Ever since the Interstate Highway program was established in 1956, federal transportation policy has meant pouring concrete. Uncle Sam picks up 90 percent of the cost of building and widening interstates and 75 percent of the tab for constructing other main roads. That makes for plenty of ribbons to cut, but those new highways seem to be clogged from the day they open. And why bother with maintenance? “It was much more inviting to build a new road with 90 percent federal money and 10 percent state money than to maintain it with 100 percent state money,” says Carl Williams, assistant director of California’s Department of Transportation.
The Senate began to reverse that bias last week. It agreed to a Bush administration plan to create a new, 185,000-mile National Highway System, including key local routes as well as interstates. For the first time, the federal government would pay more to maintain old roads than to build new ones. States would be freer to select projects: Massachusetts could upgrade railroads while Indiana focuses on rural highways. By the standards of highway engineers, the change is dramatic. But neither Congress nor the administration is ready to touch the real source of congestion: the way drivers pay to use the road.
Americans like to think of the 14 cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax and assorted state fuel taxes as user charges for highways. They aren’t. “There’s no real relationship between what you pay in gasoline taxes and the roads you’re riding on,” says Peter Salins, a planning expert at Hunter College in New York. Economists have a better way: let drivers pay for the congestion they cause. Under “congestion pricing,” people who take the expressway at 8 a.m. would be hit with a stiff charge, while those who drive at a less popular hour would pay little or nothing. If the fee is high enough, some might join a car pool or pick another time, speeding up the ride for everyone else - without widening the road.
The idea is not farfetched. (It already works for a mass-transit system, Washington’s Metro, where passengers pay $1.40 to ride from downtown to Bethesda at rush hour, but only 85 cents at midday.) A proposed turnpike in suburban Los Angeles, to be built along side an existing free way starting this fall, will charge tolls high enough to avoid congestion, with large discounts for cars carrying more than one passenger. There will be no tollbooths; radio signals will identify each car and the driver’s account will be billed by computer. Penny pinchers will have the option of using the freeway - and putting up with the delays.
Politically, charging fees for trips drivers now take for free is not a winner. “If it were put up to a vote now in any governmental body I know of, congestion pricing probably would not fly,” says Federal Highway Administrator Thomas Larson. That’s why the new transportation bill provides for nothing more than small pilot studies. But congestion continues to rise: the average mile of U.S. road handles almost one third more trips each day than it did in 1980. Unless drivers are forced to face the costs of their motoring habits, those traffic jams are only going to get worse.
