Commie Roads?

The implication in a 13 Feb TCSDaily article by Joseph Giglio entitled “The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged” is that we operate our roads like the old Evil Soviet Empire. Commie bashers looking in their own backyard?

“But the fact is that congestion pricing is conservative economics at its best. For decades, conservatives have championed market-oriented solutions to highway problems as a means to allocate scarce resources. Congestion pricing gives consumers the opportunity to decide when it is in their economic interest to ride crowded roads, and whether the price charged for a given trip is worth their travel time savings.

In the former Soviet-bloc states, the standard way to allocate scarce goods was to set the purchase price low enough for everyone to afford, but to make consumers wait in long lines to buy them. The real price depended on what value consumers placed on their time.

This approach is the way we've always allocated access to most roadways in capitalist America - access is "free," just like for a public park. But our real cost skyrockets when we consider the time we spend crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and with no option to pay extra for a faster trip.

A bizarre analogy? Maybe not.