congestion pricing on their toll roads for a long time now. I don't know that anybody really plans their travel that much based on it but I've never seen a study. This was always presented in NYC in a way that was going to draw intense fire. They should have followed other "tier pricing" programs that simply say "Here is the normal price level but if you travel in these off hours there is a discount rate." Instead they present it as the normal rate being the lower rate and then tacking a higher rate on top. Even though it's catsup/ketchup in the end.

The trucking industry fought this battle, and lost more or less, with the credit card companies and fuel providers. At one point many years ago they charged the same price per gallon of diesel regardless of whether it was cash or credit. Then they started giving a cash price and a higher credit price. This seemed to run afoul of laws restricting charging customers more for credit card use and the merchant contracts with the card companies usually forbid it also. So the court case was fought and the truck-stop industry/credit card companies came to the argument that "Hey we're not charging more than normal for card use. We're giving a discount for using cash."

A rose by any other name to be sure but the court lapped it up and here we are. The only concession of sorts from that lawsuit was that they are now required to post the price differential and to clearly state that the cash price is a discount. Nobody of course ever said to them "Why only diesel?" because they were not doing this on gasoline or any items in the store or restaurant etc. Now the fact is that historically up until the early 90's many drivers did carry a large quantity of cash with them but once computerization came along tracking fuel purchases and limiting the problems that come with carrying that much cash pushed things over to standard credit cards and specialty "fuel cards" along with electronic payment systems like Comcheck etc. That eventually morphed to "pay at the pump" so that you didn't have to clear anything with a clerk if you didn't want to.