Traffic Congestion is one of the banes of living in modern urban areas.\u00a0 This idea could help.\u00a0 I was looking around for a market solution to the problem of congestion on the freeways after spending an hour in bad traffic in the San Fernando Valley last Thursday.\u00a0 The restricted zone idea used by Singapore and London would not work because the zone that needs restricting is all of the freeways.\u00a0 Charging to get on the freeway even during congested times would be extremely unpopular and a political non-starter.\u00a0 But what if we went a different way and distributed ownership rights to freeway access and allowed these rights to be sold on a secondary market.
\nImagine that by 2010 all of the automobiles in Southern California had been equipped with a fast pass type transponder.\u00a0 During that year freeway access rights (FARs) would be distributed to all vehicle owners, business\u2019s with fleets and residents.\u00a0 About 600 FARs would be given for each car and perhaps a 120 for each non-car owner.\u00a0 Beginning in January of 2011 one FAR would be deducted from the account of each vehicle each time it went on the freeway.\u00a0 FARs would be good for one year and would expire.\u00a0 People who didn\u2019t use all of there FARs could sell them on the secondary market.\u00a0 New FARs would be issued to the owners of shares each year.\u00a0 When Caltrans increased road capacity they could sell new rights.\u00a0 Rights could be transferred from vehicle to vehicle.\u00a0 When a person stopped driving on the freeway they could sell their FARs.
\nThere are lots of details that need to be worked out and almost everybody will find something that they don\u2019t like about the plan.\u00a0 But market forces can be used to allocate this scarce resource much better than any other political solution.<\/p>\n
Your objections overcome:
\nWhat about visitors?\u00a0 Day, week and month passes could be sold to out of area cars at convenience stores.
\nWhat about commercial vehicles?\u00a0 FARs will not be needed to get on the freeway between 10pm and 6am.\u00a0 Commercial fleet operators can purchase extra FARS on the secondary market.
\nWon\u2019t it stop the purchase of new cars?\u00a0 Not for replacement cars, but it will marginally increase the cost of having more cars on the road.\u00a0 But without some restrictions driving will become so onerous that car sales will self restrict.
\nWhat about poor people?\u00a0 In this system people without cars will have 10 FARs each month to sell.\u00a0 People who never go on the freeway will also be able to sell their rights.<\/p>\n
No pictures.\u00a0 The Flickr link to my blog site doesn\u2019t seem to be working at this time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Traffic Congestion is one of the banes of living in modern urban areas.\u00a0 This idea could help.\u00a0 I was looking around for a market solution to the problem of congestion on the freeways after spending an hour in bad traffic in the San Fernando Valley last Thursday.\u00a0 The restricted zone idea used by Singapore and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-success"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p99jGb-2o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}