Tyler Duvall

Someone in comments asked me what, in light of my enthusiasm for congestion pricing, I thought about this long Washington Post profile of Tyler Duvall, a toll enthusiast and Bush administration DOT official. Mostly I think what Ryan Avent thinks namely that what you want is congestion pricing and investment in mass transit (after all, you have to give people some way to get around) not the Duvall synthesis of toll roads and blocking transit projects willy-nilly.

Combine his anti-transit views with his enthusiasm for road privatization and this sounds more like a (fairly typical for the Bush administration) case of an agency being run for the sake of the private firms it does business with than it does like a visionary new approach to transportation policy.

Comments

Bingo. Plus the working stiffs are shunted off the roads so the BMW-and-Benz crowd can make it to work faster during rush hour.

Posted by Helter | March 18, 2008 1:45 PM

"Mass transit" is not a magic invocation that makes everything all cool as soon as you say it. The truth is that the great majority of middle and low-income Americans live in regions where mass transit is not economically or geographically practical. Even in Washington, Boston, NY, and San Francisco -- the only American cities really well served by mass transit, and not coincidentally, the only places our host has lived in his life -- the hub and spoke arrangement of rail lines does not fit a lot of peoples commuting patterns. And mass transit systems are enormously expensive.

Liberals tend to underestimate the benefits of simply building public highways in reducing congestion. The evidence for induced demand swamping new highways is greatly exaggerated. Our current highways system is not well maintained. It's definitely true that congestion pricing can reduce sprawl, but it's also a regressive tax on people who have already paid for their highways through general taxation.

Posted by mq | March 18, 2008 2:10 PM

I said it before and I'll say it again, Bush and Ron Paul are opposite sides of the same coin.

Posted by freddiemac | March 18, 2008 2:31 PM

As I was reading this piece, all I could think of was airline and utility deregulation and how "well" that has worked out. huh

Typical Republican wonk. All theory living in a bubble, no reality (has a lot in common with Marx). Sure tolls might be good, but like gambling and lotteries for state revenues, they are not the lone way to fix a problem. He has got this idea in his head, and by God no one is going to tell/prove him otherwise. Mass transit expenditures are socialism while selling the roads to corporations is capitalism.

Posted by ET | March 18, 2008 2:47 PM

Jeebus, I cannot wait to get rid of these people. Is there any policy area that the Bushies have not made a mess of yet?

It's typical of their approach that it's all about enriching their cronies in industry and clearing the roads for their contributors more than it is about creating anything decent or livable for the rest of us.

Posted by Answer Guy | March 18, 2008 2:58 PM

While a doubling of the gas tax won't happen, it needs increased. Privatizing highways just makes things even more expensive. They are maybe 5% of the solution but with DOT it is THE solution. I drive to Ashburn, VA occassionally. If I take the Toll Road and then the Greenway it costs $4.25. This is on top of the federal and state tax I pay for each gallon of gasoline. The federal gas tax is one of the most fair taxes going, the more you use the more you pay.

I do wonder if congestion pricing makes sense in the many metro areas in this country with limited mass transit systems.

Posted by Ben | March 18, 2008 4:14 PM

"the hub and spoke arrangement of rail lines does not fit a lot of peoples commuting patterns. And mass transit systems are enormously expensive"

Buses are easier. Can create/change routes easily, increase/decrease fleet size quickly. Instead of waiting 5 years for rail line construction (often ending up in the wrong locations), let's get more suburb-to-suburb bus routes.

Posted by CParis | March 18, 2008 4:27 PM

CParis: "Buses are easier. Can create/change routes easily, increase/decrease fleet size quickly. Instead of waiting 5 years for rail line construction (often ending up in the wrong locations), let's get more suburb-to-suburb bus routes."

The problem is, buses are considered low-class. Suburbanites just won't ride them.

Posted by Josh G. | March 18, 2008 5:00 PM

Instead of special tolls for entering certain parts of a city, wouldn't it make more sense just to increase fees and/or taxes for parking? Wouldn't that be a lot easier politically? Am I missing something?

Posted by Jim Naureckas | March 18, 2008 5:07 PM

I couldn't help thinking about the Georgia voter-ID system where there really weren't enough locations set up in populated areas for people to get IDs. So not only do they want to make it hard to get an ID, but they also want to be able to charge fees to use the roads to get to the ID centers, and presumably, to then get to polling stations. Talk about disenfranchising the poor...

Posted by Ethel-To-Tilly | March 18, 2008 5:35 PM

It's not that the low-class association of buses means that suburbanites won't ride them. It's that the low-class association with buses means that the relevant transportation authority will never run them with the necessary frequency. Really, you need to run a bus route every 5-10 minutes at most times if you want people to use them with any kind of regularity. Buses provide transportation authorities with the ability to cut down on service the instant they have political cover to do so.

At the same time, buses are mostly ineffective for a lot of intra-city routes because the traffic situation means that they will never be able to move quickly or on schedule. Every time some politician or public servant attempts to bandaid over transportation problems by promoting buses, I cringe.

Posted by Tyro | March 18, 2008 6:15 PM

The buses I see passing me everyday in suburban NJ look pretty packed with non-poor people.
It takes forever to build rail lines and in many cases the population growth in happening in other locations.

Posted by CParis | March 18, 2008 7:56 PM

Isn't the point of congestion pricing to create incentives for using alternative transporation? If there are no choices the pricing isn't going to help the situation too much. It might cut down on trips or encourage employers to use flex schedules for their employees, but it will still hurt middle and low income workers. The alternatives should be available before congestion tolls are implemented.

And mq, although commuting patterns may not fit exactly to alternative modes of transporation. The whole concept of tolls is to help change the behaviors of drivers. If you think that's not possible even with well thought out alternatives, that's one thing. But to dismiss the idea without taking into consideration the reason for implementing tolls is not the best argument IMO>

Posted by drosz | March 19, 2008 10:18 AM

1. Congestion pricing and taxes on parking are good ideas if they are imposed by Democratic, accountable entities. Then prices will be held in check by voters and subsidies made available for middling and working people to travel (and to relocate work sites to mass transit hubs) from the revenues

2. They are terrible ideas if public assets are transferred to private, unaccountable, monopolies (as we are about to see in a couple of the Northern Virgnia experiments - when these entities charge monopolistic prices on HOV lanes and the Dulles toll roads. This will throw all truck traffic and all middling income folks folks who can't afford $5.00 a mile tolls on to the free highways will make the congestion far worse on the public (and decaying) part of the system). Private equity people do not take these projects on unless they expect a 30% or more return on equity.

3. One of the biggest myths, told by Greens like myself, and now repeated by privatizers like Duvall, is building new highways just causes more congestion. No, what causes congestion is population growth and an economy based on the automobile's ability to flexibly move people from home to work, to school, and to shopping and back. The current road system was built when the population rose from 175,000,000 million to 200,000,000 (1958 - 1973). It has not been added to in any significant degree for thirty years while the population went above 300,000,000 million and to over 100,000,000 cars from around 50,000,000 cars.

Posted by Rick Kane | March 20, 2008 11:52 AM