Kenneth A. Small

Seeking ways to ease highway financing and alleviate traffic congestion, policy makers have put toll roads on the national agenda. The public is skeptical of the idea, to say the least. So the federal government has been sponsoring demonstration projects, both to gain practical experience and to increase public familiarity with road-pricing concepts and the ways they work. Although most of the demonstrations are merely studies, two are currently operating on real roads in California. They show that the hardware and software work well, that transactions and enforcement are manageable, and that drivers easily adjust to pricing. One project, the SR91 express lanes in Orange County, is a privately financed ten-mile roadway that parallels the Riverside Freeway (SR91), a notorious bottleneck. Drivers using the new roadway pay electronically according to a fee schedule that varies by time of day and day of week. Three-person carpools use the lanes at a discount. When the new lanes opened, typical peak-hour delays on the original lanes on this ten-mile section fell from over thirty minutes to less than ten minutes.

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Martin Wachs

Transportation planners and economists are urging us to adopt congestion pricing-to charge motorists more for driving on crowded roads during rush hours and less for traveling on uncrowded roads in off-peak hours. By putting a price on peak-hour travel, we would encourage motorists to switch to less crowded alternate routes or, better yet, take public transit, join a carpool, or travel at a time of day when the roads are less crowded. Such tolls might even induce some travelers to alter the origins or destinations of their trips or to cancel less important trips, thereby cutting their total amount of auto travel.

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