Can Traffic Be Good for the Environment?

Your point about equity is the one reasonable objection to congestion pricing. Eg, Paris decided to remove lanes rather than use congestion pricing as London does, because they wanted to impact everyone equally, regardless of income.

But note that that Owen does not say anything about equity in this article. He says that congestion pricing can be bad for the environment by encouraging more driving, a nonsensical point that Charles Komanoff refuted very well at http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/10/13/paradox-schmaradox-congestion-pric...

I think the weakness of your argument from equity is that it looks it looks narrowly at local equity, equity among people in the city, but it ignores larger issues of equity. A couple of years ago, our excessive driving helped push up food prices enough to cause hunger in developing nations such as Mexico, and we can expect more of the same. Our excessive driving is a major contributor to global warming, which has already caused 300,000 deaths in developing nations (according to WHO) and will cause far more damage in the future.

Inequities among Americans who drive a bit more or a bit less are insignificant compared with the global and intergenerational inequities caused because we collectively drive far too much.

Congestion pricing is one of the most effective tools for reducing VMT in the United States. Cities like Paris, where the majority of people don't own cars, can systematically remove lanes to reduce driving, even though the congestion annoys the minority who do own cars. But in American cities, where the vast majority own cars, congestion makes it far more difficult to remove lanes, and in fact creates strong political pressure to add more lanes.

For example, I-580 is a freeway that is extremely congested with traffic commuting into the Bay Area from sprawl developments in the Central Valley. After Jerry McNerney was elected to Congress as an environmentalist with Sierra Club support, one of the first things he said was that he would work for funding to widen this freeway.

It is very hard for politicians, even those with the best intentions, to say that they don't want to provide any relief for constituents who are miserable every day because they are stuck in stop-and-go traffic during a long commute. Congestion is the main reason that politicians promise to increase road capacity.

Owen's most naive statement in his article is that he says we should reduce road capacity without reducing congestion first. Politically, congestion makes it much more difficult to reduce road capacity, and much more likely that capacity will be expanded.

Imagine what the I-80 would be like if it had always had road congestion pricing. Road prices would have been high enough that fewer people would have been able to commute in on this road, meaning that there would have been less sprawl development in the Central Valley. McNerney would have been faced with a different situation: supporting freeway expansion would not mean supporting relief for miserable constituents; it would mean supporting lower prices for driving and thereby generating more sprawl. In this situation, I think that McNerney would be less likely to support freeway expansion.

Likewise, it is difficult to remove road capacity in central parts of metropolitan areas, because traffic engineers say it would cause unworkable congestion that would gridlock all the roads. It would be easier if it were a matter of raising the prices for driving on the remaining freeways and roads.

Charles Siegel