Congestion Pricing

[jjakucyk]

Well it brings up an inherent issue with congestion pricing in that it can be very difficult to implement and manage properly.  In a situation like New York City where most of the congestion problems are caused by people driving into Manhattan from New Jersey, Staten Island, Brooklyn, or Yonkers, it's easy because the access routes are all via bridges and tunnels that naturally funnel/choke the traffic.  There's limited access points, most of which are already tolled, so it's easy to implement congestion pricing in that instance.

The situation starts to get much more difficult when there aren't those natural choke points.  In London where they had to create this nebulous downtown area and track cars by license plates at many many points of entry is a pretty over-the-top solution.  In a city without natural barriers to entry, the next logical solution would seem to be to implement congestion pricing on the major highways, with toll booths or a simpler camera system that is only on those major arteries.  That then creates a problem of people overwhelming the local street grid in order to avoid the charge though. 

I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment that just because you live within the congested area that it means you should be immune to congestion pricing.  If you drive on that congested road you're still adding to the problem, after all.  Also, living within the city means you should have more options than driving anyway, and even if you don't, the funds from congestion pricing should be used to build more of those alternatives.  It's an interesting idea though that say a city vehicle sticker or something would give you a pass, and it would certainly fix the issue say of someone who lives just outside the zone and works just inside the zone, but still nowhere near the center.  Making that person pay the same as someone else who's driving all the way through isn't really fair. 

I also don't buy the argument that people who don't have any choice but to drive shouldn't be penalized.  First, I don't really consider paying a more fair price for utilizing a resource to be penalizing.  Sure people don't like it when things like that are changed, but it prevents misuse of the resource.  There's several other situations where this has been done.  Many single-family homes in Chicago don't have water meters for instance.  Their bill is calculated on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.  Because of this however, their yards are always green as can be, and few people bother with water saving toilets or shower heads.  When buildings are renovated or new houses built, they have water meters.  Are they being penalized?  They don't have any alternative but to have water, but they still need to pay for it.  The same is true for electricity, natural gas or heating oil, and telephone.  These are all pretty much essential services, yet we don't have any qualms about paying for what we use rather than a lump sum that allows for unlimited use.  The poor still get those utilities, they're just a lot more careful to make sure they don't squander them.  Internet service is about the only thing that's (mostly) unlimited, and the main reason for that is because bandwidth use is so intangible and inexpensive to begin with.  Roads however are very tangible and very expensive too. 

So what does all this mean?  Well, I think the main part is that in cities with a well-connected road network that don't have many natural barriers, congestion pricing in the form of tolls (access control) is probably not particularly viable.  There might be other methods however that aren't so direct.  One, which has been mentioned briefly before, is parking prices.  This gets a bit messy because there's a lot of different factors in play, but I'll try to be brief.  For one thing there's city-owned lots and on-street parking.  These are usually priced way below their actual value (market rate) in the hopes of attracting more drivers, which only serves to exacerbate the traffic problem.  It also means that (just like the congested roads) they are in high demand because the low prices are undercutting the alternatives of private lots and garages.  Raising parking meter prices is a political hot potato, but it's something that really needs to be done. 

Another component that's much more insidious is the minimum parking requirements in zoning codes.  In many cases they're grossly oversized, since they're planned for the worst case (day after Thanksgiving shopping) scenario.  This also means that even in some downtown areas, while road capacity is stretched to the limit, there's a glut of parking.  By better pricing parking facilities to reflect actual market demand, and not forcing people to build lots and garages if they don't want to, the limited parking supply and higher cost will naturally limit driving as well.  Parking won't go away of course, nor will it get to be so expensive that nobody will use it, since at that point private operators will build more garages, but it won't be artificially cheap either. 

Again, this will encourage more rational use of the cars we do have by getting more people to carpool, combine trips, or look more carefully at telecommuting.  It will also encourage more compact cars or motorcycles/mopeds, since they can have lower parking costs.  It will encourage more use and construction of better public transit too.  The argument that "oh my boss won't let us telecommute" or "I don't have the flexibility to work alternate hours" or "public transit isn't good enough to serve where I live" are all things that can and do change.  As it is, there's no reason for bosses to allow flexibility with hours or to encourage telecommuting, because driving and parking is so cheap that it shouldn't matter.  That's the same reason most cities in the US don't have any meaningful public transit.  It's not that they don't have the density to support it (true most post-war suburbs don't, but most pre-war suburbs and city areas do), but because driving and parking has been made so artificially cheap that it just can't compete.  Also, people move a lot in this country, so it may come to a point where that house in the suburbs simply becomes too much of a liability and it makes more sense to move closer to work. 

The whole issue of congestion pricing might end up being a moot point anyway.  We could end up with permanent debilitating rises in oil prices that simply won't allow us to commute such long distances anymore.  If that happens, not only does it get very expensive to drive cars so much, but also to build them (plastics, tires, and paint become a lot more expensive too, as does everything else that needs to be shipped, whether by truck boat train or air).  Keeping the roads maintained gets more expensive because high oil prices means higher asphalt prices too, as well as the higher costs in mining the aggregate to make it and concrete, plus to transport it.  All that will cause shifts in how and where we live, and it would reduce congestion a lot.  The big question is will we be able to afford to rebuild all the public transit systems and long-distance rail that we dismantled in the mid 20th century? 

(I guess that wasn't so brief after all.)

[Scott5114]

That last post, especially with its comparison to restricted parking, made me think of how I personally would react to a congestion charge, and I realized that it would mean that I simply wouldn't go into the charge zone. I'm not going to try and carpool/take the bus into downtown. I'll just conduct my business somewhere where it's free to drive. If I have to pay a $10 surcharge (or whatever) to get at Crabtown, but nothing to get to Red Lobster, hell, why not save the $10 and eat at Red Lobster? Yeah, Crabtown's better, but it's already more expensive without having to pay to get into downtown. So what you end up doing is halting the economic rebound a lot of downtowns (like Oklahoma City's) are currently experiencing.

[jjakucyk]

Fair enough, and there certainly are people who would react that way.  It's a bit different though when your job is downtown.  Also, the fact that there is a congestion problem in the first place means that there's a lot of people who are trying to go there anyhow.  Shifting some of that to other areas is not always be a bad thing.

Generally, the situation of "it's easier to do X in the suburbs so why should I go downtown for it?" is the kind of fight that downtowns can't win, congestion pricing or not.  No downtown will EVER be able to compete with the suburbs on free and convenient parking access, so it's much better to play up the strengths of the city instead.  Those would be walkability, good transit access, night life, diverse and local shops and restaurants, architecture, cultural institutions, and all manner of diverse and engaging activities. 

Trying to make downtown attractive via ample parking simply doesn't work.  People need to have a reason to go there first.  If the whole area is full of parking lots, there's little left to actually go to.  Parking lots (or empty lots in general) in urban areas markedly decrease pedestrian traffic along them, which only makes the problem worse.  If there's real attractions (whether jobs, housing, shopping, or recreation), then people will find a way to get there no matter what.  The most vibrant city centers have parking problems because all the space is being used for stuff people actually want to go to.  Regardless of how full or empty the downtown is though, it's simply impossible to provide the amount of free and convenient parking you get in the suburbs, and any minor successes in that regard are very vulnerable to the next new mall built down the highway. 

Cities have a choice.  They can either have a vibrant downtown where everyone complains about parking, or they can have a dead downtown where everyone complains about parking. 

[english si]

The car is only faster because we skewed our transport network towards cars.

I don't see how. Consider the following scenario: there's a freeway and a rail line running parallel to each other. You both and live and work near an interchange and a station on each. So long as there is no congestion, it will be faster to use the freeway because 1) the train will make other stops along the way while you driving your car will not, and 2) you can just get in your car and go where as if you went to take the train you'd have to wait at the station for it to come.

Apples and Oranges - a freeway isn't the equivalent of a suburban railway. Both have to be a non-stop service. Also Freeways are designed with high speeds in mind - in the UK we have railways that do 125mph, speed limited (and one that does 186mph) that are upgraded lines that are 150 years old. Some of 125mph railways are even unelectrified. If you can go twice as fast, you could even stop a couple of times and allow for bus/walking to a station, and/or the wait.

Not saying that rail is better, also not saying the other way - just saying you've not compared like for like.

Bringing it back on the main topic, congestion is self-regulating - no one wants to sit in traffic. Of course if there isn't an alternative option, that's not great, but for Manhattan, say, there's no reason why able-bodied people have to drive there - adding a congestion charge wouldn't reduce traffic - AFAICS, the London scheme just moved it about and most of the congestion in the first place was exempt vehicles (buses and black cabs). They've added more buses, and bendy-buses, and, while journey times have been reduced for motor transport inside the zone, they did a lot of playing about with the traffic signals and optimalised them, having not done so before.

[jjakucyk]

Bendy-buses?  That's so much more fun to say than articulated buses! 

Though it's true nobody WANTS to sit in traffic, a huge number of people still do.  Nobody wants to pay their utility bills either, but they still do.  Even when there are alternatives, a lot of people choose to drive because of it's artificially low (real and perceived) cost.  The only cost to them is the congestion itself, and if they're willing to pay for it in that way, they should be willing to pay real money to avoid it too.  Time is money, after all. 

That's the difficult part about road congestion, its unpredictability.  You have to pad your schedule to account for it, which wastes time whether the road's congested or not.  Chicago presents an interesting aspect of this.  While driving to the Loop from the suburbs on one of the expressways is faster than taking Metra (the long-distance commuter rail), that's only true when the expressway is free-flowing.  What was a 35 or 40 minute drive can easily get close to an hour, at which point the 50 minute train ride, which is always 50 minutes no matter what, looks a lot more appealing.  You can also do stuff on the train that you'd have to take extra time out of your day to do otherwise, whether it's extra work or just reading the newspaper.  The train could never really compete with the cost of gas alone (though if you use the $0.50-55 total cost per mile of driving it wins there).  Even so, woe is you if you try to park in the Chicago Loop on a weekday.  The cost of a round-trip train ticket from a far-flung suburb will get you maybe an hour in a garage, if you're lucky.

[vdeane]

Nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic.

If nobody was driving, there would be no traffic, so this statement is contradictatory.

[Duke87]

Nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic.

If nobody was driving, there would be no traffic, so this statement is contradictatory.

Heh. Glad to know I'm not the only one who had that thought.

[jjakucyk]

You do realize it's a joke, right?  There is an element of truth to it though, just not in absolute terms.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic.

If nobody was driving, there would be no traffic, so this statement is contradictatory.

You're not a Yogi Berra fan, are you.