Thursday, November 20, 2008
Congestion Pricing
I admit I'm somewhat less than enthusiastic about London-style congestion pricing as I think much of what such a system would accomplish can be achieved by simply jacking up the price of parking everywhere and increasing automobile registration fees. Those aren't perfect solutions, but they're roughly comparable and don't require setting up a complicated monitoring and collection system. My understanding is that simply increasing parking fees wouldn't have worked well in London because a lot of the excess peak period traffic was due to the "school run," parents dropping off and picking up their children at school. No parking necessary.