Blame me if you're getting antsy about congestion pricing

These days it's popular for government officials and celebrities to apologize in public. Now it's my turn.

I want to apologize to the citizens of the state of Washington, and indeed to everyone in the United States. Maybe everyone in the world.

I take responsibility for the recent popularity of congestion tolling for highways. I wish I could take it all back and leave the concept of congestion pricing as confusing as it had been since first conceived in the 1950s by Nobel Prize winner William Vickrey.

Here's my story. It begins with Washington's then-Secretary of Transportation Doug MacDonald.

MacDonald, like others of the transportation community, was stymied in efforts to help elected officials and the public understand how various innovative practices could inexpensively reduce traffic congestion.

Unlike many others, MacDonald did something about it: In 2006, he held an international competition to devise the best short explanation of the term "maximizing throughput" as it relates to highways. He put up $1,000 of his own money as the prize.

Well, I won.

I proposed a simple demonstration that used rice poured into funnels to show how pacing the flow of traffic can dramatically increase the number of vehicles carried by a roadway.

I am no traffic specialist but my idea beat out those of more than 200 traffic experts from around the world.

The demonstration clearly shows how measures that regulate the flow of traffic — such as congestion pricing — can increase the amount of cars able to use a roadway.

The rice idea caught on. MacDonald developed a very effective demonstration that proved among the most popular events of the National Academy of Sciences' Transportation Research Board meeting in 2007; it was still talked about at this year's meeting.

By now the rice demo has been done (sadly, not by me) for Congress, before state legislatures, before the Washington Transportation Commission (which sets tolls in our state), before public officials across the country, and, so far as I know, in other countries as well.

So far, so good. I might have liked more personal fame and fortune out of this success, but I was happy to pocket $1,000 and proud to play a small part in addressing traffic congestion. I even like to think it was my rice demonstration that changed King County Executive Ron Sims' mind and caused him to repudiate — and ultimately defeat — the Proposition 1 roads-and-transit boondoggle.

So I thought. But, in the months since, the new acceptability of congestion pricing spurred by my idea — now that legislators and public officials can understand it, they can vote for it — has been used to propose and legislate all kinds of things I never wanted:

• House Bill 1773, which will allow congestion tolls as a means to cut the amount of driving;

• Tolls for Interstate 90 to pay for a new Highway 520 Bridge;

• New tolls on the southern approach to the already tolled Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco;

• Special cordon tolls to drive into New York City.

The list goes on.

And how I wish I could take it all back. I wish I had never entered MacDonald's competition, and thus left the traffic community as tongue-tied about congestion pricing as it has been the past 50 years.

Don't get me wrong. I think congestion pricing has an important role. It works well on highways in many places, such as California's 91 express lanes.

I applaud our Department of Transportation's upcoming demonstration of the concept on Highway 167, where solo drivers will be able to pay a variable toll to drive in the car-pool lane. I would like to see this concept (and the car-pool lanes to support it) expanded throughout the region. I'd take tolls on new roads, as a means to avoid congestion and to fund construction (although the gas tax is more efficient, as it costs much less than tolls to administer, enforce and collect).

But I don't want to see congestion pricing as a lever to curtail driving, or to get us to pay more for roads we've already paid for. I conceived my rice demonstration as a tool to help unclog the traffic jams I hate, while giving drivers an option to get where they want to go by varying their drive times.

It was not to promote a heavy-handed measure to force cars off the road. If greenhouse gas is the issue, why not simply charge drivers the same carbon-offset fees available to big business — about $50 per year for a typical car?

Of course, no one has control over any idea once introduced into the public, but, oh, how I wish I could take mine back.

In the meantime, I'd like to use my $1,000 prize to fight mandated statewide congestion pricing. And, to everyone in our state (and nation), I am so, so sorry.