In a Good Morning America report here, ABC reporter Bill Weir noted that congestion pricing is an important way to reduce traffic congestion.
But the solution to less congested highways and byways may come at a price.
“Highways will become toll roads. Your credit card will be constantly
refilling the little box on your windshield that will be charged by the
mile,” said Chris Leinberge, an urban planning expert at the Brookings
Institute.
Every errand, every outing literally would count, as the meter ticked away for each second you spend on the interstate.
“Imagine a kind of system where there’s monitoring of traffic
congestion in real time on a block-by-block basis and then prices are
adjusted in real time on a block-by-block basis,” said MIT Media lab
professor William J. Mitchell. “So if you decide to run errands at rush
hour, you’ll pay more. And if you want to use the fast lane, you’ll pay
more.”
And this important statistic:
“Ninety percent of the roads and not congested 90 percent of the time,” Vanderbilt said. [Author of Traffic]
Many of us have been imagining for years a world where private roads provide better service at a lower price than government roads. Perhaps the time has finally come.
