How about it’s free to drive into the city, but the toll booth operator gets to hit you in the nards?
I like this plan, I’m guessing that it vastly decreases the number of men driving in the city, but women are more or less unchanged.
Open season on cars is mostly just more money-based penalties. If someone returns to their car and it is damaged, they can just get in a taxi and be home.
Here’s the point of my idea: it’s not about punishing drivers. It’s about making them feel the pain of those who don’t have their transport options.
If you had to design a system without knowing your position in the system, would you take the gamble of ending up in the 1% where everything is fine? Or would you make life the most comfortable for the 99%?
I want the 1% to have the same pain as the 99%, so even if they want to keep driving over bridges into city centers, then they are also looking out for the best interests of those on the metro.
No, they can not. They have to take care of their car.
There is a lot of pain involved with choosing a car, but car people don’t realize it. Then when they finally are free of the car, only then do they see what they were doing to themselves.
A lot of that pain is that cars demand their owners take care of them. They have to find parking, even if it’s free. When they leave the place they are at, they have to use their car, they can’t just leave it there. If something is wrong with the car, they have to take care of it. It could disrupt their entire day or even week when the car has a problem.
If someone’s car is smashed, if they are poor it could ruin their entire life. If they are rich, it would still ruin their week. Not only does their entire day come to a halt because they have to scrape their car off the road, they now also have to get a new car. They need to find a new way to get where they are going. They need to get a new car. They need to deal with the ticket they got for the initial violation.
Imagine someone who double parks to grab a grocery on their way to pick up the kid at school. They come out to find out their car is a complete wreck.
You also have to consider the emotional attachment people have to their car. Just like how even a very cheap bicycle can have an enormous value to its actual owner, the same is true for cars.
And lastly, a lot of the asshole drivers are driving fancy and special cars that they care a lot about. A lot of the time you see an extremely misbehaving car, it’s often a very customized car that is not easily replaced. They put a lot of work into that car, and modifying it is their hobby. Now if they want to drive their hot rods on the streets, as opposed to the track, they will have to be on their best behavior or find months/years of investment gone in a flash.
“If you had to design a system without knowing your position in the system, would you take the gamble of ending up in the 1% where everything is fine? Or would you make life the most comfortable for the 99%?”
This is what bothers me about the fast pass whatever at airport security. It’s nice and civilized when you get it, but fundamentally unfair.
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Also, richer people have nicer cars, so getting it smashed costs more!
If we do any kind of congestion pricing, it should be income based 
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That bothers me because it’s extortion. It is immoral, and should be illegal, everywhere to create a problem and then also sell a solution to the problem.
Let me spread a disease and then sell a vaccine.
Let me spray filth on the cars as they drive down the road towards my car wash.
Let me create a long line, and then sell tickets to cut in that line.
The TSA pre-check/Clear is even worse because it’s a government by the people extorting its own citizens!
Doth my eyes deceive me or is it a honest attempt at something not regressive?
Bravo!
It’s worth noting though that it’s possible to not have particularly high income but still be really rich. The retired spring to mind. Maybe some mix of income based and wealth based?
Just worth thinking about, honestly I can think of more reasons to have it be income based than wealth based and plus wealth based brings up a few problems too.
Sure. Pass Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and base the fine off your last years tax bill. The amount would be clear to everyone ahead of time.
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Any fine for anything should be so severe that no matter what your station in life, you are forced to make some kind of sacrifice because the fine is so steep. This might mean that a speeding ticket for one person might be $1 because they are so poor that $1 means that dinner tonight is going to be less tasty. It might also mean that same speeding ticket is several billion dollars because a billionaire’s quality of life won’t meaningfully change at all without some ludicrous fine. Literally any fine will have to be huge enough to force them to fly commercial and not on their private jet.
Heh, if the stuff I’ve read about the difference between being a multi millionaire and a billionaire are to be believed, then any fine at all for someone above $1,000,000,000 needs to bring them below that number. That’s apparently the magic number after which “the plane waits for you” - Source: a reddit thread I read once.
Also to be clear I’m behind this 100%. It’s not regressive which has been my main complaint about everything everyone’s suggested with fixing congestion in NY.
To put that in perspective. I am, by many measures, rich. But I am not wealthy.
The people who are wealthy make 10x what I make. They live in a world that is alien even to me, let alone to most of the population of the Earth.
There needs to be an absolute cap on wealth. No exceptions.
Which is harder, to go from where we are today to having an absolute wealth cap or to go from an absolute wealth cap to abolishing the idea of wealth?
Personally I feel like from A to B is 90 and B to C is 10. Why stop at a wealth cap?
Yes. There are limited resources available on earth and only so many people. If we are going to allow the concept of ownership to exist, then any one person should not be able to own more than X% of the total available resources. There is nothing a single person can do, no level of greatness a person can achieve, such that they could justifiably deserve that much stuff.
If someone miraculously finds a universal perfect cure for all cancer working alone in their basement, they would deserve to be the wealthiest person alive. They would deserve a life of maximum comfort. That still wouldn’t bring them anywhere close to the wealth of a billionaire.
Well the real thing that comes from the wealth is other people’s time. Everything else is just distribution of resources like housing and technology. In theory everyone could have very nice everything. But wealth is about your individual self being worthy of many other people’s time.
An open season law on cars would not bother someone wealthy. They could hire guards to protect their car. If someone did fuck up their car if left out, they’d have crews to collect it and junk it and buy a new one. Mostly tho they would only drive throwaway cars in public and for real in any urban area likely won’t even drive themselves in the first place. I certainly would just keep my fancy cars in the country.
So none of this affects the truly rich/wealthy who have built their entire lives around having the resources to provide insulation against these kind of inconveniences.
It’s really about the shitty upper middle class douche nuggets who are still vulnerable.
Again, I’m super disappointed that you can only see as far as causing monetary damage to car drivers.
Does nobody else find it more interesting to game the system so that car drivers WANT to have a better public transit system, even if, or especially if, they don’t want to use it?
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The traffic is so bad in Mexico City and Sao Paulo that the rich just don’t use the roads any more. It’s all about helicopters. There are more helicopter flights over Sao Paulo than anywhere else on earth, and it’s 100% about rich people spending money to get around traffic.
It literally doesn’t matter what it costs, rich people really, really, really don’t want to deal with the transport issues of the poors.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-21/uber-lets-you-hail-a-helicopter-in-brazil-for-63
Adding more cost just doesn’t work. No on-street parking? How about a car elevator to take your supercar up to your penthouse?
Good lord I’ll speak to that. The last time I was there, it took me nearly four hours to get to the airport. The highway was just… stopped. Complete gridlock. We didn’t move an inch for a full two hours. No one even had their engines on.
I was even thinking how in NYC there’s very easy helicopter rides from Manhattan to the major airports. It makes sense even for non-drivers because it’s just a slog no matter which mode of ground transit you use, but it also makes me think about the whole “electric urban aerial vehicle” trend cropping up. A lot of silicon valley aspiring aero engineers making glorified drones for urban wealthy to try and fly about is not really what I think most people want. But the idea of flying cars is something everyone in a car stuck in traffic apparently dreams about.
I’m curious when these sort of flying taxis and so-on become more commonly practical and not just slightly more possible than appearing in such films as The Fifth Element and Blade Runner. Will there be a serious push to adopt them for regular transit? It’ll largely depend on just how good they are at flying themselves. And battery power. I have seen up close and first hand the current prototypes being developed, and I can see that this kind of stuff will fly eventually but, I don’t really see them taking over for cars as the personalized transit option when trains aren’t doing it for you. But like, if it could somehow, just through sheer audacity of someone to produce hundreds of thousands of these flying taxis; I’d be for it because, again, cyberpunk skyways full of crazy flying machines is pretty baller; and freeing up roads on the ground for people is the real win. Even if by that token those people are all cyborgs and everything is always raining, and there’s a good chance some leather-clad holographically enhanced anime dominatrix-assassin will hunt you down for failing to pass a Wartenburg-Heisenburg Duality Exam at your last recharge, which makes you an enemy to the regional corp.
So in the meantime, there’s some cool tech with the flying car/taxi/pod concept for urban transportation. But I kinda hate it for now, because it’ll be just a slightly less safe but evolving into a safer version of rich people in helicopters. But the technology and promise does intrigue me to see what will happen because deep down it is kinda still pretty cool.
Say it with me now: ABOLISH PARKING MINIMUMS.
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