Currently, tolls allocate in one-dimension only, the physical realm: they have an impact on which road a person takes. The tolls on the turnpike cause some drivers to avoid the pike for local roads. The quite reasonable fear that toll hikes will cause an increase in cut-through, toll-avoiding traffic is quite reasonable. It is likewise reasonable to expect that reducing or eliminating tolls would reduce cut-through traffic.
But, there is a downside to reducing or eliminating tolls. You make it more attractive. Restricted resources that are free or priced too low are poorly used. The turnpike is a restricted resource, there is limited capacity. Giving that capacity away mis-allocates the resource. Imagine two drivers, one willing to pay a reasonable toll and one not. Removing the toll creates congestion that the first driver would have been willing to pay to avoid. Of course, imposing a toll, if it is the same price round-the-clock, causes that driver to use other roads, causing congestion there.
Not all toll avoiders are going to use other roads. Some will decide not to take the trip. Others will take mass transit. But still, there is an enormous impact on local roads.
The situation would be much different if we added another dimension to tolls: time. Imagine if the gas-tax gang proposed to reduce or eliminate tolls off-peak. Now our toll avoider has another choice: travel at a different time. Everybody wins. The willing toll payer faces less congestion as toll avoiders are given another option. The toll avoider who has the flexibility to travel off peak gets the benefit of the turnpike (compared to stop-and-go local roads). Local road users see a reduction in traffic from the toll avoiders that time-shift their travel. The tolls continue to operate as an incentive to use transit. And, the state maintains the revenue stream during peak travel.
There are going to be an awful lot of MetroWest commuters who are not going to be pleased once they live through the congestion that is the entirely foreseeable — even if unintended — consequence of removing the tolls.
has a lot to do with this. Too bad I don’t know a darn thing about it. But someone on here does!
We had a long thread on congestion pricing not too long ago.
<
p>The toll booths do help cars keep moving by serving as governors — they take the sometimes light/sometimes heavy traffic before the toll booth and ensure that it’s spread out to a steady stream. It’s worth noting that the toll booth (not the toll) accomplishes this. You could remove the actual toll collection, keep the toll booth, and make it all ezPass where we remove the transmitter but keep the camera to enforce 15 mph through the booth. You’d get the traffic shaping without the toll. It sounds strange, but it’s in fact very similar to using Ramp Metering to break up platoons and get a steady flow of traffic.
<
p>This works best when there’s the right number of vehicles on the road but the wrong distribution — barren stretches and then big clumps of vehicles. Of course, we’d rather have everyone spread out relatively uniformly because average speed isn’t constrained and there are fewer accidents because people aren’t so close to each other’s bumpers.
<
p>
<
p>But tolls have another function. They reduce the usage overall, helping to eliminate use during peak times and thereby reducing traffic during rush hour.
<
p>This is why I’d support the following:
* Increase the gas tax. I don’t know if $0.50 is the right number. Bigger is better in general from my perspective, but remember that many people live near enough NY, CT, RI, VT, NH. Seems to me that we ought to limit our gas tax to roughly $0.05 higher than the max(NY, CT, RI, VT, NH) and then hope that neighboring states also raise their gas tax.
* Put some of that money into infrastructure that reduces gasoline consumption and the need for miles of road. This includes
– MBTA
– Other regional transit agencies
– Bicycling facilities (rail to trail, bike lanes, etc)
– Pedestrian improvements (safer crossings, sufficient sidewalks, etc)
– High speed Internet in rural areas
– Smart growth initiatives
– More HOV lanes on the highways
I’m sure there are other ideas too.
* Change the MassPike from toll to congestion toll. Add a congestion charge to other sections of highway which are suffering as well. Here’s how I’d do it:
1. If there’s no congestion, there’s no toll. Yay!
2. If you’ve got 2 or more people in your vehicle, there’s no toll. Yay! [I reserve the right to increase this to three people if suddenly everyone is carpooling and there’s still too many cars. Not. bloody. likely.]
3. If you’re driving alone and it’s during rush hours in the direction of heavy traffic, it’s toll time. How much? I don’t know. I don’t have access to the data. Here’s what I’d guess though. I’d guess you could keep it at the price it is now to start and see what happens… you might even be able to lower it. Why? Because some people will shift their behavior to avoid the toll. They’ll work 7-4 or even 6-3 if they can… or 11-8pm even. Some may even shift to a 4/40 or 9/80 work schedule.(fn 1) They’ll carpool. If they’re not going to work, they’ll hold off on their errand until a bit later so they can save some money.
<
p>Here’s the beauty: not everyone has to do this. If only 5% of people do this, you’ll find traffic congestion greatly reduced. This is because traffic congestion is highly nonlinear. Once you’ve hit the sweet spot of congestion, adding just a few more cars slows things dramatically. This means that if you remove just a few cars, things speed back up dramatically.
<
p>So, to recap: driving off-peak? No toll. Carpooling? No toll. Driving by yourself during rush hour? Congestion charge must be paid, designed to encourage more people to be in the first two categories because the way to get the most person-miles per hour out of the road is to ensure that an upper threshold of users at one time isn’t exceeded.
<
p>
<
p>The punch line
<
p>If you’re worried about climate change, the gas tax is the best answer. If you’re worried about dependence on foreign oil, the gas tax is the best answer. But, if you’d like to help save gajillions of hours a year of traffic and reduce injuries and financial costs due to traffic accidents, a congestion charge is the best way to ensure the maximum benefit of the road to society as a whole. Furthermore, since the congestion charge isn’t to maintain the road [that’s what the big gas tax does], you can more easily consolidate agencies and use the congestion charge money to help fewer people have to pay the congestion charge. Run better carpool services. More bus services. More commuter rail. If wildly successful, the congestion charge [and hours of congestion charge time] will be reduced to the point of elimination.
<
p>
<
p>fn 1: 4/40 is 4 days a week, 40 hours a week. The 10 hour ay. 9/80 is roughly 9 hours a day, 9 days every two weeks.
that charging more for something promotes less use, then won’t there be less traffic because of the higher cost of gasoline?
There may be some drop overall, but the gas tax alone won’t effect distribution of demand. My assumption (shared by many) is that peak-period congestion is caused by people who must drive during peak periods being joined by those who only choose to drive during peak periods. There are two things discouraging the choose-tos: the toll and the pain of congestion. The toll is called price rationing. The congestion component is called queue rationing.
<
p>If you can remove the choose-tos (or more of the choose-tos), congestion should decrease. One way to remove the choose-tos is to make the financial disincentive sharper. You can do that by increasing the price, by making a difference between peak and off-peak prices, or both.
<
p>Adding to the gas tax is not going to make a tolled road more or less attractive an option.
A stronger shift will be in the kind of vehicle used, not how many are used.
<
p>You’ll see fewer SUVs and pickups on the heavy commute, more sedans and motorcycles.
<
p>Tolls charge everyone the same for use of the road. Gas tax charges everyone a different amount for use of the road — but it charges each person the same for use of every [same length] road.
Personally, I don’t think that many people are currently avoiding the Pike and taking local roads (like Route Nine) simply to avoid tolls. Personally, I take the Pike whenever I think it will be faster and avoid it during rush hour when local roads are likely to be faster.
<
p>But let’s accept for the moment that eliminating the tolls will significantly and ins some measureable way increase traffic on the now free Turnpike. I would still advocate taking down the tolls for the many other reasons already well argued by toll opponents:
<
p>1) An absurdly inefficient revenue collection system (complete with it’s legions of overpaid toll collectors and management hacks) would be replaced by a gas tax that is efficient to collect.
<
p>2)It would likely reduce traffic on alternative local roads.
<
p>3) The environment would benefit by eliminating the need to slow down to pay the tolls and then speed up again. Not to mention the energy needed to run all those tolls booths 24/7.
<
p>4) Eliminating tolls would also mitigate the patent unfairness of the current toll system (which “taxes” only certain drivers driving certain routes in order to pay for teh Big Dig and public transportation that is used primarily by a completely other set of residents).
Every time the tolls go up, usage drops, so there’s some relationship between toll hikes and pike usage. And, I doubt the lost drivers are riding their bikes.
<
p>1. There are lots of ways to make toll collection more efficient.
<
p>2. Probably true.
<
p>3. Not if the temporary congestion at the toll plazas is replaced by more even more congestion that’s solely related to volume.
<
p>4. There’s a path to fairness and more efficient use of our limited access highways: add tolls north and south.
For an extremely efficient system of revenue collection already in place that basically uses the gas tax to charge a small toll for every road in the Commonwealth.
<
p>Adding tolls North and South would simply “tax” a different set of specific drivers for services (roads and public transportation) that are enjoyed by virtually all residents of Massachusetts.
<
p>
If you don’t think congestion is a problem, than you are right. A simple, equally distributed gas tax is efficient and fair (at least on the face of it).
<
p>If you are worried about congestion and the toll it takes (pun intended) on the environment and on business, then it makes sense to look at high-demand roads, bridges, and tunnels and figure out how to make them less congested.
<
p>If I owned a business that had to use the Central Artery to deliver goods, I would be delighted to pay a (relatively) small toll if that would lead to less traffic and a faster trip through the tunnels. Time is money.
<
p>Taking down the tolls is going to remove one cost, but add other, different costs.
This is the queueing theory stuff. It’s not at all clear that the tolls result in more gasoline consumption because the toll booths shape traffic to remove platoons, which allows each individual driver to have a smoother ride after the toll collection — fewer times that he will tap (or push hard) on the brake, immediately followed by juicing the gas.
<
p>The energy used by the toll booths themselves is negligible when compared to the energy used in the autos on the road, so that’s really a moot point.
For example, take my commute to school. If you put a toll on 140, there are enough back roads in the south coast that I would easily be able to avoid the highway with only a minor inconvenience. The pike is simply such an easy way for people in that region to get to Boston and the amount of cars going to Boston makes a toll on the pike a good source of revenue. Having tolls on assorted other highways in the state would find themselves quickly circumvented, I think, and end up being a burden beyond anything you gain in revenue.
You could do a lot of congestion busting, raise revenue, and make life fairer if you put some tolls on the I-93 and 128/95, to name two.
<
p>It might not be necessary or warranted on other highways.
Toll booths on 93, which is already badly congested doesn’t sound like a good idea.
<
p>But the Fast Lane cameras can catch a license plate at 25 mph, could they catch them at 60 mph or at off ramps and mail the toll? It could be done quarterly to cut down on postage or for folks using transponders on a per trip basis.
<
p>They could also add them throughout Boston and have a drive your car downtown toll, which I think London already does. It seems like there’s a technology solution that disperses the collection process that could solve this problem. Out of state drivers would be tough, but if you made the toll even higher for them, maybe the cost of collection would be worth it.
The technology exists. The real reason they make you slow down to 10mph at Mass tolls isn’t the technology. It’s so you don’t get into an accident with either the booth or other drivers. In Delaware and Southern NJ, they have open road tolling. You breeze through at 55mph and there is no reduction/expansion of lanes. They’re real… and they are spectacular.
<
p>You could do it here. Hell, you could make some roads “EZ Pass only” if you’re worried about new toll booths creating congestion. Or you could mandate a transponder with all vehicle registrations.
I firmly support this concept – eliminate the tolls and have a gas tax that adequately funds transportation infrastructure. The cost of collecting tolls consumes much of the toll revenue, just a boatload of waste.
<
p>One agency.
One gas tax.
Efficiency.
I’d be with you.
Because tolls do more than just generate revenue, that is an excellent reason to be even more with pablo, because the other things tolls do are on balance more harmful than good, and revenue generation is actually their saving grace.
I think the gas tax is a substantive good; it provides transportation revenue AND discourages driving.
It is politically unpalatable to many people, but if it comes with toll elimination, it becomes acceptable to Metrowest residents, some of the Commonwealth’s biggest drivers.
If this money is used partly to reduce people’s need to drive and the tax itself discourages driving, it will do something to reduce congestion on the Pike and Rt. 93 and in Downtown Boston.
All in all, congestion is not as big a problem as climate change and the gas tax would do something to address it. I never drive on the Pike, but if folks there want to get rid of the tolls, it’s fine by me.
50 c. gas tax; no tolls; more $ for the T and the RTAs. Let’s do it as soon as we pass Sen. Baddour’s MassTrans bill.
Having tolls on the pike redirects some drivers to other roads. True.
<
p>However, when you take the leap to saying that removing the tolls would “mis-allocate” the resource, you’re putting spin on that and turning it into a value judgement. I would say that having tolls on the pike is what “mis-allocates” the resource now, and that if we had more tolls, it would be allocated exactly right.
<
p>Spreading the tolls around to other roads would make some progress towards fixing the current mis-allocation caused by having tolls on the pike only, but at excessive expense and annoyance. On the other hand, a gas tax increase would have the same effect as spreading the tolls to all roads in exactly the right proportions to avoid mis-allocating their use, and would do so in a much more efficient, and less frustrating fashion.
Gas tax allocates gasoline more efficiently.
Tolls allocate space on the roadway more efficiently.
<
p>If all vehicles were single-seat and got the same MPG, they’d be the same. Since this is not the case, a gas tax cannot be an efficient way to allocate road space because for the same stretch of road passenger vehicles will pay vastly different amounts of tax.
Tolls allocate space on the roadway more efficiently.
<
p>That’s the very value judgement I was commenting about. I assert that it is the opposite of true.
<
p>P.S. Note that even if you were right, gas taxes would come much closer to ideal, by at least a few orders of magnitude, that trying to fund transportation by putting tolls on a few select roads ever could; also note that gas use tends to be proportional to vehicle weight, and hence to the amount of wear a vehicle puts on roads. It’s also somewhat correlated with amount of pollution.