Congestion Pricing

Top transportation officials from three global cities -- London, Singapore and Stockholm -- shared their experiences in expanding the use of transit at a panel at the Regional Plan Association's annual conference last Friday. Eyeing those cities, it's easy for Americans to get jealous.

In 1951, Milton Friedman coauthored a paper on road pricing. It would be a mere footnote in both Friedman's career and in the intellectual history of road pricing, if not for one sci-fi flourish: The authors propose painting radioactive material alongside expressways, so that road operators can charge drivers using car-mounted geiger counters. Obviously, this suggestion was never heeded, but it says something about the economics profession’s hunger for pricing roads that a future Nobel laureate would set his imagination to Bradbury mode to advance the cause. Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, later credited Friedman with inspiring London’s pathbreaking congestion charge.

As Deron Lovaas said this morning on NRDC’s Switchboard blog, “If recent events are any indicator, it might take Congress a while to agree on a policy that will put our underfunded, inefficient, oil-dependent transportation program on the right track.”

We hear it all the time: The road lobby insists that the only way to reduce mind-numbing traffic congestion on the roads they built is to build new roads. Federal funding gives huge blank checks to state DOTs, which tend to prioritize road building over transit, bridge maintenance or anything else. But mounting evidence suggests that building new roads won't do anything to alleviate congestion.

In the fifth chapter of "Moving Beyond the Automobile," we demystify the concept of congestion pricing in just five short minutes. Here you'll learn why putting a price on scarce road space makes economic sense and how it benefits many different modes of surface transportation.

However the Virginia off-year gubernatorial race ends up -- and at the moment it looks as though Republican Bob McDonnell will reclaim the governor's mansion for the GOP after years of Democratic dominance -- the media will frame the story as a referendum on the policies of national Democrats.

Urbanists often find themselves falling into a pattern of thinking that boils down to the dictum that what's good for drivers must be bad for walkability, and sustainability, and all the things that they prize about well-designed cities. Drivers seem to believe this too, which is interesting because it often isn't true.

Yesterday, Freakonomics linked to a new piece of research [PDF] on congestion that I'd been musing over for a few days. Let me quote the abstract here (paragraph break and emphasis mine):