Sausage factory rules

Conor Dougherty writes abut NYC street traffic in today's NY Times. "Self-Driving Cars Can't Cure Traffic but Economics Can."  There is congestion because there is no pricing. Take one rationing method off the table and another becomes the default. This has been the relevant economic insight for as many years as economists have looked at the problem. While textbooks speak of congestion as a "market failure," the failure to price is actually a failing of policy makers and politicians.  Transactions costs have been removed as an obstacle by modern technology and the arrival of easy, fast and cheap scanning and billing.  These have been implemented and tested in various parts of the world, in particular where there are bottlenecks such as at bridges and tunnels.  The remaining objection has been over the regressivity ("fairness") of pricing. But Uber's "surge pricing" has been seen as entirely sensible by most people.  Matinee pricing, early bird specials and similar time-of-day or season-of-the year demand-responsive pricing have been around for a long time. It's when prices emerge via the political sausage factory that the predictable positions are wheeled out.

Sausage factory rules also explain why the regressivity of taxing people (often via sales taxes) to pay for enormously expensive and often underused subways and similar transit is usually ignored.