Reduce traffic congestion, but keep out government

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/09/23/equaled_0924.html ^ | 24 September 2007 | Gabriel Roth

[Lorianne]

its annual Urban Mobility Report, and the area's traffic ranks among the worst in the country, worse than New York City, Chicago and Miami.

Billions of dollars have been spent over several decades on transit subsidies, consultants, studies, special high-occupancy vehicle commuter lanes, new technologies and other hoped-for panaceas, but the congestion, delays and road rage show no sign of abating.

Our current road systems are like relics of the late, unlamented Soviet Union: socialist enterprises run by well-intentioned planners. Moscow citizens got relief from food lines by embracing capitalism. The market economy could similarly liberate road users from excessive congestion.

If pricing is applied to the scarce resource "road space," and the revenues are allowed to stimulate investment in additional lanes or new technologies to speed traffic past bottlenecks, congestion could be reduced.

This has been happening since 1995 on parts of the express lanes of California's State Route 91, on which charges vary from $1.20 to $9.50.

Unfortunately, some government officials and environmental activists embrace road pricing only to restrain the demand for road use, not to increase road capacity. London's Mayor Ken Livingstone, for example, introduced "congestion pricing" in London in 2003, but surplus revenues are being spent on mass transit.

But just as sensible people do not allow alcoholics to run liquor stores, the insatiable thirst of governments for money should preclude them from involvement with road-use funds. Government expenditures are constrained because of the increasing burdens of social programs and skyrocketing defense spending. As a result, needed improvements are delayed, producing the kind of disaster we just witnessed in Minnesota with the collapse of the I-35 bridge.

But under private, market-based financing, expenditures would be limited only by the amounts road users are prepared to pay for better roads, not by politics.

[driftdiver]

Time to invest in a road construction company.

[I still care]

My brother just sold his Atlanta house because he can’t take the traffic anymore. I guess when a person is willing to uproot his entire family from a house he loves because of traffic, it must be pretty bad.

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

Two things are causing congestion. The government and the government. (1) Idiot government planners under the guise of “smart growth’ are necking down roads, reducing lanes for cars but adding bike lanes (for the 100 bicyclists a day), inserting peninsulas for traffic calming, speed bumps, and the like. (2) The second cause is the inhospitable environment crated by legislation for manufacturing and industry. Employees no longer go to one place for the day. Instead, they travel all over place doing service jobs. We are not going to fix this with roads.