Martin Wachs

A few months ago, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority mentioned it wanted to study congestion pricing and toll lanes, you’d have thought someone had dropped a small tactical nuclear weapon in the middle of the L.A. traffic discussion. On one side, transit bloggers and militant bicyclists lined up to pat Metro on the back, while those living out the suburban house-and-yard promises of Los Angeles’ past started to wonder who had amended the clause in the Constitution about free-gridlock-for-all.

But talk of such measures is old hat for Martin Wachs, who looks at traffic not as an issue of local culture, but a calculus of costs and benefits. He spent more than 30 years discussing urban planning and civil engineering strategies as a professor at UCLA, where he served as chairman of the urban planning department, and at Berkeley, where he directed the transportation studies institute. He left academe in 2005, becoming a transit guru for the gargantuan think tank, RAND Corporation.

Lately, Wachs has been working on a new RAND study exploring options for the short-term future of L.A. gridlock, turning stones including congestion pricing, which entails charging drivers when they use certain roads at certain times, and hot lanes, policy parlance for special highway lanes that charge some users, among other options. He recently chatted with CityBeat about these possibilities, politicians’ slow progress on gridlock, and why a little traffic might not be so bad, after all.

–Greg Katz

CityBeat: How should we look at gridlock so it doesn’t seem intractable?

Martin Wachs: The situation in Los Angeles is typical of many large cities in the world. There is a general frustration with the growth in traffic in urban areas, and an unwillingness politically to face up to what it will take to actually resolve the issues. I’d like to be on record as saying congestion isn’t always a bad thing, that congestion exists where there is economic activity, where people are going to schools, taking part in cultural activities, and so on. That doesn’t mean traffic can’t under any circumstances get so bad that it actually becomes a problem that has to be solved, as well as a by-product of growth, but we should bear in mind that many of us think of Paris as a wonderful place to go; we hardly ever say, “I won’t go to Paris because the Champs-Élysées is congested.”

I would also point out we all want congestion to be resolved, but none of us are willing to pay for it, and none of us are willing to change our individual habits. We don’t allow more capacity to be built on highways because of the environmental effects and the intrusion into neighborhoods. It’s enormously expensive to build more rail capacity … and we don’t want our taxes raised. We’re not willing to be regulated off the roads in order to address congestion. The fact that we object so much to strategies that would impact positively in terms of reducing congestion implies that we would prefer to have the congestion than the alternative.

The solutions involve a wide variety of very effective measures that we know work because they’ve worked in other parts of the world. One of those would be dramatically increasing the price of parking at work locations to encourage people to carpool, vanpool, use public transit, walk, or bicycle to work. Others involve charging people to use roads, especially at peak hours. [Right now] it’s as if you went into a supermarket and the price was the same for whatever you bought. If the price was the same for steak and hamburger, more people would buy steak. To travel on the roads, it’s the same price all the time and most people want it to be completely free of charges. As long as we prefer that, and our politicians continue to prefer that, the consequence is congestion.

Will the forthcoming RAND study cover congestion pricing?

It addresses what can be done in two, three, five years at most, to reduce traffic congestion and reduce delay. It does look at a wide variety of subjects such as pricing, and more technical solutions like traffic signal timing and parking prices and the possibilities of hot lanes. It looks at what other cities around the United States and elsewhere in the world have done. It looks at possible restrictions on driving, odd-even rationing, and so forth. What it’s trying to do is say which of these have the greatest potential in the short-term to be effective, and which in the short-term have the potential to be politically acceptable, both.

What do you think of the plans Metro’s recently discussed regarding congestion pricing?

Metro, in fact, has not issued any congestion pricing plans that are specific. There are … consulting firms right now writing proposals that would be submitted to Metro to do a study, and the study itself, when it’s done a year from now would result in roughly three alternative plans for debate, discussion, and further analysis.

They’ve also placed on the table the possibility of hot lanes, which we have in Southern California on State Route 91 … but they have not yet made a specific proposal as to which freeways they would try next. They have mentioned, of course, the Harbor Freeway and a couple of others as likely candidates, but I think we should be careful to acknowledge that Metro is placing these ideas on the table for discussion, debate, analysis, and study, and has not taken a position on which should be implemented.

People claimed that hot lanes would punish the poor as soon as Metro mentioned them.

I really don’t believe that’s true! I believe what it does is: It gives people choices, and some choices that they don’t have now. It would be a mistake to think that a poor person never enjoys a good meal in a restaurant, and thereby never to provide a restaurant that offers a good meal. It’s a complete misrepresentation of what hot lanes do to assert that poor people only pay the costs, and rich people only get the benefits. We know that working people who get paid by the hour are among the people who choose to use hot lanes, because they can convert the time saved into money, and it’s sometimes worth the cost to do that. On the SR-91, we know who uses it. Surely it includes more rich people than poor people, but that’s true for everything! The important point is that quite a large number of poor people … do use that lane and pay for it.

Are there good examples of congestion pricing systems?

Certainly, yes. There have been something on the order of 50 to 75 congestion pricing applications around the world. The one that comes to mind first is in Singapore, where they’ve had congestion pricing for 45 years, and they succeeded in dramatically reducing traffic congestion in the center of the downtown area, and have increased the proportion of people traveling into the central area by public transit very dramatically.

The recent growth of interest in congestion pricing is a reflection of what’s happened in London, where … you pay to be at [the center] of the city during a certain time period during the day. That’s worked pretty well, in that it has reduced congestion in the center of the city and has provided revenue that’s necessary to increase public transit service.

There isn’t a single example anywhere in the world where congestion pricing has resulted in increased congestion; it has always resulted in reduced congestion, 100 percent of the time. While it has done that, it’s also been politically unacceptable in some places, and people have complained about the cost. We’re going to have to have a more mature public debate about it than we’ve been able to have, with either politicians ruling it out of hand, or citizens saying, “I won’t pay for it and it’s a horrible idea.”

Lately, it seems there’s been a more nuanced discussion of traffic by regular citizens, pushing to see congestion pricing and other measures considered. Is that the result of politicians moving too slowly?

Politicians have to become more educated about the subtle and complex issues that are involved. [Traffic] is just as complicated as education policy and it’s just as complicated as health care policy, and we don’t have a very deep, well-informed debate on any of these subjects because we all want simple solutions to our most complicated problems.

It’s not surprising to me that public discussion is in many cases ahead of where the politicians are. On most public policy issues, politicians are not out in front. They’re sensing what their constituents are most concerned about, and they’re trying to listen to many different or competing perspectives and find a course of action among those that represents a consensus.

Illustration by Scott Gandell