Congestion Pricing

can we define “livable and lovable” cities?

Posted on April 23, 2011 in Advocacy, Congestion Pricing, Meditations, Urban Structure

That's the nice slogan from a new Phillips Corporation initiative praised today in the Atlantic by NRDC's Kaid Benfield. The Phillips think tank suggests that we can gather all the qualities of a "livable and lovable" city into three virtues:

Resilience, which replaces the more bureaucratic and depressing word sustainability, but means roughly the same thing. Some great work has already been done on the concept of resilience. There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking.
Inclusiveness, which is about "social integration and cohesion," demonstrated for example in the lack of discrimination or social exclusion based on race, religion, age, and all the other usual categories.
Authenticity, which means "the ability to maintain the local character of the city," including "heritage, culture, and environment."

Below is their graphic summary. (The PDF [Download] is much sharper!) Below that is a bit of affectionate heckling from me.

Personally, I have some practical discomfort with the framing of the Inclusiveness category because it is easily exaggerated into visions of a socialist paradise in which we have abolished competition. When Philips says that "inhabitants should have equal opportunities to participate in the activities of the city," does that mean that when our city's team in the playoffs, we'll give out tickets by lottery rather than selling them, in order to avoid discriminating against the poor? If we're talking only about nondiscrimination by extraneous demographic categories, fine. But when you imply that you can neutralize the impact of differences in wealth, you lose so much of the politicial audience — at least in North America, Australia, and the UK — that you've probably lost the game. This issue comes up often in transit, of course, notably whenever anyone suggests that in a capitalist economy, it's foolish not to use pricing to help citizens understand the intrinsic cost of things that they take for granted. It's a tough one.

Note, also, the lingering contradictory message in their framing of resilience. On the one hand, the train station signifies that resilient cities acknowledge their "interdependence" with other cities. On the other hand, the emphasis on local farms and local energy generation suggests the opposite, that resilient cities aspire to greater and greater self-reliance. This is philosophically interesting, especially because high volumes of international trade — including in food, which is the opposite of local self-reliance — are the most reliable mechanism that human society has found to prevent large-scale wars.

I make both of these comments in the spirit of meditation. I am not claiming to know how better to define inclusiveness or resilience. Rather, I'm just marvelling at how difficult it is.

are toll lanes “congestion pricing”?

Posted on March 29, 2011 in Congestion Pricing, Seattle

Congestion pricing should really be called decongestion pricing. Its purpose is to provide an alternative to sitting in congestion for people and businesses willing to pay the fair price for the scarce road space required. The toll isn't a tax, it's a price for driving in an uncongested lane. So if your toll lane is still congested, you're not doing (de)congestion pricing, and your results say nothing about whether it's a good idea.

In Crosscut, former Washington State Secretary of Transportation Douglas MacDonald lays out the issue today as it applies to Seattle area freeways. There, likely toll lanes are already High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes permitting cars with two or more people. Everyone knows that if the goal is free flow, this minimum has to go up to three whenever congestion requires it.

When carpool lanes were first established there was a vigorous “now or later” debate about the right limit for the carpool privilege: two-to-a-car, or three-to-a-car? Pragmatism won. Except for three-to-a-car from the start on the Evergreen Point Bridge, carpool lanes were introduced with the two-to-a-car rule.
Everyone involved at the time believed that later the rule would have to be, and could be, changed to three-to-a-car. Everyone was entirely up-front about this expectation. The trigger would be the growth of traffic in the carpool lanes to the point where access would have to be cut back so that they would still work.
Didn't happen. Good luck today with that ticking time bomb for a political revolt. The moment of truth is at hand, at least for some carpool lane segments. But no one today seriously talks about outright banishing the two-to-a-car carpoolers to thin out jammed carpool lanes.

I defer to Doug's knowledge of Washington State politics, but I do resist the apathy-inducing hyperbole of the phrase "no one talks seriously." Is "everyone" sure that changing carpool lanes to 3+ would trigger a political revolt if it also caused people to start getting to work on time? Especially if the state also put some effort into casual carpool facilities at the same time? Especially if transit riders (in buses in the same lanes) began getting to work on time too? I wonder. I can see it would be controversial. I can see it would take some time. But can no one "seriously" discuss it?

pricing and “the poor”

Posted on March 25, 2011 in Congestion Pricing

Is congestion pricing — charging more to use a facility when it's in high demand, in order to decongest that facility — an unacceptable burden on the poor? Joshua Arbury of the Auckland Transport Blog asks this on my recent post on congestion pricing terminology:

Fundamentally though, there's a political question to consider. Is it acceptable to have a road pricing scheme that prices the poor off the roads to create more room for the rich? Because, in a nutshell, that's effectively what road pricing/congestion charging/decongestion charging is.

These discussions will never get anywhere until we can separate two completely different questions:

What is the accurate price for this facility that arises from the relationship of supply and demand?
For whom, and for what social purposes, should we offer discounts from that price?

Australian and British transit agencies offer a nice example of how to keep this clear. As in North America, transit in those countries routinely offers discounts to senior citizens and the disabled, because, well, we as a society want to honor those people. Those discounts don't serve any particular transit agency mission, but the society judges them to be important. Fine. So in both Australia and Britain, the cost of those discounts is added up and a central government reimburses the transit agency for that amount, as a "shadow fare." The transit operator can then count all riders as equal, and compete for all riders as being of equal value to it, because it experiences them as all paying the same fare.

That's very clean, because it separates transit's real purpose from a separate (perfectly valid) social agenda, rather than just expecting transit operators to pay the cost of the social agenda. Seniors and disabled persons get their discounts, but the transit operator continues to value their patronage as much as they would value that of a full-fare customer.

Meanwhile, back on the roads, our current prevailing road pricing policy is that "when demand for road space exceeds supply, government will subsidize everyone's travel so as to elminate any monetary cost." The effect, of course, is that instead of paying in money we pay in time. That's what congestion is. Something of value is being given away for free, so we have a long queue of people waiting for it. If you want to "fix congestion," you have to change the price.

Is that hard on "poor" people? Yes, it is, like many things. The answer may be to subsidize the price as an expression of a social objective, in exactly the way that British and Australian governments subsidize senior/disabled fares as something entirely separate from other transit subsidies, thus enabling them to more cleanly connect each spending to a public purpose.

watching our words: congestion charge or price or (shudder) tax

Posted on March 17, 2011 in Auckland, Congestion Pricing, Journalism, Language, Words, Unhelpful

There seems to be a flurry of new interest in congestion pricing, partly under the pressure of tight budgets almost everywhere. But journalists can muddy the waters by describing congestion pricing as either exploitative or punitive.

Last month, I was invited to contribute to a Sydney Morning Herald thinkpiece on the subject. My contribution, the second of four pieces here, emphasises that congestion pricing is not about paying for congestion, it's about paying to avoid congestion. The core point:

Suppose you announce that you'll give away free concert tickets to the first 500 people in a queue. You'll get a queue of 500 people. These people are paying time to save money.
Other people will just buy a ticket and avoid the queue. They're choosing to pay money to save time.
Today, we require all motorists to wait in the queue. When stuck in congestion, we are paying for the road space in time rather than in money.
Shouldn't we have a choice about this? Why are we required to save money, a renewable resource, by spending time, the least renewable resource of all?

Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald framed the whole piece with the question, "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?" The implication is that congestion pricing is punitive, that some citizens believe that other citizens should be punished for their behavior. The question seems designed to sow misunderstanding and inflame rage. To their credit, none of the four expert responses — even the one from the auto club opposing the congestion charge — really took this bait.

So there's a problem with the terms congestion charge and congestion price. The terms sound like "paying for congestion," when the truth is the opposite, we're being invited to choose whether to spend money to avoid congestion. A more accurate term would be congestion avoidance price or even better, congestion avoidance option. But those are too many words.

Should we call it a decongestion price?

Real congestion pricing is about giving free and responsible adults a set of options that reflect the real-world geometry of cities. The core geometry problem is this:

Cities are, by definition, places where lots of people are close together.
Cities are therefore, by defintion, places with relatively little space per person.
Your car takes 50-100 times as much space as your body does.
Therefore, people in cars consume vastly more of the scarce resource, urban space, than the same people without their cars — for example, as pedestrians or public transit riders.
When people choose whether to drive, they're choosing how much scarce urban space to consume.
If urban space is to be used like any other scarce resource, its price needs to be deregulated so that it is used efficiently.

Congestion pricing is a form of deregulation. It is the most libertarian concept imaginable.

There's another way to mess this up, and that's the term "congestion tax." Here's the New Zealand Herald:

Aucklanders may be levied to drive through increasingly congested streets in the absence of Government funding of the region's "strategic aspirations".
A paper released by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide before Auckland's first spatial plan due out in 11 days suggests raising revenue by charging motorists to drive around the Super City at peak times.

Hide makes clear that this isn't a congestion price intended to reduce congestion. It's just another tax, intended to raise revenue. So just to be clear: If it's congestion pricing, there are public transit (and bike-ped, and casual carpool) alternatives that enable people to get where they're going. The congestion price cordons on the CBDs of London and Singapore work because there's abundant public transit to those places, so relatively few people absolutely have to drive into them. The San Francisco Bay Bridge tolls have a congestion-pricing value because there's both abundant transit and casual carpool options for avoiding them.

If, on the other hand, you're in a place where there's no reasonable alternative to driving — such as large parts of Auckland — then anything that suppresses driving will suppress travel, and that means it will suppress economic activity. And if you're just taxing economic activity, then this is really no different from sales taxes, Goods and Services Taxes (GST), or income taxes. By taxing economic activity, you're suppressing something that government and society should be encouraging. That's not a libertarian idea; quite the opposite.

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