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$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology (ggwash.org)
136 points by duck on Dec 7, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 279 comments



> Which would you prefer in general: Being forbidden from doing something at all, or allowed to do it at high cost?

There are plenty of government policies or state run services that prevent or completely avoid this dynamic in the name of pseudo 'fairness'. When usually it more often restricts options for more people rather than makes it more fair.

It's easy to see why from a populist perspective, look at the outrage on Twitter:

>> I don't have to use it, but it's effing outrageous. Armed robbery. $34.50 for 10 miles? New tolls on I-66 kick off with some high rates. https://twitter.com/andreas_adriano/status/93772317073970790...

... he admits he never even uses it but he still finds it unfair 'highway robbery' regardless.

And it's not just a policy helping the wealthy as it would be using the service to maximal efficacy rather than below capacity. It's a net gain for average users. As there will never be a high number of people willing to pay that fee, not slowing down existing traffic. Plus the additional revenue gained could otherwise be used to improve the operation, go back into the economy via employee income or spending, etc. It's a net gain.


An individual car might not be a mass transit system but a highway is (albeit inefficient). I think it's just as absurd to use demand pricing for highways as it would be to use them for subways. (I support HOV lanes though)

The main issue I see with a non-HOV toll option on an HOV road, toll lanes, etc. is that it gives the wealthy an option that others do not have. If there isn't enough commuting capacity (regardless of medium) we need to provide more. The state should not give the rich an option to make their commutes tolerable because that's easier than solving the problems (because we all know that when the rich and powerful have problems with how the state is running things that's when they change).

The wealthy have to wait on the same subway platforms as the poor. The national parks don't have a "skip the line if you're rich enough to justify the insane price" option. The wealthy should have to sit in the same traffic jams as the rest of us. Congress should have the same healthcare options as the rest of us.

The worst part about toll lanes and the other demand based pricing for necessities is that they reduce the incentive to increase supply.

If it were independently verifiable that any given implementation of surge pricing was optimized for bandwidth (people-miles over the time period surge pricing applies) rather than latency (average speed) or revenue I might feel differently but considering how pretty much every other traffic control rule turns into a revenue source of some sort (tolls on I90 in MA were only supposed to last long enough to recover the construction cost) I quite frankly don't trust any government to do it that way unless it's 100% in the open.


Is everyone else missing the fact that this may be a bug in the algorithm? Read the update to the article, tolls are “surging” despite the road being almost empty.


> Which would you prefer in general: Being forbidden from doing something at all, or allowed to do it at high cost?

This is market economics at its best. If you don't like the $40 toll go back to alternative routes you were using before they introduced the toll. I also find it ironic that "free market" Republicans are suddenly stamping their feet and demanding either price controls at $6 or reverting to the old system.


It’s nuts. Reasonable people can differ about the accuracy of economic predictions on the large scale, but market mechanisms are great for things like this (and surge pricing, etc).


I'm a guy with a long commute and a dislike of traffic jams. I've shifted my work hours to get me to work by 6:30 am at the latest. I'll take the toll route (Boston's Tobin Bridge, $1.50) or the free route (I-93) without considerating cost because I've taught myself that time is worth more than money.

But if the Tobin toll abruptly went up to $20, my loss-aversion anxiety would spike (cf. this year's Nobel Memorial winner Richard Sunstein, for behavioral economics) and my behavior would change in ways that weren't exactly rational.

This already happened on the Tobin Bridge when the tolls were first introduced. People from the neighborhoods near the Tobin used alternate routes and clogged them. The government response was wise: issue special toll tags to neighbors giving them a discount on the Tobin. The wisdom was that it countered loss-aversion with a special privilege. It worked. (Of course, this being Massachusetts, there's a small but thriving black market in those special toll tags for wiseguys wanting to save a couple of bucks a day. But so what?)

In a place like the DC area, people react to loss anxiety by attacking public projects as well as by changing their behavior, so this experiment may not last too long. I hope they can get some skilfull behavioral economics people to work with them before the whole thing gets shut down hard by fake-angry politicians.

If the goal is really to increase vehicle occupancy, the highway needs stations named for Tom and Ray Magliozzi's Russian chauffeur (Pickup Andropoff) near the exits. Getting more people into cars has proven very difficult.

Understanding this kind of peak-load pricing, and how to apply it effectively, will help all sorts of future projects in our overcrowded metroplexes.


Tolls change routing decisions. If you can't gauge a toll until you are at the road because it keeps changing, that's a risk. Dynamic tolling asks people to take a risk; that will never work unless they do like Uber and fix the price at the time you leave. It's only fair that the planning risk should fall on the central traffic manager, as they have the most information and capabilities.


The true cost of a trip is masked behind sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, various state fees unrelated to roads, insurance, rent/mortgage for the cost of space for the car, the loan for the car, etc. The technology exists to toll everyone for the actual cost per mile, with higher fees for higher weight (trucks wear roads way faster than cars), and congestion. It incentivizes more investments in cycling and pedestrian lanes, would affect how and where housing is built, and how much investment is made in public transit and where it's located.

Congestion fees are used by at least Long Island Rail Road, it's roughly 50% higher during peak times. So it can be applied to public transit as well. In fact a chunk of automobile transport is public transit because the biggest cost in the whole system is the infrastructure which is publicly owned and maintained, typically without direct user fees that relate to usage. Gasoline taxes only approximate a person's usage.


So, in the article, the author says (as the 2nd of 3 possible options):

Add lanes, which Arlington doesn't want and there's no money for (or would require high tolls to fund); or

Does adding lanes alleviate anything?

I have seen multiple studies indicate adding lanes does not help w/ traffic, and actually makes things worse.

Is it simply assumed that more roads = less traffic?


I find these types of articles massively deceiving, if there is a simple explanation for something, a complicated explanation isn't required, ie. the human psychology. Here is one reason why the drivers reaction makes sense, when previously people were disallowed to use the toll road it wasn't about money when you charge them $40 it is all of a sudden a question of money. Previously people were perhaps understanding of congestion problems and it's natural when you have so many cars on the roads that the government should disallow some and they understood that otherwise the traffic wouldn't move. Now when you make it about money, it's no longer arbitrarily decided who gets to ride in the toll road, it's about who can afford to ride on the toll road. (or to the extend that it was arbitrary before)


Consider that taxpayers fund and build airports. Available seats on an airplane are priced using demand based pricing.

Taxpayers provide land and (sometimes) fund rail infranstructure. Most long distance rail uses demand based pricing (the last seat costs more than the first).

Taxpayers also (sometimes) provide/pay for land and the costs to build roads. Until now, we haven't seen demand based pricing (the last slot costs more than the first), but it actually fits well with other modes of taxpayer funded transportation.

This approach also considers the cost and value of a road network in a congested area. This could possibly fund other new transport in the area if it really is such a valuable commodity.


I understand the psychology of it as far as the high price goes, I think also people are appalled that there are others who can afford such obscene prices too, not just that the prices are so high. And well the two counties funneling traffic into this road Fairfax and Loudon are the richest counties in US, I have no doubt they'll be enough people who will pay the $40.

But what most people are upset about is that the hours when the whole highway becomes HOV-2 only have been expanded. So solo drivers who were getting up early, could have made it into the city before the restrictions kicked in, now won't be able to, and will have to funnel to secondary roads.


When the price algorithm goes above some unacceptable amount, they should just change it to "Carpool only", as it was before, and there would then be no reason for people to complain.

If they made the "Carpool only" have some sort of fine for violations, say $100, paid the same way as the toll would have been, people could still use it in real emergencies.

It sounds like the calibration of the toll amount is a bit off, and can probably be adjusted over time as the systems get experience managing the demand of the road. If they'd launched with an $8 toll, and ended up with gridlock on the road, would that have been better?


With a $40 toll and a $100 violation, it pays off to break the rules if you only get caught every third day(!)

Incidentally, I've NEVER seen anyone get pulled over for driving solo on the car-pool lane.


There is an important point lost here. People are saying 'people who couldn't use the road before now have the option to', but they are ignoring that the restricted hours were increased by 90 minutes in the morning and evening. I used to have an option to get to work super-early, or work till 7pm then head home on a road that was no busier than the rest of the regions traffic. Those options are now off the table. What was legal, fair, free, and without congestion is now blocked by a toll that is pushing early morning traffic onto roads not built for commuter traffic.


If the road was already pretty full during rush hour when no solo driver was allowed, how is this new rule going to help by adding even more drivers? Sounds like a major fail to even have that kind of rule in first place.


This is a decent follow-up noting that the average toll is well below the peak toll. Of course, it doesn't talk about the median.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2017/12/0...


The article quotes a legislator:

> which is why I called charging the highest toll in the country what it is: price gouging.

No, no, no it's not price gouging: it's charging what the privilege of driving in the fast lane is worth.

The problem in northern Virginia is that there are too many people commuting. Fortunately, there's the entire rest of the country that they can move to.

'Not located in northern Virginia, New York or California' is a very real marketing edge for a potential employer.


Stuck in traffic, you might as well be stuck in prison. Say your loved ones are counting on you to be somewhere. When you are stuck , you're letting them down! Suddenly you have an option when there were no options previously. Now $40 looks pretty cheap in the face of fighting a spouse, disappointed children, etc.


If I drove there twice a day I wouldn't need to go to work anymore, because it would (almost) cancel out my salary. Granted I don't work with an American salary, but they're not THAT much higher. I don't know if that's what you call cheap.


This is kind of a joke, but imagine this scenario:

If I illegally immigrate to USA, how much I would make just to take a ride with people?

I believe I could charge US$20 per trip. One trip early morning, go back by public transportation (it is just 10 miles!), and get another ride. The same at rush hour in the other direction. It would me about 80 * 22 = $1760 each month. Nothing bad. Better than a minimum wage of $1,150 per month.

This is a kind of job that exists in a lot of places: https://gizmodo.com/10-transportation-related-jobs-that-only...


There are plenty of slug line commuter parking lots around the area that you can find people that will ride for free in your car so everyone can take advantage of HOV lanes. It's definitely a thing in some places where the passengers have no real need to be going anywhere in DC, people are just trying to get to work.


Why would you pay someone when we already have a mechanism in place here to pick up additional people for free? See http://www.slug-lines.com/ for more information.

Edit: Didn't notice the comment below, that's what I get for not refreshing the page...


It's not about the price, it's about expectation.

The shock comes from people thinking, you've just opened a road for the rich, not for the every man. Roads have not, historically in the US, been excluded to a certain group of people. Of course people will react harshly.

Some economists need to get their heads out of their asses and live in the real world for a bit.


Can it be cheaper if you drive faster ?

ie. 45mph = $40

ie. 80mph = $30

ie. 100mph = $6 (for contrast)

et cetera ? That would make traffic flow and people happy ?

Not US driver, don't know the US speed limits. On oposite side, Germany doesn't have speed limits on some tolls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn


Keep in mind that the safety distance you have to the preceding driver increases with speed. Additionally the large speed differential between cars leads to more frequent lane changes, acceleration and breaking, etc. Which hinders the flow of traffic, reducing throughput.

In Germany it's common to use electronic signs to limit speed when the highway is (moderately) congested to help traffic flow more smoothly, increasing throughput (typically to 100 or 120 km/h).


Valid points. Thank you. Was just stupid 'why not' late night thoughts.


they should fund public transport proportionally to a tax applied to fuel.

that way more cars also means more buses (or well maintained if people insist on using cars)

every year crank up the fuel tax and you'll see more people using busses.




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