By Tim Redmond
I’m not surprised that C.W. Nevius, who lives in the East Bay suburbs and drives into work at the Chron every day, doesn’t like the idea of congestion pricing.
But his column doesn’t entirely add up. I mean, I though he likedmodern capitalism, which is an economic philosophy based on incentives. You give people an incentive to drive downtown — like free or cheap parking — and you never charge them for the external costs of their actions, and they are, by and large, more likely to drive. You take away that incentive — by, say, charging a fee that reflects in some modest way the additional costs to the city, the environment and society as a whole of their behavior — and driving downtown may diminish. That’s pretty basic stuff.
But he’re the big mistake:
It makes you wonder about the numbers the proponents keep throwing out. Between $35 million and $60 million will be generated each year, they say. Add that to the funds the advocates hope to get from the federal government, and they insist it will all come together. The money will dramatically improve mass transit, fewer people will want to drive in the city, and more of them will happily get aboard the bus, or BART, or Caltrain.
Let’s see, just throw more money at public transit and everything will improve. Have we heard that before? You bet we have and the problems persist.
I recognize that throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve everything. It’s not always the smartest thing for government to do, and often it doesn’t work at all.
But public transportation, like public education, is an area where throwing money around really does make a difference. Spend more on Muni and Muni gets better. Cut Muni’s budget and service gets worse. There are other factors (the competance of management etc.) but on a linear regression line, the correlation between money and quality or service is going to be pretty direct.
The reason mass transit isn’t up to Nevius’ standards is mostly because we don’t fund it adequately. Making the (mostly wealthy) people who drive — and pollute the air and contribute to congestion and global warming — pay a small fee to offset just a part of those costs, and use that fee to improve transit, makes perfect sense.