alt Hacker NewsMy problem with congestion pricing is that it still doesn't provide great incentives for cities to improve walkability and public transit.
"What do you mean our transit is bad, look, our ridership numbers are 3x higher than all our neighbors combined!" *Does not mention the fact that congestion pricing in neighboring cities is 3x lower.*
In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts. If your city has safe districts with good transit where rich people live, and unsafe districts with terrible transit where poor people live, congestion pricing will allow rich people to choose between the convenience of taking a car with no traffic jams versus the cheapness of transit, while forcing poor people to choose between a car they can't afford versus walking down a street where they may be assaulted.
It's even worse if you have rich people living in the city center where they work, and poor people who also work there living in towns much further away. Then, only the rich are able to vote on congestion pricing.
This probably doesn't apply to New York specifically (not an American, have never been), but it's definitely something to have in mind in general.
Replies
>In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts.
When I lived in Atlanta, there were people, mostly YIMBYs and other urbanists, who wanted to charge a significant congestion fee to anyone living in surrounding towns like Alpharetta, Roswell, Duluth, etc., who commuted into the city to work.
It would effectively be a car vice tax paid by the working class, as most of the people I knew out there lived there because Atlanta rents and home prices are insane.
Congestion pricing is ok when there are alternate methods of transportation that are usable enough that you could expect a person to just switch to them rather than pay the fee. But when there's not such an alternative, the people will simply pay the fee because they have no other option, and now you've just further immiserated peoples' lives.
The closest thing to a response I've heard is that they think such a situation would encourage people to vote and push for better transit options. I just don't see it though. Ignoring that in my case, Atlanta, the city was a de facto one party city in which primaries were mostly determined by media endorsements and more emotional issues than transit and urbanism development, I just don't see that this kind of policy making that shapes the incentives (both carrot and stick) for the masses works in practice. Peoples' decisions are so much more complicated and subject to tons of other factors that this approach can't control.
Did any of these things happen in the other cities which have had congestion pricing for years?
Speculation based on incentives is all fine and good, but empirical results beat it every time.