An interesting take on Congestion Pricing

This WSJ article from a few months back illustrates the kind of complexity that defines most of the issues in cities today. The author, David Owen, essentially makes the point that anything you do to reduce traffic congestion makes people more likely to drive, and therefore is bad for the environment. While that alone isn’t a very surprising opinion, what is surprising is Owen’s take on Congestion Pricing. While most environmental advocates believe that congestion-pricing of roads is a good way to reduce congestion and increase use of transit systems, Owen essentially argues that, because this would make the automobile network more efficient, environmentalists should be opposed to it.

The traditional solution to traffic congestion is to create additional road capacity. But projects like those almost always end up making the original problem worse because they generate what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new, open roadway encourages existing users to make more car trips, lures drivers away from other routes and tempts transit riders to return to their automobiles, with the eventual result that the new roads become at least as clogged as the old roads.

Congestion pricing is basic economics. The idea is that if you have a sporadically scarce commodity, such as space in automobile lanes, you can eliminate distribution bottlenecks by adjusting prices in counterpoint to variations in demand. Hotels do this by raising room rates when travel is popular and lowering them when travel is not. That helps to smooth fluctuations in reservation rates, enabling the hotels to make better use of their existing rooms and to increase total revenues without building new capacity, much of which would end up being empty except during periods of peak travel.

The concept works the same way with cars. Rather than attempting to eliminate congestion by laying new asphalt, planners seek to make existing roads more efficient by imposing fees that are high enough to discourage significant numbers of drivers from traveling in the most popular places at the most popular times. This often does open up clogged streets—and London is the example that proponents usually cite—but the overall result is not necessarily a gain for the environment or for public transit. If the result of congestion pricing is simply to spread traffic out, thereby maintaining or increasing total traffic volume while also making driving more pleasant for those who continue to do it, then its putative environmental benefits are fictitious.

To be honest, I don’t have much of an opinion about it. If it were up to me, the freeway system would be privately owned and operated, and I’m sure that if it were congestion pricing would be inevitable. Whether or not that would be better for the environment is probably too complex of an issue to boil down to a simple yes/no declaration.

In any case, I found the article very interesting. If you’re in to such things, you should read the full story.