The Transportationist

Article in NY Times about experience of privatization on Indiana Toll Roads: Toll Road Offers New Jersey a Fiscal Test Drive . While noting critics, the article is generally favorable. This is an issue primarily for existing public toll agencies which a number of governors want to sell off for cash up front. Secondarily, the issue arises of tolling existing untolled roads and building new private toll roads.

The article did not raise the issue of non-compete clauses, which were the undoing of California SR-91's private ownership.

Posted by David Levinson at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From New York Times: $8 Traffic Fee for Manhattan Gets Nowhere

Posted by David Levinson at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From Streetsblog, Paterson Backs Pricing, Introduces Bill in Albany

Congestion Pricing in NYC may yet live. The politics are that the excess revenue from pricing goes to support transit. Locals support (generally), while auto commuters and others who drive into Manhattan oppose. I still have issues with an area scheme vs. a cordon scheme (the latter should have lower collection costs), but again this is a perfect vs. good situation.

My class did a case study on this last semester here

Posted by David Levinson at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nice article from the Financial Times on carsharing: You take the hire road

"Streetcar fosters this sense of community by encouraging a sense of responsibility towards other club users. You are asked not to leave the car with the petrol tank less than a quarter full; if the car gets dirty, you are invited to earn an hour’s free rental by taking it to the car wash and getting it cleaned at Streetcar’s expense; and if you return the car late, keeping a neighbour waiting, you are fined £25 – of which £20 goes to your aggrieved fellow member."

This is exactly the same logic behind the Delayer Pays Principle: Examining Congestion Pricing with Compensation (1.2 MB) (International Journal of Transport Economics 31:3 295-311) Peter Rafferty and I have posited for congestion pricing, those who cause delay pay those who they delayed.

Posted by David Levinson at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Washington Post: Infrared Scans May Regulate HOT Lanes. The latest technology used to detect cheaters in HOV/HOT lanes.

(1) Hopefully they won't throw out this data after its collected (see previous post on LA), it does have valuable planning uses in predicting mode utilization.

(2) Any semblance of privacy you thought you had is gone, hopefully we can watch the watchers just as easily as they watch us. David Brin's Transparent Society is interesting in this regard.

(3) The amount of effort we go to in order to enforce minor rules is amazing. In the absence of congestion on the HOV lane, (and the presence of congestion in the general purpose lanes) it is actually efficient for there to be some small amount of cheating: it takes a car out of the congested lanes, puts it in the uncongested lanes (without congesting them) and produces a net benefit to society. Too much clearly would congest the HOV/HOT lanes. It reminds one of the expression "A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone somewhere is having fun." The point isn't that it is costing society to have some cheating, the point is that "free riding" is cheating and "unfair" whatever that means.

Posted by David Levinson at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A nice article in NYT: Technology Eases the Ride to Higher Tolls citing important work by Amy Finkelstein of MIT on Tax Salience, the less you are aware of a tax, the easier it is to raise, this applies to tolls, so electronic tolls which have less salience than manual, result in the ability to raise tolls faster. Finkelstein's paper was cited in Levinson and Odlyzko's "Too Expensive to Meter:The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication" earlier this year.

Posted by David Levinson at 05:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mayor Bloomberg of New York is doing the hard sell to get congestion pricing approved, along with some help from FHWA (Mary Peters) Urban Partnership Agreement. The Selling of Congestion Pricing -

Everyone thinks the losers will be commuters priced off the roads. But consider the poor parking garage owner, who will now have to lower their rates to attract back customers. I wouldn't be surprised to see parking prices drop almost as much as congestion charges rise, meaning only "through trips" (New Jersey to Brooklyn, Queens, or the rest of Long Island) would be truly priced off the road.

Posted by David Levinson at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mayor of NYC Bloombergproposes a Fee for Driving Into Manhattan

"The proposal that is sure to attract the most attention, and possibly objections, is one to impose the $8 fee on car drivers, and $21 for truck operators, to drive in Manhattan south of 86th Street."

As the article notes, this proposal copies the London congestion charging scheme, almost point for point, including the use of cameras and the extremely expensive AVI system for enforcement.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From today's Sydney Morning Herald: Cross City Tunnel receivers put tollroad on sale block . The tollroad tunnel went under (so to speak) in part because they missed their forecast, getting 30000 travelers per day instead of 90000.
Oops.

Another article on this in Toll Roads News The firm responsible for the forecast was Hyder Consulting who remarkably still claim credit for the project on their website.
Oops.

Forecasting traffic is not easy, but there are established methods that should get freeway demand estimates within 20-30% or better (i.e. one lane) of actual values (not 300% off) and one is not convinced these guys used them. In fact, even with no tolls, traffic was still only 60% of the predicted flow.

Unfortunately, there is really no liability for poor forecasts, at least not for the forecasters.

Of course this points out the advantages to private sector assuming the risk, the public is not on the hook for a bailout. It also argues for higher returns to compensate for the risk, otherwise projects won't get built.

Posted by David Levinson at 02:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One might call it Rod Pricing instead of Road Pricing, given the important role that Rod Eddington of Eddington Report fame is having on the Road Pricing debate over here. Two articles from the anti-pricing Telegraph

* here and

* here

discuss the issue. Rod seems to have introduced some sense into the argument, suggesting it is only appropriate for city centers. In economic jargon, this is the area where marginal costs are increasing. On uncongested roads, marginal costs per use are falling or zero, the fixed cost of the road is spread across more users, but congestion has yet to set in. (This of course is concerned with congestion costs and construction costs, not environment costs, which should be dealt with differently).

The government moving towards zones (or cordons) is some progress on the issue. One must ask though whether the collection costs will be larger than the revenue in rural areas (I strongly suspect they will), or whether a few pence per mile will affect behavior much (I suspect it won't).

Andrew Odlyzko and I recently (two days ago) finished a draft paper on the subject "Too expensive to meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication", which he has put on his website
at
this link

Posted by David Levinson at 02:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UK PM emails road pricing signatories, those who signed the petition opposing pricing. His letter is interesting from a number of perspectives, and was clearly written in part by transportation professionals.

However there is an (intentional?) misrepresentation of the induced demand problem hidden in the text.

If it is the "beginning ,not the end of the debate", it has not got off to a good start. There are several elements missing from the context, though perhaps they will be brought back in:
1) Hypothecation (the British term for earmarking) - money raised from transportation should be spent on transportation (or its impacts). When talking about building facilities the PM says "Tackling congestion in this way would also be extremely costly, requiring substantial sums to be diverted from other services such as education and health, or increases in taxes." Implying more money for roads from the same gas tax is less money for something else. This is because in the UK the petrol (gas) tax is used as a cash cow to cross-subsidize other sectors of the economy that should be paid for out of general revenue or otherwise. If people instead saw transportation taxes/tolls/prices as paying for transportation services, there would be more readiness to do so.

2) Local decision making - most travel is local, decision making about tolls and pricing should be local (though obviously there are positive network externalities associated with choosing a common technological framework).

Posted by David Levinson at 04:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a less than overly popular move, Ken Livingstone has implemented the western extension of the Congestion Charge, as noted in the GuardianProtest greets congestion charge's westward push BBC devoted almost the entire half-hour of local news last night to the topic.

Several things to note, though the evidence is anecdotal. First, students are on break this week, so traffic levels are lighter. That said, the buses seemed to make much better time.

Second, it is being billed more for environmental than congestion-relief reasons now, so the nominal motive has changed (the underlying motive, punish the car and raise money remains). Paying lip service to carbon reduction is now politically correct, whether or not this is the best way to achieve that end.

Third, the national government's long-term road pricing scheme is becoming very unpopular with everyone but the environmentalists, as the public rightly sees it as a way to collect more money, rather than manage traffic and improve transportation. Perhaps hypothecation should be restored in England. The road pricing debate is spilling over on the congestion charge. Privacy issues are also re-emerging as critical.

Some of the roads in the old zone were empty enough during the morning that it felt like a ghost town walking around, all the cars are parked, no vehicles are moving. It is not quite that level in the western extension, though better than it had been ... but again, this week is break.

I do believe a major mistake was made in letting residents of the west get to use roads in the east as if they were local. This will raise traffic levels in the east. A zone system would be much fairer, with perhaps some discount for those in the west. I am sure there were political reasons for this.

If the zone gets extended further, some form of zoning will be necessary, or it will lose all effectiveness.

It will be intersting to see the final analysis on traffic levels. I suspect the government lowballed the official congestion reduction estimates of 4 percent to be able to claim victory when a greater reduction occurs.

Posted by David Levinson at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago I noted the anti-pricing petition in London. That petition now has over 1 million signatures (about 2% of the entire country), and the government proposed policy looks like it might be in trouble ...Pressure mounts over road tolls

Top-down schemes like this without the support of the public do not seem like they are the right way to proceed.

-- dml

Posted by David Levinson at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Road Pricing debate in the UK is much more advanced than the US. Many reports and white papers have advocated adopting road pricing to reduce congestion and pollution (though whether the fuel tax would be reduced is not quite clear, one suspects no). This has garnered some public debate, being shown on the national news and in the daily newspapers. The Telegraph has a link
to a petition at Number 10 Downing Street that opposes road pricing. To date 58,676 people have signed. I did not see a petition in favor of pricing. After the public comment, the government will make a decision, though I am doubtful the public comment will actually affect the decision.

While the success of the London Congestion Charging scheme are impressive, it is unclear whether the rest of the country is willing to go along with still higher prices to travel (fuel here is near the equivalent of $8.00 per gallon).

Posted by David Levinson at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We returned from a road trip from Minneapolis to Pittsburgh last night. We went to Pittsburgh to attend the lovely wedding of Jason Hong, a friend of ours from Berkeley quizbowl, who is now a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. We stopped for the night outside Toledo on the way there and outside Milwaukee on the way back.

Random observations in roughly chronological order.

Continue reading "Road Trip" »

Posted by David Levinson at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)