Road taxes are paid continously, it’s not a single expenditure, single pay event.
If roads become ineficient due to congestion then more taxes are collected.
Also the value of roads is their connection to other roads. Their value is as a network not as individual lines of transit. That’s why funding them as singular entities makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You need the irregularly used roads to be paved well otherwise they fall into disuse and that changes traffic patterns. You can’t separate roads from the entire system or they simply do not work.
What is the benefit then? If something doesn’t have to be there as quickly is there a competitive advantage in terms of pricing?
Yes, price is related to time. If you match the efficiency of a train with the speed of a truck then intermodal would wipe out long haul trucking. Trains are great for moving coal or any commodity that can be delivered directly to a customer without a hard delivery date. The problem with any savings realized in a train is the short haul trucking/loading cost on each end. If you could average 55 mph on a train from coast to coast there is no reason why a train couldn’t operate between distribution hubs like any other trucking company. You would see more pup trucks or smaller specialized trailers if that happened.
Irrelevant. The point to congestion pricing is not to raise revenue, it’s to assign prices to the use of roads that captures the externality cost of adding to congestion. So long as there is no financial penalty to using busy roads, they will continue to be congested, because you only have congestion to limit demand.
Imagine if you tried to deliver shoes the same way. Everyone pays a shoe tax, but once you’ve paid the tax, you can have any kind of shoe you want, in any quantity you want. What would happen? People would line up for the best shoes. They would continue to line up until the line got so long that the line itself was a deterrent to buying the best shoes. Only then would people line up for the second-best shoes, even if they are perfectly adequate. This is in fact what happened in the old Soviet Union. You had to queue up for everything, because in the absence of prices, the only thing that will limit demand is the inconvenience of getting the product.
Imagine what would happen with proper congestion pricing, coupled with real-time updates and in-car GPS: You want to get to work, and your car computer says, "There is high demand for your usual route this morning. Therefore, your trip will cost $10 today. I can plot an alternate route that will take 10 minutes longer, but only cost $2. Would you like to take the alternate?
At the end of the month, you could run an analysis that told you, “If you had left for work half an hour earlier each day, you could have saved $35 this month.” You could then use this information to negotiate a different set of hours to work.
Given that kind of information, traffic would spread out onto different roads, and would spread out across the day instead of being bunched into a one-hour rush period. When the main arteries get close to congestion, the price would rise and push people who aren’t really in a hurry into alternate routes, easing congestion for those who absolutely can’t afford the time. And if there are no alternate routes, it would provide incentives to relocate to areas where traffic flow is more efficient. Businesses would find it in their advantage to spread out or locate sub-offices closer to groups of workers, which over time would result in fewer bottlenecks and a more efficient transportation system.
Sam Stone I’m all for congestion pricing in New York. I am kind of pissed off that upstate/Long Island drivers were able to kill it so instead we see a subway fare hike and they want to add a surcharge to taxis that will disproportionately go to upstate.
The only way to collect road specific taxes reliably would be toll roads. Any other technology will be circumvented by the Geitners of the world who think their tax burden is optional. We currently pay road taxes via gas taxes and that is an efficient method that cannot easily be defeated.
Taxing roads through gasoline does not address the issue of congestion, as Sam Stone has very correctly pointed out. It does nothing to maximize the efficiency with which roads are used. Furthermore, it invariably results in either unfair burdens on necessary industries that use gasoline (trucking being the obvious example) or else complication of tax code to avoid such things.
Tolling specific roads isn’t that hard. Why not do it? Lord knows the Toronto area could use it.
As long as the tax pays for improvements nothing changes. If you can improve (or fix in my case) the area with the current tax base then gasoline taxes fix the problem. If you have something like Boston’s “big dig” then toll roads and the sale of your children make more sense.
Tolling isn’t hard but tracking cars can be.
Technically, it’s not that hard. We could do it today. In-car GPS systems coupled with full-time connectivity to the city road database. All these pieces are already in place in many cities. They have live traffic reporting services already. The in-car units do not have to report their location to any central authority. They simply query for the current charge on a road as they enter it, and store the cost. The only information given back to the central database is the cost, and your identification. So no one is tracking your location - you could be on any one of a dozen roads that have the same current charge. You could even remove the timestamp information so that user’s bill has no way on it to track patterns of movement or location.
This, coupled with a traffic reporting system that counts vehicles anonymously, gives you a secure way to charge people for the use of any road in a city, with no overhead, no toll booths, no hassle. You simply get a road bill every month just like you get a cell phone bill. At the same time the system goes into place, everyone in the city gets a tax cut equal to the total amount of road tax collected. People who only take mass transit or who make less use of the roads through walking or biking might actually wind up making money off the deal. The people who use the system the heaviest will pay more in tax.
This is fair, it’s transparent, it provides the right incentives to correct the market failure in general subsidy of the roads.
This is what governments should be doing. Forget about grand plans for managing the economy and controlling the direction of the country. Just make sure the market works properly. Intervene only when there is a demonstrated market failure, and for only so long as the problem remains unsolved. This is one area where a government truly can create wealth - by working to make markets more efficient.
This is a case of very clear, very dramatic benefits. Our cities are clearly operating inefficiently in terms of how the road system is utilized and how communities are choosing to organize themselves. There is a huge market mailure in our most critical pieces of infrastructure, and we’re doing nothing about it except throw more money at the problem. The market can fix this, but it has to be able to transmit the right signals to do so.
No it doesn’t, because it doesn’t address the demand side at all. It doesn’t reward efficient use of the roads, it just makes sure the inefficient uses are paid for. There is no signalling whatsoever to control behavior or correct for the externality cost of an expensive choice like choosing to add to a traffic jam.
There is a world of difference.
There’s no such thing as an efficient use of a road if it’s the main artery. If you look at a city like Columbus Ohio you’ll see that they built a series of highways around and through the city to take the strain off the interstate highway. It’s very effective. My city is fixing the poorly designed higway for greater flow. It would have been done a long time ago but poor planning added substantially to the cost.
Well in Manhattan it’s actually kind of simple, you just toll the incoming bridges.
Yep. It won’t affect local traffic but people driving into the city will change their routine.
FYI, from your earlier cite, I was surprised by the amount of money the city of NY generates in relation to the state. considering the WTC had more office space than the entire city of Cincinnati I understand why they are having problems now. I don’t understand the allure for businesses to locate in such a high rent district but if that dynamic changes it’s going to be painful.
“Oh, how will sprawl be dealt with?“
Another thinly veiled attack about how others should live there lives.
How about this, Live and let live. Is that too much for city folk to understand? If life is so wonderful in the city, why is it that you complain about people that don’t live there? You are not supporting suburban or rural living, it’s the other way around and we don’t complain about your lifestyle choice.
That pastrami sandwich may not have come from beef grown in the suburbs, but it sure as heck wasn’t grown in an apartment on Broadway. City dwellers seem to think that some magical line can exist between their life and those that provide the products for them to live.
City folks need suburban and country MUCH more than we need city.
It’s because there are synergistic effects of having people working in big business and finance being nearby to one another. That’s the long and the short of it.
Here is a very good article by Richard Florida from the Atlantic
Florida’s entire schtick is about the, “Creative Class”, which would be people like scientists, artists, writers, illustrators, musicians, marketers etc… etc… and he argues here that by being in close proximity with one another interacting on a daily basis that this in and of itself is a driver of economic growth.
Essentially that what you dislike about the city, everyone crawling over top of one another, is precisely what drives creative growth.
For years my friends and I have known this because we were here in New York precisely because it’s the place where things are happening. We would always get together for bitch sessions about how the music scene is ‘dead’, but then at the same time we’d say, “Even when it’s dead in New York, it’s better than it is anywhere else.”, and that in a nutshell is why we live here.
There is no doubt that living in close proximity has its advantages. Economies of scale can bring advantages in sharing the cost of public services. Being able to closely collaborate with other businesses is a great thing.
Also, a lot of companies aren’t in the city just because it’s a city - they’re there for the same advantages that brought everyone else. In New York’s case, a gigantic port and a location that makes it a hub of international air travel.
My argument is that the balance between the benefits of cities and their drawbacks is starting to shift away from the city. The direction of our society is away from central control and towards more distributed systems. This is because technology and businesses advances have put less of a penalty on distance. Telecommuting, nationwide overnight freight services, the Internet, E-mail, cell phones, and other technologies have made the population more mobile, and more able to work at a distance from each other. In the meantime, pollution, the threat of terrorism, urban decay, and transportation bottlenecks are punishing city dwellers.
I don’t know how large the aggregate effect is, or even if it’s completely offset by some other effect, sociological or financial. But all else being equal, it seems likely that there will be more of a bias towards suburbia in the next ten or twenty years.
I’m a musician myself, going on 20 years in the greater NYC area, but increasingly disenchanted with the life and all it entails. One reason (there are many) is a result of just what you’re alluding to: that you need a critical mass of like-minded people before anything at all can happen.
What I find so depressing is that as time goes on, and mass market culture drives out more and more unique and creative stuff, you need a bigger and bigger critical mass. Eventually it becomes impossible to do anything artistically unless there is a serious oversupply of creative people, and an atmosphere of one-on-one competition that makes the scene that much harder to get into and stay into. Outside the snake pit - nothing.
I see why creatives have to be close together, but I don’t see why they (and their culture) have to be crammed into what are, functionally, ghettos, except for the rules of the mass market.
Just thinking about some factors that might work in favor of cities:
- A more mobile population will be required in the future, because the rate of change of technology is still increasing, and with it industries will rise and fall. This might work against suburban life, because people who live in the burbs aren’t that mobile. They’ve put down roots. They’ve investing in their home, and customized it to their liking, and their kids have neighborhood friends. Having to move around to follow the jobs would suck for them.
If I found myself having to find a new job every five years, and possibly have to move to take it, I’d live in an apartment and rent. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well do it in the city. It’ll be easier.
Why is renting in a city easier?