It’s a bit like saying “sure, a cinema that refuses to sell more tickets than it has seats leads to a better cinema viewing experience, but only if you remove price from the equation!”
It boggles my mind (by which I mean "you should feel dirty for employing a dishonest rhetorical trick like that") that you can call his take dismissive when you simply ignored the area that is regressing (cost) in order to facilitate the tradeoff.
Cost is explicitly being traded away here to facilitate improvement in other areas. That's the whole point of implementing the toll/tax!!!!!
Phrases like “toll” and “congestion pricing” clearly imply that there will be a cost to driving, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say anyone in the conversation is ignoring cost.
But again, dismissing the improvements because costs go up is like dismissing the reduction of water pollution because “now only people who can afford chemical disposal can operate a tannery next to the river.”
There are two ways to not sell more tickets than you have seats. One is to jack up the price of seats, the other is to add more seats.
The latter in this context would be to e.g. build higher density housing so more people can feasibly take mass transit, as opposed to congestion pricing which is just a tax on people who can't afford the artificially scarce housing in the areas where mass transit use is feasible already.
Wouldn't the price of the car, fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc. dwarf the congestion tax? So the car itself is the worst part about the driving experience?
Maybe. Used vs new cars have vastly different costs. Generally tolls are far more than fuel cost where they exist. Insurance is - in the us - charged per year with unlimited use.
there are some who the charge would be significant (long paid off reliable used car) while others who it is a drop compared to the othes costs (new luxury car)
True, there’s a lot of room to optimize costs. For example the congestion tax costs can be reduced to 0 by avoiding areas it targets. And that’s not even tongue in cheek, one could commute to the edge of the city and take public transport for example.
That is the goal of course. The open question (though we will know in a year) is will they. Or will they just reduce something else from their budget to pay these tolls? If only a handful of people change their behavior this failed (though the extra money to transit may result in useful service expansions for someone else who isn't driving now). If thousands change their behavior it was a success.
