|
Tysons
Corner is a business success and a planning
disaster. Located at the epicenter of Northern
Virginia's world-class IT industry, the one-time
country crossroads is a must-be-there location for
anyone doing business with the Pentagon, CIA or Homeland Security. Tysons has fabulous
malls, fantastic restaurants and state-of-the-art
office buildings. But it has achieved commercial
stardom in spite of itself. The business center is
unwalkable and untransportable. Nightmarish traffic
congestion threatens to choke off growth.
The
brightest minds in Fairfax County, a jurisdiction
that boasts one of the highest education levels in
the United States, have struggled and failed to cope
with gridlock. There is broad-based support for
extending the Washington Metro system to Tysons, but
the fate of the $4 billion-plus project stands upon
shaky financial assumptions. Even if the rail line
gets built, the higher densities granted to property
owners around the Metro stops could bring in so many
new people that congestion could actually get worse.
Heavy
rail, Transit-Oriented
Development, Transportation Demand Management
plans... none of the conventional planning tools
seem to offer much hope. But there is one strategem
that no one in Fairfax County has given serious
consideration to: congestion pricing.
Congestion
pricing -- charging motorists for entering congested
areas of the urban center -- has worked in
Singapore, London and Stockholm. The concept is
being applied experimentally even in United States locations such
as the Puget Sound. Virginia transportation
officials have bought into the congestion-pricing
idea for HOT lanes on the Interstates. Why couldn't
it work in Tysons Corner, too?
In
a companion column, "The
Oregon Solution," I explore how mileage
fees and congestion pricing could form the basis for
restructuring Virginia's transportation funding
system. As applied to Tysons, the idea would be to
charge motorists for using local roads, with rates
varying by the level of congestion and time of day.
Such a program would accomplish worthy goals that
have heretofore remained elusive: It would reduce traffic to a level where it flows
most smoothly, in effect increasing the capacity of
local roads. Congestion pricing also would
incentivize people to carpool, ride buses or engage
in other creative forms of ride sharing. Over the
longer haul, injecting market dynamics into Tysons
Corner transportation would encourage landowners to
re-develop their properties in a more balanced,
transportation- efficient mix of uses that make it
practical for more people to walk or bicycle to
work.
To
flesh out how such an idea might work, I contacted
Bern Grush, founder of Skymeter, a Toronto,
Canada-based start-up, who has developed a
vehicle-positioning system for administering
congestion-pricing programs. Grush's pioneering
technology holds out the potential to revolutionize
congestion pricing by making it more flexible and
less expensive to administer than any other system
now available.
Grush
knows what he is talking about. A serial
entrepreneur, has an IT background in both geographic
information systems and financial back offices.
With Skymeter, he is combining the two disciplines
to create a system that uses satellite technology to
measure the location, distance and times that cars and
trucks travel, and
then charges them for entering congestion zones. "A
position-based, road-tolling system is a geographic
information system, and it’s a financial payment
system," he says. "You need those two
elements."
(I discussed some of
Grush's ideas about using pricing mechanisms to ration
parking in a recent column, "No
Such Thing as Free Parking.")
Grush
conceived the idea for Skymeter in 2002 after
getting a speeding ticket. He was riding with his
six-year-old-daughter in the car, and he wasn't too
happy about the incident. He began thinking about
it: "If my cell phone could ring me when I was
speeding... If I could set my own alarm... To do
that, I'd need a GIS system, which would know the
speed limits on each road."
As
Grush noodled the idea, the GIS system got more
ambitious and encompassed more information.
Eventually, he made the link with congestion pricing
and he saw the opportunity to overthrow one of society's
most intractable problems: traffic congestion. As he
shared his ideas, he was told that one
obstacle -- the "urban canyon" problem,
tracking vehicles in cities with high buildings that
blocked satellite signals -- was insurmountable. The
intellectual challenge intrigued him. After focusing on the problem, he claims,
he cracked the code. Says
he: "I've showed [my solution] to the people
who said it couldn't be done. They said, "It
looks like you solved it.'"
Grush
also has solved a billing problem needed to make a
satellite-based system work: non-refutable
documentation that ensures taxpayers/customers that
they're being billed fairly and consistently. Since
then, he's run successful measurements in the
toughest streets of Montreal, he says.
After
working out of his home for three years, Grush has
brought on a CEO, Kamal Hassan, to help run the company, raised outside funding,
and moved the Skymeter team
into a Toronto business incubator. His big challenge
now is convincing someone to take a risk with his
system. Unproven technologies have a long selling
cycle. Creating the political consensus for a
proposition as radical as a congestion pricing
system, whatever the technology, takes even
longer. But Grush is
convinced that Skymeter can bring market pricing to
a realm -- parking and traffic congestion -- that
has proven resistant to market solutions.
Sooner
or later, Grush says, the politicians will come
around. In urbanized areas like Tysons Corner,
right-of-way acquisition is incredibly expensive.
"We're running out of places to put roads. We
can't build our way out of congestion."
"I
can guarantee two things," he adds. "Number
one, congestion pricing is going to happen all
throughout the developed world. There’s no other
solution. Number two, it’s going to happen using
satellites. The only question is, will it be
Skymeter, or will it be someone else’s
device?"
As
I conducted a telephone interview with Grush in Toronto, he called up Google
maps on his computer and summoned aerial images of
Tysons. He immediately perceived that the business
district relies upon a handful of roads -- Rt. 7
(Leesburg Pike), Rt. 123 and a number of smaller
arteries -- to bring in traffic from outlying areas.
He also determined that the wide spacing between
relatively low office
buildings would pose few problems to his
traffic-measuring technology.
The
first step, he suggests, would be to draw the Tysons
congestion district boundaries
and establish something like a Tysons Traffic Authority to administer the congestion-pricing
program. Because
Tysons
is bounded by the Capital Beltway, the Dulles Toll
Road and low-density subdivisions, its limits would be easy to demarcate.
Next,
working with local traffic engineers, planners and
economists, the authority would determine which
areas are the most congested, during which times of
day, and what prices should be charged to reduce
traffic to the point where streets would flow
smoothly. A vital point: The goal would not to
maximize revenue but to maximize street throughput.
As a tactical matter, suggests Grush, start out with
modest charges, so as not to provoke a political
backlash, and increase them incrementally until they
have the desired effect.
A
number of practical matters would have to be addressed.
How would rates be structured: Would the traffic authority
charge on the basis of the numbers of miles driven,
or the amount of time spent in a congested area?
Could the authority use the system to rationalize
on-street parking as well?
More
questions: How would you publicize the program? How
would you make sure that people get transponders in
their cars? How would you bill outsiders who don't
have transponders -- could you sell daily passes on
the Internet perhaps? What sanctions would you bring
against people who don't have passes or
transponders, and how would you enforce them?
A
creative challenge would be devising ways to use
congestion-pricing to encourage people to avail
themselves of shared-ridership services. Most cars
that enter Tysons Corner at present probably have
two or three empty seats, Grush observes.
"That's a lot of transportation capacity that
goes unused. It's not empty road -- it's empty
seats." You could take a big bite out of
congestion by filling a fraction of them. Perhaps
you'd allow taxi cabs to come and go for free --
among other advantages, taxis don't take up parking
spaces. Perhaps buses, vans and jitneys could enter
the congestion zone freely as well.
Another
question: Should the authority cut rates for
"green" vehicles with lower pollution
emissions that would help the region meet
clean-air standards?
A
predictable objection to the congestion-pricing
scheme is that it would cost too much to administer.
If half the congestion charge winds up enriching
outside vendors, what's the point? Skymeter aims to
keep its charges to five percent of revenue, Grush
responds. "We are aiming to be like a credit
card that takes a very small amount of each
transaction," he says. "We're driving out
every cost we can."
Another
problem: People would not want to pay $200 or more it
would take to
purchase and install a transponder in their cars,
Grush acknowledges. One way to deal with that
problem might be to "finance" the
installation by tacking on $4 or $5 per month to the
monthly bill. Another option might be to add a percentage of the service charge to the
bill, or just to build the cost of the transponder into
the rate structure.
The
fun part of congestion pricing is figuring out how
to reinvest the net proceeds. As I laid out in
"The Oregon Solution," a critical aspect
of setting up a congestion- pricing cordon is to
keep faith with citizens by
reinvesting the "earnings" into
transportation improvements that will improve the
mobility of the people who paid the charges.
In
the case of Tysons Corner, that could mean making
spot improvements that would eliminate bottlenecks
on streets, or paying for traffic light
synchronization up and down the Rt. 7 and Rt. 123
corridors. It could mean building comfortable bus
shelters, subsidizing vans for the handicapped,
organizing carpooling programs or subsidizing
construction of a Metro station.
No
one has administered a congestion-pricing plan in
the way that Grush envisions. The London, Stockholm
and Singapore experiments, as successful as they
have been, were blunt instruments by comparison.
Those cities had limited flexibility to fine-tune
rates for local conditions.
Until
Skymeter-like congestion-pricing schemes become routine,
there would be many prickly issues to work through.
It would take a lot of testing and experimentation
to see what delivers the desired results, Grush
cautions. But Fairfax County and the unincorporated
district of Tysons Corner have few other obvious
tools at their disposal to tame traffic. In my
estimation, they can't afford not to give the
idea a try.
--
January 8, 2006
|
