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If highways push traffic onto local roads, why not toll them too?
Peter Gordon blogs about a paper he presented at the Transportation Research Board conference in DC:
My friends and I just presented this paper at the Transportation Research Board meetings in Washington DC. We tested the effects of tolling Los Angeles’ freeways in the peak hours (we tested 10 cents and 30 cents per mile). It’s a simulation on a real network and many substitutions occur. As expected, peak-hour freeway speeds increase, some people switch to surface streets and that traffic slows, some switch to off-peak hours and some (very few) travel less. And politicians take in a lot of money! That’s for the 10-cent toll. The 30-cent toll overloads the surface streets. Many other options can be tested, including only tolling some of the freeways. Planners have voiced concern that tolling the freeways would overload surface streets. There is probably a “sweet spot” that can easily be found. We also plan to look for effects on freight travel as well as travel by income groups.
He’s established that “very few” people lessen their travel. And if the the number of people who switch to off-peak hours is small compared to the number of people who move to surface streets (and judging from my very cursory perusal of the paper, it seems like this is the case), then tolling is just shifting the burden from highways to local roads. This could be a problem since local roads, unlike highways, are paid for almost entirely out of general revenue, not user fees. It seems like the rational thing to do at this point is to argue for tolling local surface streets as well, perhaps through a congestion charge. Maybe I missed it (like I said, I didn’t read the presentation paper thoroughly), but his talk of a “sweet spot” in the summary makes me think he didn’t consider tolling local roads to be an option.
see above
Once the local roads are clogged then the ones that balked will pay the toll. The toll needs to increase to keep the balance. Need to leave the local roads toll-free but slower.
The local roads in question aren’t the ones in your neighborhood, of course. Thy’re the feeder streets and likely to be paid for out of state and federal general funds as well as property taxes.
Maybe it’s different out on the West Coast where there’s not much street connectivity outside of highways, but here on the East Coast, there are plenty of “backroad” routes that barely use any numbered highways at all.
Though we haven’t seen a congestion fee for surface streets yet appear in the USA, even when they start to appear then I think it would be very politically difficult to implement
people love to drive for free, especially when there aren’t effective alternatives, though LA has better public transit than most people think
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Depending on where the tolls are, they could apply to all travel – for example, if they’re based on chokepoints, like the Manhattan congestion pricing or bridge toll plan.
Perhaps instead of tolling local roads, which seems logistically difficult, the focus should be on promoting market parking rates. Take away free parking at the destination and you can shift drivers to transit and active transportation alternatives lowering the burden on both highways and local roads.
I think we need an all-of-the-above approach, although I think you’re right that parking will be both logistically easier to price (and allocate!) according to the market, and will yield higher dividends in terms of “marketness,” in that parking today is probably underpriced to a larger extent than local roads.
Toll the OFF ramps?
Shifting the burden to someone else (ie ‘externalizing costs’) is the American way!