They're tolling the wrong road

Sitting at a dead stop on MoPac at 7:15 on a Thursday night -- trying to get your son to the doctor's office at Far West -- tends to focus your thoughts on Austin's traffic problems.  Why does our traffic have to suck so bad?  IH 35 is just a parking lot for hours each day.  MoPac is just as bad in the morning and evenings.  Even in the middle of the day, you don't know what you're going to get.  Ditto with the bridges over Town Lake, and Ben White near William Cannon.  And so on.

The truth is, our traffic doesn't have to suck so bad.  There's a perfectly sensible solution:  congestion pricing.  Toll the road, but vary the charges by time of day.  The idea is to discourage enough drivers that traffic will flow freely.  If it takes a $3 dollar toll to get traffic moving from William Cannon to downtown in the mornings, then charge $3. 

A congestion-priced toll raises revenue, but that's not the point.  MoPac, for example, might be free 18 hours a day.  A toll would be collected only during the peak, congestion-plagued commutes.

Here the US DOT's summary of the benefits:

Congestion pricing benefits drivers and businesses by reducing delays and stress, by increasing the predictability of trip times, and by allowing for more deliveries per hour. It benefits mass transit by improving transit speeds and the reliability of transit service, increasing transit ridership, and lowering costs for transit providers. It benefits State and local governments by improving the quality of transportation services without tax increases or large capital expenditures, by providing additional revenues for funding transportation, by retaining businesses and expanding the tax base, and by shortening incident response times for emergency personnel and thus saving lives. By preventing the loss of vehicle throughput that results from a breakdown of traffic flow, pricing maximizes return on the public's investment in highway facilities. And it benefits society as a whole by reducing fuel consumption and vehicle emissions, by allowing more efficient land use decisions, by reducing housing market distortions, and by expanding opportunities for civic participation.

On one California highway, congestion-priced lanes carried twice as much traffic as the free lanes. 

I haven't driven on SH 130, and doubt I will any time soon, but I think they've tolled the wrong road. Make SH 130 free, and congestion price the hell out of IH 35.  Through traffic will take SH 130.  Locals will carpool, or take mass transit, or travel off-peak, or just pay the toll.  IH 35 won't look a parking lot 10 hours a day.

As it is now, the toll on SH 130 will encourage through traffic to take the overcongested IH 35 through the middle of Austin.  We want SH 130 to be more enticing, not less.

I know TxDOT's got to pay for SH 130 with toll money.  Why not use the money raised by congestion pricing IH 35?  If the toll is high enough, there might even be enough money to demolish that hideous upper deck and still keep traffic moving. 

Comments

[JMVC]

Not sure such a proposal would ever come to pass - but I would be interested in seeing how it would work. It may be a much preferable option to building more sprawl-inducing, environmentally destructive toll roads on the periphery of our community - jmvc

[Ruralist]

Sadly, everyone knows there'd be political bloodbaths if this ever came to pass, so it'll never happen.

Still, it's a great idea.

[M1EK]

jmvc,

I hate to see somebody falling into the Roger Baker School of Rhetoric.

Yes, toll roads out there are worse than no roads out there; but that wasn't the choice we faced. It was tollways or freeways - and tollways induce a hell of a lot LESS sprawl than do freeways.

[AC]

Yeah, I'm sure this would be a non-starter politically. I think I understand the point of view of those who complain that the recent tolls are a "double tax," even though I don't agree with it. But the recent tolls are aimed at raising revenue; they charge even when there's no congestion. I don't understand objections to congestion pricing, unless you're someone who puts a very, very low value on your time.

[M1EK]

Tolls are always good, IMO. I'm amazed at how many purportedly red-meat conservatives want to go to the Soviet model of allocating scarce goods when it comes to driving.

Congestion pricing is even better; but tolls all the time is a good first step. No non-trivially expensive roads should be 'free', and these suburbanite 'double-tax' whiners are full of crap - they didn't pay anywhere near the cost of those roads because the gas tax doesn't come close to covering the balance, AND suburbanites pay a lot less than they get back compared to urban drivers.

(My favorite example is my drive down Lamar to Whole Foods - not one inch driven on a roadway which receives one dollar from the gas tax; yet I still pay. Meanwhile, Sal in the 'burbs uses gas-tax-funded roadways all the time).

[dan]

Has congestion pricing ever “failed”? I’ve only heard of two cases where it’s been tried, and it was a rousing success in both cases.

Personally, I’d like to live in east Austin, but I don’t, because I’d have drive up 35 to get to work. Mopac is only bad for a couple of hours in the morning and evening, so I can schedule around that, but 35 is horrendously bad even outside of rush hour.

[marty]

every time i hear austinites complain about traffic problems, i chuckle a bit. you have no idea what traffic congestion really is.

[Austin Real Estate People]

What if the cost of the roads was put on developers when they are creating a new subdivision. For instance lets say a developer wants to build 10,000 houses in the middle of nowhere. Instead of the city paying for enlarging the road. It makes sense for the money to build the roads to come from the developer and the homeowners. The developer could pay a road fee based on the number of houses built and how far away they are. Then when the road needs to be expanded this money can be used to expand the road. M1EK has a point that people living in the inner city are being taxed for roads they do not use. The developer will most likely pass the cost along to the property buyers who will be using the roads. This seems fine since basically the cost of maintaining and building roads to a house on the outskirts of town is factored into the price.

The only reason I dont like toll roads is it doesnt seem a cost and time efficient way to collect taxes.

[M1EK]

Tolls are very 'efficient' economically - they only hit the people actually doing the driving, and do so in fairly close proportion with how much cost they create on that road. Varying by time of day is of course even better; but the gas tax in and of itself (as well as impact fees like you describe) are far less efficient - the impact fee would be as bad as property taxes (which we shouldn't, but do, use heavily for major road spending here).

When thinking over these issues I've found it best to do a simple test like this: "If, today, I choose to stay at home and telecommute, what's the difference in my road taxes vs. road benefits?"

Property taxes: You still pay 100%. Ditto with sales taxes.

Gas taxes: You get a break (have to go with a different test here - like, "what if I drive a different route to work today").

Tolls: You don't pay anything (nor should you).

Impact fees: Just like property taxes - you pay whether or not you use the road.

[JMVC]

M1EK:

I'm certainly not a proponent of freeways out there either. I agree that tollways are the lesser of two evils. Pardon me while I google "Roger Baker School of Rhetoric" - jmvc

[M1EK]

Roger Baker = crackpot who floods the austin-bikes list with Peak Oil screeds _and_ warning us that the Phase-II toll roads are a sure financial disaster for local governments, due to some supposed fallback responsibility to bail them out when drivers fail to materialize in sufficient numbers to pay back the bonds.

Ignoring, of course, that under business-as-usual, the city/county would have had to kick in a lot more general-fund money just to get the roads built in the first place as we did with the other 'free'ways.

I've written on the subject here:

http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000128.html

and here:

http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000139.html

[Paul Mullen]

Back in 1980 I was co-author of a book "Transport Planning for Greater London" which proposed congestion pricing for Central London (though some similar schemes had been proosed as far back as 1974). It was a win-win situation, drivers who paid the tolls saved far more in time than they paid, while those who used public transport (including former car users) benefited from faster speed of travel too.

Of course it took London another 23 years, until 2003, to accept the idea - politicians are not economists - and several more years to admit we were right.

Of course there are practical problems - such as where to put toll booths (London's system works only because automatic cameras are allowed to issue traffic tickets including speeding, running red lights, and now driving without a congestion tax permit).

Perhaps TX DoT have got it right when they propose adding tolled (and hopefully congestion-free) lanes to Mopac?

[AC]

As has been explained to me by others, tolling just one lane of Mopac won't work because the traffic exiting the tolled lane would be stuck in the same traffic snarl; that congestion would propagate backward and stall the tolled traffic (regardless of price). Better to toll the whole road, but that will never happen.

Really, someone has to intervene with I-35. It has half the capacity it needs to be a free road, and it can't (and shouldn't) be expanded without scarring the central city more than it already does. If the road were tolled, the revenue would easily fund a very good light rail and commuter rail.

[bittergradstudent]

marty:
It's not that austin has extreme amounts of congestion, it's that the congestion Austin has is so idiotic and contrary to reason. LA has a lot of congestion because it is a large amount of people spread out over a somewhat sizeable area, so there are endless peopel going every direction at all times. DC is congested because it is this tiny place where lots of people work, and with limited access to the downtown area. NYC's congestion has quite obvious reasons. Austin, however, is congested due to horrible civil engineering (the corners of the city where seven highways intersect at a point, and navigation from one highway to another is very difficult for non-locals), by poor connectivity forcing drivers onto really inefficient arterials, or by poor driving. Geographically, Austin really should have much less congestion than it actually does

AC: What if you turned a lane of Mopac into a tolled, straight through type of deal, say going from the 360 exit to the anderson exit--peopel would have the choice between winding up spicewood/anderson or getting back on the main road and getting on 183, or doing a similar thing going to south austin, so maybe you'd get away with the trickle-down sort of issues, though I agree that it would probably be better to just toll the whole damn thing (so long as the tolls don't go to some private corporation)

[bittergradstudent]

And austin real estate people:

If this were 1988, I might agree with you about it not being a time/cost effective means of collecting revenue, but, instead, it is 2008, and the electronic tagging system of toll collection is extremely time effective.

[M1EK]

bgs, I disagree on Austin's 'should-have' congestion. We've got a far denser center of employment than does LA - or most medium US cities for that matter - essentially 38th to a bit south of the river if considering from the perspective of motorists. Think about how much of the area's employment that proportionally represents compared to an area of similar size in Houston, or Dallas, or Seattle, etc.

Add that to the fact that downtown is still overparked (hardly any employees actually have to pay to park), and the fact that there's no transit mode which doesn't suffer even more than the cars from traffic (no HOV lanes, no rail), and it's a miracle it's not even worse.