IGNORANCE & IDIOCY:AAA Bureaucrats Do Members Disservice

AAA’s bureaucrats do their motorist membership a disservice by constantly knocking tolls. The latest piece of AAA foolishness is an item in the “Traffic Guy” column of CAR & TRAVEL, AAA’s journal June issue (p28) titled “Congestion Pricing for Dummies.” Authored by the NY AAA Club’s director of Traffic Engineering and Safety Services, Mark Kulewicz, the piece says that the idea of variable tolls is being pushed by an “ivory tower crowd” and by “campus economists.”

This is a silly smear. In fact the leading exponents of varied toll rates are people like Robert Poole, a practical public policy guy with degrees in both engineering and economics, the executive-director of the New Jersey Turnpike, Ed Gross who happens to have a background in law and the civil service, a traffic administrator Kim Kawada at the San Diego Association of governments, Chris Swenson an engineer in Fort Myers FL, businessmen at 91 Express Lanes, engineers in Houston TX, traffic and revenue consultants who make a living selling advice, many transport planning people, and FHWA policy people. Certainly several excellent, practical university economists make an important contribution to the discussion of varied toll rates, but if they were the only inspiration for variable tolls the idea would not have got anywhere.

Kulewicz represents the argument for varied tolls as being that it “will convince many drivers to wait until after rush hour to hit the road.” He says the New York traffic is already bad enough “to convince most of us to wait until after rush hour if we can.” He adds: “Doesn’t it (the congestion) already deter all but the stouthearted commuter who must get to work on time, no matter how bad the backups?”

Well now who’s speculating from an ivory tower?

The survey data – National Personal Transp Survey – show a minority of travelers even in the rush hours are making work-related trips. About two-thirds are non-work trips. (NPTS Symposium FHWA Feb 1999 p7) A proportion of people can, and will, shift the time of the trips or rearrange their affairs to avoid having to make the trip when its cost rises. It is pure ivory tower theorizing by Kulewicz that almost all the people driving in rush hours are commuters, most of whom have no other alternative but to making the drives they make.

Kulewicz then says that both I-15 in San Diego and SR91 in Orange County flow better, not because of variable pricing, but that “these tolls have been applied to newly added lanes that makes the difference.... It’s really the additional lanes that do the trick.” Again if Kulewicz got out of his New York AAA ivory tower and visited San Diego’s I-15 toll lanes he would soon discover that there was NO lane addition in the case of I-15. An existing 2-lane reversible HOV facility is now being managed so that single occupant vehicles can use spare capacity for a toll. The toll is varied to ensure that the managed lanes do not get overloaded and degenerate into stop and go.

So given the lack of any lane addition, I-15 demonstrates clearly that metering traffic with a variable toll helps.

In the case of the 91 Express Lanes, certainly, there was addition of lanes. But if the improvement in traffic flow was simply a result of extra lanes then it would be evenly spread across both the tolled lanes and the free lanes. It isn’t. The tolled lanes flow freely while average speeds in the untolled lanes alongside are both significantly slower and less predictable than the tolled lanes. Many trips take ten minutes longer on the free lanes.

The clear superiority of the tolled lanes, and the value of variable tolls is reflected in the willingness of 125,000 91-Express Lanes customers to equip themselves with toll transponders and pay some $20 million/year in tolls. Motorists on CA-91 have a choice: take your chances in the regular lanes at no charge, or pay a toll and get a guaranteed free flow trip thanks to intelligent management via a variable toll.

Having that kind of choice – the opportunity to get by the congestion when a quick trip is especially important – is greatly to the advantage of motorists. Why does an organization supposed to be of service to motorists employs clowns like Kulewicz to write such uninformed trash. Do the bureaucrats at AAA have some vested interest in having their members stuck in traffic, without any choices?

NOTE: A condensed and toned down version of this was submitted as a letter to the editor of the AAA magazine. The argument that organizations such as AAA can benefit by a perpetuation of motorists woes is not merely theoretical. A leading Maryland lobbyist Gerard E. Evans is presently on trial in Baltimore for fraud, for what is called in the trade ‘working both sides of the street.’ He extracted millions of dollars from paint companies, federal prosecutors charge, by first urging legislators to make paint companies jointly liable for lead effects, regardless of whether any of their paint was involved, then reporting to the paint companies the danger of such sweeping legislation moving forward, and offering, for high fees, to work against it on their behalf.

(WP 6/22/00 pA8)