Will U.S. Support Widescale Congestion Pricing?

Dr. Peter Gordon and Bumsoo Lee offer a wide-ranging survey of research findings to answer the question, what do we know about the modern U.S. urban transportation context, and what does it suggest for further congestion pricing projects?

From the introduction:

"If price does not ration, something else will. We also know that auto ownership and use respond to rising income and that congestion has become the default rationing mechanism on most of the world's roads and highways. Economists and others have pointed out that this is increasingly wasteful and have argued that time-of-day pricing should be implemented (see, for example, the recent collection of essays edited by Roth 2006). Modern monitoring and collection technologies suggest that this can now be done at low cost â€" although that assertion is challenged in a recent examination of the Stockholm road pricing trial, by Prud’homme and Kopp (2006).

Policy makers in the U.S., however, have for the most part been reluctant to go along, fearing the prospect (or the appearance) of regressive impacts â€" even though they are thereby foregoing a new and considerable revenue source...

The world's best-known experiments with road pricing have been the area-pricing programs in Singapore (since 1975) and London (since 2004). On a smaller scale, there have been scattered cases around various cities of the developed countries with moderately scaled pricing experiments on specific areas or on specific stretches of highways.

Recently, some writers have suggested that we are now near a tipping-point in the U.S., and that many more road pricing projects will soon be implemented (Poole and Orski 2006). What do we know about the modern U.S. urban transportation context? What does it suggest for further pricing projects in this country?

This chapter is a survey of recently accumulated descriptive research findings and attempts to answer both questions."

From the conclusion:

"Our findings complement and elaborate the recommendations of Poole and Orski (2006). Converting HOV lanes to HOT lanes and redirecting current planning away from more HOV lane development (as well as from conventional transit planning) towards their suggested plan is the way to go in light of what we know of U.S. settlement and travel trends. Dispersed origins and destinations are unlikely to be well served by conventional transit or by carpooling. And the increasing tendency to combine work trips with non-work trips reflects this and also favors the HOT-lanes policy."