COLUMN RIGHT : Why a Cudgel When a Scalpel Would Do? : Instead of banning trucks from the city, charge them for rush-hour road use.

After four years of talk, the moment of truth has arrived for Tom Bradley and the truckers. The mayor intends to ban all heavy trucks from city streets during rush hours on weekdays. The California Trucking Assn., joined by the California Manufacturers Assn. and 12 other business groups, responds that the ban will cost all of us a fortune. The truckers plan to ask the Public Utilities Commission for a 75% rate hike if the ban goes into effect.

Both sides in this battle make good points. Trucks do contribute disproportionately to rush-hour traffic jams. But a ban would needlessly raise costs for everyone. It’s time for some sharper thinking on this divisive issue.

To begin with, banning trucks on city streets is targeting the wrong problem. Everyone knows that the real problem is 18-wheelers on the freeways. Those heavy trucks, while only about 4% of the traffic, account for 50% of rush-hour freeway tie-ups, what with breakdowns, spills and accidents.

Back in 1987, discussion focused on keeping big rigs off the freeways during rush hours. But since our freeways have all been built with federal aid, the government can object to truck bans on grounds of interference with interstate commerce.

So the planners turned to city streets, reasoning that if trucks couldn’t make pickups or deliveries during rush hour, they wouldn’t be on the freeways then, either. Of course, through truck traffic would be unaffected, so the planners concede that Bradley’s truck ban might cut only 50% of the freeway truck traffic.

Doing only half the job while costing everyone a bundle is not a very good solution. Moreover, a flat-out ban ignores the different values that individuals and businesses place on their time, and their different abilities to cope with rules and regulations. For example, one draft of the program would require every business that receives eight or more daytime shipments per week to stay open at least four hours every night between 7:30 p.m. and 5 a.m. to try to shift deliveries to off-peak hours. For thousands of small businesses that would be an intolerable burden.

The inspiration for this program is supposedly the 1984 Olympics, when many truck deliveries were made at night or at daybreak. But the genius of that plan was that it was voluntary. Firms and truckers were simply permitted to make alternative deliveries because the city relaxed a law that prevents deliveries before 7 a.m..

A carrot, not a stick, got results.

If we’ve learned anything from watching the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it is that market forces work better than centralized regulations that unnecessarily restrict individual choice.

What we ought to be doing is providing incentives for truckers and businesses to shift operations away from rush hours. The key is to recognize that heavy trucks impose heavy costs on the rest of us when they operate during rush hours, especially on the freeways. Why not institute some form of “congestion pricing” on the freeways during rush hours, with big rigs paying a higher rate than other vehicles? (Electronic vehicle I.D. tags--already in use in Texas and Oklahoma--would permit nonstop electronic toll payment by vehicle users.) Those heavy trucks whose users were willing to pay the price would be free to operate during rush hour. Others would work out alternate, lower-cost schedules.

The Federal Highway Administration has already proposed that large cities with air quality problems be permitted to experiment with congestion-pricing on their freeways. One such proposal has been made in the Senate and deserves the support of truckers and other business groups that oppose an outright ban.

If congestion-pricing fails to win federal approval this year, a second-best alternative would be to fall back on Bradley’s original 1987 idea: high rush-hour fees for heavy trucks that use city streets. Like congestion-pricing on the freeways, this approach leaves each trucker and each business free to weigh the costs of rush-hour deliveries against the benefits. It recognizes that those trade-offs are highly specific to individual circumstances and not amenable to central planning.

Traffic congestion and air pollution are serious problems. But they can be solved fairly and at lower cost by using market incentives.