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More from the impossible-is-catching-on-department. San Francisco is studying the idea of charging motorists fees—often called congestion pricing–for driving on some of its most-congested roads at peak hours.  The city has been inspired in part by London’s successful example, which mayor Ken Livingstone, in town for World Environment Day, has been talking up: Congestion has decreased some 30 percent—or 50,000 cars—in central London since pricing was implemented two years ago. (Many...

Via Planetizen News, evidence that the impossible is finally catching on:  according to Governing magazine, more and more jurisdictions in the US and Europe are making drivers pay to use roads when they’re congested.  And remarkably, the politicians responsible for instituting the tolls don’t seem to be paying much of a political price. London’s experiment is perhaps the most famous:  the city now charges drivers about $10 to drive into...

The golden boy of Northwest news reporters, Timothy Egan, ventures to southern California to compose an excellent overview of the US trend toward high-occupant/toll (HOT) lanes in today’s New York Times. (Money quote: The Gubernator says, "Californians can’t get from place to place on little fairy wings.") All across the United States, variable tolls-congestion pricing-are becoming the new conventional wisdom about how to do road expansions. In a few places,...

Just like Canada, the United Kingdom is seriously considering vehicle feebates, reports the invaluable newsletter Green Budget News.  To recap, feebates (sometimes called “freebates”) are a great way to harness market forces to encourage energy efficiency and discourage pollution.  The article above gives a good explanation of how they’d work: The proposal would require owners of more polluting vehicles to pay an extra levy, while drivers of environmentally friendly cars...

The provincial government in BC has taken another step toward a parking tax covering the entire Vancouver metropolitan area, as the Vancouver Sunreports. The parking tax is politically tied to constructing the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver light rail line and a new highway bridge. My enthusiasm for these three items are probably the inverse of public sentiment: I regard the parking tax as a terrific advance, the light-rail line as a mediocre idea,...

This piece by John Tierney in the New York Times Magazine is wrong in many ways, so it’s probably important to point out what’s right about it. To summarize the article (we read, so you don’t have to!): Cars are great, high-tech roads are cool, people who don’t like new roads are condescending nanny-statists who oppose consumer choice, public transit is too expensive, and the only real solutions to traffic...

Ken Orski, a Washington, DC-based student of transportation issues, reports some encouraging developments in the July/August edition of his Innovation Briefs. (Subscription required.) Congestion pricing has become mainstream. Ken writes, Six years ago, when the House and Senate conferees were negotiating the final version of TEA-21 [the US transportation funding law], the subject of tolling and transportation pricing hardly ever came up. That this time around, tolls have become an...

Eric Pryne had more on electronic mileage charges for vehicles, as a substitute for gas taxes, in yesterday’s Seattle Times. The fundamental forces behind this trend-advances in engine and information technology-will ultimately transform how Cascadians pay to drive, as we’ve been pointing out since 1996. The ultimate potential of this shift is a set of related breakthroughs: pay-as-you-drive insurance, congestion pricing, pay-as-you-drive vehicle registration and taxes, and pollution taxes. Together,...

One of the great missed opportunities of recent years is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge expansion. It’s the first major tolled road built anywhere in Cascadia in more than a decade, yet it won’t be tolled in conformance with internationally accepted congestion pricing practices. The tolls won’t vary with traffic volume. They’ll be a flat rate day and night: the effect will be to slow traffic and give tolls a bad...

The best kept secret among transportation planners is that the best—and perhaps only—way to control highway congestion is to make people pay to use roads, especially during peak driving periods. At one point, instituting road tolls seemed politcally beyond the pale, something that a populace long accustomed to freeways would never accept. But with congestion growing in every major urban area in the country, the idea of toll roads and...