Too Much of a Good Thing

Congestion tolls are coming to the Washington metropolitan region: The big question is whether they will be one piece of a patchwork approach with modest ambitions or the underpinning of a massive, region-wide plan to raise billions of dollars for transportation priorities, mainly mass transit.

Plans are already in the works to use congestion tolls to pay for construction of new lanes along the Interstate-495 Beltway and Interstates 95 and 395 in Northern Virginia, and the Intercounty Connector in Maryland. Now in a new report the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board is exploring the idea of imposing variable pricing tolls on all major highways and parkways in the region, not just transportation arteries where new lanes can be added.

As Eric Weiss explains in a Washington Post piece, regional transportation planners see no other option for keeping the roads moving. In an ideal world, congestion tolls would pay for new two-way lanes, as is planned for the Beltway and I-95/395, but in most cases the cost of acquiring the land for expanded roadways will make the cost prohibitive. Meanwhile, more money isn’t forthcoming from state governments. The only realistic alternative, the planners contend, is to impose tolls on roads that motorists now ride for free and to plow the money — as much as $2.75 billion a year — back into mass transit.

Tolls would range in price from $.20 per mile to more than $2 per mile for some stretches of road during periods of peak demand — even more for crossing Potomac River bridges

In the abstract, this a Bacon’s Rebellion fantasy come true. If new highway capacity is too expensive to build, use the price mechanism to ration it and incentivize drivers to utilize transportation alternatives from mass transit to telecommuting. Ideally, the incentives would be so powerful that they could stimulate meaningful shifts to move transportation-efficient human settlement patterns as well.

However, there are major political obstacles, not the least of which is the fact that people tend to be hostile to tolls imposed on roads and highways they once drove for free. Additionally, while the study contends that the preferred “DC and Parkways Restrained” plan would not impact any demographic group disproportionately, it does suggest that the tolls would stimulate a significant relocation of jobs within the region. A shift in jobs would create changes in land values and the tax base of different municipalities. Inevitably, the plan would create winners and losers among municipalities and within the politically influential developer/home builder community. Just as inevitably, as soon as the potential losers understand what’s a stake, they will start agitating against the proposal.
Click on this image for a close-up of a map published in the report. The flesh-colored areas designate where jobs will be lost — primarily in the inner ring of “suburbs” around the District of Columbia — and where jobs will be added, primarily in the urban core and outlying areas along the metropolitan periphery. Where the jobs go, property values will follow. Not only would the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board plan impose $2.75 billion a year in tolls upon a reluctant citizenry, jurisdictions such as Arlington and Alexandria would come out big losers. Are the elected representatives of those communities likely to support a plan with such an outcome?

Another stumbling block: A massive shift of the job base westward to Loudoun County and western Fairfax may not be what many Virginia smart growth advocates have in mind.

Bacon’s bottom line: As much as I am a huge fan of market-based solutions to transportation, this plan strikes me as overkill. The $2.75 billion-a-year cost exceeds the total $2.331 annual congestion cost for the Washington metropolitan area (as calculated by the Texas Transportation Institute). That’s plain crazy! This plan would apply a machete where a surgeon’s knife is called for. I can’t conceive of a plan like this winning public support.

There is definitely a role for congestion pricing in addressing the transportation needs of the Washington region, but the strategem needs to be applied selectively, and the public needs to be persuaded that it has an ameliorative effect before it can be rolled out on a regional scale. Furthermore, although the authors of this study did examine the impact of the tolls on land use patterns, they did not consider the reverse: how changes in land use could make the tolls work more effectively. As Ed Risse ceaselessly points out, there needs to be a balance between the travel demand generated by land uses and the transportation capacity planned for those land uses. I could detect no sign of such a sensibility in the study.