IF YOU are one of the many people of this University who happens to be from Northern Virginia, you know the hassle that traffic can be. Nothing is worse than trying to leave the University early enough to beat the exodus of traffic, only to hit commuter traffic once you get home. And traffic is not just a nuisance, I've been on I-66 when traffic was so bad that even ambulances couldn't get through, and someone injured in an accident had to be flown to a hospital.
Trying to ease traffic congestion has long been a constant plague for lawmakers. In D.C. in the past few years many different methods have been used to combat congestion -- extra lanes for traffic, HOV lane, zip cars and even car pool Web sites. One thing that hasn't been tried though, is raising toll prices during peak hours.
According to a Washington Post article published Monday ("Letting the Market Drive Transportation," March 17) last year the Department of Transportation earmarked almost one billion dollars to test out "congestion pricing" in Miami, Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Under this system, motorists would be charged more at tolls during peak traffic hours. In the article D.J. Gribbin, the department's general counsel and liaison to the White House is quoted as saying, "It's almost sort of un-American that we should be forced to sit and be stuck in traffic."
It's amazing that Gribbin would even bring up the phrase "un-American" in reference to this plan. Sure, higher prices at tolls would possibly dissuade some commuters from driving to work. However, it would only dissuade those for whom paying more money every morning was a substantial enough issue. If there was ever a truly "un-American" idea, that one about sums it up.
The Post also says that Gribbin, top Transportation Department policymaker Tyler Duvall and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters have as their ultimate goal a system of transportation more focused on road privatization. They have routinely been promoting projects that encourage roads being funded through tolls and allowing roads to be leased out to private companies.
While road privatization could provide some benefits, such as providing more of an impetus for optimizing the quality of various roads, it also brings up a scary prospect, one where those who can afford it get to go on the best roads, and those who don't are sidelined to the worst.
Besides its inherent inequality, one of the main problems with this project is a complete lack of concentration on alternative forms of transportation. There are only two ways to alleviate congestion: The first, and best, is to make sure there are less cars on the road, and the other would be to expand highways. While "congestion pricing" would focus on getting cars off the road, there's no mention of how those who were dissuaded from commuting would get to work. Ideally any dissuasion method would also have a contingency for public transportation, however, according to the Post, the new rail and bus projects "dropped from 48 in 2001 to 17 in 2007, even as transit ridership hit a 50-year high last year and demand for new service is soaring." .
Despite all its problems, greater road privatization is an idea gradually seeping into different states and project. In 2005 Macquarie Holdings, a major toll-road builder based in Australia, approached Virginia about leasing the Dulles Toll Road. The company would have taken profits from motorists, but also financed the planned Metro extension to Dulles Airport. However, Virginia wanted to keep the project in the hands of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, and so refused the deal, and simultaneously kept the Metro extension a public project.
Back on a broader scale, while all of the five congestion pricing projects have yet to be tested, when the projects are, they will again bring to the surface the ever-present question of how to alleviate congestion. Instead of privatizing roads, and kicking more people off the commuter trail, a better response would be to increase funding for modes of public transportation and instead of closing down avenues of transportation, in fact open up new ones.
Margaret Sessa-Hawkins's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at msessahawkins@cavalierdaily.com.
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