People should pay for their choices except, when they associate with gangbangers, get unplanned pregnancies, or do drugs.
Love the logic. Yes, people would be very happy to pay and sit in traffic. Just another blatant taxing scheme.
“Driving into the most transit dense area in the U.S., that’s a choice people make. I made that choice today and I’m regretting it," the executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy and policy group, told NBC News as he made his way into New York City last week.
But Sifuentes takes his remorse one step further than average commuter. “I should pay for my choice,” he said.
Sifuentes means pay in the literal sense. He and the campaign want New York City to implement congestion pricing on their roadways. If implemented, drivers on some of the busiest roads in Manhattan during peak hours would have to pay a surcharge; roads that usually are free would become toll roads.
First adopted by Singapore in 1975, congestion pricing has slowly become a go-to solution for cities plagued by heavy traffic, and has since been successfully adopted in Stockholm, London and Milan.
“The basic idea is that you use tolls for the specific purpose of reducing traffic congestion,” Michael Manville, an urban planning professor at UCLA, told NBC News.
“The last 5 percent of vehicles on the road account for a disproportionate share of the delay all cars feel,” Manville said. “If you can find a way to deter a small proportion of vehicles, you get a big improvement in speed and big increase in flow.”
And it turns out charging people more to drive helps shave off the last 5 percent. Manville says congestion pricing has been shown to ease traffic, make highways flow faster and free up side streets.
“It’s a very sensible policy,” he said. “Congestion is a shortage of road. When you see a shortage, one thing you should look for is a price that’s too low.”
The proven success of congestion pricing is why cities like New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston — the 8th most congested city in the world — have all toyed with the idea. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced they want to implement the policy by 2020, and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is considering the policy.
Sifuentes is excited about the prospect of being charged for his drives into New York City, and sees benefits of the policy beyond clearing up the roads. Chiefly, he wants to use it to fund mass transit.
In New York, revenue from congestion pricing would go toward the city’s ailing subway system. L.A. wants to use the traffic tolls to help fund a slew of infrastructure projects before it hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics and to subsidize fares on its trains and buses.
Even more, Manville says that vehicles stuck in traffic emit more pollutants than those moving at a free flow. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, after congestion pricing became the law of the land in Stockholm, childhood asthma cases decreased by nearly 50 percent.
Despite its proven success, congestion pricing is a hard sell for politicians. “People don’t get excited about a program that involves imposing transparent costs on a majority of voters,” Manville said.
In New York, a form of congestion pricing was proposed in the 1970s, and Michael Bloomberg later tried and failed it implement it as mayor.
