Charles Marohn, writing at Strong Towns, has a post entitled “The Lexus Lane.”
His opening grabbed my attention:
I penned an opinion piece in the Minnesota Daily about congestion pricing back when I was an undergraduate in civil engineering school. At that point in my life I believed – like most Americans today believe – that gas taxes pay for the cost of highways, that any lack of funding was due to bloated bureaucrats taking money from roads to pay for other things and that rural areas generated most of the revenue in the system. If that article surfaced today, it may be a bit scandalous, especially given how much my understanding has changed over the years.
So, here today, he’s trying to come up with good policies to generate and allocate revenue for transportation in a optimal way. Too much, he figures, is being spent on building and maintaining roads with under-used capacity and not enough – I suppose – for roads with over-used capacity.
He suggests:
Putting a price, not just on the lane but on the time of day that lane is used, and then sequestering those funds for the ongoing maintenance and improvement of that lane, will allow the market to send a clear signal for what the high-returning investments are. This clear signal would be free of any politician, bureaucrat or interest group. Elegant.Putting a price, not just on the lane but on the time of day that lane is used, and then sequestering those funds for the ongoing maintenance and improvement of that lane, will allow the market to send a clear signal for what the high-returning investments are. This clear signal would be free of any politician, bureaucrat or interest group. Elegant.
With that approach, I see a system that would ultimately be always slightly congested for everyone, but slightly less congested for the wealthy. Still, it’s worth thinking about. We need good transportation policy and good ways of figuring out where to put limited dollars.
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