Happy Birthday, Gabriel Roth

Gabriel Roth, who turns 90 years young today, is a rock star among transportation economists, and a special inspiration for those of us who support reducing the federal government’s role in transportation. According to his C.V., Roth earned degrees in engineering from London’s Imperial College in 1948 and economics from Cambridge in 1954.

In 1959, he began research into improved road pricing systems. This led to his appointment to a Ministry of Transport commission that published a 1964 report advocating pricing congested roads in order to end that congestion.

In 1966, the Institute for Economic Affairs published his paper, A Self-Financing Road System, which argued that user fees should pay for all roads, and not just be used to relieve congestion. Roads should be expanded, Roth noted, wherever user fees exceeded the cost of providing a particular road, but not elsewhere.

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Since then, he has been a regular participant in transportation conferences, meetings, and hearings. He edited a 2006 book, Street Smart, co-authored a 2008 paper showing how electronic tolling could be done without invading people’s privacy, and made a presentation about tolling at the 2010 American Dream conference.

My home state of Oregon is now experimenting with mileage-based user fees, and I’m one of the volunteers in this experiment. If it goes well, we may see the realization of Roth’s ideas before he turns 100.

I hope to see Gabe on my next trip to DC. I know I’ll be able to find him by looking for the nearest transportation conference.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

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