Felix Salmon’s Congestion Charging Smackdown
I’m slow to this, but the video debate, featuring Charles Komanoff and others, is here.
For those of you who are, say, too gripped by World Cup analysis (Nani is out? Lee Dong-guk might return for South Korea?) to devote too much time to this sort of thing at the moment, Felix handily provides a crib sheet to the full video.
For my money, Reihan Salam is the most interesting voice in this debate: A conservative writer for National Review — which one might think would place him close to Corey Bearak in this debate — who is actually staunch defender of public transit — the result of being of a longtime outer-borough resident and subway commuter (of course, many right-wingers favor congestion charging — one might say, to rephrase the old saw about liberals and conservatives, ‘a congestion charging advocate is a free-marketeer who has been mugged by New York City congestion.’)
“The idea that you should pay $2 or $9 to drive in to New York when other folks have to pay some amount to take a subway into New York and have a much smaller impact, in terms of traffic congestion, seems pretty fair.”
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 8:48 am and is filed under Cars, Cities, Commuting, Congestion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 29th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Hi Tom, I’m a longtime reader of your blog, and a reader-to-be of (the brazilian translation of) “Traffic”. Thank you for this post; the discussion in the video is very interesting for showing different points of view about congestion pricing. I knew - and appreciate - Charles Komanoff’s ideas and studies about CP in New York, and I can personnally confirm your argument about conservative economists being potential supporters of CP, because I was introduced to this subject by a very right-wing professor in France (and after that I decided to write my thesis about the acceptability of CP in Rio). I think the debate about CP can show the difference between a ‘conservative economist’ who knows that congestion is an externality that needs to be fighted through regulation and a mere defender of the automobile. In fact, the defense of the automobile could almost be considered an ideology apart, which is embraced mainly by right wingers, but also - and sadly - by left-wingers. Thank you.