Congestion Pricing: No Free Lunch On Roads Or Freedom

When the government holds down the price of something people value, Mr. Manville said, we get shortages. And congestion is effectively a shortage of road — one that occurs at the peak times when people want to use it most.

If we had that problem with other kinds of infrastructure or commodities, we’d charge people more for them. If airline tickets were particularly in demand, their prices would go up. If there were a run on avocados, grocers wouldn’t respond by keeping them as cheap as possible.

“The roads hold such a special position in our brain that we use logic around them that we would never use around everything else,� Mr.. Manville said.

Other countries have socialized health care, parental leave or housing, Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant at Nelson\Nygaard, pointed out. In America, we’ve socialized driving — and housing for our cars.

“We don’t let people put their self-storage containers in public parks, but it’s just fine to store their cars on other public land for free,� Mr. Tumlin wrote in an email.

Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, traces this thinking to the 1920s and ’30s, when industry groups and government officials were debating whether to fund America’s expanding roads with tolls, which were by then common on bridges.
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Road builders were happy to have tolls, and they appeared in places like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. But auto clubs and car manufacturers dependent on car sales opposed them. They preferred a gas tax, a cost less visible to drivers every time they got in a car. Together, they were remarkably savvy about branding the choice as one between “toll roads and free roads.� (A 1939 federal report even adopted that phrase as its title.)

“Of course, there’s no such thing as a free road,� Mr. Norton said. “But they were making the ambiguous association between their cause and the great cause of freedom.�


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/u...hat-plain.html