Policy problem: Congestion pricing gridlocked

A couple of the more readable papers that we gathered up from the hallfull offered at this year’s blizzard bound conference of the Transportation Research Board touch on the political problems of road pricing (tolls). One paper (Karen Frick, Steve Heminger, Hank Dittmar, Bay Bridge Congestion Pricing Project, TRB Paper 961317) is by a group of Bay area officials who patiently labored for several years to craft a process that would gain a trial of congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge, a trial which was endorsed by the Feds and funded under ISTEA., but never got off the ground because they couldn’t find a California politician willing to propose it to the state legislature.

Interestingly a clear majority of the general public in the Bay area approves the idea. In a survey 59 percent supported the Bay Bridge pricing proposal — a $3 rush hour toll for solo-car driver, $1 out of rush hours. This is hardly surprising since the public accepts premium rates at times of high demand on a variety of services including electricity, telephones, holiday resorts, airfares and suchlike. It is not necessary to have studied economics at college to appreciate that the price system works best when it is flexible and responds with a higher price to higher demand. The authors make clear however — though they don’t use the word — that opponents ‘demagogued’ the issue shamelessly. They claimed it would victimize the poor, though in fact Bay Bridge users are way above average in income, and the scheme included a ‘lifeline toll’ patterned after telephone arrangements for the poor. Simultaneously they denied the higher rush hour tolls would work in shifting excess demand to other modes and times. Somehow all of those needy solo car drivers would manage to come up with the extra two bucks/trip. Give us a break!

Demagogues?

We suspect that a problem is that these polite officials were not in a position to mix it with the demagogues. All their earnest efforts to address valid concerns may not come to grips with slick sound bite rhetoric that embraces contradictory propositions simultaneously and works loose and fast with data. The critics do seem to have had one weighty complaint: the officials refused to concede the possibility of increasing capacity.

“There were constantly questions about reducing congestion some other way — perhaps by building a new bridge or BART tube, running more transit service, or extending the carpool lane...(Our) explanation that these alternatives were either unaffordable or otherwise nsound as the principal means for providing congestion relief often failed to convince skeptics.” (p15)

Maybe under flexible pricing some extra capacity would be financeable? Why rule out extra capacity? The authors say that their proposal was successfully represented as a tax increase, especially by the media, and that it became impossible to focus discussion on congestion relief and the efficiency aspects of the proposal. This points up a special handicap of state-owned facilities and an extra source of inflexibility in their pricing. They conclude that peak pricing “is likely to occur first on private toll roads, where new capacity is provided and the role of government is limited.” On SR-91 it seems to be accepted and indeed is popular. There it is a choice, because those who don’t want to be congestion-priced can continue in unpriced stop-and-go lanes. On the Dulles Greenway management has another innovation: set a high toll right off, then later announce an off-peak discount. Result: a congestion price by another name.

Another paper (Adeel Lari, Ken Buckeye, Measuring Perceptions of Road Pricing Alternatives: Minnesota’s Public Outreach Effort, TRB paper 961125) reports an extensive set of surveys of attitudes toward congestion pricing among the public and opinion leaders. Small majorities ·(54/39) favor tolls so long as the proceeds are used for the maintaining the roads, but majorities (51/36) oppose congestion prices on new roads. There is strong opposition (50/23) to the idea of replacing the gas tax with a mileage based tax, but almost as much opposition to any increase in the gas tax (43/28). The large residuals suggest significant uncertainty.

The authors conclude: “It is unrealistic to epxect that congestion pricing and milease baed tax concepts can overcome all public objection...(M)ost of us do not like to pay more for any service and there are consequences such as increased traffic delays if no action is chosen. The ultimate success in implementing (congestion pricing) will depend not upon reaching concensus but rather on gaining informed consent.”•