– Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. The opinions expressed are her own. —
Christmas Day in most cities will be serene, free of weekday traffic jams as workers enjoy a Thursday that is free of normal routines. Many commuters wish that the free-flowing driving could last all year long. Traffic congestion wastes drivers’ time and gasoline, pollutes, reduces employment, and pushes businesses and shoppers away from cities.
There is hope. New global positioning system technology and congestion pricing can reduce traffic jams. In mid-January, 10,000 transportation professionals, including people from the incoming Obama administration, will convene in Washington D.C. at meetings of the Transportation Research Board, part of the National Academy of Sciences, to discuss solutions.
Road use varies with time of day. Time-of-day pricing can encourage drivers to shift non-essential trips to less busy hours, and eliminate some trips altogether.
London’s system of road pricing, with cars charged $16 to enter the center, is held up as a model for other cities. But its main flaw is that drivers pay flat fees, and are not charged by miles driven or by routes taken.
A better scheme would be to have drivers pay per mile, with higher charges on more heavily-used streets and in periods of heaviest congestion.
With prices of transponders and GPS falling, sophisticated and efficient systems are now possible. In some places they are optional, with drivers volunteering to participate in exchange for a reduction in license plate fees or even a credit against fuel taxes.
Here’s how this could work. GPS devices could be given to drivers who choose to participate—one per car—and drivers pay as easily as they are now paying for cell phones or E-ZPass tolls. Participating motorists could be exempt from license-renewal fees, but would pay road charges instead, charges that could vary by type of road used and time of day. Driving in rush hour along a busy road would cost more than driving on a little-used road late at night.
In Oregon, GPS-based distance measurements are designed to replace fuel taxes it now levies to pay for the use of its roads (for the full report, click here). Oregon would not immediately require all vehicles to have GPS. At least to start with, motorists would have a choice of paying either fuel taxes or mileage charges.
Efficiency in road pricing would relieve congestion. But it raises the politically thorny question of what to do with the revenue. In my view, cities must resist London’s unpopular inclination to use revenues to finance increased general spending, a measure defeated in New York and in Manchester, England.
To be acceptable to voters, a new road charging scheme should:
• Use advanced GPS-based systems, of the kind being pioneered in Oregon;
• Apply congestion pricing as part of a more general reform of financing road use, such as phasing out fuel taxes;
• Use monetary incentives, such as abolishing annual licensing fees or introducing new charging schemes on a voluntary basis; and
• Ensure that new revenues improve financing and use of roads, rather than for public transportation.
Employers could help, too. Some firms could enable employees to avoid high-priced peak driving rates by allowing flexible schedules or even telecommuting.
Critics claim congestion pricing is unfair to lower-income drivers. But if the system were voluntary, only those who wanted to participate would do so, and could receive rebates of fuel taxes.
Alternatively, low-income motorists could be given credits on their bills—cash incentives—to take part, ensuring that they have the opportunity to save money by avoiding peak-hour driving.
To reduce pollution and protect themselves from choking on traffic, cities must find a way to reduce congestion and enable people to travel more quickly and easily.
This Christmas Day, as we enjoy uncongested roads, we should think of a way to keep them like that all year round.
You can contact Diana Furchtgott-Roth at dfr@hudson.org. For previous columns, click here.
Pricing mileage is not an efficient way to reduce congestion and pollution. Basically it will just make various entities lots of money since people HAVE to get to work and to the store, etc. What we need is:
More railroads.
More commuter trains.
More buses.
More monorails.
More car pooling.
More bicycle trails.
More De-suburbanization.
Mass transit is the only efficient way to take traffic off the roads and make life easier for commuters. It might even stop the current trend of building ever more "forever" toll roads that punish the middle and lower classes.
Trackback
88 comments so far
Previous | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Next
I must say…this item has been promoted on the Reuters home page for several days, surrounded by a long list of the world’s tragedies and catastrophes. It certainly makes the headline a little less urgent. When the world is falling apart, “traffic congestion” certainly seems less important.
About your comment JR, I agree with what you mentioned about the leadership punishment, by taxation, by fines, and levies. That is all because the people who become government forget that at one point they were people too, paying taxes, fees, etc. Now perhaps they become exempt of these burdens.
The solution to traffic congestions that nobody, I mean nobody ever mentioned here or in any article I’ve ever read about such a topic is the simple syncronization and alternation of traffic lights. But that would get in the way of businesses all over cities and town across America. You all should be greatful to the businesses, small, medium and large, that gether in annual meetings in the city meetings to determine that the traffic lights should stay the way they are so that people driving on the streets see their businesses and go patronize them.
If people only new that all this traffic jam every day going to work and comming back from work is caused indirectly, or even directly by the businesses along the road, people would get so enraged - hopefully - and not patronize their local businesses anymore.
In other countries where Oil companies and Car makers don’t dictate ( at least not as much as here in America)what kind of transportation model will be used, or how the system will work, traffic flows much better. And we are talking about the so to speak “Third World Countries”.
About the comment from Dennis White, I think we should not be so narrow minded and think that now the world is over and we should all concentrate in one thing only, and that is the macro economy. Someone has to work on that issue so that we all can benefit from spending less gas, polluting less the air, having more time for leasure out of the roads, and so on.
I think that Suzzane Smith wanted to say that low income drivers should not be on the road so often. I would agree with that since in third world countries the poor take busses and trains most of the times to go to work and move around. Even the medium class uses this kind of transportation because it is efficient and inexpensive. Why can America be like this? Most people are really bad drivers because MOST PEOPLE ARE THE POOR driving on freeways and roads. So, the low income people essencially are in the situation they are because THEY NEVER STOP PROCREATING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If we have to pay for the milage or the roads we are occupying, so be it. That might be one of the solutions to take off the streets all or most of the poor and the moreons with GMC SUV’s who usually are the illiterate latinos. Please don’t hate me for saying that because you know it is true. Nothing against latinos or any other nationality, only against ignorance, poverty and perpetuation of both.
Thanks for quoting me JR and for paraphrasing the rest of my comment.
I think we can all forget the Christmas wish. The only way there will ever be or has ever been a loss of congestion in urban areas- from the days of Ancient Rome to the mega city of Paris and London in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present day has been the economic decline of the city itself. Rome solved its traffic problems sometime in the 6th century AD. It had died. Paris and London developed newer and more efficient ways of moving vast numbers in the nineteenth century. Every improvement made for an even denser center city usually. But Paris put artificial height restrictions on buildings and the urban area spread.
This country will never solve the problem of traffic congestion because it is largely a matter of subjective expectations. No one can actually define a “quick commute. What is considered an acceptable commuting time has a way of lengthening. People who can no longer afford the city move to the suburbs and keep going further out as the costs rise. That artificial scarcity we built into the suburban world by zoning “bedroom” communities has seen to that. I know of people who commute up to four hours a day to work eight. That is not a traffic problem that is a land use problem. Everybody in the suburbs wants to be Mr. Blandings and they want it to stay that way forever. That was also one more contributing factor to the burst housing bubble. Houses become too damn expensive for the locations they occupy. At any other time in history they would have been removed or converted to larger and more cost effective structures. That is the stupidity of our land use planning. We don’t allow economic forces to take their course anymore.
If you lived in a city where no trip could take you more than 15 minutes, the 20 minute commute would be a disaster and a cause to sack the traffic commissioner. As an historical anecdote - that is exactly how long it took the average Pompeii pedestrian to walk from one end of the city to the other. 15 minutes. The faster we make the trip the faster people will expect all trips to be. The rapid speed increase of the computer is a case in point. The faster it gets the more we expect them all to work that quickly.
We get spoiled.
Leadership JR is rather like what the Germans wanted in the late 20’s and what they got was the Third Reich. Don’t say that word too loudly. Someone with more expensive ideas than Mrs. F-R might hear you.
And by the way - although they don’t ask for comments on news stories, Shame on Israel for having yet another temper tantrum. Almost another case in point where someone does not want the least deviation from their more than adequate life style and routine while the so called “bad people” get the living crap beat out of them after a year or more of softening up through slow starvation. Maybe we should all be worrying about bigger issues than how long it takes to get to work. Those people in the cities and towns near the Gaza border could have moved you know. I’m sure the Gazans would all love to get out but they can’t. I can’t quite understand the logic of that bit of human traffic control or the masterminds behind the present stomach turning spectacle. Reuters really should ask for reader’s comments on that coverage. They might be surprised by what the average reader thinks about all that “got to preserve the cultural purity and demographic plurality of you know who against the you know whats”.
The killer solution to traffic jams:
- less cars
- more public transportation: buses, trains, undergrounds, etc.
That article is fundamentally flawed.
1. Rationing is not a solution.
2. Road capacity is currently used very innefficeintly.
Automated GPS navigation can be eaisly added to most modern cars that already have throttle by wire and electric power steering.
Cars tailgating at high speed can increase traffic flow 10 times!
• Ensure that new revenues improve financing and use of roads, rather than for public transportation.
Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, your attempt to deal with the issue of congestion is valiant, but alas, fails to deal with the problem comprehensively.
In North America, we have more roads than ever before, and yet they never seem to be enough. Why is that?
It boils down to flexibility. Every major city has strangled itself by restricting traffic to corridors (whether in-town roads or expressways) that limit options. Every major city has surrounded itself with endless fields of houses where streets are filled with ‘crescents’, ‘courts’, ‘lanes’. In other words these roads don’t go anywhere except back to the main corridor. The old-fashioned grid structure still found in older inner cities where you could turn off anywhere has been stymied by one-way streets and inadequate programming of signal-lights.
In my current city London, Ontario, many sleepy side-streets inexplicably have standard 3 minute signal-lights, even though 1 or 2 cars are at side-street portion of the intersection, which means the 20 cars on the main corridor wait to move long after those 1-2 cars have moved. They are trying to improve this with signal-cameras which can tell if there are no more cars traveling through the intersection, but apparently it’s taking a while to upgrade the system.
In Toronto, Ontario, where I lived for 10 years, it was often faster for me to ride my bicycle downtown from my apartment - about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) - than to drive, and also cheaper as I could chain my bike to any of the many bike racks available. Not necessarily better for my health though, breathing in fumes from street-level pollution from all the cars……
When we break with the idea that 75% of new housing can sit on what are basically dead-end roads with virtually ZERO traffic at any hour of the day or night - while being maintained by city equipment and resources - and allow more flexibility for drivers, traffic patterns will adjust themselves naturally.
Your quote above is basically nonsensical. Major investment in public transportation is a necessity. ALL road taxes, tolls, licensing fees, and anything else the government can dream up MUST be used to encourage us to use a reliable, efficient, and relatively cheap public service.
At the moment, most smaller cities have very slow public transportation service. I had to buy a car because on the bus, it would take me 90 minutes each way to travel the 5 kilometres to work on the bus, but 20 minutes by car, and that only because their is a major highway nearby.
A lesson I learned in Quebec City was that public transportation can be reliable and fast for relatively little additional cost. Quebec City can’t afford it’s own subway system, and large parts of the city are built on very hilly terrain (think San Francisco) in very old built-up areas anyway. What the city did was create express routes, where the bus only stops every 500 metres or so, instead of the usual 150 of a normal route. The normal, slow route still exists, but it’s amazing how many times I was willing to walk the additional distance because I could travel downtown very quickly.
With respect to your views, I would like government policies that encourage us to get out of the car, walk, wait for the bus, even get cold in the winter, if it meant saving gasoline, while not losing too much time.
Even if we could afford to do this, it is straight out of 1984. and if I’m not mistaken, we already pay for these roads.
too often these days America is trading freedom and privacy for convenience and safety, this plan would only be another nail in the coffin of liberty.
As drastic as that seems, the implications are there.
why not talk to the government frankly and ask why this couldn’t be done with cell phones,which are already gps devices, even when turned off, and while they’re at it they can listen to you talk.
addressing traffic congestion is akin to blowing your nose if you have a cold, it does not help the cold itself, in this case the cold is our voracious consuming habits and completely unsustainable lifestyle.
We already have a way to control congestion. It’s called unemployment. No job to annoy other people by driving to. And no money to warrant driving around shopping. Doesn’t need to be complicated. A lot of good, obvious ideas here. A GPS in my car? How is that “voluntary” if I do happen to have a minimum wage job and daycare to pay for?
I live in South Florida. It is positively delightful right now because there are so few tourists here clogging our roads and honking their horns.People are way, way more worried about food and bills than traffic congestion.
Suburban sprawl is the root of most congestion issues, as it forces commuters to travel ever-lengthening distances to reach work in the city. Instead of attempting to change driving habits through coercion, governments should focus on making cities safer, cleaner, and more affordable places to live.
“To reduce pollution and protect themselves from choking on traffic, cities must find a way to reduce congestion and enable people to travel more quickly and easily,” the author writes.
Exactly right. Bolster mass transit. Stop putting money into roads.
Diana ,
You may very well get your wish several months from now. The world’s economies are not stable and there will be continuing higher unemployment numbers for the foreseeable future. My personal feeling for 2009 is oil will again be over $100 per barrel and that US unemployment will be between 12-15% officially , but much higher unofficially because of the way the numbers are calculated.
If you do get to drive without all the traffic you will be one of the lucky few that can still afford that privilege.
The Transportation Research Board is part of the the
National Academy of Sciences, not NSF.
Make all traffic signals intelligent, and sensor-based, with advanced sensors and adaptive computer controls. this would save tons of time and pollution.
tom fleming
yes here here!!!
while people are losing their homes what a great new tax and hopefully we will see a better type of car on the road as well. the thought of my maid dropping off my children late for school is just to much to bear.
and if they don’t like it let them eat cake
shame on you Furchtgott-Roth
The traffic congestion problem could be resolved by eliminating the 8 to 5 mentality. Example: Ever notice how there is no traffic congestion on holidays when government workers stay home? Just evaluate the need for everyone to actually be at work at the same time and for them to go to lunch and home at the same time. In most places, outside of commute hours, there are plenty of roads. There should be rewards for off-shifting people so they won’t add to the congestion. There should be penalties for unnecessarily requiring employees to arrive at 0800 or scheduling training or meetings at those times. I’ve worked for several corporations that are global and even have 24×7 call centers and support, but management invariably runs an 8-5 M-F ship. Even Universities and Hospitals do it. The biggest hurdle will be government and unions as they stand in the way of flexible work hours with their strict legislation and contracts requiring additional pay for non-traditional hours. At the very least, there should be commute permits and bumper stickers so those trying to get to work will no have to compete with others who are not. That would make more sense than charging fees to people that do go to work. Instead, fine the retired guy pulling his boat to the lake at peak commute. The couple with the motor home or any of the non-workers that can’t figure out they would be helping reduce costs and pollution by not adding to the congestion during prime traffic times.
So you’re proposing to restrict peoples’ right to move freely in the country with an automobile unless they pay the required fees, all while tracking their every move. Sounds kinda like the Soviet Union.
A writer offered “Cities like New York and Boston were congested even before the private automobile was created. They built subways and streetcars to relieve that problem - Our problem is we are now dependent on private automobiles to reach the greatest part of the metro areas - the suburbs. And those areas become congested with traffic as well.”
An historical perspective would reveal the whole tragedy of individual transportation. Our major challenge is getting leadership from government. Too often there are attempts to produce change by legislating ‘pain by taxation’. There must be a marketing or psychological theory about avoidance behavior that suggests governments can retain their popularity by people crying out for change due to a bit of taxation. Then the actions of government are the result of the ‘wishes of the people’.
In the process ‘Leadership’ seems to have flown out the window, specifically the leadership and wisdom to see that governments’ promoting automobile transportation over mass rail has produced endless grid sprawl as opposed to the linear and nodular arrangement of many traditional areas in Europe and other areas in the world.
Planning for a return to nodes of urban development linked by mass rail (trains, subways, etc), thereby preserving green corridors of natural and agricultural space between them, is long overdue in north america.
Of course the rebellious spirit of “freedom” in Amerika would describe this as another form of socialism. However I thought that socialization of the raw spirit of youth by the application of wise leadership was the mandate of parents, and in a social political sense, of government. I am so weary of leadership by punishment, by taxation, by fines, and levies. Strange that the ‘home of the free’ has so many people incarcerated !
So major corporations lobbied for roads and the expansive power of the automobile, and government repaid their source of donation by mega projects like the interstates (depression relief for the people). Now we find ourselves in a severe bind in our transportation systems with cars forced to mimic individually driven and powered rail cars on limited access freeways, confined to lanes, with prescribed ’sidings’ (on and off ramps). One major result is each individual or small group of passengers is driving around on a proliferating mass of roadways burning their own fuel at a tremendously inefficient rate compared to hundreds or thousands being pulled by one 5000 hp engine. Real smart system for social transportation we have got here!!
Now the green spaces in urban areas are taken up with ‘freeways’ (ha, what is free about pollution, and the burden of carrying and feeding a car). Ah, america the free, free to pay for licenses, repairs, tires, roads, cars, and gas,,just the way the major corporations wanted it when they bought up subways, trams, rail systems,,, and shut them down, while the government stood by with their mouths stoppered.
Solutions, long and painful likely, with governments adhering to tight constraints on urban growth, mandated implementation of light rail systems between compact ‘new towns’ (as opposed to a new suburb sprawling beside a choking city). Requirements for all passenger vehicles below a certain size to be electrically driven. Buying up run down neighborhoods and adding them to restored green corridors. Of course the systems of government themselves need change. We need representatives that are not interested in making a career of politics, who will serve one term, speak the truth, offer all their wisdom, and retire to ‘civie street’. In this way we may find more wisdom and caring for the people than self interest and caring for the donations and donators who feed the political power game.
TO continue as we are invites a new ‘french revolution’ where the political and industrial elites had their heads removed for their overwhelming abuse of power and the abused and downtrodden masses of ‘consumer units’.
regards, JR
We need to increase public transportation. I live in Canton, Ga. If I want to go anywhere I have one choice, Drive an automobile. Any other option is way too exspencive and or time consuming. To leave my house I have only 3 other choices. Walk, Ride a bike, or take a cab. It takes an hour just to get a cab to my house. It would cost at least $20.00 just to go 8 miles to towm. I then could take a bus to other towns. Buses are limited and very slow. Good public transportation would also save lives by cutting down on people DUI and getting auto’s off the road.
What is it about you, Diana, that you refuse to accept the one and only solution; that is, just keep increasing tolls on bridges and roads and taxes on fuel, until the conjestion stops!
As to your comment that the above would be unfair to low income drivers, this is a bogus argument.
Low income drivers will just have to allocate their priorities like everyone else.
If it is their choice to give a priority to drive where they are going, then low income drivers will have to cut back in another area, just like everyone else; maybe save electricity by keeping the TV off or going on a diet and save money that way, if they are overweight.
Rationing (in this case rationing of transportation resources) never works and just fosters needless regimentation for all.
We don’t want your “rationing” fairness.
Earth to Diana! Our country is bankrupt, our dollar yields nothing, unemployment is very high, banks are hoarding bailout money instead of lending, our banks have been nationalized, shortly the Big 3 will also be nationalized, scandals abound on wall street & banking, etc,etc,etc—pls tell me what bubble you live in to worry about traffic jams ( forgetting most recently also $4 per gal. gas—lady, stay where you are because if you ever left your world you would definitely have a nervous breakdown with our normal(?)problems we are currently facing–enjoy your dreams! DRW/Haverford,PA