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The
way Chris Saxman, sees it, if the residents of
Stockholm, Sweden, can warm to congestion-pricing
tolls as
a tool to combat gridlock, so can the capitalist
citizens of Virginia. Says the Staunton businessman
and representative to the House of Delegates:
"Stockholm can do it -- and Sweden's a
socialist country!"
The
Greater Stockholm region, a two million-person
metropolis with numerous bridges and traffic choke
points, is prone to congestion. The national
government set up 23 tolling points and a system of
transponder boxes, laser detectors and cameras to
track cars that pass through. Tolls, varying by time
of day according to the level of congestion, range
from the equivalent of $1.38 to $2.76 per hour.
Public
opinion polls indicate that the six-month trial was
a success. Faced with tolls, many Swedes switched to mass transit,
others to bicycles. Some changed the time of their
commute. Congestion improved so much that the odds
look good that Stockholm residents will vote in an
upcoming referendum to make the congestion-pricing
scheme permanent.
(See
"Learning
from the Swedes," Aug. 29, 2006, on the Bacon's
Rebellion blog.)
The
Virginia Department of Transportation is
entertaining the idea of similar time-of-day
pricing on Interstate 95 and the Washington Beltway,
but those proposals would use the revenue to finance
construction of new lanes. What's remarkable about
the Stockholm experiment -- and others around the
world, including in London and Singapore -- is that the
purpose of the tolls is not to raise revenue but to
reduce congestion and maximize throughput of
existing roads.
Saxman
thinks it's time that Virginia introduced congestion
pricing (also referred to as "value
pricing") into its toolkit of transportation
strategies. He has introduced a package of bills
that would solicit participation in a federally
funded congestion-pricing demonstration project,
temporarily offset the tolls with local reductions
in the gasoline tax, and hold a referendum within 12
to 18 months of installing the tolls to ask citizens if they want to make
the arrangement permanent.
People
don't necessarily want more roads, says Saxman.
"They want congestion relief." And a
congestion-pricing scheme could deliver that relief
more quickly than any transportation alternative
under consideration.
Consider
the widely touted option of increasing taxes and building the road
projects in VDOT's capital improvement plan. The $1 billion a year sought by Gov. Timothy M.
Kaine, Senate Finance Chair John Chichester and
others is less than one fifth of the amount
that the VTrans 2025 study stated was needed under
the Business As Usual, build-your-
way-out-of-traffic-congestion
transportation paradigm. Given the time lag in
designing and building roads, Saxman adds, "Even if we passed
taxes today, congestion relief
would be years down the road."
By contrast, a
congestion-pricing scheme could be put into place
relatively quickly and have an immediate impact.
Like the Swedes, Virginians could take to buses and
bicycles. They could telecommute. They could leave
earlier or later than normal. They could carpool and
share the expense. Half the people on the road during
rush hour aren't even commuting, Saxman says. There
is more flexibility in the system than commonly
acknowledged.
Furthermore,
the dynamics of traffic congestion are such that an
arithmetic decrease in the number of people on the
road will lead to geometric decrease in traffic
congestion. A British study showed that a five
percent reduction in traffic will decrease
congestion by 50 percent. "When you do that, you'll actually
move more traffic," Saxman says. "You're managing
throughput."
Let
me hammer that last point home. Most people think of
tolls as a way to raise revenue. Tolls put into
place as part of a congestion-pricing program are a
way to increase highway capacity. Here's how
a U.S. Department of Transportation spokesman
explained it to me:
As
traffic speeds grind to a crawl, a typically
congested facility during peak periods in Northern
VA is handling less than 1,000 vehicles per lane
mile per hour, sometimes as low 800 vehicles. Free
flow facilities can handle approximately 2,200-2,300
vehicles. Pricing can approximate free flow
conditions, meaning that priced lanes can handle more
traffic, not less. The two priced lanes on SR-91 in
Southern Calif. handle more traffic than the four un-priced
lanes combined.
Let
me summarize the advantages: (1) Congestion pricing
encourages drivers to use other modes of
transportation. (2) It increases rush-hour
freeway capacity. And (3) it can raise revenues that
can be reinvested in the transportation system.
Simply put: There is no quicker, more cost-effective
way to ameliorate gridlock.
Saxman
says he first started thinking seriously about
congestion pricing in February when the Reason
Foundation made a presentation to the House Cost
Cutting Caucus, which he chairs. The federal
government, it turns out, is pushing congestion
pricing aggressively. The feds, he says, are looking
for a place where they can deploy a pilot project in
a less-than-a-year time frame.
Tyler
Duvall, the deputy assistant secretary who oversees that
initiative for the U.S. Department of
Transportation, is an
evangelist for congestion pricing. There is a
disconnect, Duvall observed during a November 2005
forum on road pricing and travel demand modeling,
between transportation agencies and roadway users.
"Roadway operators cannot glean information
about travelers' preferences based on their
willingness to pay. This often results in highway
investments that do not meet users' needs. ...
Pricing can be a good way to take decisions on
transportation investment out of the political realm
and into the hands of the travelers, who 'vote' with
their willingness to pay."
Also,
noted Duvall, the lack of congestion pricing leads
to inefficient land use. "Subsidizing the cost
of travel allows road users to travel farther and
more often, making the cost of living far away from
one's job artificially low and discouraging dense
land use."
The
Department of Transportation has made it a high
priority to establish a congestion-pricing
demonstration project that combines the "four 't's":
tolls in a variable pricing scheme, transit, as an
alternative to cars, telecommuting/flex schedules,
and technology in the form of expanded, real-time
traffic information.
The
feds have various pots of money they could draw upon
to help a state transportation department fund a
pilot program. (Click
here to see the DOT's description of the various
programs that could be tapped.) It's not clear to
me, however, that there would be enough to fund a
project entirely with federal monies. The state
might have to kick in some as well.
If
Virginia could qualify, the demonstration project most likely would
be located in Northern Virginia or Hampton Roads,
where congestion is worst. Duvall's office says that
there is a "tremendous opportunity" in
Northern Virginia to successful deploy a
congestion-pricing experiment. But the Virginia
Department of Transportation has made the greatest
progress in laying the groundwork for congestion
pricing in Hampton Roads.
Virginia
is one of 15 states already funded by the federal
government to study value pricing, says Marsha Fiol,
VDOT project manager. It takes a lot of prep work to
put a congestion pricing program into place. The
Commonwealth needs legal authority for SmartTags and
EZPass, for instance. It needs to set up real-time
congestion information, such as message boards,
traffic cameras and the capability to download
images of traffic conditions to the Web.
Likewise,
says Fiol, it takes considerable study to select a traffic
corridor that lends itself to congestion pricing.
The state can't just drop a toll into place. Also,
the
public needs to be educated about how it works. In
Hampton Roads, VDOT has conducted meetings with
local agencies and organizations, and it's planning
a series of focus groups with the public.
If
a demonstration project worked, it could provide
the basis for a wholesale transformation of
Virginia's transportation policy. I can envision value-pricing tolls on all transportation
corridors that experience severe traffic congestion.
Saxman's
idea of suspending the gasoline tax during the
length of the trial is a good one for purposes of a
demonstration trial: It would ease the fears of
motorists that they're getting hosed with a double
tax. But in the long run, congestion tolls should be
used not only to encourage people to adopt other
modes of transportation, not only to maximize the
throughput of existing arteries, but to inject new
revenue into the transportation system.
Establishing
congestion pricing along major transportation
arteries certainly makes more sense than the
regional tax schemes that a number of legislators in
Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads are trying to
cobble together. The problem is that any figure
picked, such as the $1 billion in new taxes
advocated by the Governor and the state Senate, is
inherently arbitrary. Also, there's a disconnect
between those who pay the taxes, such as auto
insurance premiums or auto sales taxes, and those
who use the roads.
The
beauty of congestion-pricing tolls is that they are
a self-regulating mechanism that incorporates
feedback from the marketplace. If congestion is
severe, the tolls are higher. Higher tolls means
more revenue to plow back into transportation
improvements --
whether new lane-miles of roadway, transit stations
and bus fleets, park-and-ride lots, traffic-light
synchronization, incident response systems -- in the
same corridor. Declining congestion translates into
lower toll rates and less money for improvements.
With
congestion-pricing, drivers pay tolls in direct
proportion to the stress they place on the
transportation system. Combine this with a fee based
on annual Vehicle Miles Driven and the size/weight
of the automobile to cover roadway maintenance, and
Virginia could have the ultimately fair and rational
transportation funding mechanism. (See "What
Will Replace the Gas Tax?" and "Roads
and Reason," Jan. 3, 2006.)
Congestion
pricing, says Saxman, "is not a panacea, not a
silver bullet. But it should be part of any
long-term strategy."
--
September 25, 2006
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