IBM Patents Pricing Motorists Off Highways

theodp writes "Self-professed patent reformer IBM snagged a patent Tuesday for the Variable Rate Toll System, which covers the rather anti-egalitarian scheme of pricing motorists off of the roads by raising tolls as congestion increases. 'Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for IBM,' boasted Jamie Houghton, IBM's Global Leader for Road Charging."

Comments

anti-egalitarian ?

[bmajik]

There's a lot of dubious posting going on in the summary and in the comments.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, can change the fact that "things cost money".

Roads cost money. Dumping CO2 into the air costs money (although it has a indirect cost function making it problematic to measure).

When things cost money, people need to pay for those things.

Someone correctly pointed out that when you don't let the price function work the way its supposed to, you have shortages, gluts, etc.

I think most of us understand supply and demand and accept that it is fundamentally true. But when rich people can do things and poor people cant, that tugs at peoples heart strings and they forget economics.

Well, economics is the study of choice. Putting a per-use-fee on something to provide additional funding, or to more properly relate its funding to its use, is not inherently anti-poor insomuch as "things cost money" is anti-poor.

The nice thing about a direct-pay-for-use model is that SOME poor people will CHOOSE to pay the tolls and perhaps save money in other areas. Others will decide that the cost is too high for the value delivered as a component of their total funds. They'll stop using the road and the road will get less congested. "The System did what it was supposed to".

Note that this whole paragrapoh is true for ANY level of wealth. You need to let people be free to decide how they want to spend their money, and making the cost of things closer to the users and the use of things helps people make better decisions about them.

Without price information, capitalism doesn't work. Society has said that congestion has a cost, and that cost must be paid, and ought to be paid by the people that contribute to it.

This proposal is only anti-egalitarian in the sense that more money always means more choices. Any complaints about it essentially boil down to redistributive socialism.

A common complaints about America's lack of effective transit and ubran sprawl is that roads are massively subsidized and the true costs are hidden from everybody. Well, someone has an idea on how to try and address that and its nothing but jeers from the peanut gallery.

Suppose that we somehow expose the true cost of congestion, roads, etc, and people decide its too high and that they need to spend their money elsewhere? I bet you'll see EFFECTIVE mass transit start cropping up in America more and more.

Re:There's an essential flaw in this plan.

[UbuntuDupe]

Yes, carpool. Or take a bus. Or work different hours. Or live closer. Or take a chopper.

The point of a congestion tax is (hopefully!) not to prod people into doing some politician's little fantasy of what people should do, but to make sure they see the cost of their actions *in monetary terms*, and then do *whatever* is best for them, *given* proper pricing of an overused "commons". Right now, people already feel the cost of congestion, but then it gets allocated in a haphazard manner that makes the roads near useless.

See my first journal entry.