Creative Class

UCLA’s Eric Morris, writing over at Freakonomics makes the case for pricing our roads.

For decades, economists and other transportation thinkers have advocated imposing tolls that vary with congestion levels on roadways. Simply put, the more congestion, the higher the toll, until the congestion goes away.

To many people, this sounds like a scheme by mustache-twirling bureaucrats and their academic apologists to fleece drivers out of their hard-earned cash. Why should drivers have to pay to use roads their tax dollars have already paid for? Won’t the remaining free roads be swamped as drivers are forced off the tolled roads? Won’t the working-class and poor be the victims here, as the tolled routes turn into “Lexus lanes”? …

Ultimately, there’s no free lunch; instead of paying with money, you pay with the effort and time needed to acquire the good … [D]elay is an externality imposed by drivers on their peers … In the end, of course, everybody pays, because as we impose congestion on others, others impose it on us …

Markets work best when externalities are internalized: i.e., you pay for the hassle you inflict on others … Using tolls to help internalize the congestion externality would somewhat reduce the number of trips made on the most congested roads at the peak usage periods; some trips would be moved to less congested times and routes, and others would be foregone entirely. This way we would cut down on the congestion costs we impose on each other.

He’s absolutely right. It’s a big win-win really – better for individuals who can get from point A to point B faster (also, recall being stuck in traffic is one of life’s least enjoyable activities) and generate higher overall productivity by increasing mobility and connectivity, and replacing wasted (stuck-in-traffic) time with more productive endeavor. What better time to start than with the new stimulus package.

Geographer John Agnew and his UCLA colleagues have used satellite images of light emissions to track the effectiveness of the so-called “surge.” (h/t: Alison Kemper) Their conclusion: the surge has not worked to restore stability.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery … The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.

Baghdad’s decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period. By contrast, the night-light signature in the notoriously impoverished, Shiite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as it did in the American-dominated Green Zone. Light actually increased in Shiite-dominated New Baghdad, the researchers found. Until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall …

The full study is here.