Changing Lanes: Addressing America’s Congestion Problems Through Road User Pricing
Source: Deloitte LLP

Traffic is overwhelming a growing number of America’s cities. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Miami, Americans spend hours each week caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Urban residents and commuters are confronted with the challenges that jammed roadways cause on a daily basis. The Urban Mobility Report estimated that in the United States in 2007, congestion caused 4.2 billion hours of travel delay and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel, for a total cost of $78.2 billion.

At the same time, governments facing increasing demands and reduced budgets may consider creating a market in which people are charged for their use of a given roadway to help raise additional funds for transportation projects. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that about 18 percent of the more than 912,000 miles of America’s roads and highways are in poor or mediocre condition, and about 27 percent of the nearly 594,000 U.S. bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

How can America’s cities and states reduce congestion, raise necessary funds for infrastructure improvements and reduce the environmental impact of congested roads? A new study from Deloitte highlights the benefits of road user pricing to reduce gridlock and raise significant revenues in the process.

Road pricing is based on a simple economic rationale: Road space often is a scarce commodity. Through international experiences and more recent U.S. pilot programs, robust frameworks have emerged for selecting and implementing optimal road user pricing systems that help match particular local needs and challenges.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Business and economics, Infrastructure, Motor vehicles, Transportation and travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.