This already exists in the form of a gas tax and road use taxes (registration). NIMBYs get in the way of building the lanes that already have demand and funding.
Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
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.
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)
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 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.
Tolls for entering/leaving the city at certain times (or outright bans for some percentage of cars per day) is more effective.