At high demand times, you have to be very rich indeed to outbid a full bus without even thinking about it. There aren't enough people who can do that.

But say this does happen a lot-this means rich people pay enormous road use fees, which can then be used for road maintenance, construction, and improvement, as well as other transit infrastructure!

So, the rich willingly subsidize infrastructure for everyone? Seems like a win-win!

That's a nice pipe dream, but what would happen in reality is that all of the congestion fees would go to the rich (perhaps in the form of tax cuts), who would use it to buy more stock, bribe some politicians to ban buses, and then triple the congestion charge because fuck you.

The congestion fees would go to the government responsible for the roads. Of course, they could be captured by the rich, but most governments spend most of their money not on the rich.

You'd set the congestion charge, by law (at least on public roads), to the minimum required for efficient road use- not the revenue maximizing price, which would likely be much higher due to monopoly.

>perhaps in the form of tax cuts

Why do people insist on this tired trope. We have the past and present to look at. We know how these things work.

The rules will be crafted, the commas in the laws placed, the contracts handed out, to support those who supported the endeavor. If the plumber's trade group agrees to support it their vans will be exempt. If Palantir supports it, the RFP will be written to make it nigh on impossible to not buy their stuff. No matter how flagrant the badness of the system, if the tech industry makes even a cent, the comment section full of techies will engage in olympic level mental gymnastics and not just do bending over backwards but doing full on backflips to justify the goodness of the system. If the bus drivers have such a comment section they'll do it too.

This is how things were. This is how they are. This is how they will be. Well, right up until the point where the rest of society gets sick of our shit and leaves us in a big communal hole or gives us a free shower or whatever happens to the fashionable way to do that thing is at that point in the future...

I mean, they exist in many places (London and New York are notable examples) and this has not happened

London in particular uses congestion pricing money to fund more buses and ridership exploded as a result

The same can be said of any tax meant to curb a behavior (sin tax).

What traffic-reducing policy would you suggest such that all people are affected equally?

absolutely none, which is why ideas like this will never see the light of day…

I think it's worth pointing out that congestion pricing is a policy that already exists in several cities around the world including New York City.

And also in essentially any relevant private market for goods and services where capacity is limited, especially when there are more and less desirable times.

In a very weak form, yes- and yet it still seems helpful and even popular after people saw the effects of implementation.

Depends how you define "equal". One approach is simply to scale the charge by income -- effectively, convert time to money, and charge you a congestion tax of some amount of money-earning time. "6 minutes" is 1/10000 of your annual income -- $2 for someone earning $20,000 per year, $20 for someone earning $200,000 per year.

But does a vehicle with several people in it pay for the max, min, median, average, or the driver's time? I suspect "driver" is easiest, it seems like it might work but I'll bet there are some screwy ways to game that rule, too.

There is a floor to this; there are people so poor they can't afford the ongoing expense of a car at all.

The poor are on the bus which is stuck in traffic it could outbid if the road were priced fairly.