While I'm not nearly so sure about new gas taxes - I think they'd be a real burden on someone who, say, makes $23,000 a year, lives in the outskirts of a major urban area and has to buy an average of 8 gallons a week for basic commuting (and already owns a reasonably fuel-efficient car) - I believe that, as far as toll roads go, this is exactly how it was done in the early history of our nation, as I seem to remember that most if not all of the primary roads were toll roads. The stretch of I-95 between Richmond and Petersburg used to be a toll road, but that was ended after the new bypass was constructed, and that may have been a mistake (ending the toll, not constructing the bypass). It's likely no accident that the Dulles Toll Road, which connects the airport of that name with Washington, is the best-maintained freeway in the area. (Actually, I wonder why businesses shouldn't be asked to help chip in for new roads to handle the traffic they bring to various areas. Washington and its environs stand as an object lesson as to what can happen when you have commercial and residential development without making the corresponding investments in traffic infrastructure. The pity of it all is, the plans for the Outer Beltway and other such roads were in place decades ago, but those projects got shut down because people didn't want urban sprawl and traffic. Well, we've got the sprawl and traffic now, and a pitifully inadequate road network. I honestly think D.C's traffic is worse than L.A.'s.)

Joe:

They shouldn't be driving to work at all, but especially not by themselves.

Road design, construction, and repair seems to be quite dependent upon location. GA has the best roads (interstate or otherwise) that I have seen; PA has been notorious in the past for about the worst, although NC seems to exceed that. But even there, Raleigh (the capital) has better roads than Charlotte (which is at least twice as big, and is growing faster).

CA used to have very good roads, but I haven't been there much lately. FL seems pretty poor (even on the turnpike). Like most other things, it seems to depend on who is in charge. Back in the late 70s, the PA turnpike commission could not reach a quorum because 3 of its 5 members were on their way to jail.

What Joe said. Isn't it a little draconian to spend most of a century allowing public transportation to dwindle to almost nothing outside of city limits and then suddenly impose high flat taxes on the only versatile remaining means of transportation? Especially when we want to encourage people to be homeowners and for many that means buying further and further out of town?

Car pool.

As I recall, there are two tolls on I-95 in the the tiny section that goes through Delaware.

Virginia and Texas are talking about building toll roads that would seperate truck and regular vehicle traffic, which as far as I know is only currently being done on the New Jersey Turnpike between New Brunswick and New York (six lanes each direction, trucks in the outer three though cars can also use them). I-81 in Virginia and I-35 in Texas definitely could use some extra truck lanes, but given the cost of building 350-500 miles of new toll road adjacent to (or at least in the same general area as) the existing highways, I wouldn't count on seeing those projects done any time soon.

Houston has had a very good experience with toll roads.

The highway system does largely pay for itself. In the case of Texas, though, we think it's great to siphon off gas taxes to other projects (such as the children).

A better way to view this is that the children, light-right boondoggles, and the like ought to pay for THEMSELVES, not with gas taxes.

And the Feds should stop siphoning off Texas's share of gas tax revenue to other states, while we're on the topic. You freeloaders on the east coast should be paying for your own highways! :)

Houston has had a very good experience with toll roads.

The highway system does largely pay for itself. In the case of Texas, though, we think it's great to siphon off gas taxes to other projects (such as the children).

A better way to view this is that the children, light-rail boondoggles, and the like ought to pay for THEMSELVES, not with gas taxes.

And the Feds should stop siphoning off Texas's share of gas tax revenue to other states, while we're on the topic. You freeloaders on the east coast should be paying for your own highways! :)

So tell us why raising gax taxes and car pools as social engineeering is a good thing. Are you for such social engineering in general, or just when they support your personal preferences/prejudices?

Actually, once people get past their petty prejudices, they might discover that our transportation system shows what is going to happen to social programs like Social Security. For a long time, in a lot of states, thanks to relatively high gas taxes, licensing fees, excise and property taxes and federal subsidies, transportation was bringing in a lot more than they paid out. This was due in part because the money supposedly to be used for transportation was instead being used for various social engineering projects. (Like the Golden Gate Bridge Authority, to subsidize passenger ferryies). Now they are finding out that not only does putting that money to its proper use hurt, but that their years of neglect has raised the cost even more. And no one in a position of authority has the political guts to take on the problem, allowing it to only become worse.

Another problem is that we've been subsidizing interstate trucking to the point where our railroad systems came near collapse until they figured out that they could still compete on the long haul. But railroads for shipping anything less than a thousand miles makes no sense anymore. (unless its a bulk commodity movement, like coal or grain).

Worse, most of the solutions being proposed do nothing to actually help. Here in the Seattle area they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on planning (not building, just planning) a glorified trolley system that even the supporters admit will do nothing more than cannabilize the bus ridership along the same route at the same speed. If it wouldn't contribute to the congestion, it would be cheaper to give each of those riders their personal limo and driver.

The proper thing to do is to develop a pricing structure such that those who are putting the greatest burden on the systems pay for them-- no more truck subsidy, and short line railroads and shorter movements will become more profitable. Congestion pricing will make people either stay off the road, or find ways to share that cost (like your beloved car pools).

I agree with your social engineering: "The proper thing to do is to develop a pricing structure such that those who are putting the greatest burden on the systems pay for them" They're called drivers.

Orrin, I don't know what planet you live on, but real people don't carpool because, duh, they aren't going to the same places at the same time.

Real people don't use public transportation because it does not take them where they need to go when they need to get there.

The personal automobile is a life-enhancing concept. Wealth-enhancing, too.

Furthermore, it was the public road network that turned the U.S. into an educated system. It was only when we got roads that most people went to high school, and that was no coincidence.

Virginia has toll roads because of its idiotic Byrd constition that didn't allow deficit borrowing. It ended up with, as noted, flossy roads where there was lots of traffic, bad roads everywhere else.

Byrdism held back the economic development of Virginia for at least a generation, maybe longer.

Harry:

Really? I've never been in a job where people don't carpool. In fact the companies usually sponsored them. They were also bus accessible.

Of course, if driving were actually expensive anyone who believes in markets would expect alternatives to flourish. But, I know you don't.

Harry:

"The personal automobile is a life-enhancing concept."

You know, Harry, some days I believe you personally are proof of the occurance of miracles.

OJ:

No rational network analysis would lead to concluding that car pooling, in general, will work.

Public transportation falls afoul of the same problem. Of course, you could fix that by concentrating industries and their workers.

So doing would make our economy so sclerotic as to make Europe's look positively dynamic by comparison.

Everybody drives, therefore, we already pay for the roads, regardless of the taxation source.

I don't take any federal highways to work everyday--why should I pay for them?

oj, take a job in a medium size city in fly-over country. I work in an office with about 100 people and in fifteen years haven't known anyone who DOES carpool. Population density is so low that you're probably more likely to get struck by lightning than find someone to share a ride without taking a distorted route that saves neither time nor gas. Add in short commutes (time and/or distance) and it just doesn't pay, except in a touchie-feelie greenie fashion. Our economizing is combining commutes with other errands.

Orrin:

You say "carpool" so blithely as though that would solve everything, but let me lay out a few facts for you that you may not be aware of up there in New Hampshire:

The state of public transportation in the D.C. area is, to put it briefly, not good. It's set up completely on a hub-to-spoke model, from the central city (DC) to the outer suburbs, and there is virtually no connection among the outer suburbs. This is a very serious problem because, these days, most people do not commute into D.C.; they work outside the main city, in what Joel Garreau called the "edge cities". There is _NO_ direct public-transportation connection (read: Metro) between where I live (Manassas, in Prince William County) and where I work (Tyson's Corner, at the interchange of the Beltway and Virginia Routes 7 and 123). The Metro rail system extends no further out than Vienna/Fairfax and a proposal to build a new rail line to Dulles Airport through the Herndon/Reston area recently went down to defeat because local businesses (I think - I will have to go back and look that up again) wouldn't pay for the necessary construction. A proposal to raise sales taxes in Northern VA by 1/2 cent to pay for transportation infrastructure improvements was shot down by the Northern VA voters in 2002 - and for the record, I voted for it even though I had my concerns about whether the proceeds would even actually have been reserved for transportation as promised or been diverted to something else. I'm not certain that carpooling would even do very much to relieve traffic congestion from Manassas (whose area population has expanded dramatically over the past decade) to the rest of the metropolitan area, because there are precisely _two_ northbound routes leading out of town, Virginia Route 234 (Sudley Road) and Virginia Route 28 (Centreville Road). Even at 5:40 a.m., traffic is choked on these arteries - and it's even _worse_ in the afternoon commute. And no, moving is not an option; Manassas is still one of the lower-priced areas in the metro area, and housing is sky-high just now.

Yes, we got ourselves into this mess through a combination of bad planning and zoning, NIMBYism, and reflexive tax-averseness. Fixing it is going to take years if not decades, and carpooling, while it may help, is not going to be a panacea. And one more thing: if the Republicans start proposing big gas tax increases, the Democrats are going to turn right around and start screaming about how the GOP is sticking it to the working man again through "regressive" taxes. What will that do to the 60/40 election?

Two points. Car pools don't work for many people: 1) Car pools work when people work standard hours within rigid geographical and time parameters. They don't work for people like many of us who drop a child off at school one day, work late another and periodically work from home.
2) Toll roads are a good method of encouraging users to pay for service. But, you would still help pay for them even if there were no gasoline taxes because most of the stuff you eat and drink comes to you via trucks. They would simply have to charge more to cover the tolls.

Joe:

Improve it.

Mr. Brouwer:

Yes, those who ship by rail would have a distinct advantage.

Chris:

At my company of several hundred in a town of thousands people drive as far as a half hour to pick up the person riding in with them and a small bus runs to our door. Where there's a will, ways appear.

Joe:

Atlanta is almost exactly the same, with lots of commuters going from suburb to adjacent (or next-to-adjacent) suburb. MARTA is great for going downtown, but awful for the rest. Sclerotic is a good word, although GA has done better dealing with it than most states. But the next big battle there will be for the "new" Atlanta airport: north of the city or to the southwest?

OJ:

Are your carpools (and buses) subsidized or otherwise centrally planned? Please clarify.

Washington D.C. probably has the most screwed-up highway system in the nation (yes, even more than Los Angeles or Houston), owning in great degree to the hubris of planners over the past 50 years who simply followed L'Enfant's plan that all roads should lead to downtown Washington. That may have been a reasonable design plan in the 1790s, but by the 1960s it wasn't such a hot idea. But the system was built with the idea that everyone in the area worked in downtown D.C., and the Metro was designed with the exact same thinking in mind.

Unfortunately, with the explosion of the federal government in the 1960s that boosted the number of federal workers and the realization of businesses in the 1970s that they should have some sort of representation in the Washington area to "network" better with the growing bureaucracy, you had an explosion of the suburbs that began in the middle part of the decade. But the only way to get from one suburb to the other -- especially if your going from Virginia to Maryland -- is on the Beltway, which was maxed out even before the suburban boom began, because inner city activists were able to block the federal government from extending I-95 through the district and the NE quadrant of the city. That's why I-395 now weirdly ends at New York Avenue, just north of downtown, and all the I-95 traffic passing through the area has to be shunted onto the beltway.

There are some segments in both Maryland and Virgina of what would be a partial outer Beltway that would link the Fairfax and Dulles Airport area with central Montgomery County and solve some of the traffic problem, but the NIMBYs are doing a great job killing any chance of getting the segement over the Potomac done. Until then, your only other option is the admittedly charming but slow trip across the river on the White's Ferry crossing -- which also carries a $3 one-way fee, which puts the ferry operators one step ahead of the toll road advocates.

jim:

Why would you need subsidies or central planning? Have people completely lost the capacity to communicate with co-workers, friends, and neighbors?

They drive as far as a half hour to pick up someone to carpool with? Are they crazy?

No, Hampshiremen.

So, Peter B. mocks Harry Eager because Harry wrote, "The personal automobile is a life-enhancing concept."

Curious to know what, exactly, makes that an off-the-wall statement.

Peter?

A high gas tax will increase costs, but the costs will be mitigated by an increasing number of people who carpool. It will also spur increased use of public transportation. Buses are a short term solution, and if there's enough demand than a rail service will be put in. They will never abolish driving, but for people looking to avoid high costs or prefer not to drive, there will be options. Plus, Detroit and Tokyo will sell more fuel efficient cars, like the hybrids who routinely get 50+ MPG.

People still drive in NY or Chicago, but many already choose to use the subway, El, or Metra to commute in those cities.

Some people would be financially hurt in the short term with say an immediate 50 cents per gallon tax, but you could always roll out a 5 cent increase per quarter, which would give people plenty of time to alter their habits and allow bus companies to establish themselves.

Gas is already over $2.00 here in AZ. And those prices will continue to increase as an industrializing China increaes demand for a flat supply. Get used to high gax prices anyway.

Higher gas taxes. Sigh. Do you see why libertarians want government out of the roads business?

Everything the government gets involved in simply creates its own unique set of problems. I know that's not a novel concept, but apparently it's SO obvious that people just forget it. When the feds invent health care subsidies, for instance, they unwittingly invite eventual debates about the legitimacy of cigarette smoking. When they invent public housing, they invite eventual arguments about gun ownership by residents. And so on, ad nauseam.

What happens is that after time, we come to take for granted the "health care subsidies" part, or the "public housing" part, or the "roads funding" part, and we wind up with these labyrinthine debates about cigarettes and guns and gas, with no real answers. We end up with discussions like this thread and posts like that of Chris Durnell, going on and on about "tweaking" this and "solving" that, fruitlessly trying to find magic answers within a framework whose very foundation is screwed up to begin with. It doesn't have to be this complicated; it's complicated only because of government involvement. It's citizens trying to figure out how to best spend each other's money, which of COURSE is going to lead to tortuous debates.

Orrin, you're right: You shouldn't be taxed to pay for roads you don't use. B-I-N-G-O. That's where these discussions should start and end, rather than getting mired in debates about how-much-and-when-and-who. It would all be so much simpler and fair if Americans would stop swiping money from each other in the first place, whether for health care or housing or roads or whatever. Once that happens, we can all quit arguing these ridiculous details and have a lot more free time with which to take advantage of our newly returned freedom.

"Government is not involved in roads" is a lot more simple than "See, if we tweak this thing here, and screw in this thing there, and then increase this, and plan for that, and make this little change over this way, and tinker around with something else over that way, we can maybe temporarily 'solve' this 'issue.'" It's not only more simple, it's the only "solution" that involves actual freedom, which is, ya know, that thing we founded America for.

Jim: Have you ever been to any part of GA outside of Atlanta? Your opinion might be different.

tomcat:

Because I took his statement as telling us somewhat sonorously that he really likes his car.

Are there any roads in NH with even 20% of the congestion seen on Route 128? But I notice you didn't answer my question.

People talk and carpool all over, but vanpools and the like only seem to work when lots of people have the same destination and the same schedule (like manufacturing & industrial facilities).

Chris:

North GA has good roads. I can't really speak for South GA.

oj,

Then 'Hampshiremen' must be a word that means 'more than just crazy'--because, at a half hour, the're already exceeding the national average for commute time. Bozos, if you ask me.

Economists never put a value on the network. The network is more valuable than any single road -- toll or otherwise -- because it multiplies the value of every road, just by being there.

In the Middle Ages, we're told, most people never traveled more than 10 miles from the village of their birth. It wasn't for lack of public transportation, it was for lack of private transportation.

The auto is life-enhancing because it is the means of participating in the wealth created by the network.

At least half of you guys wouldn't have even attended high school if it hadn't been for the personal automobile. Autos created our secondary school system.

You might give some thanks to the automobile if you drink fresh milk, too.

Harry:

But that hasn't enhanced life.

It certainly did for the workers who built them (and still do).

Then why are they unhappier than their grandparents and great grandparents and backwards?

Force them to give up their cars and see how many smiles you receive in return.

You said above you shouldn't pay for federal highways you do not drive on. Fair enough. Then you should not receive goods that are transported over federal highways you personally do not drive on.

Somewhere, I forget where, in a life of Dorothy Thompson I think, was a description of what happened to her and Sinclair Lewis when they sought out the idyllic life of the Hampshireman, in the preauto era.

They were not happy.