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Story taken from US News & World Report, Dec 30, 1996

August 12, 1996 Volume 148, No. 7

Message in a bottleneck: It's time to start charging rush-hour commuters

BY BETSY STREISAND

 

This news story reports that:

"[S]ince 1986, car travel has increased almost 40 percent, while highway capacity
has barely grown," and "Gridlock costs Americans roughly the equivalent of $51
billion a year in lost wages and wasted fuel...the situation is only going to get
worse."

The author suggests that a possible remedy is "peak-period pricing," which means
charging drivers for access to highways during peak times.

 

According to the story:

"This simple idea (peak-load pricing) isn't new. But it hasn't been adopted on a
single public road because politicians know it would be career suicide to force
Americans to pay for something they've long had for free. Instead, they embrace
solutions that are more politically palatable than they are effective. They
include:

Building more roads. Sounds good. But additional roads inevitably produce what
traffic expert Anthony Downs in his book Stuck in Traffic calls "triple
convergence." More commuters come--from other roads, from mass transit and from
new developments. Soon, the new roads are as crowded as the old. Los Angeles is a
monument to this phenomenon.

Bolstering mass transit. Even if Americans could learn to rely on buses and
trains--and that's a huge if--workplaces are now so spread out in the suburbs
that connecting all the dots with buses or other transports in affordable and
convenient routes is nearly impossible. This makes perfect sense. Suburbs were
designed with drivers in mind. If the number of mass-transit users miraculously
doubled, they still would constitute only 10 percent of commuters.

Developing "smart cars" and highways. The federal government is spending millions
a year to develop an intelligent-vehicle highway system. It would involve a
network of road sensors and computers that would feed traffic information to car
TV screens, warning of trouble spots. Sounds impressive, in a Jetsons sort of
way. But its limitations are obvious: Drivers will head for open roads,
relocating but not reducing congestion.

The story proposes the " more drastic solution of putting a price on the
rush-hour commute. Peak-period pricing would turn all major metropolitan arteries
into toll roads, with prices high enough to keep traffic moving steadily. During
slow times, tolls would be cut or eliminated. Tolls could be collected easily,
thanks to new technology that lets sensors read signals from small transponders
inside the car. Fees would be debited from prepaid accounts. "

 

The story has two interesting snippets of data, one is a report on an operating
toll road in California which uses peak-load pricing:

 

"About a year ago, a 10-mile, four-lane, fully automated toll road (the nation's
first) replaced the median on the 91 Freeway in Orange County (California), one
of the busiest roads in the country. With a peak one-way toll of $2.50, the
privately operated 91 Express Lanes are some of the most expensive 10 miles of
road to travel in the United States. Yet they attract roughly 30,000 cars a day
and have produced some surprising results.

Rather than becoming "Lexus Lanes" for well-off commuters, as expected, express
lanes are a mirror of the freeway as a whole, attracting drivers from all income
brackets, according to surveys by the California Private Transportation Co.,
which built the $126 million road. For many working parents, a $2.50 toll is
preferable to steep overtime charges for day care. The fast lanes also are
popular with independent contractors and other workers who are paid by the job. "

The other bit of data reported in the story is an estimate of the "number of
hours lost per year" (presumably the average number of hours per commuter) by
drivers in large U.S. cities, due to sitting in traffic in some of the nations
congested cities. The story includes the following table:

 

IN LOS ANGELES

BUMPER-TO-BUMPER CROP

Here's how much time drivers waste each year sitting in traffic in the nation's most congested cities.

CITY / HOURS LOST

Washington, DC 70

San Francisco--Oakland 66

Los Angeles 65

Houston 60

Detroit 57

Atlanta 53

Boston 44

New York 39

Chicago 34

Philadelphia 23

Source: Texas Department of Transportation