Congestion pricing II

Most of the comments to my post on congestion pricing were, "Good idea, but it won't sell here."

Here's a timely article from the New York Post that suggests they're right.  New Yorkers, whose traffic problems are much worse than ours, oppose congestion pricing 2-to-1.  They think of it as a "traffic tax."  If New Yorkers won't go for it, I suppose there's zero chance that we will.

It's probably a waste of time to make this distinction, but the point of congestion-price tolling is not to levy a tax, but to prevent overuse by charging admission.  Suppose Schlitterbahn defaulted on its property taxes and was seized by Comal County.  Schlitterbahn would then be owned by the "people."  Free admission for everyone, right?  Of course not.  The park would be so crowed that it would be unuseable.   Access has to be rationed somehow.  Any scarce good that has value must be rationed somehow.

Perhaps our highways at rush hour are not as congested as a free Schlitterbahn would be on July 4.  (I think this is debatable with IH 35.)  Still, hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted every year in traffic because we have a free-for-all rather than rationed access.  That's a deadweight loss.

Comments

[M1EK]

It's going to take a long time before we can actually get any thing done with roads - because politicians have been feeding their suburban constituents lies about supposedly large diversions of gas tax money in order to get elected. It's now conventional wisdom (although completely wrong) that gas taxes are far higher than the cost of building and maintaining roadways - so any additional taxes are defeated by resorting to the "you're already taxing me too much" meme.