As with single-payer healthcare, this is a much better post before we have the evidence in. "Can't be done!" loses a lot of oomph when it⦠gets done, in large scale and with great success.
The improvements extend to more than the high-income folks. It's making mass transit more efficient. Per the article:
> Buses are travelling so much faster that their drivers are having to stop and wait to keep to their schedules.
The health benefits of lower traffic (noise, pollution, etc.) should be considered here, too.
> Buses are travelling so much faster that their drivers are having to stop and wait to keep to their schedules.
This makes sense to me as long as that infrastructure exists and is kept up. There needs to be a balance where taking public transit is a practical option. The city I live in (in Canada) has pretty brutal public transit. It's 1-1.5h on the bus for something that takes 20-30m by car and the busses are already full because of the price of parking.
If you introduced congestion pricing where I live, commute times for people driving cars might go down even more as people are priced out of driving, but there aren't enough buses so you would simply be left with no viable options.
>If you introduced congestion pricing where I live, commute times for people driving cars might go down even more as people are priced out of driving, but there aren't enough buses so you would simply be left with no viable options.
What evidence do you have that there physically aren't enough buses?
Here in Toronto, it often happens that the buses move too slowly, because they aren't prioritized over other traffic. They keep a slow, irregular schedule which allows too many new passengers to accumulate at a bus stop in between, a positive feedback loop.
Extra buses don't help as much in this situation as might naively be expected. The first bus gets overloaded while the second nearly tailgates behind, with far fewer passengers. The second bus should be able to overtake and pick up the passengers for the next stop (or the first one should bypass it if nobody's disembarking there), but this can be hard to arrange with cars in the way and passengers on the first bus already getting impatient.
But if the existing service is only every half hour or something like that, then yes of course that adds quite a bit to mean transit time. And yes you probably do fix that mainly by adding more buses and carrot-and-sticking people out of their cars. The neat thing about congestion pricing is that you can use it to fund those buses.
If implemented as in NYC, the congestion charge flows into the coffers of the transit system, allowing your city to finally fix the "not enough buses" problem.
The improvements extend to more than the high-income folks. It's making mass transit more efficient. Per the article:
> Buses are travelling so much faster that their drivers are having to stop and wait to keep to their schedules.
The health benefits of lower traffic (noise, pollution, etc.) should be considered here, too.