Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

[DominusNovus]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Honestly, are we really having a conversation where people are asking why voters are not thrilled with the idea that their taxes are going up?

I also happen to reject the idea that the tax code(s) should be crafted to encourage or discourage certain behavior among the citizenry (other than, of course, the behavior of paying the taxes).

 

[Matthew]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

You don't think we should discourage unmitigated pollution?

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Of course the legislature, by refusing to just go along with the guv's plan, is raising taxes, but not by enough to fix any problems. So people will bitch that raising taxes fixes nothing, the state is being wasteful, etc., while our infrastructure continues to crumble... and when we need to raise taxes again later people will be even more against it. There appears to be no long-term strategy from the Great and General Court at all...

 

[ant8904]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Even with raising taxes enough to start fixing stuff, it is true that it may be hard to ensure perception of improvement.

Let's say we got a large tax hike and there is no longer any budget debate for the MBTA, night owl returns, extend the Green Line, do a bunch of bridge repairs, and reworks highway exchanges from cloverleaf to flyovers. That's a huge checking off from the infrastructure checklist. However, there's a good chance quite few will recognize it as a reflection of improved service from new taxes. Many won't notice it or even perceived as it always been like that while still deeming poor service.

Of course, I'm still not sure raising revenues via tax is the only way to get the funding needed for infrastructure. Like the link I posted in the previous page, why does 43% of the state budget have to go to healthcare while infrastructure go by with only 4.8%? If Deval is right that the raised revenue amount is enough to see real improvement in infrastructure, than's it is equivalent to less than 1 total percent of the state budget. It means a raise roughly from 4.8% to 5.8% (actually quite less). When I look at the healthcare portion, I have to wonder that the 1 total percent removed from healthcare and putting to transit sure seem to mean a lot more bang for the buck. Raising from 4.8% to 5.8% sure seem to do a lot, meanwhile reducing from 43% to 42% sure make me wonder the damage when it is out of a current total of 43%.

---

As for the gas tax thing, I think I can see where DominusNovus is trying to get at: Should government be playing the role of using gas tax a weapon to modify behaviors rather than just a funding strategy? A Pigouvian tax have some merits in its argument to cover damage to neighborhoods though I can imagine this can easily fall into debate between groups if the government openly follow this policy. Using tax (negative reinforcement) to modify behavior is government social engineering, something I can find the disagreeableness, understandable.

 

[DominusNovus]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

You don't think we should discourage unmitigated pollution?

Thats not what taxes are there for. Beyond the massive inconvenience it produces for the taxpayers, its also self-defeating. We have a fantastic example in cigarette taxes. Various states tax cigarettes, largely based on the idea that 'smoking it bad' and therefore, higher taxes will discourage smoking. However, the state starts to depend on that revenue and, as people decrease their smoking habits, revenue goes down. So, the states raise the taxes even higher, and its a viscous circle. Ultimately, you get the situation that they have in NY state, where over 60% of all cigarettes are purchased outside of the tax code (people and store owners going over to NH to buy them).

Although, admittedly, we're getting *way* off topic.

 

[Matthew]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

So I take it you're an opponent of a carbon tax? Even as a replacement for, say, the payroll tax?

 

[DominusNovus]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

So I take it you're an opponent of a carbon tax? Even as a replacement for, say, the payroll tax?

Of course, though I fail to see how the two are really connected.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

All taxes change behavior (what you tax, you get less of; what you subsidize, you get more of) and deter some activity, and I think it natural and healthy if you don't like any taxes, whether because they're expensive or because they're warping behavior.

At the same time, mobility is rare (congestion-prone) and valuable (let's us live and work better places). Roads are expensive, exurbs are expensive to provide services for, and most cars have negative externalities (costs born by others) like pollution and congestion.

We can also complain that work rules (trade unions) and politicians and contractors charge us too much for all our transport infrastructure.

In the end, we need to fully-charge for these services what they cost to provide. Hiking the gas tax does a reasonably cheap and accurate job of that.

 

[Equilibria]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

All taxes change behavior (what you tax, you get less of; what you subsidize, you get more of) and deter some activity, and I think it natural and healthy if you don't like any taxes, whether because they're expensive or because they're warping behavior.

At the same time, mobility is rare (congestion-prone) and valuable (let's us live and work better places). Roads are expensive, exurbs are expensive to provide services for, and most cars have negative externalities (costs born by others) like pollution and congestion.

We can also complain that work rules (trade unions) and politicians and contractors charge us too much for all our transport infrastructure.

In the end, we need to fully-charge for these services what they cost to provide. Hiking the gas tax does a reasonably cheap and accurate job of that.

One could also argue that taxes for the purpose of behavior modification or social engineering are like free speech (hear me out). We can generally agree that the Westboro Baptist Church is horrible, and what they say is horrible. However, for the sake of a free society we have to respect their right to spew their crap all over the place.

Similarly, giving the government the ability to charge people to live in a certain way is incredibly dangerous. We might be able to argue that it's a reasonable power in this particular case, but I don't want my government having the power to tax any way of living they don't like. That has way too much potential for abuse, from my perspective.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Similarly, giving the government the ability to charge people to live in a certain way is incredibly dangerous. We might be able to argue that it's a reasonable power in this particular case, but I don't want my government having the power to tax any way of living they don't like. That has way too much potential for abuse, from my perspective.

Look, I am extremely sympathetic to the libertarian view on this, but the little economist in me knows that somebody's got to pay for the benefits of driving on good (and, ideally, un-congested) roads.

There's a good economic case to be made that driving--and rush hour driving in particular--has been underpriced in the USA for quite some time (for example, not counting the tax revenue lost when we take land for roads in the "price" of the road or of driving).

Clearly some people have a "don't like" attitude toward certain others' lifestyles and we can even agree there's too much of that that's been turned into laws.

But the point remains that mobility (bridges, roads, and alternatives to them) must be paid for and that single-occupant vehicles on long commutes at rush hour place a lot of expensive burdens on the system (roads must be sized for the daily peak and if you do most of your driving at that peak, well, you're imposing lots of congestion and/or forcing lots of road construction).

If we had a choice of how to accommodate the "next" new traveler on a road, they're often the straw that tips the road into congestion--and therefore very expensive to accommodate and very burdensome on other drivers.

I do think of car taxes as mobility taxes. It isn't a moral judgment, just an economic one, more along the lines of:
1) User fees
2) Congestion charges (making peak commutes more expensive)

Divorced from all the moral judgments, there's still a great case for higher taxes on cars. Also it turns out to be cheaper to pay higher taxes and drive on good roads than to skimp on taxes and have your car wear out faster on bad roads. (gas taxes are cheaper than front-end alignments)

 

[Matthew]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Pigouvian taxes change behavior in the same way that charging for bread at the store changes behavior -- since it costs money, you don't empty the shelves and hoard it. Instead you calculate what you need and buy just that amount. And the money the store earns gets used to restock the shelves, supply chain etc.

Driving a car imposes costs on society in a number of ways, e.g. pollution and congestion. Much like a store intends to recoup the cost of stocking bread by charging you money for each loaf, a Pigouvian tax on driving is intended to recoup the cost to society of you operating a motor vehicle. It's not punitive, it's not a moral judgement, and it's not social engineering. It's just attempting to pay for the costs.

With the loaf of bread, it's rather easy to see how the inputs correspond to the outputs, so it's not controversial for a store to charge money for that. But because pollution is ambient, and congestion is a complex dynamics problem, it's much more difficult for people to understand the relationship between cost and benefit. It's also difficult to figure out exactly what the cost is. That's why it's controversial.

I think you're right that raising the gas tax is probably the simplest and most straightforward way to go forward at this time. And the legislature has just done that, and tied it to inflation for the next 7 years too.

 

[Equilibria]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Pigouvian taxes change behavior in the same way that charging for bread at the store changes behavior -- since it costs money, you don't empty the shelves and hoard it. Instead you calculate what you need and buy just that amount. And the money the store earns gets used to restock the shelves, supply chain etc.

That's not an accurate analogy. It would be more appropriate to say that pigouvian taxes are like the government deciding that since white bread consumers tend to be less healthy and cost the public money to treat for heart disease, white bread will be hit with a tax to raise its cost above that of whole wheat bread. Not only that, but the white bread tax money will be used to fund wheat bread producers, who until now haven't been able to keep up with their far more powerful competitor.

Or how about taxing the true impacts of providing policing services to Roslindale, Dorchester, and Roxbury? Why should the residents of West Roxbury and Brighton, who chose to live in safe communities, have to cover the hidden costs of keeping people in high-crime neighborhoods safe?

Roads are currently paid for in 2 ways: property taxes at the municipal level (which everyone pays for because everyone in the city utilizes roads in some way), and a gas tax at the state level, though I'm not sure if MA also has municipal gas taxes like California does. Certain roads also have tolls. Transit is paid for partially by its own users, but mostly by (in MA) state and local taxes primarily paid by people who never use the service and who, in some cases, live hours away from a transit line.

I haven't done the math, but I suspect drivers actually bear more of the costs of their system than transit riders do, simply because they cover all maintenance and operating expenses for their vehicles. Functionally, drivers in MA are already being forced to subsidize the ability of low-income urban residents to move about the city via transit, and unquestioned social good. They are also, however, being forced to subsidize the ability of people with lucrative jobs to live urban professional lifestyles while paying 4 bucks a day in commuting expenses, less than half of what gas alone will cost you for a 25-mile commute by car.

It's unquestionable that the costs of carbon emissions and lost productivity due to congestion are significant (though drivers are already paying for the latter). It is crazy, however, to argue that drivers are "not paying the full cost of their commutes" while transit riders are. If you were advocating taxing drivers to pay for necessary road improvements, sure. You're arguing raising taxes on drivers to pay for transit improvements which are unlikely to pull more than a handful of cars off the road.

 

[Matthew]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Bother. I typed in a whole response and the browser ate it.

Wikipedia:

A Pigouvian tax (also spelled Pigovian tax) is a tax applied to a market activity that is generating negative externalities. The tax is intended to correct an inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] An oft-cited example of such an externality is for environmental pollution.[2]

I guess I'll type back more if I feel like it later.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Bother. I typed in a whole response and the browser ate it.

Wikipedia:
I guess I'll type back more if I feel like it later.

The Wikipedia quote was pretty good (thousands of editors can do that ;-) I don't see what more can be said. We're trying to put a $ on externalities and then spend the $ in a sorta-related, sorta-ofsetting way.

 

[Equilibria]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

The Wikipedia quote was pretty good (thousands of editors can do that ;-) I don't see what more can be said. We're trying to put a $ on externalities and then spend the $ in a sorta-related, sorta-ofsetting way.

That might be a good definition, but I'm not arguing with that a Pigouvian tax is, I'm arguing that applying one in this specific case is unreasonable. You can argue that pollution caused by cars is an externality, and that we need to charge for that, but I could argue that we really shouldn't be worried about pricing the externalities of one mode of transportation when users of the alternative mode don't pay the SIMPLE COSTS OF THE SERVICE, and in fact don't come close, claiming massive subsidies not only from their neighbors who choose not to use that mode but also from people who live 150 miles away (or 3,000 miles way through the Federal gas tax) and have no interest whatsoever in that mode continuing to exist.

I have no problem with transportation revenues being used to fund a complete system approach. To use a local example (for me), if Bay Bridge tolls are funding BART, that's fine, because without BART the Bay Bridge becomes unusable. I have a problem with transit advocates proposing billion-dollar projects while pooh-poohing any highway improvements, then demanding that highway users pay for their projects out of some sense of "justice".

Ok, so you've chosen the lifestyle of having and commuting with a car. When do you start paying extra for that? When you plunk down $20,000 transit users never have to? When you pay $2,000 per month for state-mandated insurance? When you pay $60 per week for gas? Meanwhile, those enjoying the urban lifestyle pay $20 per week in transit fares which cover less than a third of the cost of their trip, and have the nerve to demand that not only do you pay the balance, but that you now pay new, higher taxes to fund billion-dollar public investments so that their $2 fare can take them 10 miles further into the suburbs.

The trade-off with transit is that it's uncomfortable, non-private, and doesn't afford you complete freedom to go where and when one would like. If the community that rides transit (or those seeking access to it) want to expand the reach of the network to incrementally improve the last of those, then great, more power to them. When they hold protests every time fares go up to pay for those things while continuing to milk the supposed "evil" of people in the suburbs for massive subsidies, well, that's when I start to have issues.

 

[Arlington]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

That might be a good definition, but I'm not arguing with that a Pigouvian tax is, I'm arguing that applying one in this specific case is unreasonable. You can argue that pollution caused by cars is an externality, and that we need to charge for that, but I could argue that we really shouldn't be worried about pricing the externalities of one mode of transportation when users of the alternative mode don't pay the SIMPLE COSTS OF THE SERVICE, and in fact don't come close, claiming massive subsidies not only from their neighbors who choose not to use that mode but also from people who live 150 miles away (or 3,000 miles way through the Federal gas tax) and have no interest whatsoever in that mode continuing to exist.

Congestion is the other HUGE externality that (mostly) cars and (somewhat) trucks impose on the other modes with smaller footprints (bike, transit, and walking) or greater densities of people (rail & bus).

Forget fuel taxes for a moment.

Let's try this thought experiment: What if the cost of the road itself (for both parking and driving) were raised so that at all times road traffic flowed freely? That is, what if everyone were made to bear the price of congestion via congestion pricing?

Almost nowhere is transit "at fault" for rush hour jams--its mostly cars, and mostly cars would therefore have to (in almost any free-market scheme) bear the cost of de-congesting the roads. Sure, a bus might pay 10x what a car pays in congestion charges (it should), but it has 30x to 50x as many people on board and so would happily do so.

Gas taxes (and probably low ones) would suffice to price all non-congesting driving, such as on my local streets and off-hours use of almost any road.

The interesting thing is that if high-demand roads really were uncongested through market pricing, streetcars could go back to actually running in the street (and not in tunnels--expensive subways would never have been necessary to begin with, but we didn't understand pricing in 1898). Also if street traffic were priced so as to not be congested, you could provide greater frequencies and faster service with *fewer* buses than it takes today.

THe big conclusion is that if there were no congestion (caused mainly by cars) transit service would also be faster on the road, and less capital and labor intensive. Transit is expensive (in tunnels and in many slow-crawling buses) because cars were permitted to push their congestion costs on to others.

So because roads are thought of as "free" cars fill them up 'til they stop being roads and instead crawl along as parking lots. Roads are for moving--their price should be hiked until they start moving.

No matter how you decide to configure your market-pricing (by pricing fuel, vehicles, tonnage, miles-traveled, or square feet of road occupied), you see that cars--particularly cars in cities at rush hour--need to be being charged more in order that they not impose congestion costs on each other and on other modes.

The fuel tax is too blunt for much of this--taxing people who aren't congesting the roads about the same as those who are. Time-of-day pricing, congestion charges for Central Business District entry, and fully-market parking pricing (such that there's always a spot empty) are better--but will drivers give them to us?

 

[Equilibria]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Congestion is the other HUGE externality that (mostly) cars and (somewhat) trucks impose on the other modes with smaller footprints (bike, transit, and walking) or greater densities of people (rail & bus).

Yes, let's please talk about the fallacy of congestion pricing.

I've seen and had to calculate a congestion tax, and the ideology doesn't match the actual math. When one speaks of a congestion tax, the theory (as you've so artfully laid out) is that each individual driver causes an incremental increase in the time it takes every other driver on the road (you've brought in other modes, which I'll address in a minute) to get where they are going. Congestion pricing holds by the logic that using the value of time, each driver should pay for their tiny share of the lost time of every other user which, when summed over the full set, equals some dollar amount.

However, one calculates congestion tax in a very different way. There, the logic is "how much can we charge each individual user so that the total number of users declines to a level we're comfortable with?"

This is necessary because not only is the theory of congestion taxes fairly impossible to quantify - how exactly do you define the drivers one person has inconvenienced? - it's also logically false because every one of those delayed drivers is wasting their own time and thus their own money. Over the full system, each driver's personal wasted time is being paid for twice: once by themselves waiting, and once by the sum of every other driver's incremental congestion tax. With no tax, each person being inconvenienced is paying for it in full, and the system pays for its own inconvenience.

To resolve this requires one to believe that by paying into the system, the latter collective sum is "paying back" each driver's own investment by funding public improvements which benefit them, but that logic goes out the window once you earmark the money for other modes. Once the tax does nothing to benefit the user who pays it and doubles a price they've already paid for a good (wasted time, in this case), it ceases to be a tax and becomes a fine, which, by the way, is precisely how it's calculated. Congestion taxes aren't pricing the road, they're like taxes on cigarettes: we charge it because we can make money off of it and we like to stick up our noses at the people who pay it.

So, let's talk about the other modes. First off, buses and streetcars may be held up by road congestion, but they collectively carry a tiny fraction of the people that cars do. Each driver's "debt" to the system, therefore, is owed overwhelmingly to other drivers, each of whom is being charged double by the congestion tax. The transit riders may cause far less of the congestion, but they are, as I've said before, quite a bit in debt to the drivers already.

By the way, it's an interesting vision you bring up for streetcars in cleared streets, but it doesn't really work. Street-running transit addresses trips within the cordoned area only, meaning people who could, frankly, walk to work. The type of transit which actually serves as a proxy for driving - LRT, HRT, and CR - typically requires a dedicated ROW or even grade separation to function. In any case, this is the GLX thread, and the performance of GLX and every other rail transit line in Boston has not one iota of relation to road congestion. The reason we have the Central Subway in Boston is that, in an era when there were no cars, streetcars congested streets so much on their own that the city couldn't function with them at grade.

 

[CSTH]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Equlibria, this statement is not accurate: "Congestion pricing holds by the logic that using the value of time, each driver should pay for their tiny share of the lost time of every other user which, when summed over the full set, equals some dollar amount."

Specifically, neither the value to each driver of lost traffic time, nor the congestion cost imposed by each driver, is constant. In reality each driver will value the lost time differently, depending on their opportunity costs & the occasion. This is the demand curve for open road. Also, there are points at which an additional driver slows nobody down (e.g. 2am), points where the imposed delay is relatively small (e.g. when things are already slow), and points at which an additional drive will make a big difference (thick but moving, and on the verge of a rapid phase change). This is the supply curve for open road.

So, done right, congestion pricing is not specifcally about compensating unjust losses to other users ("each driver should pay for their tiny share of the lost time of every other user which"), its about finding a price to efficiently allocate a scarce resource. And the only thing complicated about that is finding good data to extrapolate from, because its an empirical problem.

The role of the road operator (usually, the government) in this is to artificially intermediate & stablize the bidding between those willing to pay cash for a faster ride and those willing to be compensated in the form of direct reinvestment in alternative modes + their notional share of the net increase in general welfare from decreased friction to commerce, emergency services, space use, etc. The value is in introducing choice into the system - today, if i want to get from Needham to Reading at 5pm, my only choice is to suffer in traffic for 60 minutes. There would be a net gain if i could decide whether to pay $25 to drive there now (especially if its during the work day and I'm billing my clients $500 an hour), or $2 to take an express bus (so that the other high rollers could pay for the still-open road).

In sum: it's not that its impossible to quantify, its just that you're solving for the wrong factor and using the wrong logic to get there.

 

[Matthew]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Along the corridors in which they run, transit services generally carry far, far more people than cars do.

But anyway, there was a point in my lost text which was applicable to your argument about subsidies, it's this: road subsidies cause transit subsidies.

Because transit a high fixed operating cost, the trains/buses run regardless of who uses them, it is dependent on attracting customers for revenue. Under normal competitive circumstances, both companies are constrained by the need to cover costs, and therefore cannot necessarily undercut each other.

But when the government steps in and pumps taxpayer money into a direct competitor, like a freeway, then there is no possible response for the transit agency. The government doesn't care about recovering costs, it's on the taxpayers. In some cases, it's the transit agency and its users who are being forced to subsidize the highway.

Because of the high fixed cost financial structure, the transit agency is stuck: it's paying the same costs but the revenue is lower and lower. The most obvious response is to cut service or raise fares. But this causes ridership to decline even further. It's a positive feedback loop which we've seen all over the country. The service cut/fare hike/ridership loss tailspin of doom. Either the agency dies, or the only way to prop it up is with subsidies. So road subsidies lead to transit subsidies.

I think it's quite telling that one of the few places where transit (both public and private!) is profitable is Tokyo, which does not subsidize car ownership the way we do here. (Also, they have competent rail operators).

P.S. props to CSTH, nice explanation, better than I could have said it

 

[Arlington]

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

In sum: it's not that its impossible to quantify, its just that you're solving for the wrong factor and using the wrong logic to get there.

Yes: people are really bad at valuing their own time, but auctions are really good at allocating scare resources (as when dynamic road pricing allocated uncongested road)

Equilibria, in focusing on the time and trying to get people to reveal its value has chosen the area where people either don't know, won't tell, or outright lie to themselves or to policy maker. People are just really bad at all kinds of decisions like this (like whether to mow their own lawns or deciding to race a train crossing)

But assets like roads, we're really really good at auctioning (since dynamic pricing and open-road tolling) .