Gabriel Roth
2007-06-04 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

One of the most persistent burdens of living in the metro area is the traffic congestion.

Every day, from downtown to the Beltway, Route 7 in western Loudoun County and Interstate 270 near Frederick, lines of cars inch their way into the city and home again. For many, the commute has become a nightmare.

Billions of dollars have been spent over the past several decades on the Metro subway system, consultants and studies, additional buses, special high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, new technologies and other hoped-for panaceas, but the congestion, delays and road rage continue.

Are we doomed to spend a good portion of our lives, as Washington author Anthony Downs has argued, “stuck in traffic”? Is traffic congestion a sort of disease of civilization from which relief is impossible?

To the contrary. Our road systems are like relics of the late and unlamented Soviet Union: Socialist enterprises run by well-intentioned planners with no regard to the pricing and investment criteria that allocate goods and services in market economies. Just as Moscow citizens got relief from food lines by abolishing socialism and embracing capitalism, the market economy could liberate road users from traffic congestion.

If pricing is applied to the scarce resource “road space” and the revenues produced from this pricing stimulates investment in new capacity — such as additional lanes or new technologies to speed traffic past bottlenecks — congestion can be reduced. But “if” is a big word when government is involved.

London and Stockholm, Sweden, already have demonstrated that such “congestion pricing” can reduce traffic problems in major urban areas. But, in a free society, getting the prices right is not enough.

In London, surplus revenues are used to subsidize transit; in Stockholm they are dedicated to road improvement. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed a system similar to London’s in much of Manhattan.

How about D.C.? Councilman Marion Barry’s call to install toll booths at entry points into the city is clearly not the answer, if only because toll booths themselves would create additional congestion.

Furthermore, if tolls were charged at the entry points to D.C., the prices wouldn’t reflect changing traffic conditions at different places during different times of the day. Barry and Mayor Adrian Fenty apparently see toll booths as a new revenue source — a substitute for the “commuter tax” long desired by D.C. politicians.

In 1959, the late Nobel Laureate William Vickrey proposed to Congress’s Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems that congestion in the D.C. area could be relieved by using variable tolls, electronically-collected. Nearly half a century later we’re still having the same discussion.

Road pricing is not rocket science. Thanks to recent advances in technology, road users can be charged electronically, without vehicles having to stop, as on the Dulles Toll Road. Furthermore, charges can be varied from place to place and time to time as traffic conditions change, as is being done in Southern California, Minneapolis, Minn., and Denver.

Local governments, presumably with congressional support, could establish a “Washington Metropolitan Highway Authority” with the power to levy transport tolls and spend the surplus revenues for the benefit of those who pay the tab. But who would run such an organization?

Experience with politically controlled “trust” funds — such as the Social Security and Highway Trust Funds — shows that money raised as appropriate and necessary for one government purpose is often diverted to other purposes.

Given such realities, the only way to relieve congestion through the market economy might be to place the money collected under the care of nongovernment trustees, some possibly selected by representatives of road users, who would have a fiduciary duty to see that the money is spent as intended and could be sent to prison if it’s not.

The market can reduce our traffic woes, but only if revenues are used to increase capacity and improve technology — not if they’re cannibalized by politicians.

Gabriel Roth of Chevy Chase is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and editor of “Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads.”