During a Kinko’s misadventure last week, a misadventure caused by one “Bill” being unable to write down “colour” instead of “black and white” but managing to read the order back to me as “colour”, I spent some quality time on I-10. Currently under construction and scheduled for completion sometime in 2008, the I-10/I-410 interchange causes San Antonio’s commuters no end of woe; especially between 9AM and 3PM when the left lane going both directions is closed.
The frustration of moving 10 miles in about an hour, both directions, twice, gave me plenty of time to think. Perhaps too much. In any case, the left lane is closed for about 100 meters or so right near the I-10/410 interchange and the closure is clearly marked for 2.5 miles, which would lead one to assume that getting over to avoid causing trouble once the lane actually ended would be fairly easy. Not so. A large, large number of people will drive in the left lane up until the point where they must move over lest they plow into a heavy, metal sign with flashing lights on it. What’s worse, people in the center lane gladly oblige to let these idiots in when they reach the end of the line. Meaning, of course, that traffic backs up and everyone is frustrated as hell.
And here we have the most mundane collective action problem ever given pixels in the blogosphere: Everyone would be better off if folks moved from the left lane in a timely fashion, but individuals have little to no incentive for this as they can gain (or perceive they can gain) from darting ahead in the left lane and forcing their way in. Granted, if everyone moved in a timely manner traffic would still flow more slowly than if the city would just close the lanes late at night instead, but I’m willing to bet that things would move faster than 10MPH.
But, how do we get people to move over? Closing the lane sooner just shifts the problem, and a gradual rather than abrupt merging won’t really solve anything either (entrances are designed this way and still cause major traffic problems). One solution is that everyone stop letting folks in, forcing the people who drove to the end of the left lane to sit there until it reopens, but that’s like saying life would be better if people were nicer: pleasant to think about, but ultimately useless. The other solution that I immediately thought of was installing some sort of gating device to trap those who drive too far in a lane that will be closed soon. Force them to sit and not be able to merge until the road is reopened…but once the queue filled up things would be exactly the same, only in a slightly different freeway location.
I think the most feasible solution is that the city close the lanes at night instead. Maybe putting up a bunch of lights and paying more for worker’s who’ll work nights would be prohibitively expensive, but I doubt it. Plus, once you factor in the costs of thousands of people stuck wasting their time for an hour in a traffic jam, I doubt closing the roads at night would really be a bad trade-off. That, or I should be provided with a flying car and missiles that I might get to Kinko’s in the middle of the day faster. Okay, yes, and so that I might smite those who drive as if there are no laws here, and those named “Bill” at the I-10 & Huebner Kinko’s.
ADDENDUM: Upon further inspection it’s interesting that the highway system has a tendency to spawn wholly new collective-action problems. I find this amusing in that the interstates are really a shot at solving what some see as another collective-action problem.
Roads are considered, by quite a lot of folks, to be one of the better examples of a public good. Roads are usually thought of as non-rivalrous in consumption and exhibiting non-excludability. Meaning, of course, that multiple parties can use a road at the same time, and it’s impossible to stop people from using them. Thusly roads are constructed by the government, and financed by taxes. The assumption being that roads weren’t built through taxation, everyone would want roads but nobody would want to pay for them*. But is this actually true?
I’ll grant that it probably is for surface streets. It’d be impossible to keep anybody from using surface streets: You can’t very well put a gate at the end of every driveway that will only open if you’ve paid the road fee to Road Corp. And I’ll even go so far as to say that all roads are non-rivalrous in consumption, at least to a certain point. Sure there’s some point at which things are so crowded everyone is vying for space and nobody else can enter, but under most circumstances this isn’t really the case; especially not on surface streets, but even most of the time on the highway. It cars may choke the freeway, and the commute might be annoying at times, but most of the time everyone who wants to can use the highway.
However, consumers can most certainly be prevented from using highways. Toll roads have found success all over, and I think they might make a better model for highways generally. Gates at entrance ramps might serve to shift delay to things like frontage roads in the short-term, but commutes on the highway would be greatly shortened. Longer term, once proper entrance procedures were established, I doubt the delay at entry would be sufficient to offset the benefit of a less crowed highway. Why would the highway be less crowded? Not everyone is going to want to pay the toll; the toll would likely be charged per vehicle (this is the most obvious choice and probably the easiest) which would, in all likelihood, encourage carpooling. Presuming that cities would still run public transit services, which I see as quite likely, more people might be willing to use those services instead of driving and paying the toll.
The counter argument is that everyone is already paying to support the current system. While this is true, the cost isn’t immediate as it’s paid in taxes rather than at the point of purchase. Further, in the event that Congress and the states (or some states) were persuaded to adopt a private highway proposal, tax rates may or may not change depending on the political make-up of the governing body that passed the private highway legislation. A legislature that would move to privatize the highway system would likely also cut taxes, perhaps on gasoline as that’s where a lot of highway and road dollars come from. That might increase the incentive to take one’s own vehicle, but gasoline consumption is relatively inelastic with respect to price, so I doubt that would tend to increase driving all that much (although it might encourage a shift toward less fuel-efficient cars).
But, let’s suppose that the toll and the tax decrease cancel each other out, just for the sake of argument. Then the traffic needs are the same under government or private roads. Is there still a welfare gain to be had from having private firms provide highway services? I say yes. If the privatization were done well, by having many firms bid for the right to provide highway services, the winner would be the firm willing to invest the most to gain the right to provide, the most eager to perform the service. Further, there’s always the potential for some competition among road-provision companies. Even if the situation turned out to be one of natural monopoly, the firm would still be accountable to its bottom line and to its shareholders, which the government most certainly isn’t.
Do I think any of this is likely or even politically feasible in the slightest? No, but it seems that there are obvious gains to be had from some form of highway privatization and I cannot think of a good reason why so many people would be so averse to it. I guess I’ll go ahead and blame FDR, same way I blame him for this Social Security mess that I’ll likely post something about later.
