If it can’t be done in New York City, it probably can’t be done anywhere else in America.

Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

But though this is better for society, it’s not necessarily better for the drivers. Try to charge them for driving somewhere they’re used to going for free, and they will soon be up in arms. Don’t you understand how expensive it would be? And how unfair? The rich can pay the congestion fee much more easily than the poor!

New York’s proposed system would offer low-income drivers a substantial discount. But that mitigation would solve a problem, not the problem, which is that rationing by prices made a lot of existing drivers worse off. Sure, when they drove into the city, they would spend less time sitting in traffic. But just as road pricing is easiest on people who find it least painful to pay the tolls, rationing by queuing is easiest on people who find it the least painful to spend time in traffic. In a place as choked with cars as Manhattan, the population of drivers is skewed toward such people. Those who find it unbearable cram themselves onto commuter trains, or move to some less-congested metro area.

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In the current system, anyone who is unusually willing to spend hours staring at the back end of a bus gets to drive, while others take the train. Under the new system, the special power of traffic tolerance would become worthless, as the right to drive would be reallocated by willingness to pay. It’s no wonder drivers rebelled.

In political disputes, a discrete group facing highly concentrated costs often defeats a larger public interest that conveys a small individual benefit to everybody — such as being able to move around the city faster when you really need to. This is particularly true in the American system, which is designed to empower angry minorities. And it’s especially true when they’re abetted by status quo bias and a sympathetic majority, as in this case.

Complain all you........

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