It is a tax to increase revenue. LA has almost non-existent public transit, so anyone riding Uber/Lyft is likely to drive on their own.
It is disingenuous to describe this as anything that has any remote chance to even reduce traffic minimally. LA is an extended suburb, and only infill development of higher density over time can make more public transit economically viable.
This. We have this in Minneapolis / St Paul. It just _works_. We're rolling it out on most of the highways. I wish we had it on _all_ lanes on all highways already, because what is the point of having a 60mph road if most of the time you are barely going 20mph, or trip lengths are otherwise completely unpredictable?
There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. But you have to have the price mechanism first. People will say, what about this, what about that. It doesn't matter. People will figure it out and adapt, but you need to implement congestion pricing right now, because practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems. Importantly, you cannot set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change.
Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur. Given a little bit of time, the emergence of various kinds of social order from a combination of self-interested individuals will occur.
What a great plan! Not improving public transportation. Not taxing people who own private cars. Taxing cars who serve dozens passengers a day! Guess what, if these people weren't using Uber, each of them would be driving their own car.
Charging for use of the road is the only way to balance supply and demand for road. More at peak times and a discount off-peak. Fixed price subscriptions for your commute.
But I see no reason to treat Uber cars differently, except that having a driver does not qualify to one to use the carpool lane (which I would eliminate anyway)!
I'd also allow subscribers and those who buy ahead to sell their prepaid trip when the price surges. Wait an hour and make $5 when there's an accident.
Hmm I often wonder why California doesn't implement a congestion tax. In Stockholm you need to pay around 4$ if you want to drive on the highway during certain hours into and out of the city.
I can't say if it works to reduce congestion but it does even the field and it certainly made me want to not drive there.
How do you guys think the trend from public transit to rideshare will look once self-driving cars begin ramping up?
I imagine that without the cost of labor from the driver, rideshares should become dirt cheap. Will anybody use public transit in 10 years? If not, the congestion problem will get many times worse.
It's the classic induced demand phenomenon - when roads are expanded, people drive a lot more, and congestion remains the same. Same thing with transit - people ride it up to the point where it's miserably crowded.
Both are signs that our infrastructure in either form is unable to service the maximal demand society places on it, so people ultimately decide not to go places because of the cost of doing so (in terms not just of cash, but also comfort and time).
I think people will use rideshares only to the point that congestion is precisely miserable enough those who choose to rideshare to tolerate it.
So what might happen is that mass transit remains equally as congested, just more people are taking trips than they were before because the capacity of the whole system has increased.
It's also the case that, unlike self-driving car infrastructure, trains are far more scalable - in places that actually invest in their mass transit infrastructure, I think mass transit can compete pretty well the more the municipality invests in train lines and stuff.
But to assume that self-driving cars will save cities that don't have transit infrastructure—that might be true for very sparsely populated, small cities, but for all the American cities that lack public transit infrastructure, I think the situation will only change marginally.
It's really frustrating that in so many cities, car owners are perceived to have more of a right to the road than non-car owners (aka those who take only rideshare). Roads are payed for by public subsidy and there shouldn't be special handouts for car owners.
Seems like there could be a lot of unintended commercial consequences — people that would be customers deciding not to bother. I don’t know the situation in other places, but in Colorado the RTD smartphones apps are just awful. Twice in the last month I ended up taking an uber home because the ticketing app for the buses was down and I couldn’t access tickets I bought. Not to mention it frequently feels unsafe. I’m fortunate to be a 6’4” male, but if I was say a 5’2” woman I would totally want to avoid the harassment.
Maybe the focus should be in providing better public transportation instead of encouraging people to stay home.
> Ridership is now at its lowest level in more than a decade, driven by a shift to driving instead of using Metro’s sprawling bus network.
Maybe if they realised that the reason nobody takes public transit is because LA's is one of the worst of developed countries, they'd be a bit more incentivised into building a better system instead of trying to blame external things and create more taxes.
I barely use Uber/Lyft when I'm travelling in Amsterdam, Paris, London or NYC, but find myself having no choice but be in a car when I'm in SF or LA.
This has to be just a money grab right? How can they possibly contend that people using ride sharing services exacerbates road congestion? Neither of their arguments makes any sense.
The space your car uses is a resource. The amount of people in the car doesn't affect the amount of space resource you have used. I think a fee should be applied to the space resource you are using regardless of the amount of people in the car. That way if multiple people need to get to the same place its cheaper for them all to use one car but one person can't just get someone else to sit in the car to make it cheaper.
> [San Francisco Supervisor Aaron] Peskin is drafting a measure for the November election that would levy a 3.25% fee on rides with one passenger, and a 1.5% fee on shared rides.
With all the nonsense going on, I’ve actually just got a car in SF. And that’s after 7 years car-free. Cycling is bloody impossible these days, and they got rid of the damned scooters too. Good job, Aaron. You’re a bloody genius.
My friends were all car-free too and only a fourth of them are still that way. No kids or anything. It’s just gotten kinda crappy here. I was hoping to hold out for just a little longer but I think I’m done.
Forget hyperloops and similar gadgetbahn bullshit. The solution isn't exotic, it's mundane. Street cars work damn well if you treat them as legitimate transit, not a tourist attraction. You can even bury them using cut-and-cover if the situation really calls for it. Forget microtunnel bullshit, that have ultra-expensive stations never mentioned by the advocates
Honest question. How are street cars better than busses?
They put one in near me recently, and all I could think is that compared to a bus it cost a ton more money, took forever to build, and can't be rerouted in case of an issue. Additionally, it doesn't even bypass traffic so it's not any faster.
Why not just buy a few busses to run the exact route they built the street car on instead ?
Better rolling resistance and electric powered without battery nonsense. However they are in close competition with trolley-buses (rubber wheeled electric vehicles powered from overhead lines, as seen in Seattle.)
(And unlike buses they don't have a "low class" reputation that prevents middle class snobs from using them!)
Using cars is embedded into the DNA of American people so deeply that I am not sure it can be changed. I remember the first time I was in LA for a longer period and somebody did not believe me that I do not own a car. She literally though I am a liar and I do not want to share with her what sort of car I drive instead of believing me that I do not have one.
Amen. Uber and Lyft are adding congestion to our roads and undermining public transportation, all while profiting off public infrastructure and a class of driver “partners” who incur all of the costs for a razor thin upside.
Id like to see the start of a state owned rideshare network with specially zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft don’t get access to.
> Id like to see the start of a state owned rideshare network with specially zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft don’t get access to.
Uber and Lyft exist because the state didn't build one of those. In fact the state has built a completely inadequate public transit system in LA. Uber and Lyft are widely used because people in LA don't have an alternative.
Fine, but the concept is out in the world now. The cities should be able to replicate the concept, compete and leverage their strengths the same way any for profit entity could.
If the private market provides a service at a fair price, and consumers like it, why should the city try to duplicate it? It would be a waste of taxpayer money for the city government to try to clone a business that is doing just fine already.
Why draw an artificial line between cities and private markets? Innovation isn’t the exclusive domain of for profit companies. Part of the reason why we end up in these situations where public utilities are in such an embarrassing state is that we don’t expect or allow them to innovate, even down what is now a well proven pathway.
It's not an artificial line because of stuff like this, which you mentioned:
> specially zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft don’t get access to
There are clear differences between the state and private businesses. The state can make laws to prevent private businesses from competing with it, can grant monopolies, etc.
The state is not operated for profit, and the profit motive is the only reason things like Uber and Lyft exist -- the state never would have thought to create something like that.
Private companies innovate and solve problems at rapid pace and huge scale while governments get bogged down and come up with solutions such as high-speed trains that get indefinitely delayed, outrageously expensive, and ultimately cancelled. When those all fail, they just shug and say tax it.
I’m not saying they need to deliver a better service. I’m saying they should meet the current status quo, and use their regulatory power to make Uber and Lyft’s services inferior.
if your purpose is to make people hate politicians and government even more than they do now, then this would be a good way to do it.
but this idea that somehow the state/government knows better is very condescending.
I’m not saying they know better. I’m saying that what Uber and Lyft are doing is extracting a margin at the cost of drivers and taxpayers without having built any real competitive moat. Cities could do the same thing, leverage their control over airports, streets, and other public infrastructure to build a distinct advantage over Uber and Lyft, and reinvest the earnings from this capital light business model back into the capital intensive but ultimately better for society public transit system.
Also - why instantly criticize government for “knowing better”? Any entrepreneur starting a business in an existing space is doing the same thing, and they’d likely be celebrated.
> I’m saying that what Uber and Lyft are doing is extracting a margin at the cost of drivers and taxpayers without having built any real competitive moat.
I agree with the competitive moat issue. Not ideal for a business, but not a deal breaker.
> Cities could do the same thing, leverage their control over airports, streets, and other public infrastructure to build a distinct advantage over Uber and Lyft, and reinvest the earnings from this capital light business model back into the capital intensive but ultimately better for society public transit system.
Thanks for the explanation. It's a bit clearer to me know. I don't see a need to tax Uber/Lyft when considering that the main fault lies in the municipality failing to make owning a car so expensive that people would rather take the bus. Good examples come from Europe: owning a car in some places costs you so much, that taking an Uber/tram/subway/bus is the only way to go. Thus, fewer people have cars. And thus politicians focus on public transport.
As long as we're talking taxes, why tax a taxi service when you can instead tax the huge number of people that actually don't need cars?
Based on the comments here, it appears to me that many people don't understand the economy lose from the inefficiency of public transportation. 1 hour of bus transportation usually take only 20 minutes of taxi ride. It means I can save 40 minutes from the taxi ride. This 40 minutes have considerable value.
It'd be nice to be able to at least see the math that is used to calculate and budget road repairs then compare them with value that that particular road brings in. More broadly, some kind of (global?) effort to accurately calculate externalized costs of all kinds. Gotta catch'em all!
> More broadly, some kind of (global?) effort to accurately calculate externalized costs of all kinds.
So, to do this, you first need to one:
(1) Develop a means to measure individual experienced utility, and
(2) Develop the correct mechanism for aggregating utility across time and individuals.
Analysis which go beyond purely financial impacts now tend to get around this by only considering a narrow range of non-financial externalities, assigning them dollar values by various means, and just treating them as financial externalities. This provides answers, but as to whether they are “accurate” in any deeper sense other than being exactly what you get when you make the assumptions about value that they do is debatable. (But then, that's true of how we aggregate financial externalities, too, because we treat a $ as having equal utility wherever it is, though we know that not to be the case.)
If you start measure externalities, then you can start predicting their expected value. Proposers of dumb laws will have to spend more effort in showing that their law is effective at whatever thing that they are trying to affect. The feedback loop will become more apparent and hopefully tighter. You won't be able to recoup that money back, but you would be able to demonstrate negligence / malice / incompetence more effectively and deal with them then as appropriate.
Another dumbass Aaron Peskin proposal. :eyeroll: At least we can vote this one down in November.
You'd think someone who spends so much time positioning himself as a "progressive" would understand why taxing people who don't own cars is both stupid and unfair.
The alternatives are not taxis, it’s people having their own cars which are probably on average larger than the typical Prius my Uber driver has. Moreover, I often take pool so it could further increase number of cars on the road.
If anything they should be giving tax rebates to Uber and Lyft drivers since this is called f'ing car pooling, and it's saving additional cars from getting on LA roads.
Yet again the "achilles heal" of mass transit it exposed. Uber and Lyft work because they go where I want to go and when I want to go at a reasonable price.
Busses are not full of people who want to ride the bus, they are full of people who must ride the bus.
Yet again the "achilles heal" of mass transit it exposed. Uber and Lyft work because they go where I want to go and when I want to go at a reasonable price.
Busses are not full of people who want to ride the bus, they are full of people who must ride the bus.
LA Times' latest plan to free up congested attention spans is to omit grammar and words.
First picture's caption:
"Kristine Valenzuela exits a Uber at Union Station in Los Angeles."
Second picture's caption:
"Elena Markusic lifts her heavy luggage into the trunk of an at Union Station in Los Angeles. Transportation officials are considering a tax on Uber and Lyft rides in Los Angeles County."
It is disingenuous to describe this as anything that has any remote chance to even reduce traffic minimally. LA is an extended suburb, and only infill development of higher density over time can make more public transit economically viable.