Highway congestion is a serious problem that will only get worse as the US population grows. And our traditional solution to congestion—building more lanes—seems to be running out of steam. With governments facing record deficits, elected officials are having enough trouble finding the money to maintain existing infrastructure, to say nothing of adding new capacity. And in many places, proposals to expand highways encounter fierce resistance from nearby residents.
So public officials are searching for strategies to use existing highway capacity more efficiently. Recently they've begun experimenting with a new strategy for controlling congestion: demand-based pricing of scarce road capacity. Congestion pricing promises to kill two pigs with one bird, keeping traffic flowing smoothly while simultaneously generating new revenue that can be used for public investments. New technologies—notably RFID transponders and license-plate-reading cameras—are allowing the replacement of traditional tollbooths with cashless tolling at freeway speeds.
The congestion tolling projects that have been undertaken to date are relatively modest, but some transportation experts view them as a first step toward a future where tolls are collected on most major roads, and perhaps even the minor ones. Such schemes might abolish traffic jams once and for all, but they also have significant downsides. Ubiquitous tolling requires ubiquitous surveillance, which raises obvious civil liberties concerns. And more ambitious tolling schemes have proven broadly unpopular with voters, who believe they have already paid for the roads via other taxes.
In this article we'll consider whether congestion pricing can cure what ails the American transportation system. The economic arguments are compelling, and the current generation of tolled express lanes have produced real benefits. But we remain skeptical that the economic advantages of more ambitious tolling regimes are large enough to justify the potential costs in individual liberty. At a minimum, there needs to be much stronger legal and technological safeguards to ensure that infrastructure built to catch people evading tolls isn't used as a general-purpose system for governments to monitor and control motorists' every move.
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Gina Carano Sanaa Lathan Ana Beatriz Barros Maria Menounos Shakira
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