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Originally Posted by BrownTown
Sure there is. The lack of access to Long Island means people have to drive through NYC just to get there. This is horribly inefficient as you're sending traffic through incredibly dense areas when it would save loads of time if they could simply avoid the city. Step 1 is to triple the federal gas tax though. Its almost pointless to discuss this issue until that is done.
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There are two types of efficiencies. You were talking about market efficiencies and that was what I was addressing. Your point was "it is not efficient to spend money on transit if it can't pay for itself". Taking your same logic, it is not efficient to spend congestion pricing charged to lower Manhattan drivers for a bridge for Connecticut and Long Island drivers.
Of course it is overall efficient to get people from point A to point B without a diversion through point C. The same reason why a transit line can be more efficient than a lane of road. But that is a different type of efficiency.
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Originally Posted by Busy Bee
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It's a miracle. I agree with BrownTown on something.
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I am surprised you think congestion pricing for cars entering lower Manhattan should be spent on a bridge from Connecticut to Long Island.
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Originally Posted by The Chemist
Beijing has no double deck expressways. You may be thinking of Shanghai, which has many elevated highways in the central city with major surface arterial roads running underneath them.
The lottery you mention is not for the right to buy a car, but rather to buy a license plate. The number of Beijing license plates available per month is heavily restricted, and there is a lottery for the right to bid on available plates. Since the number of plates is so restricted, the price of a plate is extremely high, exceeding the price of a small car.
Beijing's problems are due to the fact that the restrictions that you mention came very late. In Shanghai, which has a larger population than Beijing, the lottery system has been in use for much longer, and as a result Shanghai has half the number of registered cars as Beijing. This means that Shanghai has nowhere near as bad traffic as Beijing, even with fewer highways and far fewer restrictions on out of province cars (the only restriction on non Shanghai plated vehicles is that they cannot use the elevated highways within the Outer Ring Road during peak hours).
I know you've already conceded on this point, but I should point out that Beijing's density here is based on the area of Beijing Municipality, which is much larger in area than the city of Beijing, and includes a lot of mountainous areas and farmland. The true density of the actual built up areas of Beijing is much, much higher.
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Your pendantry aside (a lottery to buy a license plate is effectively the right to buy a car), all those items reinforce the fact that congestion pricing probably would relieve traffic and at the same time act as a disincentive for further road improvements. You say the reason Beijing, with more highways, has a problem is because it has not banned enough cars early enough.
Congestion pricing, if planned correctly, is to set road pricing at a point such that drivers choose to take themselves off the roads at peak periods, while also raising revenue in the process. The heavy-handed bans may make people more likely to drive (My car's plate is banned from driving tomorrow, so I better drive on the unbanned days; I waited 5 years to be able to get the right to drive, I better take advantage of it).