L.A.’s “Congestion Pricing” Gaining National Attention

But the reason to have a congestion toll is that... there's too muchcongestion! Road congestion involves an unpriced externality. That is,when you get on a crowded freeway in the morning you take into accountyour private cost (cost of expected travel time), but don't take intoaccount the fact that your car on the road is making things just a bitworse off. Everyone pays for this excess congestion by extra waiting intraffic time. Tolling is essentially a way to replace "excess wastedtime in traffic jams" with money raised, which could either be spent onproductive things (SUPERTRAINS) or just rebated back to all people.

Thepoint isn't to punish people for driving, it's to try to line upincentives a bit more closely with actual costs in order to make moreefficient use of the existing infrastructure.

One thing to think about, though, is what kinds of people really reallyneed to be at work on time. For a normal professional, this isn’t thatbig a deal. If you’re ten or fifteen minutes late to work every now andagain, it’s not that big a deal. But for shift workers, who tend to befurther down the economic totem pole, showing up late will get youfired—it’s hard to make up for it by just staying late or putting anhour in on Saturday from home. People like that would reap adisproportionately large benefit from the reduction in congestionassociated with a congestion price.