Next year, congestion pricing is coming to New York City. And maybe, just maybe, the toll for motor vehicles entering the lower half of Manhattan should be set at $100.
That number comes from Charles Komanoff, an environmental activist, a transit analyst, and a local political fixture. It represents neither the amount that would maximize revenue nor the amount that would minimize traffic. Rather, it is an estimate of how much it really costs for a single vehicle to take a trip into the congestion zone—in economists’ terminology, the unpriced externality associated with driving into one of the most financially productive and eternally gridlocked places on Earth.
This number comes just from calculating the monetary value of the average delay incurred by each car’s contribution to traffic, not even accounting for all the other negative externalities – e.g., air pollution, sound pollution, injuries, deaths, etc. – meaning this is probably a sever underestimate.
Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/LSpi5
I have seen some truly terrible takes elsewhere online from New Yorkers who think this is another poor people tax. This is the opposite of a poor people tax. I don’t know where that idea is coming from, but it sounds like a Fox News and New York Post talking point.
Yeah, exactly. The problem is the poor are kept poor because they have to keep shouldering the costs of other (usually richer) people’s negative externalities. Properly pricing those externalities and using the funds either for a citizen’s dividend or for other beneficial public spending is like one of the most obvious ways to make a more prosperous and equal society.
Just because you don’t tax the externalities doesn’t mean those costs disappear; instead they just get paid by society’s most vulnerable.
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