It never surprises me to hear suburban commuters bash congestion tolls. But I am surprised when a sophisticated transit blogger bashes them. Yonah Freemark, who writes the very good the transport politic, is the guilty party. He and Ryan Avent have been going back and forth and back again.
Yonah's objection is equity:
A huge percentage of the U.S. population pays far too much for transportation; to put it simply, most working adults have no choice other than to own a vehicle and often to drive it dozens of miles every day. Making driving more expensive is a great way to devastate the already impoverished.
It’s true, tolling highways would save “money, time, lives, and emissions.” But it would also sacrifice the mobility of a large segment of America, because the reduced congestion would be a result of the poor and the middle class choosing not to drive because of expense, not because of choices made by the wealthy.
He argues that our public transit systems are too underdeveloped in most places to cure this inequity.
Ryan responds with several good points, but I want to elaborate on why the regressivity argument leaves me cold.
First, congestion tolls are less regressive than toll opponents claims. The low-income do pay tolls, which means they value the time savings more than the price of the toll. Plenty of low-income drivers take the toll lanes on SR 91 in California, for example. The reason many do is that they have little flexibility in their schedules. They have to be at work or at the daycare center at a specific time. To compensate for congestion, they must leave much earlier to guarantee a timely arrival. They thus suffer two types of costs: scheduling delays and travel delays. (The value of scheduling delays is very hard to measure, which means that studies like the TTI report almost surely understate the cost of congestion.) Affluent professionals often have more flexibility.
Second, tolls encourage a number of shifts. Yes, shifts to transit, which seems to be Yonah's main concern, at least when the transit system is underdeveloped. But they encourage other shifts, too. Shifts to other routes and shifts to other times. Commuters are the least likely to be nudged to other routes or times. The most sensitive are those who use congested roads for local trips. Take the soccer mom who hops in the SUV and enters a congested highway to get to the grocery store a mile down the road. She imposes enormous costs on others. Tolls make her internalize those costs and nudge her to use the local streets. Perhaps this is regressive. But it doesn't evoke much sympathy from me. A congestion toll is a charge for getting in everyone else's way. Behind every claim of regressivity is the assumption that drivers are entitled to get in everyone else's way even when it is not worth all that much to them. And that leads to my last point. The regressivity argument wouldn't move me even if it were true. This is one of those cases in which our desire for efficiency should trump our concern with regressivity. Here's an apt analogy. An amusement park owner decides to throw open the gate to all comers on a first-come, first-serve. Naturally, a long line forms. But this isn't a typical line where newcomers go to the back of the line. No, in this queue, newcomers elbow their way to the front of the line and force everyone behind them to wait a little longer. Naturally, chaos ensues. No one leaves for the park knowing how long it will take to get in. There is "queue rage" and general aggravation. The park owner loses business. And many low-income parents find themselves worse off because they have a smaller window of free time and dislike the chaos and aggravation as much as anyone else. (I've always thought it patronizing to assume that low-income drivers put such a low value on their time and aggravation.) Now, in the real world, the queue would never work this way. Those at the rear of the line would use informal sanctions (fist fights) to deter queue jumpers. And, in fact, there would be only a short line to get into the park in the first place because the owner would charge for admission. But this is exactly the crazy system we use to ration highway access. For whatever reason, our cultural norms have evolved to tolerate a free-for-all. In almost every other situation we ration scarce goods using price. Sure, that's regressive in the sense that the poor have less money to spend on things. But we tolerate some regressivity elsewhere because we recognize that (1) the gains in efficiency outweigh the equity concerns; and (2) there are better ways to ensure an egalitarian distribution of wealth than creating artificial shortages, chaos and mayhem.
Regressivity is not the be all and end all.
Cross-posted at Urban Returns.
