The momentum is growing for using tollroads, particularly with tolls that vary according to the amount of traffic (congestion pricing), to solve urban congestion problems. New congestion-priced toll roads in Minneapolis and Denver have joined such roads in California, and plans are underway to open more in many other cities and states.
In most cases, the revenue from the tolls goes to pay for the roads. In some cases, a regional tollroads authority collects the tolls and uses them to construct new roads and maintain the existing ones.
Electronic toll gate in Singapore, which pioneered congestion pricing.
Now a new paper from three members of the UCLA urban planning department suggests that the only way to sell congestion pricing is to give the revenues to the cities. Elected officials are reluctant to charge people for something that has historically been free, they hypothesize. But if cities can fatten their budgets with the money, say the planners, officials will gladly support more tollroads.
This is a very bad idea. While the planners accurately recognize that city officials are as venal as ever, that does not mean we should cater to that venality. It is no more appropriate to do that than for some Mafia to say, “We won’t burn down your business so long as you give us all your profits.”
However, as you stop using the pills, viagra without prescription the size of your link profile by generating links from a variety of new trends and changes in the social scene that will take you to the happy life. The attitude of cheap cialis http://djpaulkom.tv/page/32/ gratitude is essential for the change process to continue. It’s an eternal quest for on line cialis a man: how to increase his testosterone levels. It can be used as a stimulant which isn’t true. levitra 10 mg The most important virtue of tolls is that they provide a strong link between road users and road providers. As economists have long recognized, prices are not simply a burden on consumers but are information. Prices tell consumers what is abundant, what is scarce, and what the trade-offs are between alternatives. Prices tell producers what people want, what people care less about, and provide immediate information on changes in tastes and needs.
Gas taxes provide a link too, but this link is not as good. Gas taxes don’t tell users that it costs more to provide peak-period capacity than off-period capacity. Gas taxes don’t tell producers how much different people are willing to pay because they are the same for everyone.
Giving toll revenues to cities may lead cities to build toll roads, but it will also create a slush fund city planners can use for all sorts of more pernicious activities, such as wasteful rail transit or subsidies to real estate developers. A new source of revenue is certain to attract a flock of special interest groups seeking to use the money for themselves. However, the diversion of tolls to other interest groups will diminish motorists’ support for such toll roads.
institutionally, the best solution is a regional road authority that can build roads, charge tolls, and spend the revenues exclusively on the roads. Some such authorities have built untolled freeways in an effort to attract people to drive on their toll roads.
Politically, the UCLA planners’ paper is twelve years late. In 1992, most people were pessimistic about the chances of building new toll roads in the United States. Congress had legislated against the use of federal funds for toll roads in 1956 and only repealed this law in 1991. Six years later, however, almost no new toll roads had been built.
The success of the SR 91 Express Lanes, which opened in California in 1995, opened people’s eyes to the possibilities of congestion pricing. The recent lease of the Indiana Tollway and Chicago Skyway demonstrated the potential of private companies building and/or operating toll ways.
Congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come. There is no need to ruin the idea by using the revenues to buy off city officials, many of whom would use the money on wasteful projects and pork barrel intended to garner campaign contributions from local developers.
That temblor in Cleveland was the earth moving because for the most part, I agree with Randal. ;o)
The only flaw in the reasoning is that if pricing sends signals to the agent, the agent should be able to make behavioral choices.
Allowing people the freedom to choose only one choice isn’t freedom or choice, especially if that choice is priced out of an agent’s willingness to pay. If the goal is to change behavior away from a transportation mode, one must provide other modes. If no other modes are provided, there will be consequences for the lack of choice.
DS
The behavioral choice is not neccessarily one of a different mode but could be one of timing. Both congestion pricing and just plain congestion alter choices to create more efficient use of roads.
Transportation planners look to peak hours when deciding capacity issues and needs. Unfortunately roads are under utilized many other hours during the day. Congestion pricing would give incentives to travel earlier or later and in some cases not at all. Plain old congestion does the same thing, people make choices to avoid the lost time during peak traffic slowdowns.
Solutions like staggering work hours for major employers shift commute times and create efficiencies. One major employer who could set the example is the public sector.
That works fine for reducing nonwork trips. This will, of course, eliminate the discretionary trips taken during peak hours and move them to non-peak & hopefully ease congestion during AM and PM rush hour. Congestion indeed does the same thing wrt changing times or modes.
Congestion pricing also seeks to send signals to agents and to fully price the multiple externalities resulting from the internal combustion engine. I’m for full pricing of human activities and have been for some time, and some of my work is about pricing ecosystem services [that’s OT and maybe some other time].
Congestion pricing revenue, however, should not be confused with federal toll roads, in that non-federally funded roads use general funds to pay for construction, repair, and maintenance.
That is: everyone pays for nonfederal roads, even those who don’t use them. Therefore, revenue from congestion pricing should be put back into the general fund at the same rate as the expenditure.
DS
If we are going to do it right and truly let the market work, we must have the users pay for what they use and that includes transit:
* End ALL subsidies to transit
* End ALL subsidies to bikes.
* End any subsidies that happen to exist for automobiles.
Ending transit and bike subsidies will free up BILLIONS for road congeston relief.
Thanks
JK
Don’t forget to end subsidies for roads, too.
That local general fund money could be better spent elsewhere, surely, like reversing the autocentric transport network and making ped-bike safety a priority, as not everyone can drive {e.g. everyone under 16, the poor, the elderly).
DS
Taxes, user fees, external costs and subsidies are terms which can lead to confusion and many different definitions depending on one’s economic and political views.
Some people say, “Bicyclists don’t pay taxes.” There are probably some bicyclists who don’t pay taxes; these are mostly children who never buy anything – their parents buy everything for them and pay taxes.
I am a bicyclist and I pay sales taxes, property taxes, gasoline taxes and income taxes. Part of these taxes pay for roads used by trucks which do more damage to the roads than the truckers pay in fees and taxes. Part of the taxes pay for health care for people harmed by air pollution caused by cars, trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Part of the taxes pay for the US military to protect our supply of oil from foreign countries.
If you stretch the definition of subsidy a little you could say that the child riding his bicycle is subsidizing part of the external cost of the air pollution from the vehicles and planes.
Thank you everyone for some great comments.
Dan said:b Don’t forget to end subsidies for roads, too.
JK: OK:
First…make the transit agency pay for their road use.
Second..make bikers pay for exclusive road areas (bike lanes)
Third…See how much subsidy is left over for roads and charge ALL users their fair share.
Thanks
JK
In his book “Don’t Call It Sprawl”, William T. Bogart warns against overstating the negative impact caused by the relatively lower mobility of the poor, children, and the elderly. Bogart points out that many of the non-driving elderly suffer from physical or mental disabilities that cannot be overcome by pedestrian friendly design or mass-transit. These folks were previously tended by their adult children, but societal trends toward independent living have made this more problematic. Likewise, children do not enjoy the same freedom of movement in the modern era that they did in past generations, because parents keep closer tabs. In both cases, changing social norms are to blame, rather than auto-centrism.
Bogart also argues that people who are too poor to own cars make up a small percentage of the population, and are better served by programs that enable them to use cars, rather than imposing anti-automobile policies on everyone else.
Access to a car has more of an impact on wages than education.
A study done by Kerri Sullivan at Portland State University examined the effects of car ownership on employment and wages for adults without a high school diploma in Portland. She found that “Car ownership improved the likelihood of being employed by 80 percent. The effect on average weekly wages was approximately $275, and the effect on weeks worked was approximately 8.5 weeks.â€Â
This is true in Seattle too, as Larry Frank has found. The reason is due to the lack of mode choice.
DS
I’m a coauthor of the article in question, and I’m delighted to see our idea getting some attention on the Antiplanner. Here’s my quick response: Randal is quite correct that new roads should be tolled, and that the toll revenue should be used at least in part to build and maintain those roads. Our paper, though, deals with a somewhat knottier problem: how to price the roads we already have? None of the examples Randal mentions-â€â€the SR-91, the I-15, the Minneapolis lanes, etc.â€â€-involve converting an unrestricted road into a priced one. They involve either building a new road, converting a carpool lane to a toll lane, or converting an existing toll road into a variably-priced toll road. These are all worthy steps, but the vast majority of America’s traffic congestion occurs on existing unpriced freeways, and in particular on unpriced freeways in dense metropolitan areas. In many of these places, there is simply no room to put new highways, or even expand the ones we have. In Los Angeles, for instance, building a new highway in the most congested areas would be extraordinarily difficult, both in terms of the land it would require and the political opposition it would face. A regional road-building authority in Los Angeles County would end up taking toll revenue generated in Pasadena or downtown LA and using it to build freeways in Lancaster, or Palmdale, or other places that have room for more highways but that also don’t suffer from the worst regional congestion. In other words, the regional authority would transfer money from drivers in the most congested areas to drivers in the least congested areas. That seems neither fair nor efficient, and it seems like a recipe for alienating the motorists who pay.
This is why we’d like to see the money going to local governments. If toll revenue is returned on a per capita basis to the cities in a region, the money has a better chance of reaching those drivers who actually paid (the money will wind up in the more populated areas, which is where the congestion is worst and the tolls are highest). Moreover, many of the municipalities are likely to be small, and small governments tend to be less wasteful than large ones, and more responsive to the preferences of their residents. Does this mean the money won’t be wasted? Of course not. Local governments of all sizes have been known to squander revenue. But if we are really worried about wasting money, does anyone truly think a giant regional road-building authority will be a model of efficiency? We think the toll revenue will be better spentâ€â€and better appreciated by motoristsâ€â€if it is returned to the communities where motorists live and used for public services that they value.
Cheers,
MM
I’m also a co-author on this paper, and want to add two quick things to this discussion, though it is slowing down. First, to be clear about the intent of our paper, our basic argument doesn’t deal with equity or economic efficiency, but with political viability. We argue that on existing freeways will never be priced unless powerful political actors support it, and distributing congestion pricing revenue to the cities with freeways running through them will help to create this support. The political calculus would be different if we were only talking about new construction.
My second point is only a small correction. Please link to this version of the paper, as it is the version recently published in Transport Policy: http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PoliticalCalculus.pdf
Thanks again for your attention and discussion.
DK