Brian D. Taylor
To live in Los Angeles is to endure chronic traffic congestion. Cities are places where people cluster together to create and enjoy the benefits of economic wealth, cultural vibrancy, intellectual exchange, and more. But with clustering comes traffic — often lots of it. While nearly everyone agrees that traffic is a problem, opinions diverge widely on what to do about it.
Richard Arnott
William Vickrey is the “father of congestion pricing” and a Nobel Laureate in economics. While watching the ebb and flow of traffic from his Manhattan office, he developed a hypothesis that the dynamics of rush-hour traffic have the same properties as water flowing into and out of a hypothetical bathtub.
Paul Sorensen
For much of the past century, federal and state taxes on gasoline and diesel have provided the majority of funding for US highway construction and maintenance. Fuel taxes perform well in this role: they distribute the tax burden among drivers in rough proportion to their use of the road network, are inexpensive to administer, and offer a modest incentive to buy and drive fuel-efficient vehicles.
Download the PDF.
Gregory Pierce and
Donald Shoup
In 2011, San Francisco adopted the biggest price reform for on-street parking since the invention of the parking meter in 1935. Most cities’ parking meters charge the same price all day, and some cities charge the same price everywhere. San Francisco’s meters, however, now vary the price of curb parking by location and time of day.
Download the PDF.
Gian-Claudia Sciara
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Congressional earmarking played a larger role in federal transportation funding bills than ever before. Through earmarks, the US Congress directs federal funding to selected transport projects in specific places. Between 1994 and 2006, highway earmarks more than doubled. Notorious earmarks like Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere and Florida’s Coconut Road together with fiscal pressures from the 2008 US economic crisis have led both the House and the Senate to adopt temporary earmark moratoria, calling time-out in the game of pork barrel politics.
Download the PDF.
Björn Hårsman and
John Quigley
Thirty-five years ago, economist John Kain proposed several simple pricing mechanisms for roadways that would "improve urban transportation at practically no cost." At about the same time, Nobel laureate William Vickrey championed a number of likeminded ideas, especially in New York City, that would reduce traffic congestion and improve the efficiency of the transport sector. Some of these proposals would also involve "practically no cost," even using the technology of the 1960s. For example, Vickrey proposed varying the tolls on New York's George Washington Bridge with the time of day, which would make rush-hour driving more expensive and reduce traffic congestion.
Donald Shoup
Cities should charge the right prices for curb parking because the wrong prices produce such bad results. Where curb parking is underpriced and overcrowded, a surprising share of cars on congested streets can be searching for a place to park. Sixteen studies conducted between 1927 and 2001 found that, on average, 30 percent of the cars in congested downtown traffic were cruising for parking. More recently, when researchers interviewed drivers stopped at traffic signals in New York City in 2006 and 2007, they found that 28 percent of the drivers on a street in Manhattan and 45 percent on a street in Brooklyn were cruising for curb parking.