Is Our Planners Learning?
- Posted by ryan on February 19th, 2009 filed in Cities
See if you can follow this logic. Raleigh has been building a massive outer beltline for the past decade or so. The northern arc is basically finished. Now there are projections that the northern arc will be congested within another decade. To address the congestion problem, Raleigh is going to add lanes to the road. To pay for the new lanes, they’re going to collect tolls.
Got that? Not only does Raleigh totally miss that building new lanes will just induce new demand, despite concrete evidence of this relationship on the very road at issue, but they also seem not to realize that if they’re going to toll the road, they could simply set the toll at a congestion eliminating rate. Then they wouldn’t need the additional lanes and could use the revenues to build the southern arc (as was the original plan) or, and I know this is crazy, to build a transit system.
We desperately need better federal guidelines for transportation spending and land-use. This is just a joke; Raleigh is wasting taxpayer money.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
This is certainly not optimal but it does seem to represent an improvement. It used to be that if there was congestion on a highway the proposal to remedy the congestion was to build more lanes. At least in tolling for the new lane planners are starting to get that congestion is caused by underpricing a good (i.e. free access to highways). Maybe in ten years there will be the recognition and political will to address the problem where it starts, entering the highway for a charge.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
I doubt there’s any recognition of the link between highway pricing and highway usage. I bet they’re budgeting for the new highway based on current number of cars times toll, with no acknowledgment that traffic will decrease with the toll.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
No the point is instead of adding more lanes they should just add tolls then set the price accordingly. They aren’t using the tolls to handle congestion, they’re using the tolls to pay for more lanes.