Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

How do they pay? dropping quarters into a bucket? That seems sort of sketchy...
But In Seattle we've upped the carpool lanes to three people, so two aren't good enough...

This seems like a good solution though...

I can see the I-15 from where I sit. The problem with it, and a lot of Southern California, is that there is no "there" for carpools to go to--the destination is quite diffuse. Some people work downtown, but a lot are in Kearny Mesa or Sorrento Valley or elsewhere. In Oakland/Berkeley, the carpool across the bridge works because so many people end up in San Francisco.

I can't see how paying a toll does anything but increase revenue. The HOT lane on I-15 works partly because it doesn't have as many exits as the regular freeway. Seems like you could accomplish the same thing by making a free express road.

How do they pay?
FasTrak radio transponders. You have to sign up for them.

I was in London this summer and everyone, but everyone loved the results of the congestion tax.

I do not think I have ever heard of any public policy that has worked as well as it has.

I'd be interested to know if the sight of the lanes with "no" carpools in them is more than anecdotal. I recall seeing letters to the Washington Post whining about the unfairness of the "few" cars whizzing by in the carpool lanes on I-395 during rush hour. At the same time, statistics showed that the two carpool lanes moved more *people* during rush hour than the four non-carpool lanes. So in effect what the whiners were whining for was to make things worse for everyone in order to make it more "fair."

If the dynamic pricing can let more people use the carpool lanes without harming their usefulness in actually moving traffic, then I have no problem with that. But I have zero sympathy with those who find the sight of near-empty carpool lanes "maddening."

Sweet! That's a cool idea, especially the feedback mechanism based on load.

me2i81, there are no carpool lanes across the Bay or Golden Gate bridges, even though there should be.

When I can read my email, browse the web, and read books while driving *then* I'll prefer driving to taking good public transit. I can copy my favorite news programs to my Rio before leaving for work, so even 'listening to the car radio' isn't better in the car.

No, I can't spend as much time talking on the phone on transit. But then studies have shown that the driving + cellphone combination makes people distracted, handsfree or not: I try to avoid cellphoning while driving anyways.

If you can spend your transit commute time doing anything fun/useful, then driving has personally opportunity costs.

My vague impression of Krugman pre-shrill was that he was not all that liberal. Moderate liberal, maybe.

"me2i81, there are no carpool lanes across the Bay or Golden Gate bridges, even though there should be."

Yes, but there are carpool lanes (3-person) on the Bay Bridge approach, before the metering lights, which is where most of the traffic jam is anyway. They can save 45 minutes on a bad day, especially if you're coming via the carpool flyover on 80 West. (That carpool flyover was supposed to be 24 hours a day, but the forces of evil prevailed.)

It's always interesting to see how far public infrastructure must decay (or be overused) prior to the introduction of market solutions. I would hazard that the current California metro highway system is well over 100% of capacity.

Similar results have been had in public education and health care - and I expect the same in Social Security.

Of COURSE congestion pricing is a good idea, especially now that it can be done with transponders.

As it happens, I have written a few things about sprawl. Like everyone else who has written about it, I noted that it is the result of a number of bad policys, among which is the fact that automobiles fail to pay their social cost. If we could internalize those costs, the improvements to society would be large.

I was thus placed on a panel at a meeting of something like the National Association of Transportation Planners in Chicago a few years back, where I extolled the virtue of congestion pricing. A San Francisco planner came up to me after and agreed that it was a great idea--that wasn't going anywhere in the SF Bay area. He talked about Lexus lanes, and said that the attitude was that everyone should suffer together. I pointed out that revenues collected from the Lexi could be used to subsidize public transit for the poor, but he still seemed to think it was a political non-starter.

But now that everyone from Ken Livingstone to not just John Tierney but Lee Kwan Yew has discovered the joys of congestion pricing, maybe it will take off in other places where it is needed--Chicago, NYC, the Capital Beltway.

Congestion pricing may be a good idea, but there is no legitimate 'case for sprawl and cars'. Every argument anyone has ever made for sprawl consists largely of pretending that hidden costs simply don't exist.

Well, since dynamic, self-calibrating traffic signs are de jour, how about...

Speed Limits that adjust on weather/light/traffic conditions?

Wheeeeee!

Color me skeptical, but whenever I read an article making claims backed by number from the Heritage Foundation, I refuse to believe it until I see the numbers in great detail. More often than not, their numbers are dodgy, and their calculations are nonsense. Perhaps it's possible that travelling by bus is five times as expensive as by car, but I'll believe it when I see it.

The only problem I have with congestion pricing is that it means someone knows where I'm driving -- someone who can be handed a subpoena, or who is already willing to cooperate with Ashcroft's brownshirts.

Color me skeptical, but whenever I read an article making claims backed by number from the Heritage Foundation, I refuse to believe it until I see the numbers in great detail. More often than not, their numbers are dodgy, and their calculations are nonsense. Perhaps it's possible that travelling by bus is five times as expensive as by car, but I'll believe it when I see it.

The only problem I have with congestion pricing is that it means someone knows where I'm driving -- someone who can be handed a subpoena, or who is already willing to cooperate with Ashcroft's brownshirts.

The alternative (mine) is to live down town and scrap the commute. You pay in less space -- but think of what you save on your wife's clothe, not to mention your own.

Interesting that the solution Brad and many readers choose is market based, while for health care they want a more socialized, government-sponsored solution because the market hasn't worked. Why can't the solution for jammed traffic be (1) better investment in better mass transit, (2) tougher zoning which stops the suburban sprawl (3) and inner city commitment to more dense housing (yes, Berkeley, you can go higher than three stories, and you need to!).

Because as soon as you improve traffic flow by market or other solution, the suburban sprawl will get worse, and you will have to build more pathways to work. Which costs all taxpayers more.

Congestion pricing is an interesting idea when and if you have anywhere near the appropriate infrastrucure in place, or if your existing infrastructure is essentially built-out to its maximum level. What I *don't* see an easy answer to in the NYT article, is what you are supposed to do for the relatively large number of quickly growing (or sprawling) places where you have a 2-lane road but need a 4- or 6-lane expressway. So people move to Columbia, MO for what they think is going to be a simpler, less congested life, but so many people are now expected to do it that our road system will be completely toast inside of 20 years. There is now an (un-funded) $500 million plan to improve I-70 through town to improve it from D-level to maybe C-level service. But there is probably another $500 million needed to do all of the other infrastructure we'll need to do in that time period. We're in the $500 per person per year category now. And I shudder to think how they'll accompish what have to be larger projects still in sub/exurban Atlanta or Las Vegas, or elsewhere.

I accept Tierney's big point that automobile-centric places are what we will be building, but I think the truly hard and unanswered question is how to pay for that build-out in a way that is as fair and elegant as HOT lane tolls. But what is the efficient prescription for the places that are growing really fast but haven't yet reached the scale of San Diego? I look around, but I don't really see much written about this. It's a distinctly low glory problem.

Three words--
Adaptive Cruise Control
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2876941

two points:

1.) make congestion pay, and you will create an incentive for congestion; Orange County has a couple of privately-financed toll-roads, which were put in place to relieve congestion. The problem: the owners of the toll-roads have a veto on measures by the public authorities to relieve congestion. Roads cannot be widened or intersections redesigned, because the private toll-road builders have contracts guaranteeing them congestion for x number of years.

2.) money is not always the problem. making good feedback on the extent of congestion available to people, who have some discretion, would help. Everyday, I travel the 101 thru Hollywood. There is no a single on-ramp from which a driver can actually see conditions on the freeway, BEFORE deciding whether to join the madding crowd streaming to or from downtown. A sensible measure would be to find a way to let people, who might be going only a short distance, know, while they can still change their minds, whether the freeway is clogged.

Keeping cars out of central London through market pricing is a swell idea: it's served by a large network of public transit; they only need to get people to suffer a little more in order to get out of their cars and onto the rails. The I-15 Corridor in San Diego has no such alternative. There's no "central San Diego" to go to, really, so even if you built a nice light rail line, there's no obvious destination, unless you could build a truly massive system, and the ridership probably doesn't support that. So you end up with something like the light rail line to Pasadena--a very expensive, under-utilized albatross. (There's a downtown here, but a large fraction of the workplaces are spread all over the county). The only chance for this area is much better bus service. I once tried to figure out how to get downtown from where I live (on the south end of the carpool/FasTrak lane) on a bus, and it was comical. There's simply nothing that's going to make me spend 2 hours on 2 different buses for a ride that takes 20 minutes in my car.

My solution is to live 5 minutes from my office, but that's a luxury that most people don't have.

Did anyone notice a side point Tierney made -- the problem with L.A. is that there aren't enough freeways? If only they'd replaced Santa Monica Boulevard with 6 roaring lanes, the way they'd wanted. Stupid pointyheads.

kathryn from SV: Good point about the fun activities. I missed the reading when I switched from mass transit to driving. But try having fun wedged standing between two sweating guys, one with bad breath and the other smelling like he had way too much booze the night before. I'm not joking. That happens when mass transit hits capacity, and people have to squeeze into cars. To say nothing about getting a seat.

From the looks of it, they are making santa monica into six roaring lanes...they're doing all sorts of construction on the street....

From the looks of it, they are making santa monica into six roaring lanes...they're doing all sorts of construction on the street....

It doesn't seem to me like a bad idea in the short term, though it does give the gummint an incentive to build more highways, and tear up more neighborhoods to do it. (Advocates of more highways generally don't talk about how much private property has to be taken to build the damn things; they seem to believe it won't be their property.) In the long run, heck, individual automobiles as primary transit just don't make sense--they use too much energy and take too much space.

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Here's an ever better idea: public transit.

Here in California, both houses of the state legislature are allegedly controlled by liberal Democrats, and even when Dems had a lock on all branches of state government (under Davis), the state party seemed more concerned about banning cell phones in cars, and further restricting smoking in public places, than the vast, deep and intractable problems faced by the state: the scarcity and staggering cost of housing (and in the cities, even rentals), the miserable quality of k-12 education, the existence of a new urban caste system (with wealthy white professionals/home owners at the top, and the vast "servant" class - clerks, waiters, maids, nannies, bartenders, customer service reps etc beneath them), and yes the perpetual gridlock (and lack of public transit) in California's metro areas.

(Nice rap lyrics on gambling up there.) I was wondering, what is the contractual commitment to the driver of the operator of express toll lanes? When you pay a fee to go fast, and then find out that the toll road itself is congested, what are you paying for? And should the operator (a monopoly provider of a "market solution" to traffic jams) be able to modulate tolls -- change them at will -- to maintain a certain traffic speed/density? And if so, does the service become one for the very wealthy -- the operator discovers the optimum pricing level far above what even a desparate middle class commuter will pay?

Just a couple of notes on congestion charging in London - my wife runs surveys for Transport for London, so I've been hearing a lot about it:

- The idea of the Congestion Charge is to jump-start an improvement in public transport. London needs better busses (the Underground is at full capacity), so the Charge is supposed to make bus services more reliable (by getting people off the roads) while funding improvements. In practice, most people prefer to pay and keep driving - the current hope is that better busses and a good PR campaign will fix this.

- Enforcement is by automated license-plate reading cameras. (I gather that it's easier to do this with British plates than with American ones.) This means no special passes or radio gadgets are needed - just a record of payment, which you can do at a newsagents, by phone, or on the web. You can also after you travel, if you don't leave it too long.

In metro Atlanta, living near your in-town job is not a viable alternative for most families because the in-town public schools suck.

Of course some live in the far suburbs because they like to spend saturday morning mowing the lawn, but a very large number are there simply for the schools.

Basically the in-town areas are populated by the poor, gay, or young professionals with no school age children. When the Yups have school age children they bolt for the suburbs. I would suggest a publicly financed school voucher system as a reasonable alternative to congestion pricing.

paulo: That's easy. You are paying for access.

RAND just announced a study showing the ill health effects of sprawl: residents of driving cities (like Atlanta) have health profiles of walking city residents 5 years older. As in, an Atlantan of 40 is as healthy as a New Yorker of 45. 8600 people in the study, 38 cities, next month's Public Health.

Also, the head pediatrician for the CDC in Atlanta has documented the massive ill health impacts of sprawl living on children - those kids in their suburban schools are paying a price with their very lives, decon.

I'd also like to note that every suburbanite insists that the schools in the nearest city are abominable, and so they had no choice but to move to their nice, white suburb. Funny how there's zero correlation between sprawl and actual, tested urban school quality. For instance, Pittsburgh Public Schools are actually quite good, with innovative and exceptional programs. But sprawl here is actually somewhat worse than in Cleveland, where almost literally every school has been designated Failing by NCLB, and where the state had to take over the system. Why, it's almost as if "poor public schools" are a rationalization, not a reason....

All very interesting observations JRoth.

But I'm not sure where you get the impression that there is "zero correlation" between sprawl and tested school quality. Here in the Atlanta area, for example, SAT scores and geography are highly correlated. If the school is within a 15 mile radius of Atlanta City Hall it sucks.

I don't know much about the situation elsewhere, but in Atlanta, anyone dumb enough to think the in-town schools are "good" -- by any measure -- must have gone to one of those in-town schools.
Because, almost without exception, they suck.

That's a one to one correlation, in other words. Inner city school implies bad school.

I'll have to find that report that calculates the costs of driving vs. the costs of public transportation. If in the years since I studied it they've come up with better measures of costs of air pollution, I'd like to read them.

But for me in the Bay Area, a driving commute is a strong net loss: I cannot work, I cannot play, and (if W2) I cannot deduct it. At best I listen to some decent music or news programs. Luckily my 45 and my 55 mile long commutes were both anticommute directions: no being stuck in 20 mph traffic during regular commute hours.

But here some commutes have no reasonable public transit. 7 rail systems, and almost none inter-compatible or interconnecting. To get from the South bay to the southern East Bay requires going on an upside-down U shaped transit ride up to San Francisco and then across and down the East Bay (why didn't Bart originally cicle the whole bay? politics). We used to have trolley lines, but they and their land got eaten up in the 40's: expensive to buy back.

For many Bay Area residents, a driving commute has no freedom: you have to leave at 5am to beat traffic, you cannot stop during your commute to shop (because then you'd end up in worse traffic), you must take shorter lunches so you can leave earlier. Unless the phone is a significant part of your job, the drive is pure lost time.

When taking transit I can always listen to music, sometimes read books or work on my laptop, and even if I'm standing I can browse the web or read ebooks on my handheld. That time spend is either neutral or a net gain money-wise, and definitely a net gain to my happiness.