In 2000 the average driver in U.S. metropolitan areas endured 27 hours of traffic delay, a rise from 7 hours in 1980. In many other countries, traffic delays are considerably worse than in the United States, and in developing countries urban traffic congestion is increasing with alarming rapidity. For fifty years economists have been advocating congestion pricing as the way to deal with urban traffic congestion. Until very recently, their arguments appeared to be falling on deaf ears, but even now, after some successes, congestion pricing is encountering considerable political resistance. Faced with the apparently inexorable rise of urban traffic congestion around the world and the limited success of congestion pricing, the authors of Alleviating Urban Traffic Congestion advocate active c/nsideration of more microscopic policies, that attack the problem at the scale at which actual policy decisions are made.
Richard Arnott, Tilmann Rave and Ronnie Schöb argue that urban transport economists’ preoccupation with congestion pricing derives from their thinking about urban traffic congestion using macroscopic models that are too simplified and too aggregated, and that refocusing their attention on more microscopic models will lead them to the analysis of a wider and more creative range of policies, at least some of which should work well and be politically acceptable.
After developing the themes of the book, the authors illustrate them by examining some areas of urban transport policy that have been neglected by the macroscopic approach. These include downtown parking policy, the encouragement of bicycling, the staggering of work hours by dominant employers, and the use by medium-sized cities of a “multi-mode” ticket that charges cars entering the city center a toll equal to the transit fare. The reorientation of urban transport analysis that they advocate will by no means eliminate traffic delays, but should speed up the adoption of a richer, more flexible, and ultimately more effective set of policies to alleviate urban traffic congestion.
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