MichaelBishop comments on Less wrong economic policy - Less Wrong

6 Post author: gworley 09 June 2009 08:11PM

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Comment author: MichaelBishop 04 July 2009 08:35:15PM 2 points [-]

"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?

Comment author: taw 04 July 2009 11:40:19PM 1 point [-]

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.