Testing the pay-by-the-mile plan: Commuters volunteer to try tolls

By Eric Pryne
Seattle Times staff reporter

GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Eastside commuter Dave Miller's car is equipped with a dash-mounted unit that can send a signal to a central receiver monitoring the car's location to determine road tolls.

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Dave Miller drives Interstate 405 and Interstate 90 almost every day from his Kirkland home to his job in Issaquah. The 15-mile trip home can take up to an hour on a bad day, but it's a price the software tester is willing to pay.

If he had to pay cash to use the freeways, though, Miller says he'd think hard about changing his rush-hour commute.

If it would save him money, maybe he'd leave work later. Maybe he'd join a van pool. Maybe he'd take a different route.

Tradeoffs like those will become more than hypothetical in a few months for Miller and 500 other Seattle-area drivers. They're volunteers in a pioneering Puget Sound Regional Council study to gauge how people's driving behavior might change if they had to pay by the mile.

Miller and his fellow volunteers could be charged for driving on every highway and significant arterial from SeaTac to Everett. Cellular and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology will track their travels. Tolls will be deducted electronically from prepaid accounts.

Tolling is an old idea that is attracting renewed interest from transportation planners searching for ways to both curtail congestion and raise revenue. From California to New York, they're experimenting with tolls on roads.

The regional council's Traffic Choices study is different. No one has tested such widespread "road pricing" before.

"Almost all the pricing we've seen so far in the United States has been for individual facilities," says Robert Poole, transportation director at the Reason Public Policy Institute, a libertarian-oriented think tank in Los Angeles.

"What's unique about the Puget Sound project is, it's a method of pricing that could apply to an entire region."

No one's talking about imposing regionwide tolls for real anytime soon. Aubrey Davis, former chairman of the state Transportation Commission and a big booster of the pilot project, says that charging people to drive on roads they already use for free just won't fly, for now.

"This is a sea change," he says. "It's not going to happen quickly."

But Davis says pricing could ease the region's traffic troubles by both increasing the supply of roads and driving down demand for them.

"I think our present system is broken," he says. "It'd be stupid not to try to figure out some alternatives."

"A free good"

What we have is broken in two places, Davis says.

First, the state gas tax hasn't kept pace with inflation. Partly because of that, the transportation network hasn't kept pace with the region's explosive growth.

Voters have been reluctant to raise taxes to catch up. The problem will only get worse if cars become more fuel-efficient and gas-tax collections drop.

On top of that, Davis says, transportation planners are trying to keep up with growing demand for more lanes. That's distorted by the absence of the mechanism that usually brings demand into balance with supply: prices.

"Once you've got a car," he says, "driving is close enough to free that costs don't affect us very much. ... We're trying to supply the need for what is essentially a free good."

Without price signals, he says, peak demand far exceeds supply. Roads clog up. Because no one pays, everyone suffers.

The Puget Sound Regional Council, a four-county planning organization, identified road pricing as a potential solution to both problems when members adopted a long-range transportation plan in 2001.

That's when work on the Traffic Choices study began. It got a big boost in 2002 when the Federal Highway Administration agreed to pick up 80 percent of the $2.35 million cost.

Study participants will begin paying tolls in March. The money won't come out of their pockets, but they'll still have a real incentive to change when and where they drive.

Here's how the test will work:

Project managers will give each participant what they call an "endowment account" from which the tolls will be paid. GPS/cellular devices will be installed on their car dashboards to track where they drive, and transmit that information to a computer server, which will deduct the tolls from the drivers' accounts.

If there's money left in those accounts when the experiment ends in December 2005, the volunteers will get to keep it — in real dollars, perhaps hundreds.

Project manager Matthew Kitchen says a consultant is piecing together the toll schedules for each road in the study network now, using current congestion patterns as a guide. The charges will be higher at peak periods, he says, and higher on severely clogged roads.

Some roads won't have tolls most of the time, he says. Others may have tolls even on weekends.

Participants will get details about the charges for each road before tolling starts, Kitchen says. They'll be able to monitor their accounts online. And the dashboard unit will display the current charge per mile each time the car approaches a road with a toll.

"It's up to them to decide how valuable this money is in relation to the trip they'd be taking," Kitchen says.

The study doesn't reflect how an actual regional pricing scheme might work, in at least two respects:

In the real world, tolls presumably would discourage enough people from driving during peak periods to reduce commute times for those willing to pay. Study participants won't enjoy that benefit because everyone else still will be driving for free.

In the real world, tolls presumably would motivate people to drive less to save money. In the pilot project, volunteers who drive less will actually earn some money. Plus they're being paid a stipend to participate.

But, Kitchen says, once the test is completed, sophisticated statistical analysis can factor out those influences and give a better picture of what real-world pricing could accomplish: How much money it might raise, and how much congestion relief it might provide.

The project also should advance understanding of thorny technical and policy issues that pricing would raise, he says.

Many fear, for instance, that the technology that makes such widespread tolling possible threatens privacy. Others say tolls would turn highway lanes into "Lexus lanes," off-limits to the poor.

Exploring options

A project contractor began installing the dashboard units in participants' cars this month. Kitchen says project managers will spend the next few months testing the system before people start "paying."

Some volunteers are thinking about how they can save.

Ann Merwin drives I-405 every morning from her home in Bothell's Canyon Park area to her job as a telephone customer-service representative in Bellevue. She starts work early — 6 a.m. — when traffic usually isn't a problem and alternatives to solo driving are scarce.

But if it would be cheaper, Merwin says, she might take back roads or find a car pool.

Dave Miller usually arrives at work in Issaquah around 9 a.m. If the tolls on I-90 and I-405 are lower later, he says, maybe he could come in at 10. Or, if it's cheaper, he might take arterials through Redmond and down the east shore of Lake Sammamish.

Or maybe he'll join one of the van pools that drops commuters at Costco headquarters, about a half-mile from his office: "It's not that bad a walk."

Miller, 37, says road pricing appeals to his libertarian leanings. "I see it as a very market-driven solution to a problem," he says. "I like seeing market approaches."

But he's not certain he'd want to pay tolls for real. "If I'm asked to pay for the same roads I've been driving for 10 years for free," he says, "that would take some adjustment."

It's too big an adjustment for now, says Poole of the Reason Public Policy Institute. "I can't imagine that anything would flow out of this project for the next five or 10 years in terms of implementation," he says.

"The value of this is for the whole nation to learn."

But state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald says regional road pricing is coming.

"This is a groundbreaking experiment," he said at a recent regional council meeting, "because we've got to get there."

In 12 or 15 years, he said, "everybody's going to be doing this."

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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