Congestion pricing has become the topic du jour among transportation planners and decision-makers alike, but for the sake of this article, we’ll refer to it as mobility pricing.
Mobility pricing can take many forms, whether it’s charging a fee for driving through downtown or a variable pricing structure that adjusts to peak demand. For major metropolitan areas, it’s an opportunity to manage the transportation network while generating revenue streams that can be reinvested directly into the local system.
But it’s also extremely controversial. While other cities have successfully implemented pricing programs, it remains untested in North America. In most cities, people can drive downtown for free. And who wants to pay for something that was free?
Unfortunately, when lots of people drive through cities at no cost, it creates congestion. But when elected officials propose mobility pricing as a solution, they face intense backlash. One major point of contention is that mobility pricing is unfair, especially for lower-income drivers, who can’t afford to live near their jobs, near a reliable transit option, or need to rely on their cars for work.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
If your city doesn’t provide sufficient housing options near workplaces or near transit, you’re unfortunately on the tail end of terrible zoning policies that have historically subsidized low-density sprawl. The only transportation mode that allows people to get around sprawl is driving and the end result is that people are trapped into relying on their cars.
Sprawl also creates a higher cost of living. Let’s compare the City of Los Angeles and Mobility Lab’s home base of Arlington, VA. Using the CNT Housing and Transportation index, the percentage of household income towards transportation is 20 percent for LA, while it’s only 11 percent for Arlington. (For comparison, Washington, DC and New York City is only 9 percent.) A transportation network designed in favor of the personal vehicle means fewer options – and it is inherently unfair.
And it’s been that way for awhile. Billions and billions of dollars have been poured into widening roads, expanding highways, and paving parking lots. For example, the 405 is a heavily used freeway in southern California. After a 2014 road widening that cost $1.1 billion – focused on a 10-mile stretch in Los Angeles – another expansion was announced in 2018, this time for expanding a 16-mile section in nearby Orange County for a tidy $1.9 billion. That’s $3 billion in four years towards one freeway. When so much money has been poured into supporting cars, no wonder so many people drive.
But it’s not a sustainable system in the long term, especially given that widening highways makes traffic worse. And it’s not even working now: many people assume that gas tax revenues help maintain our roads but in fact, the federal gas tax has remain unchanged since 1993. The Highway Trust Fund remains insolvent and can only stay afloat by allocations from the general fund.
Highways are just the tip of the iceberg: suburban housing built and sold at low prices due to tax incentives and other subsidies further fuels the notion that the suburbs and driving are cheap. In fact, low-density suburbs are a very, very expensive endeavor — especially for cities. When the costs are made visible, it can be a shock. Washington, DC area residents recently experienced this with Interstate 66, a popular route for suburbanites commuting to their jobs in the District: when tolls were added in December 2017, prices reached $46 during rush-hour.
Mobility pricing adjusts for this highly subsidized system. In fancy economist speak, mobility pricing means pricing for externalities. In this case, the externality is physical space. (We’re not talking about freight, which is a separate discussion.) If you compare walking, biking, transit, and single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs), the SOVs takes up significantly more space relative to the others. In other words, if you put twenty people together and they were either walking, on bikes, riding transit, or driving in their own cars, everyone fits fine on the first three and the last one becomes a traffic jam. Driving puts a greater burden on the transportation network and to manage that, it needs to be priced.
Plus, revenues from mobility pricing can be used towards projects like fixing sidewalks, installing protected bike lanes, and increasing transit service – all of which helps everyone, but especially low-income residents. This brings us back to our initial point. Despite the growing rates of car ownership since the 2008 recession, lower-income residents are still more likely rely on walking, biking, and transit as their primary transportation modes than middle and upper-income people. Mobility pricing brings them a two-fold benefit: improved transit service from the increased investment and, because there are fewer cars on the road, time savings for those who do have to drive. In addition, cities can outline exemptions for lower-income households.
What can cities do next? They’re definitely talking about it. The next hurdle is getting people to warm up to the idea and understand that mobility pricing can lead to more options. Educating the public and elected officials about the actual costs of driving is an important step towards making mobility pricing a reality.
Photo by mariordo59 on Flickr.