"Road Pricing" means that vehicles pay for driving on congested roads. The price is set so that road supply and demand match, and traffic flows optimally. It also gives the road owner an income for providing important roads.
Singapore has solved this extremely effectively. Note that the solution is not just on demand pricing but also having good transportation infrastructure that actually is usable and is a viable alternative.
Bay Area has addressed it to some degree but I would not call it solved by any means. They have dynamic pricing which ensure you can pay to go faster during peak times. This is mostly a solution for rich people who can afford the $15-20 tolls one way on 101 but in a pinch the common person may be able to use by paying money. However the US just has no decent public transportation infrastructure that can be relied on a daily basis to live your life normally due to legalized bribery (lobbying) by the by the car companies during the earlier years.
https://www.introducingsingapore.com/taxi#:~:text=With%20som....
3 people in the car should be free in all circumstances.
2 people in the car should be free sometimes, but pay a very small fee when the road is very congested.
1 person should always pay a fee. Sometimes small, sometimes large, depending on traffic.
0 people in the car (in the case of autonomous cars) should always pay a phat fee.
This is the only thing that will prevent driverless cars from ruining our awesome road infrastructure in America. If we don't do this, driverless taxi companies will have cars polluting and congesting every public road trying to be capture a ride until they're clogged and useless.
Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
Neither of these target congestion directly, but road use in general. As a result, they usually fail to do much to slow down driving (since the goal is basically just to fund roads).
>NIMBYs get in the way of building the lanes that already have demand and funding.
Why shouldn't somebody oppose yet more noise, pollution, and traffic in their neighbourhood? That something has externalities on the people around it is a good reason to oppose it.
>Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
The poorest are in many ways already relegated to using transit, which in most US cities is woefully inadequate for getting around. Effort to make transit more viable can only make these people better off.
We have decades of experience showing building more lanes just induces more demand and the problem gets worse.
But we keep doing it. Because it sounds like it should work.
You could make a genuine argument that demand should not exist because people should be taking busses, trains, submarines, or whatever. But continuing to kneecap public infrastructure only furthers the perception that trains might be a good idea, but will become unreliable and packed when NIMBYs decide to turn their attention to noise or whatever and demand we build less track.
I've been in the Bay Area 20 something years now and I have never seen 101 or 280 meaningfully expanded, so no we haven't actually tried it.
That’s misunderstanding the concept: in our hypothetical superhighway, it’s true that people who already lived on that route wouldn’t buy more cars to drive it but that was never the claim. What was claimed is what we saw throughout the 20th century: people would favor car commutes along that route because it’s faster so they could get more house for their budget by living further out of the cities. That’s fine at first but inevitably hits the spatial inefficiency of cars unless the local economy isn’t active enough, at which point you can’t afford road maintenance.
Gas tax and registration fees are intended to pay for road maintenance, which is also useful, but are way too primitive and unfocused for this purpose.
Tolls for entering/leaving the city at certain times (or outright bans for some percentage of cars per day) is more effective.
All it does is force the poor to sit in traffic while some lanes are reserved for people to whom $12 is inconsequential.
I fail to see how applying this same logic to an entire road makes it any better.
This increases the traffic throughput by maybe 5x, which makes the road much more useful.
How then does your gardener get his truck to your house? Your DoorDash driver? The elderly woman on a fixed income who needs to get to her doctors appointment?
Roads cannot be the domain of the rich. (Also please don't pretend that public transport is even remotely viable in the US)
The whole idea is to reduce peak demand. Your gardener doesn’t need to go downtown at the same time as office workers, so they are unlikely to be affected since they’re going to your house rather than your office and they can show up at 10am. Similarly, getting breakfast from DoorDash across town is not a human right - you can order closer to home or pay market rate for use of a couple hundred feet of public space to haul your burrito.
For many errands, people can avoid rush hours, which may not even need road pricing.
I'll note that all your "poor" examples own a car.
This is actually a key point many city dwelling anti-car advocates completely miss. The poor do depend heavily on cars because they are pushed to the outskirts where they can afford housing but still have to commute to the cities where the jobs are. When I lived outside the Bay Area my car cost me less than what some people here spend on their bikes.
The most congested roads often coincide with the most valuable land in city centres, so charging users (public roads) or owners (private toll roads) based on local land value could be useful. It is also advantageous in that it would be progressive.
Yeah, but people don't like it when we have economic downturns or forced migration.