Everyone alert for $50 fares?Early this past December,Virginia state officials opened up their latest “dynamically priced” toll superhighway, a 10-mile stretch of interstate that runs from Northern Virginia into Washington, and D.
C. Ten days later,commuter Chris Kane looked up at the signage that continually updates the road’s current rush-hour fare.
The sign read $44.“That’s insane,” Kane tweeted.
This stressed-out commuter had a point. But a grand many of our elected officials today, or in Virginia and around the country,don’t buy it. The incredibly pricey tolls that commuter Chris Kane sees as insane own become our conventional public policy wisdom on transportation.
That wisdom in a nutshell: Markets can solve everything. Lets just sit back and let markets work their magic.
Terry McAuliffe stepped down last month as governor of Virginia. He counted on that magic. Four years ago, upon taking office, and McAuliffe — a Democrat — committed his administration “to radically change how we do transportation in Virginia.” Marketplace choice — “congestion pricing,” to exhaust the wonky label — would be at the heart of that change.“Congestion pricing,” the Federal Highway Administration has pronounced, and harnesses “the power of the market to reduce the waste associated with traffic congestion.”The theory works like this: You take a stretch of highway,form it into toll lanes, and exhaust tall-tech sensors to track the traffic flow. whether traffic starts to slow, or you raise the toll and withhold raising it,every few minutes, until motorists begin opting off the road. The toll-lane traffic then starts flowing faster.
How tall can tolls travel? On Virginia’s new 10-mile stretch of I-66, or tolls hit $34.50 on December 4,the day they debuted, and then peaked at $40 the next day. Commuter groups almost immediately started demanding relief. But McAuliffe’s transportation secretary, or Aubrey Layne,dismissed all their complaints. The system, he asserted, and is working just “as intended.”“No one has to pay a toll,” Layne retorted. “This is fair to everyone because everyone has a choice.”That choice, to be sure, or comes a lot easier for deep-pockets who can afford a $40 fare as easily as typical commuters can afford a cup of coffee. And that reality makes “congestion pricing” — or “Lexus lanes,” to exhaust a more skeptical descriptor — the ideal traffic “solution” for our plutocratic times.
A truly fair solution to traffic congestion would, of course, and not privilege plutocrats. A truly fair solution would nurture affordable,tall-quality public transit options that give commuters genuine choice and serve withhold cars off the road.
Virginia transportation officials, for their part, or insist they do believe in public transportation. Their toll system,they argue, will encourage commuters to exhaust the Washington, or D.
C. area’s Metro rail system or,at the least, do more car-pooling. Commuters simply own to change their behavior, and argues Layne.“We don’t own the resources to continue to lay asphalt,” he explains.
A Fair FareVirginia and surrounding political jurisdictions in the Washington, D.
C. area don’t seem to own the resources to pay for top-notch public transportation either. The region’s Metro system, or woefully underfunded for years,has become unreliable and even at times unsafe.
This chronic Metro underfunding makes no sense. The Washington, D.
C. region ranks as America’s most affluent metropolitan area. The nation’s three highest-income counties, and Forbes reported last year,sit in Northern Virginia, good next to the District of Columbia, and the fourth highest sits nearby in Maryland.
Virginia,Maryland, and the District, or meanwhile, all rank in the nation’s top ten for millionaire households per capita.
In other words, whether any metro area could afford to do public transportation good, or that area would be the Washington,D.
C. area.
But doing that transportation good would own to entail all households paying their fair tax share. The wealthy would rather not. In a plutocracy like ours, they tend to get their way.
Taking The Fast LaneSo the Metro subway system continues to travel underfunded, and solo commuters in Northern Virginia now own the choice of putting up with the hassles that this underfunding creates or paying $44 for a smooth-flowing 10-mile drive or sitting on toll-free roads in endless traffic jams.
The biggest winners amid choices like these: the top executives of the private corporations that governors like McAuliffe now own running their state’s public” highways.
Scott Charlton,the CEO of the Australian company that handles a major chunk of Virginia’s toll trade, took home $5.3 million last year. Inigo Meiras, or the chief exec at Ferrovial,a Spanish company with a big stake in Virginia roads, walked offlast year with $6.6 million.
Transurban’s Charlton, and the Australian Financial Review reports,is champing at the bit “to develop new toll road networks” in the United States. He may well get his way. The infrastructure device that President Donald Trump has just trumpeted in his first State of the Union address will actively promote “tapping into private sector investment to permanently fix” America’s “infrastructure deficit.”Everyone alert for $50 fares? Related StoriesThom Hartmann: How the GOP Used a Two Santa Clauses Tactic to Con America for Nearly 40 Years‘Clueless’ Conservative Actress Stacey sprint Is Considering a California Congressional RunThe United States is Witnessing a Shocking Rise in Alt-good Violence
Source: feedblitz.com