Steve Lafleur makes the case that beyond “moral suasion,” routine financial incentives are required for local policies to have a real impact on driving behavior:
LA drivers spend over half a billion hours per year stuck in excess traffic delays, which costs the economy roughly $12 billion dollars. Adding more freeway lanes seems like an obvious solution, except for the fact that it doesn’t work. Studies have shown that every percentage increase in roads leads to an equal percentage increase in driving. In other words, more roads mean more driving.
There are certainly exceptions to this, since the optimal level of roads isn’t zero, but it does illustrate the fact that we can’t just build our way out of traffic congestion. Instead, we need to introduce strong incentives other than fear to reduce congestion. That incentive is congestion pricing.
While road tolls aren’t the most appealing thing to drivers, electronic tolls can reduce the amount of discretionary driving, and convince some number of people to take transit rather than driving. Some would describe this approach as a “War on Drivers,” but the reality is that the intention is precisely the opposite. It is an attempt to make sure that drivers can actually get where they need without soul crushing traffic.
Dana Goodyear reflects on the disaster that wasn't:
Saturday night, I got from Beverly Hills to Pasadena in forty-five minutes, with the only snag being the perpetual slowdown caused by visitors in rented Thunderbirds on the Sunset Strip. Yes, I took Sunset. On a Saturday night. People started calling the road conditions “Carmaheaven.” To me, it was a vision of the city as it was imagined by the planners, such as they were, of last century: an automotive fantasy-land for the few, not a brake light in sight.
(TDW captions the above photo: "Four friends — Amanda Corrigan, her husband Matt, and their pals Barry Neely and Jesse Glucksman — hopped a fence near the 405 Freeway and toasted this past weekend’s “Carmageddon” with an early brunch.")
The Dish 