Tied up in traffic
Re “U.S. offers funds for toll lanes,” April 24
L.A. City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel said it’s “time to try something new” by charging a special fee to drive alone in the already privileged carpool lane. How about trying something that worked 30 years ago, before this preferential-treatment nonsense got started: Open all lanes on all public-funded freeways to all motorists?
If we’re really serious about trying something new, how about electing politicians who have a vision beyond the next election?
Robert L. Rosebrock
Brentwood
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Transportation economists have understood for almost 50 years that the only systemic solution to congestion is a congestion tolling scheme. I travel if the benefit the trip affords me exceeds the price I must pay for the trip. When I get on the freeway at rush hour, I delay other people, and I foul the air. These costs are real, but I ignore them because I do not pay them. If the costs I impose on others are forced inside my decision to travel in the form of an electronic toll, then I will not take the trip unless the benefits to me exceed the full private and social costs of doing so.
Forcing us to pay the costs we impose on others when we travel on congested facilities increases efficiency and fairness, and provides an ideal source of revenue for maintaining and expanding infrastructure. It is past time for public authorities to take this important step.
James E. Moore II
Director, Transportation Engineering Program
USC, Los Angeles
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Congestion pricing and toll lanes in Southern California are evil ideas that apparently will not die. The federal government will buy 60 high-volume buses that would use the toll lanes so the Metropolitan Transportation Authority can free up funds to create toll lanes with congestion-pricing tiers. Was the MTA already planning on buying 60 high-volume buses to use toll lanes that do not currently exist?
No matter what anybody says about congestion pricing and toll roads, they are built and operated on the backs of working-class people who have no defense against the power elites. It would be hideously stupid ivory-tower thinking to expect the working class to have any control over work hours. This is nothing more than class or institutional discrimination. At a time when energy costs are in such a runaway inflationary mode that they are causing shortages of affordable food worldwide, bringing up something like this is unconscionable -- assuming one has a conscience.
Nels Norene
Camarillo
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The carpool-lane system has always been absurd and is likely to become more so with the proposed fee-for-use lanes. We all should know that carpool lanes are misnamed because they are not used only by carpoolers. Two workers in a vehicle are not carpooling. The system is mainly a governmental pretense at doing something about traffic congestion.
Charging anyone using special lanes at rush hour regardless of occupancy will merely give advantages to those who can pay and exclude those who cannot, selling convenience to the affluent. So, the poor get poorer and slower, and the rich get their own lanes. So it goes, as usual.
Samuel Gould
Los Angeles