Rush-Hour Air: Cost It Out? : Dealing With Congestion and Pollution

What price cleaner air and less rush-hour congestion? Would it make sense to charge tolls during rush hours, say, to cars with only one passenger? How can we know if we don’t test the proposition?

Sure, it’s a dangerous question to ask in a region that calls its highways free ways. But consider some cost-benefit facts. Californians pay about a penny a mile in gas tax. Society pays, one way or another, half again that much per mile just for the trail of air pollution that automobiles leave.

None of this pollution mathematics is new to theoretical economists. But it was largely overlooked until environmentalists and smog and transportation planners realized that solving the congestion problem would help reduce smog. Idling cars and ones that go slow cause more air problems than vehicles that are moving efficiently.

So now the experts are dusting off the notion that the same kind of pricing mechanism that rightly discourages companies from selling $5 products for $1 might serve to persuade commuters to double up, triple up or even delay a commute in ways that traditional regulations may not.

Some of the statistics that underpin the concept of market forces in transportation seem solid enough. Others largely result from random curiosity among economists and transportation buffs--and from the understandable desire to see if there isn’t some viable alternative to the regulatory approach to the air quality problem.

Some people are attracted to price mechanisms because they put market forces in the driver’s seat instead of impersonal--and sometimes imperfect--regulatory bureaucracies. Some business leaders are interested in pricing mechanisms because it is a world they are familiar with. They understand that no company can stay in business spending $5 to build a product it can sell for only $1. Government can get away with this sort of behavior longer than a manufacturer who is held by the invisible hand of market economics. But not even government can do it forever.

But even if all the pricing statistics were beyond dispute, the approach--which perhaps unavoidably gets reduced to “commuter fees”--needs testing to verify that it is not just another way to make life even more difficult for the poor.

These studies and tests may well be the most important task before the region’s big transportation and smog control regions--the Southern California Assn. of Governments and the South Coast Air Quality Management District. They should get on with it. If not, the Legislature, which has been looking for ways to move Southern California toward regional government, should direct the agencies to do a joint study of market-oriented approaches and find the funds for them.

As a bonus, the effort might even provide something of a real-life starter test of a regional government approach to air quality.