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$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

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Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#121

Post by IshKebab »

madaxe_again wrote: post #101
maxxxxx wrote: post #37

My 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…

They have a strategy in the UK to get everyone to pay £40 tolls, regardless of your income - by stealth. There’s been a trend towards digital tolls - that is, no physical means to pay, you just have to know that you need to go online to their site to pay within an hour of leaving the toll road/bridge. Thing is, many operators have little signage, poor or unavailable websites, and you can end up in a situation where y…

Rubbish. I guess this happened to you once somewhere and now you think it is a 'strategy', but the only automatic toll I can think of is the London congestion charge and everyone knows about that.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#122

Post by eru »

beobab wrote: post #83
sharpercoder wrote: post #79

We have the best road system in the world with high quality roads over the whole country. Most roads are "rain-resistant", meaning heavy rainfall does not affect road conditions negatively. We don't have any toll roads. We do pay a relatively high tax for it though. The article is spot on that tolls are the consequence of public not willing to increase their taxes.

Where are you?

Perhaps Singapore? (Though high taxes wouldn't fit. Perhaps Germany?)

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#123

Post by dalbasal »

speedplane wrote: post #113
dalbasal wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a 1st principles economic rationale that agrees with you. In a nutshell, you need to get down to the "utility" concept. It's used (for example) to theoretically prove/support the idea that free exchange is always beneficial for both parties. Putting prices onto otherwise unrestricted resources likewise optimizes for utility, especially if there are tragedy of the commons issues. The catch is that uti…

Agree that dollars are not the ideal measure of utility, primarily because of of diminishing marginal returns as you get more wealthy. But they are pretty good for the majority. Appealing to a right to an egalitarian "family dinner time" is also not terribly convincing. There are plenty of rich people who don't care much about family dinner time. There are plenty of poor who would eagerly spend half their day's wages…

I don't think that's fair. I'm not making an emotional appeal. I'm making (or attempting, at least) a rational one.

You can put it in diminishing marginal value terms, but I'm basically saying the same thing with fewer assumptions. Family time (or TV time or whatever) is an example to demonstrate that utility does not scale with money.

On the whole poor people commuting enjoy their free time, pleasant commutes and the other things at stake just as much as rich people. That's a fairly intuitive point.

Given that, the price that does not correspond to the value it provides^, inasmuch as income is unequally distributed. It corresponds to the wealth of the person making a decision and the value it provides.

The value of the fast lane is fairly evenly distributed between commuters. Everyone wants to get home. Everyone hates traffic. There are differences, but they're not huge on average.

What isn't evenly distributed is income. Therefore the sorting that this mechanism does is a little bit of utility based sorting and a lot of income based sorting.

If income was more even, there would be an argument for such a system. Given the actual distribution, the system is probably utility destroying.

Tolls are just a revenue raising mechanism, not an efficient allocation one.

^or to marginal costs

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#124

Post by Retric »

pm24601 wrote: post #102
vog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch! Regulating infrastructure purely by market mechanisms is an ugly anti-pattern that is well-known for decades, if not centuries. Among others, this creates an incentive to keep the resource scarce and to not invest into maintaining and expanding it. Why? Because the lowest level infrastructure is a natural monopoly: Even if it was technically feasible (put wires next to existing wires, put pipes next to existing…

I would like you to reconsider this point. Specifically, 1. driving causes pollution 2. people local to the freeway are heavily impacted by the pollution, 3. global warming is a real issue - solo drivers are a heavy contributor. 4. the freeway cost money and should have to pay its costs same as transit systems are made to pay their costs. fyi - i carpool to work / take transit. I would rather see free buses and heavi…

That's what gas taxes are for. Living near a freeway you are better off if they reduced congestion. Increasing congestion increases pollution as cars accelerate and break more frequently etc.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#125

Post by speedplane »

dalbasal wrote: post #123
speedplane wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that dollars are not the ideal measure of utility, primarily because of of diminishing marginal returns as you get more wealthy. But they are pretty good for the majority. Appealing to a right to an egalitarian "family dinner time" is also not terribly convincing. There are plenty of rich people who don't care much about family dinner time. There are plenty of poor who would eagerly spend half their day's wages…

I don't think that's fair. I'm not making an emotional appeal. I'm making (or attempting, at least) a rational one. You can put it in diminishing marginal value terms, but I'm basically saying the same thing with fewer assumptions. Family time (or TV time or whatever) is an example to demonstrate that utility does not scale with money. On the whole poor people commuting enjoy their free time, pleasant commutes and th…

I see your point now. I think you could go further with it. Arguably, a poor person who has never been on an airplane would get far more "utility" from a flight on a private jet than someone who flies every day. So one could argue (a stretch), that the poor, and not the rich, should ride that toll road if it would increase total happiness more.

But that seems ridiculous, and I think the issue here is that we're conflating capitalism with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism strives to maximize utility, i.e., total happiness. Capitalism strives for efficient use of scarce resources. They often overlap, but they are fundamentally different concepts.

Going back to the example, I buy your argument that tolls are a crude way of maximizing utility. However, they are a good way of putting a scarce resource (fast commuting time) to economic use.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#126

Post by CPLX »

closeparen wrote: post #77
mjevans wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lack of urban planning. * Not enough family sized units in the city (drive down cost with supply). * Insufficient quality of life in building codes. (Noise, smell, clean air, green spaces) * Lack of vertical density; This is begging for Cave of Steel like results complete with indoor parks and atriums.

There's not a lack of urban planning; there's an urban planning (and popular) consensus "lack of vertical density" == "quality of life."

That set of values is certainly not a consensus opinion.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#127

Post by rjmunro »

When the price algorithm goes above some unacceptable amount, they should just change it to "Carpool only", as it was before, and there would then be no reason for people to complain.

If they made the "Carpool only" have some sort of fine for violations, say $100, paid the same way as the toll would have been, people could still use it in real emergencies.

It sounds like the calibration of the toll amount is a bit off, and can probably be adjusted over time as the systems get experience managing the demand of the road. If they'd launched with an $8 toll, and ended up with gridlock on the road, would that have been better?

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#128

Post by nikanj »

rjmunro wrote: post #127

When the price algorithm goes above some unacceptable amount, they should just change it to "Carpool only", as it was before, and there would then be no reason for people to complain. If they made the "Carpool only" have some sort of fine for violations, say $100, paid the same way as the toll would have been, people could still use it in real emergencies. It sounds like the calibration of the toll amount is a bit of…

With a $40 toll and a $100 violation, it pays off to break the rules if you only get caught every third day(!)

Incidentally, I've NEVER seen anyone get pulled over for driving solo on the car-pool lane.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#129

Post by crankylinuxuser »

pwg wrote: post #105
RickS wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They combat this fairly smartly: the fine starts at $125 and doubles with every incident, up into the thousands. This was the case before this toll road, circa 2013 ish.

When the I-66 HOV lanes originally opened, there was a problem of some percentage of drivers being willing to risk an $X citation (and the delay while being written up) every few months in exchange for using the road every day. The solution that VA put in place to combat that is that the HOV violation citation not only has a money cost, but second or subsequent infractions within a five year window result in assessme…

That only proves that once lawmakers have access to a legitimate tool to get bad drivers off the road (you know, things like ignoring stop signs/lights and stuff that can get people killed), they'll use it on non-dangerous stuff as well.

Crooked fucks, they are.

Its the same lot that has made public urination into a "sex crime", registry and all.

Re: $40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology

#130

Post by OliverJones »

I'm a guy with a long commute and a dislike of traffic jams. I've shifted my work hours to get me to work by 6:30 am at the latest. I'll take the toll route (Boston's Tobin Bridge, $1.50) or the free route (I-93) without considerating cost because I've taught myself that time is worth more than money.

But if the Tobin toll abruptly went up to $20, my loss-aversion anxiety would spike (cf. this year's Nobel Memorial winner Richard Sunstein, for behavioral economics) and my behavior would change in ways that weren't exactly rational.

This already happened on the Tobin Bridge when the tolls were first introduced. People from the neighborhoods near the Tobin used alternate routes and clogged them. The government response was wise: issue special toll tags to neighbors giving them a discount on the Tobin. The wisdom was that it countered loss-aversion with a special privilege. It worked. (Of course, this being Massachusetts, there's a small but thriving black market in those special toll tags for wiseguys wanting to save a couple of bucks a day. But so what?)

In a place like the DC area, people react to loss anxiety by attacking public projects as well as by changing their behavior, so this experiment may not last too long. I hope they can get some skilfull behavioral economics people to work with them before the whole thing gets shut down hard by fake-angry politicians.

If the goal is really to increase vehicle occupancy, the highway needs stations named for Tom and Ray Magliozzi's Russian chauffeur (Pickup Andropoff) near the exits. Getting more people into cars has proven very difficult.

Understanding this kind of peak-load pricing, and how to apply it effectively, will help all sorts of future projects in our overcrowded metroplexes.

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