By: Josh Voorhees
Greenwire, Energy + Environment Daily
April 29, 2008
Carpool lanes should be turned into express tollways as the nation motors toward a "pay as you drive" system that will charge for every mile you travel, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said yesterday.
"In the near term, these express lanes are a temporary solution," Peters told a Brookings Institution forum in Washington. "They are a way to get people acclimated to paying a fee to use a road at a particular time."
Express lanes -- also known as high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes -- would replace existing carpool lanes or are added to existing highways. Drivers are given the option of either paying a variable fee based on traffic congestion to enter the lane or staying in the free lanes.
An aggressive congestion-pricing proposal for New York City failed earlier this month despite the backing of DOT and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I). The cordon-pricing plan would have required drivers entering a set congestion zone in Manhattan during peak hours to pay an $8 fee.
"With cordon pricing, there is no choice. If you want to enter at a certain time of day in a car, you have to pay," said Steve Heminger, executive director for San Francisco's Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is currently overseeing congestion-pricing projects in the Bay Area. "With [express] lanes there is a choice. There are other lanes and other roads you can use."
Because drivers still have options, express lanes "are certainly the path of lesser resistance" toward gaining public and political support, he added.
After the defeat of the New York City plan, DOT re-evaluated the political landscape and decided to offer more than half of the $354 million that would have been gone to New York to Los Angeles for an express lane project.
A handful of similar congestion-priced express lane projects are under way, with federal funding acting as an incentive.
"Environmental groups and academics say [congestion pricing plans] will work, but what we need to do with these early projects is show the public that they really will," said Steve Marshall, a senior fellow at the Cascadia Project, a Seattle-based transportation think tank.
'Power of the purse'
Heminger, who saw a partial cordon-pricing plan fail in Bay Area in the 1990s, agreed with Marshall.
"There is a bit of a chicken and the egg issue," Heminger said. "In a capitalistic country anywhere in the world, the public is used to, and accepts the idea, you pay for goods and the price of those goods will rise when they become scarce. But for whatever reason, the public doesn't see that for roads."
That is where the federal funds enter the picture. In addition to the more than $213 million being offered to Los Angeles if its express-lane project is approved, DOT would award -- assuming local approval -- a total of nearly $500 million in grants to Seattle, Minneapolis, Miami and San Francisco for projects aimed at reducing gridlock.
"A relatively small amount of funding can go a long way," Peters said.
Heminger said that even though federal cash failed to convince New York state legislators to support the cordon pricing plan, grants are having a larger impact elsewhere. "They are using the power of the purse to provide financial incentives for change," he said. "I think it's an encouraging direction."
Despite his support for congestion pricing, however, Heminger, who was a member of the bipartisan federal commission that is calling for sweeping changes to how the nation funds transportation infrastructure, cautioned that congestion pricing is "not a national panacea."
"Congestion pricing holds a lot of promise in fighting congestion and generating revenues in those corridors, but there are a lot of places in the country that are not congested," he said. "The U.S. faces massive infrastructure backlog, and tolling is not going to take care of all of those needs."
Opponents of congestion pricing schemes often argue that the tolls serve as a regressive tax that places an unfair burden on poor people who must spend a larger percentage of their income on travel. Even proponents of the plan have suggested financial reimbursements might be necessary to offset the heavy impact the tolls could have on low-income households.
End game
Express lanes are a simple solution that can start paying dividends almost immediately, Peters said. "This isn't rocket science," she said. "This is something we can do and do very quickly."
Assuming congestion pricing clears political hurdles and wins public affection, the end game will likely be a pay-as-you-drive system that has drivers paying for every mile they travel, Peters said.
While she cautioned that such a plan was a long way away, she said such a system would likely rely on a combination of congestion-based rates for metropolitan areas and flat fees for the more rural parts of the country.
Peters said the American public would eventually embrace drastic changes to the national transportation system because they want commutes that are predictable and consistent.
"Americans," she said, "will pay for convenience."
