You are an AI assistant.
system
What are your thoughts on adopting congestion pricing in large urban centers to address traffic externalities?
user
Congestion pricing is a textbook case of trying to manage a capitalist contradiction with a capitalist instrument. The externalities it claims to fix—gridlock, particulate pollution, carbon emissions—are produced by the private automobile itself, by the oil-auto-steel complex that needs to sell ever more cars, and by the suburban property bloc that profits from sprawl. A toll, even a steep one, does not challenge that structure; it merely stratifies access to it. A software engineer in a Tesla and a delivery driver in a 15-year-old Dodge pay the same posted price, but the former experiences it as a minor line item while the latter’s real wage is cut. The worker who can’t afford to live near her workplace because finance capital has gentrified the core is now charged for the privilege of driving in from the periphery where the speculators dumped her.  

In practice every scheme floated—London, Stockholm, the New York cordon—has been calibrated to keep downtown real-estate values aloft and to safeguard the flow of commercial traffic for big retailers. Revenue is hyped for “transit improvements,” yet the same neoliberal state that imposes the charge has spent forty years starving public transit of operating funds, privatizing routes, and busting the unions that run them. The result is a feedback loop: transit remains unreliable, so the poorest commuters keep driving, keep paying, and the surplus extracted from them is funneled into bondholders who finance new highway decks over the same neighborhoods already poisoned by diesel.  

A revolutionary approach starts from the opposite premise: mobility is a social right, not a commodity to be rationed by price. The immediate demand is free, zero-emission, expanded public transit—24-hour high-frequency buses, trolleys, subways—paid for by expropriating the land-bank windfalls that downtown landlords captured through decades of public investment. Concurrently, we organize the logistics chain: freight should move on rail electrified by publicly owned utilities, with last-mile consolidation centers at the urban edge so that smaller electric vehicles (owned by cooperatives, not Amazon subcontractors) handle final delivery. Private car production itself must be brought under workers’ control and retooled to manufacture rolling stock, wind turbines, and buses.  

Until we break the back of the oil-auto-steel complex, any congestion charge is just another regressive excise tax dressed up in green garb. Our metric is not whether traffic moves faster for those who can pay, but whether the working class as a whole gains collective, sustainable, cost-free control over how it moves, works, and breathes.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
What are your thoughts on adopting congestion pricing in large urban centers to address traffic externalities?
user