The registration system you proposed would not work because it would do nothing for cars registered outside of New York. There are wealthy people in New Jersey that own summer homes in Vermont that register their cars there so they do not have to pay NJ insurance rates. Wealthy people again have an even greater advantage here.

New York could not ban cars from other states due to the interstate commerce clause of the constitution. Nor could it force other states to agree to its program.

As I said before, the C.P. charge *should* be higher to give suburban commuters a greater incentive to switch to mass transit.

And Ian, I could not disagree with that. Of course there is some price at which congestion would be relieved and even eliminated entirely. But by then you’ll be weeding out everyone except the exceptionally rich, and we don’t want to live in a place where only the exceptionally rich could enjoy certain uses of public facilities, do we (even if they are sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House and having coffee with Dick Cheney)?

It’s difficult because we live in a unique area where there are lots of rich people who commute by public transportation because they all work on this crowded little island that is at the center of a massive metropolitan area. But the point you make reinforces one of the arguments that CP opponents are making – that while it may be $8 today, it will inevitably go up tomorrow. Just as it did in London.

Now this technique is used in Mexico city. And you what ? the rich people buy two cars so that they can drive any day of the week.

As you can see, there is nothing that will stop rich pepole to do what they want ..

I’ll address you with a title when you use a less pseudonymous identifier.

What you seem to be saying is that there exists a price whereat congestion pricing will be ineffective because induced demand will drown out any effect it might otherwise have. That is undoubtedly true, and we can argue about whether or not the proposed price of $8 is higher or lower than this threshold. But if not, then congestion pricing still has advantages — namely, it raises transportation funds from a more stable transportation source. Furthermore, even if $8 is too little there must exist /some/ price that would exceed induced or latent demand and actually reduce congestion. If the congestion charge were $100,000/day, then I think we could all agree that there would be a marked effect (probably too marked) in congestion. So there must be a number between $0 and $100,000 that yields the desired amount of traffic. Do you disagree?

The point I was trying to make is that currently, the marginal cost plus opportunity cost for making a trip is more expensive for taking transit than driving for a lot of people. As a result, there is little or no incentive to carpool, take transit, etc. aside from parking costs (which too many people avoid) or congestion. By adding in congestion pricing, it raises the marginal cost of choosing to drive.

That being said, I think the main flaw in congestion pricing as proposed is that the fee is too low. I think that it should be scaled in regard to transit fares for suburban commuters within a certain radius of the city so that the charge will be at least equal, if not more expensive than the available transit options. As of right now, it is set to be comparable to Bellerose on LIRR, Tuckahoe on MN and between Elizabeth and Linden on NJT. I think it should be scaled more to major park and ride stations such as White Plains and Metropark. If it was scaled to Metropark, for example, the charge should be around $10.5 – $11.

This of course needs to be coupled with government permit reform. It should also go with market pricing of street parking.

If what you say is true — and the basic factor limiting car trips into the City is congestion itself — then CP will not reduce congestion because the people who leave their cars at home will be replaced by people who can easily afford the $8/day but who avoided driving because of the time and hassle involved. Don’t you think there are plenty of wealthy folks in Westchester, Jersey, Long Island, etc. who would pay the $40 a week if it meant an easier ride in their comfy Lexuses? (They’re already paying for their monthly commuter passes anyway, so the expense isn’t really that great for them.)

So perhaps it’s reasonable to assume that what CP will do is clear the streets of the less well-off so that the more well-off can drive more comfortably. In which case you can claim that CP would be an effective revenue collector, but you can’t say that it will reduce congestion.

Although the suggestion made by pols such as Anthony Weiner and others such as the Cross Harbor Freight tunnel, bike lanes, better enforcement, etc. would be great for the city, none of them address the core causes of congestion: the perverse incentive to drive and induced demand.

For every car or truck that the freight tunnel or new bike lane takes off the road, another car will replace it. The basic factor limiting car trips in the New York area (aside from parking costs), especially east of the Hudson, is congestion itself. This is due to the concept of induced demand. The extra road capacity freed by these suggestions will induce more demand from these road which would have otherwise been deterred by congestion. The net effect would mean that the congestion would remain the same.

If you have free parking, for example, there is no disincentive (aside from congestion) for you to drive rather than take mass transit and no incentive for you to car pool. This is because the marginal cost for driving is below that of the marginal cost and opportunity cost for the inconvenience for some mass transit. The opportunity cost for car pooling is also higher than the marginal cost for driving alone.

What C.P. does is raise the marginal cost of driving to a point in which it hopefully is more than the total cost of car-pooling or taking mass transit. In doing so, it can artificially hold back demand for road space so that it is not in equilibrium with supply. This creates a surplus of road space which results in reduced congestion.

Spudly, if you have an alternative suggestion that addresses induced demand, please put it out there.

And who, BTW, lives inside the CP zone (by just eight blocks) and who could piss away $8 a day for the next 200 years and still not be affected by his proposal.

Iris Weinshall’s enlarged street signs designed to be visible at higher speeds were effective (in encouraging faster traffic), but definitely changed the look of the city. As do overhead expressway-scale traffic signs on the parkways and service roads.

A minor point to most, I’m sure, but the commission should be asked to consider aesthetics in evaluating alternatives IMHO.

And they couldn’t care less about the class divisions that CP would enforce, or the fact that NYC is already the most stratified spot in the country in terms of income and wealth distribution.

But Silver’s appointees sure seem to point to continued opposition by the Speaker to any kind of congestion pricing. He threw the biggest monkey wrench at them that he could find.

In the months since this has been proposed, I’ve only heard of one person (a maid) who travels to Midtown by car on weekdays and could be considered low-income by any stretch of the imagination, and she carpools so the burden on her wouldn’t be all that great. I think it’s very telling that Brodsky and others have not been able to find anyone. If these poor Manhattan-commuting drivers exist, there may be at most a handful of them, and you have to ask whether it’s worth the asthma, car deaths, slow buses and underfunded transit for the sake of such a small number.

As I’ve written before, the vast majority of car commuters have a choice, so the only way that the concept of regressive vs. progressive makes sense is if you look at all the ways of getting to work: car, bus, subway, bike, foot, ferry, etc., and the incomes of all commuters. If you do that, it’s pretty clear that the congestion charge is one of the most progressive things you could do.

Interesting and something to ponder. More importantly, thanks for the civil tone! I think we on the left attack too much and the sharing of ideas then gets lost. This helps.

Mark

I’m of a leftist bent and inclined to agree with you in a lot of cases, but not so much on this one. I think what’s important is the way the funds are allocated, and NYC’s fairly unique transportation market share. Even assuming that there’s a lot of low-income motorists driving into the business district (and I’m pretty sure someone who works on this site could point out a study showing that there aren’t), ultimately the tax on those motorists is funneled to transit. $8 out of the pockets of one low-income motorist becomes $7 in benefits to low-income commuters who do take the train.

It makes sense to me to incentivize one behavior over the other, given the choice, regardless of the class of the parties involved. Ultimately, when a poor guy drives from the Bronx to Manhattan, the impact is the same — if not worse — as when a rich guy does it from Westchester.

JF, I don’t know what to tell you, I am who I am. I figured I’d say poor folk instead of a broke son of a bitch. I’m also a Sierra Club member. Put it together and you get a Sierra Club member who is poor. If you want to get into elitism in the environmental movement we can, but I don’t think we need to.

Some comments are good and I understand Ian’s point about shared social costs, although he says lower income people who drive into downtown are “imaginary.” I’m sure at least some do exist.

I guess even more than that is my philosophical opposition to taxes like this that gives me pause. Yes, no matter how rich or poor you are each person may be equally using the scarce resource, but that doesn’t mean, as a progressive, we’ve taken that approach as fair or equitable. As a society we’ve almost made it a common practice, but one I think is not fair.

For instance we have mass transportation run by quasi-governmental agencies that were created to build infrastructure. The agency released bonds to pay for the project and then charged users a fee to repay those bonds. It was supposed to be that after those bonds were repaid that the agency disbanded that these projects went back to being funded by taxes. Here’s the problem: they keep bonding to stay in existence and the temporary user fee structure has become permanent.

Drive in Canada and you don’t pay fees to use their roads etc. It is paid for out budgets paid from progressive taxing. It was meant to be done the same way here, but we’ve (even on the Left) be reconditioned to think that equal flat charges for scarce resources is ok without regard to how much people can actually afford it. I don’t like when Republican presidential candidates of yesteryear sell us “Flat Taxing” and I don’t like it now. Maybe it is foolish or naive to think so, but let’s try to do it in a progressive way.

That was long-winded. Now I shall take a breath and drink my coffee.