HOV lanes and People who need to get there fast

Why do traffic jams exist? The answer is either 1) there's an obstruction: a wreck, construction, tree in the road, etc., and thus the capacity of the road is limited [reduced supply]; 2) there are too many cars on the road versus the capacity of the road [increased demand], 3) there's not an obstruction, but there's some event that causes people to slow down to have a look (like a wreck that's been moved off the road so it no longer is blocking traffic).

Most traffic jams result because of the capacity issue. There are simply too many cars for the road (and this often leads to wrecks, which causes further delays). The problem with highways is that the cost is almost always fixed, regardless of the time of day that the road is being used. Roads are funded through gasoline taxes and tolls, and tolls are usually fixed. Furthermore, while the lanes going into the city may be backed up for a few hours each day in the morning, most of the time it's smooth sailing.

Traffic jams cost drivers money in that they can't be doing something else, like working (this is "opportunity cost"). For an unemployed guy driving somewhere, the opportunity cost of sitting in a traffic jam is basically negligible. For a lawyer who sits in a traffic jam, the opportunity cost can be quite high.

Governments have two methods of reducing traffic jams resulting from capacity issues: increase supply or decrease demand. Increasing supply means adding more lanes, or alternate routes: an expensive proposition. States currently have fairly clumsy methods of reducing demand during peak periods: one of the more prevalent methods is to promote carpooling through HOV lanes, adding public transportation with more robust schedules during peak times, etc.

Why not charge drivers a high toll during peak periods? The key would be to have lower tolls outside the peak periods, when there's excess capacity. This would encourage some drivers to shift their work schedules so they'd start and end work during non-peak times (the first to do so would be workers who could shift their hours without a great impact [such as computer programmers]).

In addition to having the toll be reduced (or even eliminated) during non-peak times, there would also have to be a good collection mechanism (probably via electronic devices like EZPass) in place so that drivers wouldn't have to wait to pay a toll, thus negating the benefit of paying the toll in the first place. I believe that the technology to do this exists well enough right now.

Convert the HOV lanes into "pay to drive faster" lanes. This way, poor people could afford to drive, it would just take them longer (but they don't value their time that highly). Meanwhile, people whose time was very valuable could pay to drive in the HOV lanes.

What would the cost of the pay lanes have to be? Well, there would have to be some sort of mechanism to determine the price: at what price does traffic again move at the speed limit? That's where the price should be set.

Roads are a limited resource, and when you have a fixed price (i.e., the gasoline tax or a fixed toll) for a scarce good, you are going to get a shortage of that good (in this case, the good is a lane of pavement as long as your car and four car lengths to the next car). By raising the price of the good, you get rid of the shortage.

While local governments would probably make money by implementing this system, I do not think it should be viewed by municipalities as a way to keep getting lots of money (rather, it should be viewed like fines: attempting to control behavior). With current technology, it would probably be quite easy to reset the price every month for each hour window based on the demand. The price would be set so that at any given time, there would not be a backup (so most of the night, there should probably be no toll).

Many of you might say this would just hurt the poor working man who needs to get to work by a certain time, and why should he be penalized (if free lanes didn't exist next to pay lanes). My answer would be that he could leave earlier when there were no tolls. If he wants to consume a limited resource, he needs to pay for it (at 5:00 AM, roads usually aren't a limited resource, so tolls then could be free). He could carpool with others who wanted to drive during the peak period but could not afford to do so alone. Or he could lobby his employer to shift his working hours. If his employer refused, he might then find alternative employment that did allow for more flexible hours. This would eventually cause employers to have to raise their wages for lower-income people who work normal business hours. It would also provide an incentive for people who had normal working hours to live closer to their employer (or at least not in the same direction as all other commuters).

By having rates that vary according to demand, we'd eliminate the shortages. That's what done in almost every other facet of our lives, so why not with the highways as well?