London already charges only during work days between 7 am and 6 pm.
Technology might improve revenue to waste ratio, but right now it would need to get over order of magnitude cheaper to be practical, and that sounds unlikely. Also—if there are hardly any changes in congestion, it’s still a stupid tax even if it became much cheaper. If you just want to charge traffic, gasoline taxes and car taxes are much easier way to go.
It’s not obvious that toll roads really reduce highway congestion. I know in Poland they introduced them as a backdoor tax to fund building highways, in no way related to congestion issues. The costs include not only operating costs, but all the slowdowns to pay the toll, and extra travel due to invariably reduced number of highway exits. I’m not so sure if revenue to waste ratio is really that good.
“on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.”
I had to add to this thread because I found this quote in what appears to be a good analysis of Manhattan’s transportation externalities and a proposal that includes congestion pricing.
If this is accurate, does it change your opinion on the need for congestion pricing? How much?
Would congestion pricing significantly reduce amount of traffic? I quite doubt it.
People are willing to stay extremely long in the traffic, a few extra dollars of congestion charge on top of that won’t make much of a difference, and cost of operating the scheme would be enormous.
Unless the congestion charge is really extremely high, like $100 a day, that would probably work well enough to reduce traffic, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever do that.
London already charges only during work days between 7 am and 6 pm.
Technology might improve revenue to waste ratio, but right now it would need to get over order of magnitude cheaper to be practical, and that sounds unlikely. Also—if there are hardly any changes in congestion, it’s still a stupid tax even if it became much cheaper. If you just want to charge traffic, gasoline taxes and car taxes are much easier way to go.
It’s not obvious that toll roads really reduce highway congestion. I know in Poland they introduced them as a backdoor tax to fund building highways, in no way related to congestion issues. The costs include not only operating costs, but all the slowdowns to pay the toll, and extra travel due to invariably reduced number of highway exits. I’m not so sure if revenue to waste ratio is really that good.
“on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.”
I had to add to this thread because I found this quote in what appears to be a good analysis of Manhattan’s transportation externalities and a proposal that includes congestion pricing.
If this is accurate, does it change your opinion on the need for congestion pricing? How much?
Would congestion pricing significantly reduce amount of traffic? I quite doubt it. People are willing to stay extremely long in the traffic, a few extra dollars of congestion charge on top of that won’t make much of a difference, and cost of operating the scheme would be enormous.
Unless the congestion charge is really extremely high, like $100 a day, that would probably work well enough to reduce traffic, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever do that.