2012 Perspectives Magazine - Manitoba Heavy Construction ...

Stuck in Traffic (continued from page 17)
be the first to bring his sheep to graze for fear of being crowded
out by the rest. It should not be surprising, then, to see the
consequences: not only congestion, but its close cousin, sprawl. It
seems odd that the more area a city covers, the more congested
it becomes. But the reason for each is the same. We have made
travelling by car artificially cheap in terms of money, and artificially
costly in terms of time.
But wait a minute, you say: I paid for those roads already, via the
gas tax. Isn’t that a kind of user fee? Not so fast. You may have
paid for the roads. What you haven’t paid for is you. Every time
you use the road, you take up space that might be occupied by
another car. And so far as you do, you impede the driver of that
car from getting where he wants to go, and doing what he would
rather be doing there. Since time is money, you impose a cost on
him—as does he on you.
Of course, any one driver only slows up the mass to a small extent,
but add up the ”external” costs of every driver on the road—and
it comes to a great deal, as we’ve seen. The obstruction need
not be overt, as in a stalled car or accident. Just the presence
of other drivers is enough to cause drivers to slow slightly, or to
miscalculate, get too close, and have to slam on the brakes. The
ripple effect of any one car doing so is then transmitted back
through the line, exponentially worsening the initial disturbance.
That’s how we get traffic jams.
The task, then, is to make those ”external” costs apparent to each
driver. Raise the price of using the roads, and people will reduce
their demand for it, just as they do for most other things. That
makes driving more expensive, at least at first. But with less
congestion, other costs fall. Not only are travel times reduced,
but so are all those other ills of congestion, from accidents
to pollution.
So: jack up the gas tax, then? No, because congestion is a
phenomenon, not so much of roads in general, but of particular
roads, at particular times. Fuel taxes may be a good rough proxy
for distance travelled, but they take no account of which roads
you travel on, or at what time of day. For that you need a more
precisely targeted ”congestion price.”
Does that mean zero congestion should be the goal? No. While
there’s an inverse relationship between traffic density—how
closely packed the cars are—and speed, what matters is the
product of the two, traffic volume: how many cars pass through a
given stretch of road in a given time interval. So a certain amount
more density is worth a certain amount less speed. How to
judge the trade-off? How about leaving it to drivers themselves?
Up to a point, they’ll be willing to pay to reduce congestion. But
past that point, the additional savings in time and other costs
won’t be worth it to them. It’s the excess congestion we want to
eliminate—the part motorists would be willing to pay to avoid.
That sounds theorectical. But in fact there are plenty of real-world
examples. Anyone who has driven the toll-funded autoroutes in
France will know what wonders they are: fast, glass-smooth, with
pleasant rest stops every few kilometres. You enter at certain
restricted access points, and pay as you leave, depending on your
distance travelled. They’re not cheap: about $65 to drive from
Paris to Marseille. But there’s another point. It turns out drivers
are willing to pay for good roads: more, perhaps, than they might
be allocated around the cabinet table, where they must compete
against health care and—well, against health care. And the toll
does its job of rationing demand. You and yourself weighing the
options, calculating: am I in that much of a hurry today? Or can I
afford to take the smaller, slower, ”free” road?
On some U.S. highways, you get both options in one. Drivers on
Los Angeles’s notoriously congested Riverside Freeway can take
the Express Lanes, a privately built freeway-inside-a-freeway.
The price varies by the hour, depending on volume, with a view
to keeping traffic flowing at the speed limit: from $1.30 late at
night to as much as $10.25 during ”super peak hours.” (That’s
not just a targeted speed, by the way: you get your money back
if it’s any slower.) It puts through twice as many cars per hour as
the free lanes, at four times the speed. On Interstate 394 near
Minneapolis, drivers can likewise pay to join the carpoolers in
the high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane, a variant of the HOV concept.
Again, the price fluctuates with demand; roadside signs advise
drivers of the going rate. Since opening in 2005, it has increased
average speeds by 15 per cent.
But why cite foreign examples? Just north of Toronto, running
roughly parallel to Highway 401, is the privately owned Highway
407 Express Toll Route. Built in 1997, it is among the busiest toll
roads in the world, with more than 360,000 trips taken along its
108-km route on a typical workday. There are no toll-booths:
drivers can enter or exit where they like, their presence recorded
by overhead ”gantries,” or sensors. Rather, tolls are collected
and administered electronically, via on-board transponders
(for regular customers) or by snapping a photo of the driver’s
licence plate and billing them by mail: between 18 and 42 cents a
kilometre, depending on the type of vehicle and the time of day.
Because it depends on repeat business for the bulk of its revenues,
the 407’s owners have a strong incentive to keep the traffic
flowing as smoothly as they can. Tolls are only part of that. The
company offers free 24-hour roadside assistance, for example,
including boost, tire change, gasoline, and a tow truck if needed.
The highway is noticeably well-maintained and pothole-free,
especially by comparison to its often impassable neighbour.
Of course, who knows what the 401 would look like had the
government simply put a toll on it? Maybe if it had, it would
not have been necessary to build the 407 at all. While cashconstrained
governments would be well advised to make any
new road construction toll-funded—as a test of demand—
they should first test whether better use could be made of
existing roads.
Still, just tolling the surrounding highways won’t be enough to
clear Canada’s major cities of congestion. Rather, we need to
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