, how exactly is housing construction being constrained in NYC?

Housing is expensive in NYC because it's a popular place to live.

> If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state

If you make the subway free, that only helps for travel within NYC, but not for the portion of travel from out-of-state e.g. NJ Transit rail, NJ Transit bus, Port Authority's PATH subway. These are completely separate from the MTA.

> Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation

Nonsense, this line of thinking assumes that everyone coming from out-of-state drives. I live in NJ, and am strongly in favor of congestion pricing, because I take public transit into NYC, and use public transit within NYC.

[AnthonyMouse]

> how exactly is housing construction being constrained in NYC?

Most of the existing tall buildings in NYC would be illegal to build today under the current zoning. You also can't build buildings in the other boroughs of the sort currently in Manhattan. The supply needed is relative to local demand, not relative to other cities.

> Housing is expensive in NYC because it's a popular place to live.

Housing is expensive because there is more demand than supply. This happens when there is high demand and increases in supply are constrained. Otherwise supply would respond to increased demand.

> If you make the subway free, that only helps for travel within NYC, but not for the portion of travel from out-of-state e.g. NJ Transit rail, NJ Transit bus, Port Authority's PATH subway. These are completely separate from the MTA.

If you make the subway free, you remove the fare associated with taking the subway, which is part of the cost of using mass transit.

You could also remove the cost of the other mass transit. That might require you to do things at the federal level or in partnership with other states, but that doesn't mean it's something you can't do, it's just something you'd be doing in a different way.

> I live in NJ, and am strongly in favor of congestion pricing, because I take public transit into NYC, and use public transit within NYC.

You're in favor of congestion pricing because you don't pay it. This is unsurprising, right? It's the people who do pay it who are opposed, and that appears to be a majority of the people of NJ since the governor elected by the people of NJ is opposed, but then those people don't get a vote, which is the issue.

[evanelias]

> Most of the existing tall buildings in NYC would be illegal to build today under the current zoning.

Citation please? I've lived in this metro area for 18 years, and the only constant has been that they keep building more giant buildings all the time, so clearly something there doesn't add up.

> You also can't build buildings in the other boroughs of the sort currently in Manhattan.

What type of building are you talking about here?

If you mean skyscrapers, they're plentiful in Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, among other outer-borough neighborhoods. But many skyscrapers aren't residential (regardless of borough) so I'm not sure if that's what you mean.

If you mean mid-rises, there are large high-density apartment buildings in all five boroughs, in quite a few different neighborhoods.

I must ask, do you actually live in NYC?

> Housing is expensive because there is more demand than supply.

Yes, and realistically there's no practical amount of construction that would cause NYC to become inexpensive, because the demand is too great.

> Otherwise supply would respond to increased demand.

That doesn't happen overnight and is subject to physical limitations: finite space constraints / a lack of purchasable land for development or re-development, finite limitations on building rate (e.g. the size of the construction sector), and the time required for infrastructure improvements to support an even higher population density.

> You could also remove the cost of the other mass transit.

Paid for how, and by whom?

> You're in favor of congestion pricing because you don't pay it.

No, I'm in favor of it because it makes bus commutes substantially faster, and the revenue will support the continued operational needs of the subway system.

> that appears to be a majority of the people of NJ since the governor elected by the people of NJ is opposed

Murphy very narrowly won reelection in 2021 and is now term-limited from running again. You're asserting that because Murphy is opposed to congestion pricing several years later, this somehow means a majority of NJ residents are also opposed? That's ridiculous and doesn't logically follow. In truth a majority of NJ residents don't ever drive into NYC anyway and don't care one way or the other about this issue.

> but then those people don't get a vote, which is the issue.

Why should people living outside of New York get to vote on something affecting local roads in New York City?

[7e]

There are better, valid reasons to oppose building more housing. Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't!

Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. If people relocate from another area, rather than breed, you get expensive housing even more quickly.

After each round of the cycle, there is less nature, less beauty, more traffic congestion, less parking, more noise, more pollution, more crowded parks, more mouths to feed, and more hassle. Look at what happened to California as an example.

The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. The world population has almost tripled since 1960. The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.

The sustainable solution is human habitat control: keep housing supply at population replacement levels only. Don't build infinitely just to allow the human population to reach 20 billion (which is not a net benefit to anybody). 8 billion people is plenty. Be happy with that number.

[rcpt]

> building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't!

The difference is that using a road is free but having a house very much is not.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's not really a difference. Using a road isn't free even when there is no toll; you still have to pay for fuel and vehicle maintenance. It costs less when there is less congestion, like housing costs less when there is more supply, which puts you at a different point on the demand curve because of the lower price or higher convenience.

The fallacy is the assumption that the resulting increase in demand can never be met by any increase in supply. You need more supply to meet the demand at the lower cost than the demand at the current cost; that doesn't imply that the demand at the lower cost is infinite and can never be met.

The real question is, what's the best way to do it? But that's context-specific. If you could satisfy road congestion by building a single new subway line because all the traffic is really going between two points, maybe that's better than adding eight more lanes to the highway, even though that would also work. Whereas if you would only need to add one lane to the highway, but the traffic then branches off in every direction so the alternative would require eight new subway lines, maybe the extra lane is what you want.

[rcpt]

When there's no toll I can drive right onto as many roads as I want and never pay a dime. Sure, my car isn't free, but that's a sunk cost. One could even argue that the more I drive the better deal I get.

Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.

[AnthonyMouse]

> When there's no toll I can drive right onto as many roads as I want and never pay a dime. Sure, my car isn't free, but that's a sunk cost.

Do you somehow have access to free fuel or electricity?

> Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.

You want to ignore the fixed cost of owning a car but not the fixed cost of owning a home?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't!

It does, in both cases. Induced demand is a garbage theory. It's basically the idea that if you increase supply by 50%, and then lower prices increase demand by 20%, you would then have to increase supply by another 20%. Which would increase demand by 5%. But that just means you should increase supply by 80% to begin with so you have enough for both the existing and additional demand. The latter is finite.

> Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle.

More kids are good, actually? It prevents economic collapse as a result of an ageing population. The US fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate -- in significant part as a result of high housing costs.

> The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full.

You need to build more housing even for a given level of population because demand shifts around, e.g. Detroit has negative population growth so existing housing in Detroit doesn't satisfy demand in San Francisco.

> The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are solvable independent of housing. You can heat a house using electric heat pumps and power heat pumps from renewable or nuclear energy without CO2 emissions. If you want to solve CO2 you use a carbon tax, not zoning laws.

If anything restricting the number of kids does the opposite because you get more childless retirees with little incentive to vote for preserving the future because they were deprived of the opportunity to have a family to care about the future of.

[jampekka]

There are many quite obvious alternatives to congestion pricing. E.g. banning (private) vehicles from roads, or having fewer parking spaces or decreasing speed limits. These would also affect people quite equally regardless of how much money they have.

With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough.

[jakelazaroff]

The same constituencies that oppose congestion pricing also oppose the things you're describing. When the Adams administration effectively ended curbside dining, they were the people telling us that it was an improvement to replace tables for a dozen people with a parking spot for one SUV. The only way we were even able to get congestion pricing passed was by tying it to MTA funding.

[jampekka]

You can oppose congestion pricing but still support restricting driving. Funding MTA more in no way requires congestion pricing. The earmark is mostly a sharade.

[jakelazaroff]

Of course it's possible to hold both of those views. I'm just telling you what happens in practice.

[7speter]

Have you paid for dining in Manhattan lately? The people who can afford dining in Manhattan and the people who want street parking for their 100k SUV are different sides of the same cohort, generally.

[jakelazaroff]

My wife and I recently went to Hamburger America for less than $20 each, including tip. We had rice rolls at this hole in the wall in Chinatown for probably $15 between us.

Obviously the average meal is on the pricier side but there are tons of great options that don’t break the bank.

[foxyv]

> With congestion pricing you actually incentivize driving for the wealthy enough.

Driving in New York is for the wealthy. Who has money to pay for parking in New York?

[Jcowell]

This is not true. Not all neighborhoods in the city (Basically harlem and up) have wealthy residents, and street parking is free. Anyone who lives in New York knows this.

[jampekka]

Now it's for even wealthier. And with less congestion.