You can hang any number of shiny baubles on a mistake, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, but when you're done, all you've really got is a bad idea -- with glitter.
Congestion pricing is just that sort of bad idea. Here in Los Angeles, the idea of opening the high-occupancy vehicle lanes on the freeways to toll-paying single drivers first surfaced some months ago, not because it had been carefully weighed or debated but because there was federal money available to fund a couple of demonstration projects.
The Bush administration liked toll roads because they dovetailed with an ideological predilection for market-oriented solutions to public policy issues. The Obama administration backed the idea because it likes shovel-ready projects that can play a role in the stimulus effort. So L.A. is getting $210.6 million in federal funds to convert the carpool lanes on the San Bernardino and Harbor freeways into high-occupancy toll lanes.
Those conversions will create 7,000 construction jobs between now and 2010. That's good. On Saturday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will begin a series of public hearings on a tentative pricing plan for the two roads. It proposes to charge solo drivers 25 cents a mile to enter the lanes when traffic is lightest and $1.40 when traffic is heaviest.
Oddly enough, no solo drivers will be admitted when average speeds in the new high-occupancy toll lanes fall below 45 miles per hour. That's to keep them from getting clogged, but the result is that there will be congestion pricing -- except when the highways are most congested.
This project simply is a backdoor way of introducing toll roads in Los Angeles County. That's a policy that discriminates against the working poor in a particularly burdensome way, because our public agencies provide most neighborhoods with the sketchiest of public transit alternatives.
Moreover, it couldn't happen at a worse time, because California's draconian budget cuts in education, healthcare and every other public service are about to pull the remnants of equal opportunity from beneath many of our neighbors' feet.
The MTA appears to be taking notice of a recently released Rand Corp. study of congestion pricing financed with a grant from the Environmental Defense Fund. The researchers urged public officials considering congestion-linked tolls to address the projects' equity issues early in the process. But the study bent over backward to redefine equity in so many ways that congestion pricing actually, and misleadingly, seemed to benefit low-income people.
