Building a lobby for tolling free roads - IDEA

It's good public policy to move toward tolls on presently free urban roads, because then they can be priced properly. Variable tolls will allow the scarce roadspace to be properly managed to avoid the all-too-common breakdown in flow that occurs when the roadway gets overloaded. Once the flow breaks down speed and throughput each drop substantially.

Just when people value their time most highly, just when customers need more capacity, they get less. The performance of the free highway goes to pot just when it should be humming. Unmanaged free urban highways are insane - a completely unnecessary burden on the economy and and a daily annoyance to tens of millions of Americans.

The case for tolling roads susceptible to regular congestion is overwhelming, but few people make it.

There's a popular notion that the free roads have been paid for with taxes and imposing a toll will constitute double charging. That's doubly nonsensical.

First no road is ever paid for. It goes on costing money in maintenance, operations and policing. Its pavements, bridges, guardrails, signage, lights and drains, its whole physical fabric is constantly aging. There's a need to keep it up to date, modernize it too.

It may be of historic interest how it was originally financed - taxes, tolls, land grants, philanthropy, imperial seizure, whatever - but the policy issue now is what's the best way to generate a revenue stream to look after the present and future needs of the road. Dwelling on how the road was financed initially is backward looking and irrelevant to how it should be funded now.

What could be fairer than getting that revenue for its needs now from the people who use the road according to their use?

Second prices are not just about raising revenue, they are also about managing demand. The dumb gasoline tax, not to speak of sales taxes, license fees and general fund revenues are useless in managing highways for efficient operations. We see the lousy job they do every day on the freeways of major metro areas.

Three researchers at University of California Los Angeles - David King, Michael Manville and Donald Shoup (UCLA3) - address this problem in an article in "Access" magazine published by the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) titled "For whom the road tolls: the politics of congestion pricing."

see this link for a 6 page pdf:

http://www.uctc.net/access/31/Access%2031%20-%2002%20-%20For%20Whom%20the%20Road%20Tolls.pdf

The UCLA3 write: "We propose a new way to create political support for congestion pricing on urban freeways: distribute the toll revenue to cities with the tolled freeways."

With the prospect of all those toll revenues coming their way the authors see the local elected officials becoming the champions of congestion pricing tolls.  They estimate they would receive $500/citizen from the revenue.

So far they say proposals for using toll revenues have been directed more to mitigating opposition than to creating support.

"Most pricing proposals attempt to placate those who do well under the old order and fail to focus on those who might do well under the new (order)."

Spending the revenues on transit is a popular planner's prescription, but apart from failure to halt the inexorable reduction to insignificance of the transit mode share, it is a political failure since motorists see no benefits.

Rebating the money to motorists themselves won't work because motorists are poorly organized - think an ineffectual AAA.  

Cities by contrast are super-organized, they say. The number of cities is relatively small so each will have a major incentive to lobby for toll revenues, the UCLA3 say.

COMMENT: the authors don't suggest quite how this would be done. Where interstates are involved there would have to be federal legislation to amend surface transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) to allow systemwide tolling within metro areas. Or else a state would have to propose this as a value pricing demonstration project.

If tolling the freeways is so much in the interests of cities one wonders why haven't they come up with proposals already?

Who would operate the toll system: the cities, the MPO, the state, a concessionaire, or a public toll authority. How would the cities' entitlement be determined?

UCLA3 don't provide any hints here either.

Here's what's really needed: clear property rights attaching to roads - in which the rights to any revenues but also the responsibilities to maintain and operate, and the opportunity to expand, go together. And title to the road to be real must contain the right to buy and sell the property as with other infrastructure. Presently the interstates are a property rights mess. The state governments own them in formal terms but the federal government largely negates that ownership with laws and regulations on how they may be used. And the feds continue to dole out money for them.

The feds and the states could cede title and control over urban interstates to local officials under some arrangement that recovered the heavily depreciated value of their contributions to the roads and provided some commitments to maintain them in good order. Most likely regional organizations comprising local associations of governments (MPOs) would take title to the freeways and arrange to have them operated as a toll system under contract, or under a concession.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-01-07