The cost of roads doesn’t include the cost of buying a car, insuring it, filling it with gas, and fixing it. Without a car a road is not useful, cars must be counted as part of the whole system.
The cost of transit includes the operation of the vehicles and the whole deal. The user boards and that’s it.
That chart is Apples to oranges.
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To anyone that says tolls are worse or more regressive than gasoline taxes, I would say that gasoline taxes could be worse for all, especially the poor. If someone poor owns a car, they pay that tax any time they drive, even if it's down the street to work or to the supermarket. But with tolls, someone poor only pays that tax when they cross that bridge or use that expressway.
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1. Who said gas taxes were being repealed?
2. If gas taxes didn’t exist tolls would be higher.
3. Commutes are not a choice. People live and work where the market sorts them. You take a job where you get it and rent or buy a house you can afford it. I doubt consumer preference means much at a metro area level of focus.
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suppose you toll only one of the routes. Put the revenue out of your mind for a moment and look at the other effects of this. Imagine the toll is perfectly calibrated so that it only displaces a relatively small amount of traffic from the tolled road to the freeway at peak commuting times: by removing even this small quantity of cars from a moderately congested road, suddenly traffic begins flowing much more smoothly! That's the way traffic works. The minority of drivers who are willing and able to pay for it now have a better commute, because their money insulates them from the consequences of the city's poor planning decisions.
But the majority of drivers? Their commute just became much worse. Adding even a small quantity of additional traffic to an already congested route now makes the congestion appalling. There is suddenly political pressure to expand the freeway, to build a new bypass. That's the way politics works. The city will build more roads to appease these drivers (since they're the majority), cutting the budget for public transit. The expanded capacity will induce further sprawl, and within a few more years the roads will be just as congested as before.]
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This is interesting and something I hadn’t thought of. Dynamic pricing results in a zero s game rich get richer type outcome because few trips are truly nonessential and commute times not as flexible as economists probably assume. Traffic must go somewhere and alternative routes do not contain infinite capacity.