I had the pleasure of driving to Sunapee on Friday afternoon last week amongst the onslaught of northbound weekend traffic. The Everett Turnpike in New Hampshire has two express lanes for E-Zpass vehicles to bypass the traditional toll booths. The irony was that the normal toll booth lanes had little to no traffic, while the express lane was a parking lot. Being the clever person that I am, I went thru the old toll booth, which still accepted my E-Zpass, and I went about my merry way with little to no traffic.
This got me thinking. The express lane system that was designed with the intent to relieve traffic had completely failed. The majority of the vehicles on the road at that time had E-Zpass.
Wouldn’t there be a better way to allocate the scarce resource that is road capacity? Turns out there is a very old fashioned solution: market-based pricing. Be it tulips in 17th century Netherlands or airline tickets, they all have something in common, pricing based on the supply and demand. When market-based pricing is applied to roads, it means that as traffic demand increases, so do the tolls to keep traffic at an equilibrium.
A reasonable example of congestion-based pricing of roads is around Denver, Colorado, where instead of carpool/HOV lanes, there are toll lanes with variable pricing. The standard lanes are still free at the point of use. I propose taking this model a step further. All lanes should be tolled and dynamically priced, however the left lanes should be slightly more expensive, allowing vehicles that want to travel faster to be able to do so without more congestion. At the same time, this system would also encourage drivers to stick to the right-most lane as possible to avoid higher tolls. I hate getting stuck behind a slow, clueless driver in the left lane. Under my system, these clueless drivers would be dinged with higher tolls.
Lastly, there should be significant weight surcharges for heavier vehicles. Roads in the United States are heavily (intended) over-engineered for trucks, which put at least 6-8 times more wear on the road than a standard vehicle. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing government roads for the benefit of long-distance trucking, which in many cases would be more efficiently served with private trains.