Why Not Congestion Tolls?

TW: Wanna spend more time with your kids, reduce pollution, reduce your blood pressure and perhaps even reduce taxes? Think about a little road congestion pricing (i.e. floating tolls based on time of day, day of week etc.). Congestion tolls have been tried and proven effective in numerous places yet have not been widely adopted in the U.S. Time "wasted" in jams and taxes spent building and maintaining highways are real costs. Congestion tolls are a classic micro-economic device to charge those who benefit most from a good for that value.

From Ryan Avent's Bellows blog:
"The Texas Transportation Institute’s latest urban mobility report is out, and the news isn’t very good. Sure, congestion has fallen in recent months in much of the country; recession will do that for you. But the annual bill for traffic congestion now sits at $87 billion. That’s lost time and wasted gas.

It takes a lot of dumb decision making to get congestion that bad. An example: here in the Washington metropolitan area — one of the few places where congestion has increased through the recession — Maryland is going to spend nearly $4 billion widening an exurban stretch of highway. So far as long-term results are concerned, they may as well be setting the money on fire. If they’re absolutely determined to spend more money on capacity, they could significantly improve regional rail lines along the corridor and build a local service light rail line for far less than $4 billion.

But the best way to understand the $87 billion we lose annually to congestion is as a political failure. Tolling highways would eliminate congestion. It would eliminate the perceived need to spend billions on general revenues on new highway capacity. And it would raise billions which could be used to keep highways in a good state of repair and provide effective public transportation for those unable or unwilling to pay for access to tolled highways. It would save gobs of money, time, lives, and emissions...but the prospects for wide-scale adoption of congestion tolling seems bleak."