One benefit of tolls: Better traffic
If there’s one thing that Connecticut residents can agree on, it’s that no one likes sitting in traffic. Unfortunately, for many drivers, crawling through congestion has become part of our normal routine.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. As the highway toll debate continues on, much of the focus is on potential revenue for the state and costs to motorists. But the debate has ignored the issue of how tolls can affect driver behavior.
When the government provides a valuable resource of limited capacity to the citizens for free, the demand will be far higher than the supply, and that resource will not be used in an economically efficient way. In our case, that valuable resource is our state’s fast and high-capacity highway network. Since all roads in Connecticut are currently priced at the same rate ($0), there is no incentive to not use the highways, which makes choosing the highways over surface roads an easy choice.
And because most commuters think this way, our fastest highways turn into just the opposite during rush hour.
By tolling our state’s most congested roadways, drivers would be faced with a choice: time or money. To save time, a driver can elect to take the tolled highway, effectively paying for a quicker ride, but also paying for their impact on the people around them. As the highways have limited capacity, a motorist taking up space on this scarce public resource should be paying for the additional congestion they cause.
On the other hand, if a driver wants to save money, they can take surface roads to their destination. Because origins and destinations of drivers are widely scattered throughout the state, and people value time and money differently, traffic will redistribute much more evenly on local roads that can handle the additional volume.
Although tolling as a means to reduce traffic will ultimately benefit residents, some are opposed to tolls because it would add a cost onto our currently free highways. This leads into the tax vs. user fee debate (it’s a user fee — you are paying for access to a service and have the option to not drive on the highway). Ideally, highway tolls should have never been eliminated. In America, driving-related fees such as the gas tax and DMV charges only cover about 51% of roadway spending. The other 49% comes from general taxes, which is paid by all citizens, including those who don’t drive at all. People who do not own cars are subsidizing drivers’ abilities to create traffic. In the toll debate, it’s not just about out-of-state drivers and truckers paying their fair share, it’s about all motorists paying for their effect on society and the environment.
How else we can reduce traffic without tolls? Some say the best way to reduce congestion is to add lanes to highways — increasing their capacity. And sadly, many engineers and planners will agree. But widening or building new highways does not fix traffic. In fact, it makes it worse.
Because congestion itself is a deterrent to drivers who would want to use the highway but ultimately decide against it, adding capacity will free up space for more cars to enter, and this continues until a new equilibrium of traffic congestion is reached. Now the highway is just as jammed as before, but this time with an extra lane of bumper-to-bumper cars. This concept is called induced demand. It has been proven to occur in instances of widening or construction of new highways across the country, yet many state departments of transportation still do not believe the empirical data. This includes the Connecticut Department of Transportation, which is why projects such as those in Danbury and Norwalk are advancing.
The only guaranteed way to clear up the state’s highways is to simply get cars off the road. Traffic congestion is not a linear function, but rather exponential. Just removing a small percentage of traffic volume can speed up vehicles greatly. By redistributing the demand for our most sought-after roadways through tolling and congestion pricing, we can finally start to chip away at chronic traffic jams and the economic and social costs they impose.
Adam Weber works at a civil engineering firm that specializes in transportation. He lives in Milford.