The citizens of Stockholm, Sweden, have voted in a referendum to approve “congestion pricing” as a permanent solution to reduce traffic congestion in their densely populated city. The vote follows an experiment in which motorists were charged a toll that varied by time of day when they passed any one of 23 tolling points around the central city.
An article in the Wall Street Journal (summarized on this blog) noted that the tolls reduced congestion by changing many peoples’ behavior. Many Stockholm residents switched to buses and bikes for transport, or changed their routes entirely. Thanks to the dynamics of traffic flow, an arithmetical reduction in peak traffic leads to a geometric reduction in congestion.
Congestion pricing is a congestion-mitigation tool being considered in Virginia. The Virginia Department of Transportation is studying the application of the strategy in Hampton Roads, while Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, has submitted bills that would encourage Virginia to participate in a federal congestion-pricing pilot project.
Details of the Swedish vote come to me by way of C.P. Zilliacus, principal transportation engineer with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. You can read the account in the Dagens Nyheter here. If you don’t read Swedish, you may not get very far. Fortunately, Zilliacus is fluent in the Nordic tongue. And it appears from his translation that the new center/right government is doing in Sweden exactly what I recommended in my recent column (“The Swedish Solution“) be done in Virginia, which is to plow revenue from the congestion tolls into transportation improvements.
If the Governor and lawmakers are looking for a long-term, sustainable source of transportation revenues, this is the best way to get it. Unlike taxing people when they purchase automobiles or buy car insurance, which does nothing to induce positive changes in behavior, congestion pricing both (a) raises revenue, and (b) induces people to drive less.
If we add the proviso here in Virginia that all congestion-tolling revenues in are to be reinvested in the same traffic corridor, we could create a self-regulating mechanism that would ensure that no more money was being taxed than was actually needed. It would work like this: Congestion tolls would raise money for new projects — new lanes of roadway, more buses, more bus stations, traffic light synchronization, incident-response management, etc. Those new projects would reduce congestion… Less congestion would mean lower tolls… at least for a while.
Contrast that with plans to raise $1 billion or more in general fund revenues. Those taxes would never be removed, and the money would be spent regardless of the demand for new projects. What the congestion-pricing scheme would not do is subsidize construction of road projects designed to open new areas to develop.
