Road Warriors

Matt Yglesias writes:

The “world in numbers” for our current print issue is a nifty map of the overtaxed highway infrastructure in our major urban areas. Under the circumstances, the case for more transportation infrastructure is compelling, but it’s worth underscoring the fact that you’re never going to have anything more than a very temporary solution to congestion problems until you start implementing congestion pricing.

Building a highway, after all, costs money. But it creates something of value — the chance to drive on an uncrowded roadway. But if you just give this valuable opportunity away for free, then people wind up consuming too much of it and soon enough there’s no uncrowded roadway left. It’s just like overfishing or any other “tragedy of the commons” issue. When you see construction of a new, unpriced and it’s not likely that it’ll soon become overcrowded, you’re looking at a porkalicious “bridge to nowhere” sort of phenomenon where people are constructing something that has a cost out of proportion to its value. Anything that’s genuinely valuable and also given away for free is going to wind up overconsumed.

Seems to me like this is less an argument for congestion pricing than an argument for privately-funded toll roads.  Using public funds on a public resource creates a commons problem, which you then have to add additional charges to solve. Why not simply have private  entities fund the roads in the first place and then set prices that allow them to make a profit?  Understandably, this isn’t exactly politically palatable* right now, and the persistence of current public infrastructure might make even a partial transition difficult.  But using actual markets rather than some vaguely market-based system underwritten by public money seem like it’d provide a more efficient, less risky solution to the problem.

*Understatement, I know.