THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TREATING STREETS LIKE PRODUCTIVE ASSETS.

Sorry for the clunky title, but don't say you weren't warned.

I've called attention to them for years.  "Make people aware of just how much they're relying on other people's money to keep their roads passable and watch the fireworks. But it's an idea that might just catch on, after Our Political Masters have tried everything else."  It doesn't matter who gets the credit for selling the idea.

The fireworks came to the Big Apple a little early this year.  "Hochul Condemned for NYC Congestion Pricing Flip-Flop."  It's not often you find me in agreement with the communists of Common Dreams, but I agree with New York's congestion pricing, and there's room for more markets allocating transportation assets.  "The roads are productive assets and perhaps the environmentalist wing of the self-styled party of science might be able to find common cause with libertarian-minded transportation advocates."

That sort of flips the script on "subsidize things we want to see," doesn't it? As a practical matter, almost any subsidy in practice leads to inefficiently much production of whatever is being subsidized, no matter how pretty the blackboard economics version of the policy is.

That's the way the infrastructure crumbles.  "[R]oad usage charges − also known as mileage-based user fees, distance-based fees or vehicle-miles-traveled taxes − are attracting the bulk of the academic attention, research dollars and legislative activity."  Governments, however, are not nimble institutions when it comes to pricing their productive assets.

Nor, apparently does pricing productive assets appeal to at least some of the governors' constituents, or perhaps somebody in New Jersey made her an offer she couldn't refuse?  Or she has to perpetuate the grand fiction.  "The error of any sort of socialism is in pretending that something that has scarcity value, whether it's medical care, food, housing, or transportation, ought a priori to be free. I've been toying with the idea that governments price services they offer as if they were in business."

In attempting to influence voters who have had enough nanny-state progressivism, though, the governor has antagonized ... a key part of her base?

"A generational setback for climate policy."

"The kind of sabotage by a leader that warrants impeachment."

Those were just some of the ways New Yorkers and climate advocates described Gov. Kathy Hochul's decision to cancel a first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan for New York City on Wednesday.

Although the move will directly impact a relatively small percentage of U.S. residents' daily lives, critics said the move will stymie progress that could ultimately have been seen across the country—instead dooming communities to continued reliance on vehicles and the planet-heating emissions they cause.

A year after signaling approval for the congestion pricing plan, which was years in the making, the Democratic governor stunned campaigners Wednesday when she released a pre-recorded message announcing that "circumstances have changed" and would not allow the policy to take effect on June 30 as planned.

Under the plan, drivers who entered certain parts of Manhattan would be charged $15, with the projected annual revenue of $1 billion accounting for 50% of the funds needed for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's (MTA) upgrades to its system.

You knew that sooner or later governors issuing ukases, the way they became accustomed to during the corona tyranny, and deliberative bodies using impeachment for light and transient causes, would get out of hand.  The governor, however, pins her hope on ... new taxes.  "Hochul said she was considering a new tax on businesses to fill in the $1 billion funding gap caused by her decision, but that would require approval by the New York Legislature, whose session ends this week."  As if productive people aren't fleeing New York for less burdensome states already.

It's all too much for eternal doomsayer Bill McKibben.

I am an unrepentant supporter of Sunrise, so let me explain. I knew many of their first generation of leaders, who had cut their teeth on the fossil fuel divestment campaign; wanting to fight on after college, they’d formed Sunrise, ginned up the Green New Deal, and used a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office, with AOC in attendance, to give it oxygen. Their tactics worked—they were a big reason that by the 2020 Democratic primaries “climate change” was the number one issue for huge numbers of voters. They were obvious Bernie Sanders supporters, but when he lost they swallowed hard, and took part in the negotiations that produced a united Democratic front for Biden: Indeed, Sunrise’s director, Varshini Prakash, was on the team that sat with a couple of key Biden aides to work out the essentials of Build Back Better. They didn’t endorse Biden, but they did work hard, and effectively, against Trump, as the youth vote in 2020 eventually demonstrated. And then they worked hard, and effectively, to pass Build Back Better, even as Joe Manchin cut it down into the Inflation Reduction Act—again they swallowed hard and backed a seriously imperfect bill. It was a rare display of political maturity and effectiveness among any progressives, let alone young ones.

With friends like this, Joe Biden doesn't need enemies. He changed his tune on immigration, maybe. The governor, likewise on congestion pricing?

This is stupid policy—it’s the most aggressively anti-environmental stand I can recall a major Democratic governor taking, beating even Gavin Newsom’s recent demolition of rooftop and community solar in California. Congestion pricing meant that people who wanted to drive into the clogged streets of lower Manhattan would pay a $15 toll; the revenue would go to support the beleaguered transit system that actually allows New York to operate. This kind of system has been a huge success in the European cities that have tried it, like London and Milan; Manhattan (as advocates back to Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer have noted) would be an incredibly sweet place with many fewer cars. This is, as Robinson Meyer noted yesterday “tier one climate policy,” which with a success in Manhattan could quickly spread to other cities. And so there’s been a tremendous effort over decades to build out support for congestion pricing. An earlier version came close to passing years ago—lore has it that the opposition of parking garage owners carried the day in Albany. This time, though, everything was lined up: Governor Hochul had given a rousing defense of the plan in a speech just two weeks ago.

Welcome to the club. Libertarian ideas such as selling the highways to private operators to charge tolls and maintain them don't sell well either.  Nor, apparently, does congestion pricing in Manhattan, economically sensible notion that it is.

Speculation ranges from (the now fashionable) brain worm to lots of Hochul fundraising by local autodealers to the notion that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries was worried that congestion pricing would hurt the prospects for regaining his majority in the fall elections. (A bad showing by New York Democrats in the suburbs cost him the speakership last time around; the same people are still in charge of the Empire State campaign this time around). If it’s really electoral fear that drove Hochul’s stab in the back, then this is political malpractice: You don’t wait until the last possible moment to jerk around the advocates who have spent years working with you to craft an agreement.

People on the outside underestimate, I think, the degree to which significant change comes from a long and controlled dance between activists and politicians—and one of the rules of that, on both sides, is that you don’t pull out the rug at the last minute. People like Charles Komanoff have spent most of their lives working up to this deal, jumping through every hoop to demonstrate the needed support, and now it’s been trashed. And trashed with the support of other parts of the progressive coalition. It was so sad to see the United Federation of Teachers gloating at the downfall of congestion pricing—the larger left has engaged in a generational effort to raise teacher pay, understanding it to be both right and a core concern of a partner; the UFT ignored the core concern of environmentalists in order to help teachers who wanted to keep driving. Public school teachers should be supporters of public transit; this, not Sunrise, is real-world malarkey.

Can a passage better summarize precisely why consensus is a chimera and politics fails?  That bundle might have appealed to Mr McKibben's kaffeeklatsch.  The teachers, not so much.  The rent-seekers paying protection money raising funds ... don't they get to work with the government too?

Nowhere in Mr McKibben's rant-cum-Biden apologia, though, is there any attempt to work with libertarians, who might be skeptical of doomsday environmentalists yet can make common cause on turning infrastructure into productive assets.