aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Tolls & congestion

I’ve long been a fan of congestion pricing. James Joyner points to a Seattle Times report today on a study that takes it a big step further:

For about eight months, drivers in 275 Seattle-area households agreed to pay for something the rest of us get for free: The right to drive on the region’s freeways and streets.

They were guinea pigs in a pioneering study that explored how motorists’ behavior might change if they had to pay tolls - not just on a few bridges or highways, but on almost every road with a yellow center line.

Researchers established virtual tolls ranging from a nickel to 50 cents a mile. They gave participants pre-paid accounts of between $600 and $3,000, and told them they could keep whatever the tolls didn’t eat up.

The experiment ended in February. Preliminary results, released this month, suggest that if such so-called “road pricing” were widespread, it could make a significant dent in traffic.

But don’t expect to start paying to commute down Interstate 5 or Aurora Avenue anytime soon.

Transportation policymakers are intrigued by the study, but they say there still are too many questions and too little experience with tolls in the Seattle area to adopt them across the entire road network. And the public isn’t ready for such a radical plan, they add.

“The politics of that is just too tough,” said Richard Ford, chairman of the state Transportation Commission.

It is striking to me that there is so little discussion of solutions to our congestion problems relative to the scale of what we face. I’m watching and wondering when that will change.