Two big stories on road pricing in the Post today. One concerns plans for local congestion tolling, and the other is a long piece on a DOT guy named Tyler Duvall who believes that road pricing, and ultimately road privatization, is the magic bullet that will make all our transportation problems go away.

The first story, on local issues, is a less painful read. Personally, I think the idea of a comprehensive road pricing system, spanning all the major roads around the region, is an excellent idea. On the other hand, the piece accurately notes that it’s a rare case when Maryland, Virginia, and the District cooperate to assemble a workable regional plan. Certainly a regional plan would be more likely if we had a sitting regional body, expressly detailed to analyze and propose regional transportation policy. But we don’t. Maybe we should look into that.

The second story is incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, you have this Duvall fellow, about whom the Post writes:

He had no transportation experience when he was plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT in 2002.

So this is a guy without real transportation experience or economic training, who nonetheless thinks he’s found the solution to the congestion problem. Something tells me he’s not been all that concerned with reading up on network externalities, public goods, or a whole host of other economic issues that might come into play.

On the other hand, you have transit advocates who appear to see this conversation as either/or. Now that could just be the Post’s reporting, or it could be a reaction to DOT’s framing of the policy options, but the Post story reads as if transit supporters are saying don’t do pricing, do transit.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why no one is suggesting that we do both. Transit demand is growing, the adoption of road user fees will only increase such demand, and for the past 50 years we’ve busied ourselves building way, way more highway mileage than new transit capacity. Now, you start pricing roads and several things happen. 1) Congestion falls. 2) Demand for transit grows, and existing transit systems are overwhelmed. 3) You have a large pot of new money. 4) You could use that money to build new transit capacity, generating a large net increase in transportation connectivity while cushioning the cost of expensive roads and gas to commuters.

The thing about that scenario is that it calls for investments in new network capacity, which is good for the economy, but it also has a valuable redistributive function, since road pricing is going to pinch middle and low income commuters. If you price roads without transit, you place lots of those drivers in a tough spot. Either they accept the new costs and curtail spending on other goods and services, or they drastically rearrange their commuting patterns. And pattern changes won’t be easy for poorer commuters, either, since road pricing should increase the premium on homes near important business locations.

If you want to kill congestion while increasing overall access to economic centers, you do both. But the Bushies would rather hand the money from pricing to private industry, while some transit advocates would prefer to pay for improvements out of existing revenue streams. Why not go for the win-win?

Lastly: A little conspiracy blogging. The Post writes:

For Macquarie, the Dulles Toll Road has enormous appeal. The company approached Virginia in 2005 about leasing the road, pocketing motorist fees and financing the rail extension to the airport. But Virginia officials had other ideas. They wanted to keep the road in the hands of a public entity — the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority — and let it build the rail line.

According to four former senior DOT officials, Virginia’s decision upset Duvall and then-DOT chief of staff John A. Flaherty. “They went ballistic,” one of the officials said. “[They] wanted that to be their pet project in the nation’s capital. Tyler would mention that frequently . . . that it would be better for the project to go to Macquarie.”

Duvall said the DOT is not trying to steer Virginia toward a public-private partnership for Dulles rail and that Flaherty was angered because the state did not notify the department, not by the substance of its decision. “My interest in this was solely to make sure the taxpayer was getting the right deal,” he said.

When the DOT said in January that it would not fund the rail project, Macquarie repeated its interest to Virginia officials, as did another private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, which created a $1.5 billion fund to invest in U.S. infrastructure and has hired Flaherty to head it.

Makes you think, no?