Myths of the oppressed motorist: freeways and tolls

Freeways are a very crucial matter of transport and urbanism, I've spoken many times about how speed is, I think, the most important factor determining how we spread about urban developments, and about the unbeatable point-to-point speed of freeways. Freeways are extremely disruptive to any city that is burdened with them as they are high-speed, but at the same time, low-capacity. Their high speed makes them highly desirable, their low capacity makes them unable to deal with the demand. A subway track can carry 20 000 people per hour, some like in Tokyo carry up to 80 000 people per hour. A freeway lane carries about 2 000-2 500 people per hour.

Many urbanists have started little less than a war on urban freeways, the "highway to boulevard" movement. Others argue for a mitigating approach if removal is not feasible: tolling.

Tolling on freeways seems like a no-brainer:

1. The limited access points make it easy to implement
2. Freeways are extremely expensive, but all the taxes made to fund them result in them being funded by all car drivers (license fees, gas taxes, etc...), whether they use them or not, which makes freeways, for the individual car driver, extremely cheap to use while at the same time, for the government, extremely expensive to build and maintain (perverse incentive)
3. Since freeways often suffer from congestion, tolling may help keep demand down and avoid the need to build new ones

Yet nothing irks more hardened motorists than any suggestion of tearing down freeways, tolling them or even not building projected freeways.

Note that by freeway I mean the limited access, high-speed, grade-separated roads, in some places. It seems they have different names in every country: freeway, expressway, highway, motorway, etc...

Myth 1: freeways are necessary for economic development

Like all myths, there is a degree of truth in this. freeways between cities do help the economy a lot by helping national and regional transport, even international transport. Freight truck companies are thus likely to want to settle near freeways, as are heavy industries that rely from a regular influx of heavy parts and materials. So, in other words, freeways are very useful for some freight and rapid movement from city to city, that's their major economic contribution. Trains can do the same thing, but trucks have the advantage of being able to go from point-to-point without the need to stop at stations along the way for modal shifts.

So tying in a region together with freeways is justifiable. However, the problem is freeway commuting. Commuting is by far the dominant reason that leads cars on urban and metropolitan freeways, not freight, nor long-distance trips.  And the reality is that this freeway commuting is absolutely economically inefficient, even useless. It allows people to live farther from their jobs, and that just means more waste, wasted gas, wasted land, wasted energy. And since freeways are low-capacity, it leads to congestion because all commuters in a region cannot all use the freeways.

So how many freeways do we actually require for economic efficiency? Well, let's take a region with urban areas in grey:

A region of a country, urban areas in gray, how many freeways are needed?

Here's the answer:

All the efficient freeways for the previous region

Note that no freeway penetrates any urban area, they all go around them, not through them. You have freeways surrounding cities, then branches connecting to other cities. That's all you need, any additional freeways to these are completely pointless on an economic level, wastes of money.

We have examples of this at work, for example in Europe, where many countries were reluctant to bulldoze their historic cities just to run freeways through. Even Germany, the country of the Autobahn, has largely rejected the concept of urban freeways:

Munich, Germany: freeways in orange, none inside the city itself

Kansas City, Missouri: a bit more freeways

But then, what about all these industrial parks and shopping malls that spring up whenever a freeway is built, aren't those proofs of economic developments?

No. They are economic displacement. Almost all suburban industrial parks near freeways are echoes of decaying industrial areas closer to the center of the region, areas that have been abandoned as commuters jammed up roads and made these areas harder to get to, leading industries to move away to ensure more reliable and speedy transport. Likewise, all suburban freeway malls leave in their wake dead strip malls or even older malls who empty out as stores seek better locations to keep up with sprawl.

Myth 2: we must build more freeways to reduce pollution from stop-and-go traffic

This is one we often see when freeways are congested to try to greenwash building new roads. Cars idling in traffic do burn more fuel than if they had free flow all the way, and the concentration of many cars all idling in the same spot does create a greater impression of pollution than if they were all spread around. However, we have to understand induced demand... building new freeways incites a lot of sprawl, increasing travel distances, so what is "saved" by getting rid of congestion is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of fuel you incite people to burn when they start living further and further away from jobs, retail and services.

In fact, one of the things we can notice is that most people tend to define distances in term of travel time, not travel distance, and make their decisions based on that. So someone who wants to spend 30 minutes maximum on commuting will choose a place to live that offers him a 30-minute commute. or less. Whether that 30 minutes is 30 minutes of free-flowing freeway or stop-and-go traffic is irrelevant.

Though fuel economy measured on the distance traveled is much worse in stop-and-go traffic, idling engines, of course, use but a fraction of gas per hour as engines at freeway speeds. A fuel consumption of 8 L/100 km (around 30 mpg) means that the engine is burning 8 liters (around 2 gallons) every hour, meanwhile an idling engine will burn about 1,5 liter of fuel per hour (0,4 gallon per hour), if I go by the estimate that engines burn 0,6 liters per hour per liter of engine displacement (so a 2.4L engine would burn around 1,4 liters per hour). So for a threshold of 30 minutes for the commute, the 30-minute stop-and-go commute will burn up to 5 times less fuel than the 30-minute freeway commute without congestion. Likewise, a 30-minute 30 km/h commute with fuel consumption of 12 L/100 km (around 20 MPG) will burn 1,8 liter of fuel, while a 30-minute 70 km/h commute with fuel consumption of 8 L/100 km will burn 2,8 liters of fuel, more than 50% more.

Myth 3: removing freeways would mean chaos and gridlock

As a traffic engineer I can tell you that freeways do have to be closed once in a while, or bridges (more frequently). Whenever this happens, or a capacity reduction on a major freeway, the first day is terrible and chaotic. The second day is a bit better. After 3 or 4 days, when people have understood that this isn't going to be resolved, people find alternatives to deal with the traffic and adapt their movement patterns. Though the situation is generally a bit worse than prior to the capacity reduction, most of the traffic effectively vanishes from the grid, especially in the long-term, people and development will adapt to the new situation. This adaptation occurs even faster if you have alternatives like transit ready to go.

This isn't merely theoretical, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Seoul have all removed freeways, some of this removal was intentional, some wasn't but resulted from damages from earthquake or from collapse. In all cases, traffic adjusted and life goes on.

Myth 4: roads are public goods that should be free to use (no toll), because everyone benefits from them

First of all, technically, they probably aren't, but I will discount that argument, because what is meant by "public good" is different from the technical term. It is meant simply that they are goods provided by the government, open to all and so can benefit anyone who can use them.

However, that it be true doesn't mean necessarily that it should be free to use. Roads have limited capacity, and though everyone may benefit from them at one point or another, the truth is that not everyone derives the same benefit from them. Why should someone who uses roads a lot not pay more for them than someone who uses them but little?

Let's make an analogy... electricity is in many places still a public good, with public electricity providers still being very common. In many ways, electricity is a public good just like roads. Yet, how would people react if someone proposed to get rid of metering and just charge a flat fee to all people connected to the electricity network? So someone who keeps the Christmas lights on until July and never turns off the lights in his house, with AC on full blast all summer (opening windows when it gets too cold) and the heater on max all winter would pay the same as someone who is careful with electricity and spent thousands to insulate his house better to lower energy consumption. Most people would find the proposal completely stupid and mock it.

Yet, that's basically how it works when roads are free to use. We reward vice and punish virtue. Expressways are a special case as they are extremely expensive and so would deserve tolls on them, since gas taxes are a very poor user fee when some roads are cheap (old, narrow roads in rural areas that follow the terrain's ups and downs and curves) and others are tremendously expensive (elevated or underground expressways). The case of freeways is the most evident, no road is as expensive to build as freeways, but for users, without tolls, no road is cheaper and faster to use than freeways. That's what I call a "perverse incentive", people are personally advantaged to make a choice that is the most expensive one, because the cost is assumed by everyone else.

Let's make another analogy why just charging people a flat fee (license fees) or gas taxes is a bad idea. Take a restaurant that serves hamburger steaks and lobsters (the owner is weird like that). They can sell their hamburger steaks for 10$ and make a profit off of them, or lobster for 30$ to have the same profit margin. Let's say 50% of their customers eat hamburger steaks and 50% eat lobsters. Now let's say that, to make it simpler, the owner decides: instead of charging people 10$ for hamburger steaks and 30$ for lobsters, I'll just charge everyone a flat price of 20$ when they enter the restaurant, then they can choose whichever platter they prefer, after all, 50% take the 10$ meal and 50% take the 30$ meal, so it should be fine. So now, the hamburger steak is insanely expensive at 20$ and the lobster is much cheaper at 20$. What happens? Well, people who want hamburger steaks go elsewhere, people who want lobsters flock the place, suddenly 90% of people take lobsters (some people are with friends and are allergic to seafood), the average cost of the meals should be 28$, but they charge only 20$, they're losing money on every meal, so they have to hike up the price to compensate.

That's what happens when you tax the cheap options to reduce the cost of expensive options, people start opting for what was expensive before and is now just as cheap as alternatives. In the end, everyone ends up paying more because the prices need to rise to compensate.

So though everyone benefits from roads, they don't do it at the same level, it would be fair for those who use them most to pay more for them. The argument against this is a non sequitur, it's not because they're provided by the government and everyone benefits at one degree or another that they necessarily should be free to use.

Myth 5: if freeways were tolled, all goods in stores would be extremely expensive!

Not so. For one thing, just because roads are not tolled doesn't mean that their costs vanish, we just pay for them in other ways. So overall, since tolls simply replace other funding methods, the end result for society is nil.

But even so, let's just consider an example of a reasonable toll to use freeways, 10 cents per kilometer (16 cents per mile) and see how it affects prices if we consider that trucks pay 3 times as much as cars, so 30 cents per kilometer (48 cents per mile). Let's say a beer truck, that carries 900 24-bottle cases of beer, travels 2 000 kilometers (1 300 miles), or half the distance from Los Angeles to New York. The toll for the trip would be 600$, the truck is carrying 21 600 bottles of beers, that's an average of less than 3 cents per bottle, a bit less than 70 cents per case. And this is an extreme example with a very, very long distance trip, and it amounts to less than 3% of the cost.

So that's not extremely expensive at all. It may add a 2-3 percents to costs, but no more than that, and that's not considering the savings from reduced congestion or reduction in gas taxes if they are reduced once there are tolls.

Myth 6: cars are tools of social equality

I actually had someone pull me that argument on me in a debate on parking. The gist of it is that cars allow people to move around wherever there are roads, so they allow the poor as great an ease of movement as the rich and make rich neighborhoods accessible to the poor too.

The absurdity is that he assumed that everyone can afford cars. The problem with cars is that though their operating cost may seem small, they have a huge threshold cost: you must be willing and able to pay thousands to buy a car and maintain it in order to be able to use roads. On the other hand, transit's marginal cost may sometimes seem high, yet it has no threshold cost. If you can pay the ticket, you can use it.

Cars and, before them, carriages have always been tools of socio-economic segregation. The rich who were willing and able to live apart from the "riff raff" in the country have always had manors far from cities (while often maintaining "townhomes"). This was extremely expensive as transport was very expensive back in the day, but cars and carriages allowed it by making transport first less physically demanding, then faster. If the popularization of cars has made this strategy less successful, it says nothing about cars being a tool of social equality, but more about how rich as a society we have become.

Myth 7: if you don't build a freeway to my home, you're treating me like a second class citizen, I have a right to a freeway!

Actually, I had an old high school friend of mine pull that on me recently when I told him I was against the project of converting a road to his new city into a freeway. I don't think I need to explain the ridicule of it, yet this is a common mentality because of the way we have funded roads. Since freeways have no higher cost than any other road and everything is funded by everyone, there is a mentality that spread that since everyone pays for them, everyone should be entitled to them. And, well, that reasoning actually makes some sense... otherwise, you have everyone paying for things that only some people get to benefit from. It does seem unfair. Which again provides an argument for tolling freeways, then it's the people who use them who have to pay for them.

But still, no one forced anyone (in general) to go live where they live, so going to a faraway suburb without freeway connect, then pleading for freeways as if they were your due, is quite galling behavior.