Sooner or later it was bound to happen: The Washington Post has run an editorial that I agree with. Rest assured, I haven’t gone soft and mushy — it’s the Post that has seen the light.

Buried in the latest White House budget, writes the Post, is a proposal to grant $100 million to as-yet-unspecified cities to experiment with value pricing as a strategy for combatting traffic congestion. The Post, which has plugged tirelessly for more construction and higher taxes in Virginia, sees merit in a strategy that would modulate the demand side of the equation:

Traffic jams cost millions of Americans real money, an expense that is disguised in the form of lost time and wasted gas, not to mention the daily frustration that’s harder to price or otherwise quantify. The White House estimates that in 2003 American motorists in the 85 most-clogged metropolitan areas wasted 3.7 billion hours and 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline — about $63 billion worth — stuck in traffic. Every year, drivers in the 10 most-congested cities pay between $850 and $1,600 and use the equivalent of about eight work days on jammed highways and streets. These calculations do not even consider the massive social cost of additional air pollution. The Washington area is one of the worst-off: The Census Bureau announced last year that, on average, commuters in and around the District have the second-longest trips in the country.

Urban congestion has become so bad that, in addition to investing in public transportation and traffic-calming strategies, many cities are considering ways of making these disguised costs explicit — by, for example, charging a toll when drivers enter certain parts of towns or use particularly popular highways during peak hours — thereby discouraging unnecessary trips when congestion is at its worst.

It’s scary when I find myself agreeing with a Post editorial. There must be some significance to this harmonic convergence of such divergent philosophies. Perhaps it’s a sign that the time for congestion pricing has truly come. Now… if only we could persuade the lawmakers trapped inside the bubble of the General Assembly to halt their bickering over which taxes to raise and start thinking about how to institute congestion pricing.