"While these people may not drive and thus are seemingly cheated out of tax money, I have to ask, where do they get their groceries and other goods? How do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency? How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?"

If they live in New York, presumably they get their food from bodegas. Those corner stores in turn get their inventory shipped in mostly by truck. So, when congestion taxes go into effect, that shipping will get more expensive and the food will get slightly more expensive. Which seems fine to me.

Either you are paying for it directly through your taxes or indirectly through pricing, but one way more directly places the burden on the industries that use the roads, creating (in my opinion) less market distortion and better allocation of resources. If fewer people use the roads in a major city, the vehicles that do will have an easier time of it. This would likely make food delivery and emergency services cheaper, not more expensive.

I don't live in a major city, but I do live in a suburb with extremely bad traffic during rush hour. A big part of the problem is that there is a disconnect between the cost of the roads and their use. As a result, people treat the roads as a free resource and this creates traffic. The government attempts to expand the road system to handle the traffic, but that just encourages higher usage. There is no back pressure and people who don't drive much subsidize those that do. Charging people directly for road usage rather than hiding it in gas and other taxes would be helpful.

Shippers will have to pay a congestion charge but will also experience less congestion, which means they might well be able to charge less money.

>Parking and road access isn't about individuals, it's about making an entire metropolitan area functional.

You don't need cars for a metro to be functional. This is purely a 1st world construct that we've burdened ourselves with. It can and should be undone.

>where do they get their groceries and other goods?

From stores in the neighborhood. There is typically truck access and back alley ways for things to get unloaded. If there is not, most roads have some wiggle room to them where the truck can pull over.

>how do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency?

Via the road. But you don't need parking for emergency vehicles. Not sure what world you're in, but emergency services don't just throw their hands up in the air if all the parking spaces are taken. Not sure why you think they'd act any different with less parking. It's a really funny example, to be honest.

>How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?

Not having a car free's up a lot of money. Assuming you think the cost of goods would rise to some absurd amount, it'd still be way, way cheaper to pay for those goods in comparison to getting cheap goods because you own a car, and forcing the entire community to pay for miles and miles and miles of road.

>We all pay for the roads because we all use them

Roads aren't going away. We just probably need less of them, and we need to not construct our cities and metro's with a "car's first" attitude. Because it just shifts the costs elsewhere, for absolutely no gain and quite a few negatives.

You know what's great? Not having to drive 30 minutes somewhere. That's 30 minutes I can spend walking out in the sunshine. Not dealing with traffic while risking life and limb, and not paying a boat load of money to go buy $20 worth of goods.

They money freed up by not having a car is promptly swallowed up by contending for a smaller pool of usable land.

I'm sorry, what? Why does having less cars create less usable land? If anything it provides way more of it, since you need less road, less parking lots/garages, less infrastructure to support cars like gas stations, huge on/off ramps, toll roads, etc.

> Why does having less cars create less usable land?

Not "usable-as-in-present", but "usable-as-in-available".

Having less cars drives up the value of land, making land more expensive for everyone, and making that land less usable for any one person specifically.

>Having less cars drives up the value of land, making land more expensive for everyone

You just repeated what he said... while also repeating it again. I want to know how having less cars drives up the value of land.

The N-minute radius around a destination is a lot smaller when you are walking to transit vs. driving. People who can afford to will spend to keep their door to door times low.

A huge chunk of American housing supply is in places that only made sense to settle because they were connected by freeways to downtown parking. Take that away and there will be just as much money, chasing less land.

>A huge chunk of American housing supply is in places that only made sense to settle because they were connected by freeways to downtown parking.

Err, no. It's because the government heavily subsidized it at the detriment to city centers. You don't have to be NYC. City centers by their very nature our extremely economical beneficial and affordable.

Our current housing infrastructure is in no way reasonably affordable or even sane. Building houses in a dense manner is not expensive.

I'm not sure what the confusion is here.