Transportation for Massachusetts has a nifty primer on peak-period tolling, which is a form of congestion pricing.
I’ve been planning to post on congestion pricing (again). In the meantime, please invest two minutes in the Transportation for Massachusetts video. I don’t think they put enough emphasis on the impact on global climate change or the opportunity congestion pricing presents to raise desperately needed revenue for transit. And, if you really want to reduce car volume, it makes more sense to raise prices at peak time than to reduce prices off-peak. But, those are differences of degree. We need dynamic road pricing.
Here’s another good video on congestion pricing, from an NYC angle.
What do you think? Would it be better if there were a $.50 difference between driving the pike at 7:00 v. 8:00 AM? What would be the impact on Newton.
Sean… I see the video on the homepage worked. Thanks for using.
BTW I think there should be no tolls at all. I think they net something like only 60 cents on the dollar.
Plus all the corruption with the pay by plate and the transponder rip-off.
I’m with Newton Business Staff on this one. I don’t think there should be ANY toll roads. Raise the gas tax to whatever it needs to be fund the support the roads, bridges, etc. Charging for this road but not that road leads to all kinds of weird side affects and charges one set of road users and not another. As NBS mentions it’s also a woefully inefficient way of raising money with a sizable chunk of it being squandered on the collection of the money itself.
Paying for roads with a gas tax has the added benefit of providing a financial incentive for more fuel efficient cars and trucks and less use of them.
As for “congestion pricing”, we already have an extremely egalitarian form of that. If I or anyone else wants to drive on the roads at peak hours we all pay equally with our time. Demand pricing has a nasty underside to it. It in effect takes a very important public resource and allocates it via income. We take all the people with not enough money to afford the tolls off the road so that those who can afford them have shorter travel times. That sort of allocation is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a commercial market but its a horrible way to allocate our public resources.
@jerry I totally agree. (you can call me Jon BTW)
And you just made me think…. When is there EVER no congestion? I’ve been on the pike 2 am on Sunday and there is less, but not no congestion.
And… this is another front on the war on cars. We have the explosion of empty bike lanes taking away car lanes in some places, we have sidewalk bulges taking up parking spaces, at least in Boston. (Not to mention what this does to snow plowing.)
We have condemned MBTA parking garages in Quincy and 2 stations on the Red Line under construction simultaneously, Wallaston and its parking lot closed completely for 2 years.
And they are running luxury buses that are for the most part empty with the “required” gaggle of detail cops standing around playing on their cell phones and I counted 9 MBTA “commuter helpers” hanging out, doing nothing to help anyone bunched up in a bus shelter.
We have an MBTA that builds stations lacking convenient “kiss and go” drop off areas to facilitate easy car to train transition. Think about the design of Forrest Hills Station. And for Newton I’m not impressed with the parking at Riverside line stations.
God help newton if the MBTA wants to rebuild Riverside for example.
And Mass has the highest cost per mile of building roads, mostly due to corruption in my opinion.
see: http://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/local_news/mass-ranks-at-top-of-highway-spending-but-roads-among/article_f389bae6-877b-11e6-a35e-9bfd5b96ab63.html
What is being done to first REDUCE costs of road building and repair and building an efficient, cost effective public transportation system BEFORE jumping to raising tolls?
If the congestion charge is only on the pike I’m thinking people are just going to get off at Weston/Auburndale or West Newton and jam up local roads, unless it’s applied at the Weston barracks gantry. If we’re going to go down this route I’d look at something like what London does where they have a section of the city flagged as a congestion zone and charge cars regardless of the route they take to get in between X and Y hours. The problem with that approach besides the infrastructure to charge cars is we don’t have near the level of public transit that London does to make it work. We need to work on improving the GR/CR and general public transit before we look at congestion charges, it won’t do much if people don’t have a viable alternative.
I think a better idea is to make public transportation totally free and really “public”. Can you think of how better the environment would be not having to wait for people to pay while the bus idles? Both doors could be open and folks could get on and off quickly speeding up traffic.
How many more would leave their cars at home if the T were free?
Not to mention the inefficiency of Charlie cards and fare collection. The fraud, wast and abuse. Payments for software, there is an entire industry built up around fare collection infrastructure. You load up your charlie card with a credit card even the credit card companies get a piece of the action.
Employers who offer cards as a benefit have to administer the program, driving up costs.
MBTA employees hired to administer this, their salaries, benefits and pensions.
Costs go on and on.
I wonder has anyone figured out what the net is to the MBTA after all the costs associated with fare collection, including the impacts on the traffic, environment and impediments to use are?
I think the comments are conflating congestion pricing with modal shift, both potential solutions to gridlock. Congestion pricing makes better use of resources like roads and bridges and could just as easily apply to public transit. If the T is at capacity at rush hour, peak pricing might help move some commuters on to empty trains and enable transit to move more people overall.
Yep, tolls always hit a nerve. The War On Cars? Jon, we need to stop pretending that our roads are free and have endless capacity. If we manage those resources better or put more people on public transit, we’re doing people in cars a huge favor. I agree it’s the right idea to make public transit free, and hopefully invest in it more than today to expand and improve service, but as always, one has to ask, who is going to pay for that? We’d have to reallocate our transportation dollars. Right now, public transportation is already subsidized, but nobody thinks about the enormous subsidies for running our roads and bridges. Tolls are one unpopular way to do it. The gas tax has obvious problems. Jerry, it’s hard enough to get anyone in the legislature to entertain a one-time increase. The common-sense attempt to peg the gas tax to an index and take politics out of the equation was tossed out. Ignoring, for the moment, that electric cars may one day make the gas tax irrelevant, how do you suggest changing the status quo? I like logging VMT, but that’s another idea that’s not going to happen, and it’s more to do with funding and mode shift and nothing to do with congestion pricing.
@Adam – I agree we need funding for our roads and yes all taxes (gas tax, tolls, etc) are always unpopular. No matter how the state raises substantial new tax revenue they will have to face the always difficult job of selling it to the public.
If we are raise that money via tolls, that is an inherently inefficient approach and I believe that it allocates our public resources much more inequitably.
Why are some roads charged and others aren’t?
Mass Pike? Fee.
Tobin Bridge? Fee
Southeast Expressway? Free
Why?
Why are some commuters charged and others aren’t? I am happy to pay a gas tax on the gas that I use. If I own a Prius I pay a smaller fee that if I own an Expedition. Charge me on what I use on a scale that is fair all around.
I am fortunate that I can get to work really early so I miss the 8:30 AM commute, but on days that I have another commitment, I am thankful for the flexibility that I have that I don’t have do be on the highway at 8:30 AM.
The gas tax is one tool, but it doesn’t go far enough. For example, it would help in fuel efficiency, which is a key factor here, but it doesn’t help in congestion.
The toll gets closer to the idea of using economics as a way to control access. Right now we use public roads for private transportation. We put vehicles that carry large numbers of people (buses) within the same pattern as those carrying individuals. Tolling lets us move off those who don’t NEED to be on the right RIGHT NOW and shift their time to when the roadways are more open. We do this with other aspects of our economy, so it’s not a completely new idea.
As for making all public transportation free, even the most ardent advocates argue against that. I’ve been working with the 128 Business Council on a few projects and they say that charging riders something, even if it’s a token amount, is an important part of the process. It creates a personal value to the system. What we don’t want to do is create a transportation system that is only used by the poorest citizens, we want something that everyone can use together.
@Chuck Tanowicz – The toll gets closer to the idea of using economics as a way to control access.
That is exactly my problem with it. Another way of saying that same thing is – set the price high enough so that half the cars disappear and the ones that remain are those that can afford the escalated tolls.
Yes we do indeed use the market to manage large aspects of our economy. It doesn’t follow though that therefore everything should be managed via market forces. Public resources are just that ‘public’ – with equal access regardless of income or wealth. I dread the idea of treating the management of public resources as private marketplaces.
That being said I may tempted to buy an RMV Premium Pass to jump the queues at the registry 😉
Or they mode-shift. Or they time-shift.
We think that closing highways or reducing access is going to create huge issues, but that just doesn’t happen. Examples include Minneapolis, Atlanta and LA. In two cases huge accidents ripped holes in the infrastructure, and the city just… adjusted. In the case of LA they closed the 405 for construction and traffic just disappeared. Trips shifted either in time or in mode: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/04/what-happened-to-atlantas-carmageddon/521805/.
So limiting access in time doesn’t necessarily mean that only the wealthy will move, it means that the people will find another way to accomplish their goal.