President Bush Gets Into the Congestion Debate
President Bush's latest budget proposal includes grants for state and local governments to experiment with strategies to combat traffic congestion. This includes ideas like raising tolls during rush hour, and "cordon" tolls - which charge people as they enter and exit a metropolitan area (such as those in London).
In the WSJ Article covering this subject, I find a couple of quotes signifigant:
Congestion pricing "is a lot cheaper than the way we're paying now ... with time, unreliability, psychological hell," said Tyler Duvall, DOT's assistant secretary for policy.
Amen, brother!
Even a 5% reduction in traffic jams can increase traffic speeds by as much as 50%, says Mr. Duvall. DOT officials figure a typical big-city traffic jam can be cleared with tolls of as little as $2 to $2.50 a day, if all lanes on a big highway are charged. But on some Southern California highways where fees are charged only for the former high-occupancy lanes, prices at the peak of rush hour have reached $8.50.
The 5% number is interesting - but the estimates that $2.50 a day in tolls will remove congestion? That's a stretch. People still queue up by the hundreds to pay the "double toll" of $0.80 at most plazas in the area. I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't still queue up for $1.60 tolls.
That being said, I'm all for toll increases, if it will reduce the numbers of travelers, and improve road conditions. But that's always the question - nobody can guarantee results. We could just end up with increased tolls, but the same congestion problems.
Thanks Chicagoist for the link.
posted by Jon @ 10:55 AM
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