Comments Charles Siegel has made

  • Energy And Equity

     David, this is not "a tax on lower income groups," who generally use public transportation rather than driving into Manhattan.  It is primarily a tax on suburbanites that will benefit low and moderate income New Yorkers by improving public transportation.  Bloomberg came up with a long list of transit improvements that would be funded with this money.

    Rune, I am afraid that your ideas are pipe dreams.  There are small car-free areas in many cities, but nothing on the scale that is needed to reduce congestion in New York; are you really suggesting a car-free area in all of Manhattan below 86th st?  City planners generally agree that license-plate based rationing has failed to reduce congestion significantly when it has been tried: people get a second car to get around the rationing. In fact, this sort of plan actually increased driving in Mexico City; see http://www.tstc.org/bulletin/index.html#article01 for info about the failure of this and of other alternatives to Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan.

    If I may mix metaphors, these pipe dreams are red herrings distracting us from a method of reducing congestion that has worked very well and has been very popular where it has been tried, in Stockholm and London.  Interestingly, there was widespread oppostion to congestion pricing in both of those cities before it was adopted, but it became verey popular after it was adopted and proved successful, since it made these cities more livable and made it easier for everyone to get around.

    Many people here seem to resent the rich so much that their resentment makes them oppose a program that will benefit the great majority of New Yorkers and the environment.  The majority of New Yorkers (54% of all households according to the 2000 census) don't even own cars, and those who do own cars rarely drive them into downtown or mid-town Manhattan.

    Finally, no one has addressed the main point of my eariler post, a point that Ivan Illich first made in Energy And Equity.  The real inequity involved here is between the small minority of the world's people who drive and the vast majority who do not drive, who will not be able to drive in the foreseeable future because of ecological constraints, and who will suffer and die in immense numbers because of global warming.  

    When people on his board complain about congestion pricing because they do not want to cut down on their own driving, they are perpetuating this inequity.  The rhetoric is egalitarian.  The reality is American consumers defending their own privilege and causing massive suffering among the poor people of the world.  On The connection between congestion pricing and carbon taxes posted 2 years, 4 months ago 18 Responses

  • Congestion Pricing And Elitism

    I have news for the people who complain that congestion pricing is a form of elitism that will hurt the masses and let only the rich drive:  if you drive regularly, then you are the elite.

    About 20% of the people in the world have access to an automobile, and 80% don't.  Of those who do have autos, Americans drive far more than others: Americans consume almost as much gasoline as the rest of the world combined.

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that global warming will cause hundreds of millions of deaths in Africa and Asia, unless we act dramatically to slow it.

    Congestion pricing is one of the only effective ways of reducing the amount that people drive, controlling a major source of CO2 emissions. The options that Rune lists are just pipe dreams that will not happen, and in this case, the perfect is an enemy of the good.  (Rune also apparently does not know the widely publicized fact that Bloomberg plans to spend the revenues on public transportion.)

    If you oppose congestion pricing as elitist, then you are using egalitarian rhetoric to defend the privileges of American consumers at the expense of the great majority of the people of the world.

    You could use exactly the same argument to oppose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade: the rich would be able to pay the extra cost of emissions, and only the middle-class would be affected.  

    The argument from elitism makes it impossible to deal effectively with global warming - until you realize that the middle-class consumers you are defending are themselves the most dangerous elitists. On The connection between congestion pricing and carbon taxes posted 2 years, 4 months ago 18 Responses