The price we must pay to fix congestion

We pay for using cars — why not for using roads?

Well what do you know. The good news in Tuesday’s initial report of Metro Vancouver’s Mobility Pricing Independent Commission, struck last year to come up with ways to relieve the region’s crippling traffic congestion, is not just that it has put mobility pricing — road pricing, tolls, or as the commission calls it, decongestion charging — squarely on the province’s political agenda: it’s that the idea was not dismissed out of hand by political leaders.

That includes the premier, John Horgan, elected just last year in part on the strength of a demagogic pledge to eliminate the existing tolls on two Vancouver-area bridges. But that was then. “The tolls that we removed were in one part of the Lower Mainland,” he told reporters this week, “and it was the fairness question we raised during the election campaign.” And now, with the commission due to deliver its final report in April? “I want to see what they come back with,” he said, “and how it fits in with our affordability plan for British Columbians.”

Expect to hear similarly cautious responses from other office-holders. They know that people are used to driving the roads for “free.” And whenever people are used to getting something for “free” they react badly to any suggestion that they should begin paying for it.

Only what comes out of their mouth is not “I don’t want to pay for something I’ve been used to getting for free” or even “this is new and I hate new things.” It’s “affordability.” I suspect this is a rationalization, and the reason I say so is that there’s nothing new about it.

It is not new, for starters, to charge for things. We may not price roads, but we price nearly everything else in the economy: for example, food. Generally we recognize that affordability is a problem of income, not prices. If we are worried whether people can afford X or Y, the answer we most often choose is to give them the money to buy it, rather than suppress prices. Because in the absence of prices, demand overwhelms supply. Thank goodness we price food, or the result would be breadlines.

Yet point out that a similar consequence has in fact followed from our failure to price roads — the delays and congestion that are everywhere in our major cities — and the instant objection is “affordability.” Never mind that the only people for whom the cost of road pricing would be an issue are those who can afford to buy a car.

But in fact we already pay to use the roads in all sorts of ways. If affordability forbids charging a few dollars a day in road tolls, it is odd that it is not already invoked as an objection to pricing gas. Or tires. Or auto insurance. Or cars.

And of course, we pay in other ways beyond those. Congestion itself imposes all sorts of costs, not only on drivers but on others, from delays and missed appointments, to the added air pollution, to the reduction in property values in highly congested areas.

But wait: if we “already pay to use the roads,” why haven’t these existing prices — or the taxes we pay on top, such as the gas tax — been sufficient to prevent this? Because they are not directed to particular times and places, or vary with traffic conditions. Congestion isn’t a problem of overall or average traffic volumes. It’s a problem of bottlenecks: on certain heavily travelled roads, especially at peak times.

So any solution to congestion must put a price on road use. Of course, that’s nothing new, either, in a sense. Right now we price it in time: the most desirable road space at the most desirable times goes to those willing to wait the longest to use it. But this is perverse. The whole point of a road is to get you where you want as speedily as possible.

It also renders ineffective any non-pricing fix for congestion, such as are commonly proposed — from more roads to more transit to synchronizing traffic lights and beyond. For any solution that aims to “get cars off the road” or “make the traffic go faster” simply reduces the time-price of driving. How do people respond to this? The evidence confirms what the theory predicts: by driving more.

That’s even true of tolls, in some cases. Charge people to drive into the centre of town, as cities from London to Stockholm have done, and fewer cars will indeed enter. Traffic in the city centre eases for a while — until its residents notice, and start driving more.

Of the two alternatives proposed by the commission, then — “congestion point” pricing, charged at particular locations throughout the city, versus pricing use of the road network generally, via GPS-based transponders installed in every car — put me down for the latter.

The instant objection here is privacy. Would the government know where you were at any given moment? Very well: do you use a cellphone? Because the same objections would seem to apply. Privacy concerns did not prove insoluble there; neither do they seem likely to in the present case.

This is admittedly groundbreaking stuff. No jurisdiction has yet adopted such a system, for the simple reason that the technology is only now becoming available. But Washington and Oregon are testing prototypes, while Singapore will be first in the world to actually implement it, beginning in 2020.

And here’s the thing. Even the idea of charging to use particular stretches of road at particular times — even that is not new. It’s how we pay for street parking. We get how important it is to price scarce road space when the cars are standing still. Should the same logic not apply just because the cars are moving?