Monday, January 22, 2018
Michael Manville, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA, says the best way to ease congestion in Boston is to put a price on it.
In a Codcast interview with Josh Fairchild and James Aloisi of TransitMatters, Manville said our roads are clogged because we have too much demand for scarce road space at certain times of the day. We've all been there, inching along because everyone is trying to get to work or head home at the same time.
"We have traffic congestion because driving on our roads is underpriced," Manville said.
The answer is to set the price for driving at high-demand times at whatever level is needed to get some people to shift their behavior so traffic can move along at 55 miles per hour. Gas taxes, carbon taxes, even tolls don't do that -- just congestion pricing, said the UCLA professor.
Manville, who grew up in Reading and attended Holy Cross in Worcester as an undergraduate, insisted the price doesn't need to be super high, only high enough to prompt a small number of drivers to drive at a different time or to give up driving all together and shift to carpooling or public transit. A small shift is usually enough to unclog a street or a highway, he said.
It's true that congestion pricing is regressive and falls harder on the poor, but Manville says the very poorest people don't drive anyway, and the rest could receive some sort of public aid to offset the financial burden the same way they do if they have difficulty affording food or heating fuel.
BRUCE MOHL
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