20
votes
"Pollution tax" should go two ways
Public Transportation should be free. Or near free, like a library. The same way we tax or want to tax pollution, we should fully subside public and ecological transports.
I was thinking about this earlier and was disappointed to find very few examples of pollution tax being put to funding public transports. Even fewer of public transportation being free. It's a bit underwhelming that this isn't talked about more in environmental policies.
Pollution tax should be spent removing the pollution and damage caused. Public transport doesn't need to be free because then you are pushing a solution rather than just discouraging a problem. If someone chooses to ride an ebike instead of driving they are now discouraged from doing this because they are financially incentivised to take public transport. If there was a pollution tax then driving would become so expensive that many would use public transport without any need to make it free.
I agree with this statement. (Not necessarily anything else in this comment, but I agree with this particular statement.)
Pollution is about using and/or despoiling common resources. Taking a simplistic example, everyone in a region should have access to clean water from the local river, but someone dumping chemical waste into the lake spoils it for everyone. Their pollution is an imposition on everyone else. Therefore, the polluter should pay to clean up their mess so that it doesn't impact on anyone else.
I use the same argument for legalising illicit drugs: tax them and direct the tax funds into the health system to pay for the imposition that drug users put on hospitals and doctors which everyone should have access to.
And a resource tax. Rocks and ores and minerals and oils are owned collectively by the people in the form of their government. If someone takes those collective resources and uses them for private profit, they should pay the people via the government for taking those collective resources.
User pays. If you use or damage a collective resource, you pay for it. Pollution taxes should pay for cleaning up pollution.
Isn't making public transport more accessible and popular a way to clean the damage caused by pollution? (By reversing the trend)
No. Using public transport may reduce pollution from other sources, but it doesn't clean pollution from the source being taxed.
Pollution is about much more than just carbon dioxide emissions. If a factory is pouring industrial waste into its local river, no amount of public transport use is going to clean that river. I want the pollution tax paid by that factory to clean the river polluted by that factory.
Hmm, fair point, I think I probably should have been more specific when I initially said "pollution tax". I specifically was thinking about the tax on gas, cars, and driving.
Thanks for the clarification but, even so, my answer would remain the same: the tax paid by polluters should be used to clean their pollution. If we're talking about a tax on carbon emissions from cars, then that money should be used to remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere. For example, the funds could be used to plant a few trees.
Taxing pollution will make driving so expensive that public transport seems very cheap. Most people only drive because its still very affordable for them to.
I understand your skepticism of subsidies (for instance in public transit or ebikes), but I think they can be important. When we tax things like fuel to distort the market, we are also raising all the prices in that sector. When that sector involves staple goods and services (as opposed to luxury items), this will disproportionately affect the poor, as they spend a disproportionate amount of their income on staples. Near me, housing is expensive and there is not sufficient public transit, so if we raise a heavy gas tax, it will make it much harder for our teachers and janitors who have to live further away to get to work, without significantly affecting the relatively wealthier people in the area (as they live closer to their jobs, and could afford the tax anyway). If we don't subsidize the prices of better alternatives, at least for people who are less well off, taxes on staples will be a regressive tax on the poor.
The same applies for food. If we want to tax meat and reclaim farmland for carbon-capture, this will drive up food prices. Without either subsidizing greener alternatives, or spending money on marketing to shift public opinion to naturally liking greener diets (much less dealing with food deserts where a fastfood hamburger could literally be one of your only options), then proportionally more of the poor person's budget is going to go toward paying this tax. A wealthy person will tend to spend less of their total budget on food, and so such a tax would affect them less, on top of their increased ability to shoulder that burden.
I agree that we need to invest in cleaning the pollution as well, but I think we need to remember how these policies affect the poorest individuals. Maybe instead of subsidies, we should spend all of this tax on countering the pollution and damage, but couple it with a strongly progressive tax to subsidize the increased burden on the poor? Maybe even through a non-market-distorting method like a negative income tax?
That is an interesting point but at least where I am in Australia, public transport is already much cheaper than driving. I'd guess that the majority of people driving could switch to public transport right now and be saving money. They only drive because they can afford to. The people who couldn't switch to public transport are the ones who require a car for work and these people would benefit none from free public transport.
In my city public transport is quite cheap, $3 for 2 hours. Its cheap enough that anyone who can't afford it certainly can't afford to be driving currently. Its just expensive enough that people don't take pointless trips around the place just for fun however.
That's fair. But maybe where public transit is already free or cheap, it might still be important to expand the public transit, to make it more convenient for those currently driving cars. When I visited L.A. (I know, they aren't representative of the average case, but bear with me), they had a reasonably cheap public transit system, where I could travel along it for less than $2, but the infrastructure was nowhere near enough to cover the breadth of the city, much less the potential human capacity. I could get from the train station to downtown, but it was hard to get many other places.
Or because they believe it's more convenient to drive. Public transport doesn't run everywhere you need it, any time you want it. Some areas have minimal public transport coverage.
Some people would switch to public transport if it was available and convenient.
Price is part of convenience. If driving was too expensive than public transport would be more convenient. The extra people using it would cause the service provided to be expanded as well.
this is the case in a lot of middle-sized american cities. in mine, there's a bus network, but it sucks and is just a massive pain in the ass to use because our city is cheap and doesn't like to pay for it and the city itself is quite sprawling for the population it has meaning that everything is incredibly spread out. if it's possible, driving is an order of magnitude more convenient, and it doesn't take literally a minimum of an hour to get places like would be the case if you used the bus system.
Not necessarily, no. Ebikes are free in my city for example (within reason). Why would free public transportation discourage taking ebikes?
Furthermore the point isn't just about discouraging pollution, but doing so in a way that doesn't fuck people over. I'm suggesting there should be a pollution tax and that money should go towards making public transports free (and for that matter, towards making personal eco-friendly transportation cheaper).
They aren't anywhere I have been. Also within the city usually means totally useless for getting people from their house to the city. If you make public transport free then people have no reason to buy a bike and ride it to work when it costs more than using the bus for free. Getting people who would cycle to work on public transport because its now cheaper is a worse end result.
This seems kind of absurd. It's kind of like claiming that by offering free roller skates to everyone, nobody will walk or run anymore. Cars are heavily utilitarian and a huge investment. Bikes are, by comparison, very cheap. Can you not see how whichever bike-related effect you're thinking of would be massively overshadowed by the effect it'd have on cars?
And honestly, so what if you're right -- what's the problem with less cyclists on the road? Why is public transportation worse than cycling? It's certainly a lot safer than cycling statistically.
I'm all ears on arguments against making PT free, but they have to at least make sense in the face of what their effects will be. If your argument is "We should spend pollution tax money on improving cycling infrastructure" (which would encourage cycling), then I agree as well. Proportionally.
Public transport mainly runs on pollution causing fuels. It also does nothing to promote a healthy society which will cost lots in healthcare.
... there's a ton of electric buses. Subways are all electric. And public transportation is in general highly efficient.
I can't really continue this conversation on such a weird premise. I challenge you to do the napkin math of how many cyclists you would have to get off the streets and into gas buses to counteract the positive effect of a single car off the street.
Taxing pollution will already get people out of cars though. Its just when they are out they now equally able to pick one of they many alternatives to driving. Also even if they do drive they will be paying taxes that go right in to removing the damage they cause so it doesn't matter.
Assuming the buses are running close to capacity, around six. Personally though, I think you'd see a lot more cars being taken off the streets than bikes if there was free public transit, which would actually make bikes safer to ride and presumably expand their use. Not to mention their utility to transit riders for getting that last mile.
It doesn't have to. Train systems could be switched to electricity generated from renewable sources. Buses could be switch to ethanol-based fuels, or even electric motors these days. Would that change your negative opinion of public transport?
That's total bullshit. I read something somewhere (please don't ask me to source it!) that said people who catch public transport walk more than people who drive (walking to & from train stations and bus stops, which are usually farther from your departure point and your destination than car parks). Using public transport requires people to get more exercise than driving cars.
On the electric/alternative fuel bus point, buses really are the perfect vehicle for that kind of thing when you think about it. City vehicles are likely to only ever use city fueling infrastructure, so finding an ethanol/methanol/biodiesel/charging station is much easier. Plus, bus driving patterns play into the strengths of electric and hybrid vehicles in a few ways:
Plus, if a city decides to make their public transit electric, it can relatively easily transition over in 5-10 years, whereas it would be very difficult for a city to get a large portion of its car-owning population to be fully electric in that same time frame.
But public transport is a lot more expensive to build and operate than a library. Also, public transport is also privately owned in some places, why should they give up their revenue?
But ok, lets say the government is subsidizing it, you still are not guaranteeing that people will take it. What will guarantee it? Convenience. If you genuinely have a good public transport network, that is not only fast and cheap, but also meets the needs of the public, then yeah people will use it. Essentially, you want to incentivize the public to use it.
Relating thus back to your main point, first of all I am not sure if you mean this globally or to a specific country, but let's say globally. If you start a pollution tax on somewhere like India, the wealthy wont give a shit unless its a ridiculous tax. The poor are essentially screwed because they cannot pay the tax and because current infrastructure could not support the majority of the population going on buses (short term) or trains (long term). I say India, but you could really model this in places in any country, including the US.
I mean, sure, convenience is one way. In addition to the carrot, though, there's also the stick. There are some pretty expensive externalities to each ounce of carbon we release into the atmosphere, and by not internalizing that into the costs of goods and services, we are allowing a distorted market to exist. Yes, providing better green alternatives is the ideal, but sometimes this needs to be supported by taxes or subsidies to better represent the externalities. These taxes would help dissuade use of less green technology. And, if we're gonna collect that tax money (and if we accurately represent the true cost, it would be a lot at first), what are we going to do with it? @Adys suggests subsidizing public transit so that it can achieve the requisite quality and convenience to become a viable alternative.
Eh, I mean sure, poorly written legislation will screw over poor people, but when isn't that true? There are ways to work around the issues you raise; those ways are complicated and subject to debate, but they exist. We just need to write careful, quality legislation. For instance, one broad strategy talked about in the Paris Climate Accords and America's Green New Deal proposal is to reinvest a lot of the money and infrastructure work into helping the poorest people, who, as you rightfully point out, would be the most negatively affected. Turn what would be a regressive tax into a progressive one, as much as possible. (Although, investing in public transit is already pretty progressive, as wealthier people tend not to use it.)
For instance, the effort to build out public transit or green energy infrastructure in India could in theory lift many of the world's poorest out of poverty while simultaneously lessening the country's impact on the climate. Such a plan would require low levels of corruption and high levels of trust, but that's a very different problem than just saying that public transit is too expensive.
Case-by-case obviously, but there's good arguments to doing this in a lot of the western world (EU and US).
Of course, all the usual disclaimers of the efficacity of public transportation apply. I'm focusing on accessibility (which is part of the convenience aspect).
Not saying they should give up their revenue. That's what a subsidy is: The government pays for it. In places where public transport is privatized, that could be through for example a free local subscription that people have to validate in-vehicle or in-station, which the govt then reimburses.