A large and growing burden on the nation’s economy, traffic congestion arises for various reasons, and more than one mechanism is needed to combat it. It is most unlikely, however, that serious inroads to address the problem will be made without fundamental reform in the way consumers are charged for their use of congested highways. Congestion prices are tolls that reflect the economic costs of congestion, including productivity losses from traffic delays, increased accidents, higher emissions, and more. Such prices would help reduce these economic costs, and guide transportation investment resources to their highest and best use—which would include a better balance between highway and transit investment. In addition, such prices would generate revenues to help finance new investment and compensate low-income people and others for whom toll payments are especially burdensome. Requiring federal, state, and local engagement, such reform is a necessary step in the development of an effective, efficient, and sustainable highway system for the twenty-first century.
[ Very interesting article, and probably a vision of the future in this country... I think congestion pricing is one of the only potentially viable ways to get people to recognize something closer to the true cost of driving their cars. Nonetheless, I have a couple of concerns about congestion pricing schemes. The first is the extent to which they expect an existing public transportation infrastructure that can be *improved* upon with the influx of toll revenues, as opposed to the situation in most US cities, which lack even a basic infrastructure. Even Atlanta falls largely into this category. The advent of CP would be fundamentally unable to shift transportation usage to other modes, because those modes don't exist. The years required to build them out, while people pay tolls and see little or no improvement in traffic congestion, may lead to widespread disillusionment with congestion pricing and eventual abandonment of this mechanism. In other words, how do you demonstrate short-term improvements to transportation systems or infrastructure while the longer-term improvements develop? { SIDENOTE : In Atlanta, for example, even if the money were avaialable (it's not) we'd need a long time to build what the city requires, such as the Beltline, a downtown streetcar (or, better, subway) system, a set of secondary MARTA lines, maybe ordinal routes or some diagonals connecting the existing cardinal routes about half way between downtown and the Perimeter, not to mention getting those damn suburbanites to accept lines in Marietta and Gwinett. } An even more serious concern I have is the extent to which congestion pricing acts as an incentive to corporate sprawl. That is, if the cost of travel within an urban cordon is increased, might not businesses choose to re-locate outside of the cordon? This response likely reduces congestion overall, though it must be said : anyone who's been out on Barrett parkway, or any of the major secondary roads in Atlanta's suburbs, will know that traffic is quite atrocious there as well. This strikes me as a non-optimal solution to the problem of congestion, in that it creates an even larger environmental and social cost in the form of expanded suburban and exurban development. In cities like New York, this is difficult due to the geographical constraints and existing social environment. But in Atlanta, and most other cities in the US outside the East Cost corridor, I see the potential for tolls to accelerate the death of urban cores as both residents and employers flee. I'd be curious to find out if these issues have been addressed anywhere, as they weren't covered in the article text. America’s Traffic Congestion Problem: Toward a Framework for Nationwide Reform |
