Tolls change routing decisions. If you can't gauge a toll until you are at the road because it keeps changing, that's a risk. Dynamic tolling asks people to take a risk; that will never work unless they do like Uber and fix the price at the time you leave. It's only fair that the planning risk should fall on the central traffic manager, as they have the most information and capabilities.
$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
61–70 of 284 posts
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious how they use the money from the $40 toll. If, for example, they used the money to improve roads and other public transportation options so that everyone on average gets where they need to go faster, then that ought to make everyone happy. Or else just divide up the revenue and mail everyone in the state a check at the end of the year. That would make me less angry about the fact that other people are able…
> "I'm curious how they use the money from the $40 toll." The article says that it is being used to fund new construction: "This is what transportation costs!" "The real reason there's sticker shock is that the real cost of road transportation is hidden from most voters. Gas tax money goes to states and the US Department of Transportation which flows back as what seems like free federal money to build a lot of roads.…
Transportation costs are perhaps the most perfect example of Parkinson's law and it's permutations. “purchasing expands to fill the entire budget.”
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#63My main concern is that with tolls that high that only people with a lot of money can afford them (I make six figures but I doubt I would ever pay $40 for a toll. I would need much more money). These are also often the most influential people so they may think that everything is OK because they can afford the toll and never suffer in traffic. I think the same is happening with health care. Most people in Congress hav…
Road capacity is a scarce resource, and it should be allocated with a market mechanism like every other resource. You can then take the economic gain created by the increased efficiency and tax it to provide more public transit services.
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#64"The government could theoretically go back to the 20th century model of taxing more and building more free transportation, but voters haven't shown much appetite for raising their taxes."
This is the author weaseling out of addressing the reality that most Americans want higher taxes on the rich. Not taxes raised on everyone, not funds raised through purchasable perks.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/208685/majority-say-wealthy-amer...
"A significant majority of Americans believe that upper-income people and corporations pay too little in taxes, supporting other research showing that well less than half of Americans -- 38% -- agree with a proposal to cut corporate income taxes, and that the majority favor heavier taxes on the rich."
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#65"The government could theoretically go back to the 20th century model of taxing more and building more free transportation, but voters haven't shown much appetite for raising their taxes." This is the author weaseling out of addressing the reality that most Americans want higher taxes on the rich. Not taxes raised on everyone, not funds raised through purchasable perks. http://news.gallup.com/poll/208685/majority-say…
Which would make voting in a president that openly campaigned in a platform to massively cut taxes on corporations and the rich unthinkable, right?
You can often predict reasonably well what individual segments of the voting public will vote for, but they overlap with each other so divining the will of the voters as a whole is really hard. Unless you just promise everyone the earth without any regard to the cost. That can work.
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#66My main concern is that with tolls that high that only people with a lot of money can afford them (I make six figures but I doubt I would ever pay $40 for a toll. I would need much more money). These are also often the most influential people so they may think that everything is OK because they can afford the toll and never suffer in traffic. I think the same is happening with health care. Most people in Congress hav…
Road capacity is a scarce resource, and it should be allocated with a market mechanism like every other resource. You can then take the economic gain created by the increased efficiency and tax it to provide more public transit services.
Ability to pay is not the only way to ration scarce resources, neither is it proven to be the best in all scenarios: this is why you can’t pay to bring your court date forward
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#67My main concern is that with tolls that high that only people with a lot of money can afford them (I make six figures but I doubt I would ever pay $40 for a toll. I would need much more money). These are also often the most influential people so they may think that everything is OK because they can afford the toll and never suffer in traffic. I think the same is happening with health care. Most people in Congress hav…
Road capacity is a scarce resource, and it should be allocated with a market mechanism like every other resource. You can then take the economic gain created by the increased efficiency and tax it to provide more public transit services.
Usually yes, but when one or a few suppliers are the sole source of a resource it’s not that simple. Especially when that resource is very widely used for a huge variety of applications. That’s becaus the benefit to society isn’t simple captured in the monetary cost.
Consider police vehicles, ambulances and utility maintenance vehicles. Does anybody really think they should have to pay tolls? A real market forces purist would say yes, but in reality passing along those costs efficiently isn’t practical. Similarly in theory all roads could be toll roads, but the cost of raising those tolls would massively increase the cost of the road infrastructure, driving up tolls in a vicious cycle. The gas tax is a reasonable compromise by taxing road use indirectly, it doesn’t capture the differing costs of different segments of roads and the demands on them, hence tolls on specific roads. So in the real world you can’t just treat everything like a nail and hit it with a market forces hammer. It’s a powerful and useful tool, one of the best we have, but still needs to be wielded responsibly with an eye to the intended outcome.
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#68I mean, one of the problems with tolls is that it is another form of taxing that has a bigger impact the lower income you have. Without getting into an ideological discussion, having surge pricing on tolls would contribute to a minor divide in class. In Australia this is a current topic, as (in Sydney specifically) there was a recent controversial highway widening which has been funded by tolls and constructed by a p…
Ive seen multiple sources say that widening roads only makes the problem worse yet in this article and in your comment it seems like the "solution" people are going for. That leaves me wondering; Are these sources not sound or are the people in charge of transport morons?
When people say widening roads makes the problem worse, they usually cite as an example 'before construction, traffic was congested for X minutes; and after it is congested for X + Y minutes' the problem is that often demand has increased in the meantime (because of population growth, or increased economic activity).
There is certainly some amount of induced demand, and in the right scenarios, that could make things significantly worse. In the Bay Area, if 880 was significantly widened but 101 and 280 were not, it might make it attractive to drive from San Francisco to San Jose by crossing the bay and taking 880 south. This could make 880 less effective for east bay users.
This doesn't become a significant issue if there's reasonable regional planning, and routes are kept in rough balance.
There's a limited budget for transportation projects though, and they can be complex and time consuming, so often roads aren't widened until there is a significant amount of peak congestion. During construction, things get worse, and afterwards, there's still a period of peak congestion. People who expect a road widening to create free flow conditions at all hours will be sorely disappointed. I'll add that on and off ramp design makes a big difference in traffic flow as well; a full clover leaf is good for interchanges with low traffic, but all the weaving makes for poor results in congestion; redesigning to avoid weaving helps flow tremendously without widening, although more/different space can be needed depending on the specific road alignment.
There is potential to argue about what is the best use of transportation money; I'm not familiar with transportation in the DC area though, so I won't weigh in on that.
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
where they previously had no permission to drive at all. I think this is where it's getting hung up. The signage and all other road markings on I-66 did not give a solo driver the overwhelming impression that they did not have "permission" to drive on those roads. Compounding this is that it was/is only during certain portions of the day. As an example, if I go onto the Dulles or Loudoun county toll roads, it's expli…
Definitely unique. I've never lived in DC but visited a few times for work and was flabbergasted when I heard about slug lines (I still am). It's a bad driving situation when you'll voluntarily get into a stranger's car, and drivers will just let random strangers in their car. That doesn't happen in any of the cities I've lived in.
At Microsoft in the 90s people would swoop by the bus stops to pick up bodies on Fridays for the HOV lanes home.
Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology
#70My main concern is that with tolls that high that only people with a lot of money can afford them (I make six figures but I doubt I would ever pay $40 for a toll. I would need much more money). These are also often the most influential people so they may think that everything is OK because they can afford the toll and never suffer in traffic. I think the same is happening with health care. Most people in Congress hav…
Road capacity is a scarce resource, and it should be allocated with a market mechanism like every other resource. You can then take the economic gain created by the increased efficiency and tax it to provide more public transit services.
I'm a really market-oriented guy, but I have concerns about wealth's distorting effect on markets. That is, the "cost" of an item is much less to a wealthy person than to a non-wealthy person.
Billionaire Bob can spend $100,000 on a whim, but Pauper Paul can't scrounge $10,000 for life-critical health-care. Or after a natural disaster, market theory says equilibrium prices rise to balance demand, but prices cannot rise enough so that Bob hesitates to buy all the ice for his drinks, pricing Paul out of buying ice to keep his insulin cold.
It almost feels like there needs to be some fixed currency that everyone gets equal amounts of per day and that can be exchanged for the really important things. But then some people will accumulate that currency, and we're back to wealth distortions.