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Bid On eBay To Speed Up Your Commute
malfunct writes "The traffic in the greater Seattle area is atrocious, and the State Government has been working hard to find a way to solve the issue. In the interim, they may use eBay as an innovative solution for estimating demand and raising funds. According to a MSNBC article, the plan is to use eBay to sell stickers that allow access for single driver vehicles to the car pool lane. The idea is to use eBay to find just how much a speedy commute is worth to drivers."
Most Impressive indeed! I like the ldea, and they have little over head (IE a new department) to go along with it.
Good work!
eBaying? Unless they let it go on for a LONG time so they can find a statistical mean, it's just going to represent the upper-echelon of prices paid. Judging the value of things by their auction price, unless you're talking about one-of-a-kinds, is going to result in hideous inflation. No matter how useless something is, there will be someone, somewhere, who's willing to shell out big money for it.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
The threat of an $X00 speeding ticket doesn't seem to deter them from dangerous driving...
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
If your commute doesn't improve by much, can you leave negative feedback?
Chris
I'll ride in your car with you on the way to work, so you can go in the carpool lane.
This could lead to some really bad economic decision. eBay is not a fair marketplace, especially in areas like this. We're operating in the extreme portion of the demand curve here. These extremely rare (unless they sell thousands of them) items might be very sought after by the $300k/year executive who hates his morning drive. If they price further sales based on a few eBay auctions, they might end up only catering to the very rich.
Not to mention they will be operating well above the point where they will make the largest (potential) profit.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
If everyone is able to buy their way into the carpool lane doesn't that defeat the purpose? Isn't the carpool lane supposed to reward drivers for reducing their fossil fuel emmissions?
Does it seem to anyone else that this will just end up with another crowded lane, especially if there are too many stickers sold? And isn't the whole point to keep that lane uncontested so people actually use it? This is just another example of government trying to get every dollar they can, and pandering to corporate interest.
Doesn't that lessen the incentive to carpool? Why are going to carpool if you have to share the carpool with a bunch of rich wankers who can afford stickers? The carpool lane encourages the ecologically friendlier practice of carpooling and that should be its focus.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Seller was awesome! Totally fast shipping! Great communication! I love my sticker and will buy again! A+++++++
This is like buying tickets for a sporting event or concert, or the domain-name speculation game.
Speculators will bid up to enormous prices for the stickers, then will resell them to desperate motorists, making a profit.
eBay is not necessarily a factor in determining how much something is really worth. For certain collector's items, the item may sell at a much lower price than book value if there is not a captive market (people may want to inspect a coin or medallion in person, for example). For other items that generate a huge buzz of publicity in advance, like concert tickets and now HOV-lane stickers, the price quickly rises far beyond what the market will bear.
For more information, click here.
This provides an interesting opportunity to assess the "worth" of HOV lanes from an entirely new perspective. It would be interesting to see how such a market-based approach would value these high-speed lane projects, as opposed to the traditional multi-year study process that planning boards typically use today. What would be required is growth and maturation of the market in these stickers so one could get an estimate of the overall demand.
My guess is that the valuation would come in lower than today's standards, due to many parties who use the roads not participating (infrequent drivers, interstate drivers, etc.).
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Personally, I would pay for this. However, I would only pay up to about 3/4 of the price of the ticket I could receive if I was caught without the ticket. Second off, I think that if they implement this type of plan, they should look at making it into an electronic type device with a remote detector for installation into police vehicles. Maryland has a similar system which they use to asses tolls on bridges and tunnels.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
This sounds like a good idea, but will it really be full-proof? I could see people running up the prices just for fun. Using an internet bidding system as a census to see what people will pay for something seems like a good idea in theory. But I hope they make it a private auction or use some kind of security to AT LEAST make sure the people bidding even live in the area. Also, should an available lane on a highway really be "given out" in accordance to what someone is willing to pay? The car-pool lane is there for a reason, not for the highest bidder.
The articles states that you would get a 3 inch square sticker on the right side of the windshield. Ok, lets say I win one for the month of July.... and now its August, I still hae the sticker. Now you could argue to put a date on it, but I defy a cop to spot the date on a 3 inch square while the car is traveling 65 mph. I suppose you could color code, it, but even that has its limits. I see this as a potential problem.
Great Linux Site
Come on, this is just a thinly veiled attempt at making an old-people-free lane. Since old people generally aren't heavy computer users, let alone heavy eBayers, this lane will be regulated to the young and fast! We've all dreamed of it, and now its here!
daed si luap
If someone is willing to pay a lot of money for something, why shouldn't they? eBay is a very fair marketplace. It allows sellers to obtain maximum value for their product. If someone wants to pay more for something, why not let them? With state budget crunches (although I beleive that cutting spending is the answer), this will only help, and not harm anyone.
Honestly, people get bent out of shape if someone is willing to pay for something that you aren't. Why is this?
Ok, so if you have enough money from having a good job, you can get to work early or on time and keep that good job. If you don't have enough money from having a bad job then you'll arrive late and lose that bad job and never move up.
good thinking there..............
That's a great idea, but they'll probably need special permission from the Transportation Department to implement it, or risk losing some of their federal highway funds. The issue is that many urban highway construction projects are funded with conditions requiring HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lanes (or other specific things to encourage carpooling or mass transit).
Of course, with the current administration, such a waiver shouldn't be difficult to obtain.
Unless I am missing something, the point of high occupancy lanes is to reduce the number of cars on the road in the first place, helping with congestion as well as environmental issues.
Wouldn't these functions be better served by encouraging more ride share pickup areas and public information about ride sharing?
Oh, wait, that wouldn't produce new income past the already outrageous taxes involved and that means no new campaign kickbacks. How silly of me.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
I think this idea is great. I give it an A++++++++++++. Oustanding thinking and clever idea!!!!! I would work with Government again, anytime!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here
Talk about law makers being blatently biased toward the upper class. If you have enough money, you can buy special priveleges.
I thought car-pool lanes were designed to encourage a reduction in pollution. So now if you have enough money, environmental concerns don't apply?
> "It's a lesson in economics," explains Mercer Island's state Rep. Fred Jarrett
Indeed it is. They're taking the corruption enjoyed by big business who's bottom line can't be bothered by the environment and applying to local laws.
An auction is the wrong way to set the price for something like a car pool lane. The reason is that if too many slots are sold, the value of the car pool lane goes down. i.e. the carpool lane is jammed full of cars.
They need to figure out how many slots they need to sell, then figure out the demand curve for the product. The price should be figured from that curve, so that not too many are sold.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Now that the "non" carpool cars can drive on the "fast" lane. An say alot of people fork over the dough. Will the "fast" lane be fast or will they then have to pay McMonkey McBean aka the seller of the tickets, for the privledge of riding in the newest fastlane, the old ones.
In Washington DC the community slugs their way into the HOV lanes.
In a nutshell, folks driving alone on common routes who want to drive in the HOV lane pick up (car-less) complete strangers who also travel the same route. The driver gets to work more quickly. The passenger gets a free ride. The community gets less pollution and less traffic. Everybody wins.
If only Seattle would pick up on the trend! T'would solve their problems without any additional govenrment intervention whatsoever... without destroying the benefit of the HOV lanes.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Seriously, I think it's quite obvious there's more than one person commuting from Kent to Seattle every morning and evening so you'd have no problem finding a carpool partner. If you need to run errands during the day, use the bus tunnel -- it's free.
Carpool lanes were a great experiment, but a failed experiment. Trying to force people to carpool by opening up carpool only lanes only works if people are willing to share their car in the first place. Many people are not and would rather spend hours in traffic than share what is likely their only time alone in the car with other people.
Carpool lanes only serve to remove a viable lane for traffic and restrict it to 5-10% of drivers, much like special lanes in Soviet Moscow for the communist party leaders who were âoemore equalâ than their workers.
If Seattle were to just open all lanes to all traffic, traffic congestion would improve dramatically. It wouldnâ(TM)t completely disappear, the problem is to severe, but it would be a step in the right direction. Many of the roads with carpool lanes around Seattle are just 3-4 lanes in each direction to begin with. Cutting that down to 2-3 lanes causes severe problems and the obvious desparation illustrated by this scheme.
Possibly because the roads are public property, intended for use by everyone - not a consumer good.
Do you think you should be able to pay extra to have the police or fire department respond to your calls faster than they do to someone who cannot pay extra? Please also explain why or why not.
Now obviously, this isn't the same as preferred law enforcement priviledges, but it's still letting certain people pay to break the rules.
1. Scroll down to description of auction
2. Click on picture of sticker
3. Print out onto sticker paper
4. Profit!
--riney
Impressive? WTF? The whole point of the carpool lane is to get people to CARPOOL. As in, make a fucking friend at work and drive in with him so you reduce the emissions and cut down on the smog and make the air a little nicer to breathe for everyone. If you can't make a little effort to carpool, you don't deserve a speedy commute. No matter how much you pay.
So what, now it's not the carpool lane, it's the carpool/rich-lazy-bastard lane? Sickening.
c-hack.com |
Possibly because the roads are public property, intended for use by everyone - not a consumer good.
I guess you don't like driving on a toll-way either.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
Where I used to live, the volunteer fire department did something like that. People had to pay the fire department either a low yearly fee to be a member, or $200 per truck that responded to their fire if they weren't a member. Plus, members received preference while dispatching, so if you were not a member, and were unlucky enough to have a fire the same time as a member did, you would have to wait until the member's fire was assessed to see how many trucks would be needed before a truck was dispatched to you (if there were any who weren't needed for the member's fire).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
So instead of freezing the price of the stickers, you freeze demand (we'll sell 500 to the top bidders) and let supply (i.e. rich drivers) fluctuate.
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
Actually, I think this is a great idea if the money from the stickers is used to build appropriate light rail.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I'm a solo driver
:)-
If I am in a hurry I will speed
If Iou are in my way I will go around you
I will cut you off
I will use the Car Pool lane
Because MY needs come before yours
Someday I may get a ticket, but until then why would I pay to do what I do now for free
yes I am an ass on the road
Ave Molech Setting
"100 people bid at least $1,000 for these 100 stickers. There's no way the market would bear a price like that."
It's an AUCTION. By DEFINITION, the price is exactly what the (online auction) market will bear.
paintball
... into the future where only rich l337 people have their own private tree-lined, traffic-free highways to/from home. The rest of the people idle in a virtual parking lot, looking at the weeds and garbage (thanks VTA and CalTrans!!!). Just get rid of these stupid carpool lanes.. because you know that getting Americans to use mass-transportation is alot like trying to get us to give up McDonalds (Look how fat we americans are!). The gov't big ideas either give unfair advantages to a small, minority of rich people and screw us all (pay to play); make the problems worse (carpool lanes); or does nothing at all but waste money (VTA Lightrail (san jose), VTA Paratrans). Try something like getting rid of all highways and replace them w/ speedy trains like in japan. Japan is so small relatively, that they couldn't build anymore highways/parking structures/airports etc. so it's faster to ride a train/shuttle/lightrail for most commuting. American towns/cities are wasting money on a polutting, inefficient, uneconomical means of transportation. It would be alot cheaper to have electric trains ran from hydrogen generated by the from fusion reactor. Note that hydrogen is not a primary power source, but a fuel and a good energy transmission carrier medium (for both the fusion reactor and fuel-cells, nuclear vs. chemical). We gotta invest gigabucks in making fusion a reality ASAP!!! These goddamn Bush/Cheney oilmongers want to keep us sucking on the petroleum teats perpetually.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
As one who drives Seattle's roads every day, I can tell you this is par for the course for our state government. They can't decide how to solve the problem (because they're too busy siphoning off transportation money to fill someone's pockets), so they look for hair-brained "solutions" to make it look like they're doing their job. There is no interest in emissions -- first and foremost, the carpool lanes here are designed to reduce congestion by reducing the number of cars on the road. By selling exemptions, they are reducing the incentive to get a modest increase in tax dollars, at a time when everyone is screaming about the budget deficit. (Mostly it's the politicians screaming, saying "how can we keep spending up when income is going down? How? How?") By using eBay, they're looking for a way to set the price, but it doesn't really matter. They could sell enough stickers to clog the carpool lane at $1000 a pop, and still make no dent at all in what it costs to build a single offramp (about $300 million dollars in Seattle!)
The point here is to use a free marketplace -- Ebay -- to determine the value of access to the carpool lane to single drivers. This is valuable information, cheaply derived, which can be used to direct transportation policy in the future. Seems like a good idea to me.
Any auction with a fixed time limit is inherently unfair... the optimal bidding strategy is not to bid until the very last minute so as not to increase the price.
You obviously do not understand eBay's proxy bidding system.
Let's talk about oversimplified supply and demand like you learned in high school.
When a consumer is willing to pay more than a producer is selling for, the consumer has an obvious benefit. The sum of these benefits (consumer valuation - price) over all the consumers is the consumer surplus. There is a similar concept for producer surplus that takes longer to explain.
Auctions (in theory) eliminate the consumer surplus. That's why people complain about them: they like their share of the consumer surplus.
That's also why companies don't like haggling or competitive bidding: it removes produce surplus. (Car dealerships in America are something of an exception. They're a well-refined system of manipulation to make you think you're getting a better deal by haggling even though they're still making sizeable profits from you.)
IANA economist
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
In Ukraine they had a system years back where many of the roads had 'government lanes'. The idea was that these lanes were reserved for emergency vehicles and vehicles transporting government officials on 'important business', and not for 'the public'.
The 'government vehicles' had a blue spinning light that they could put on the dashboard and turn on (just like the police ones, but blue). It wasn't long before people figured out that you could pick a light just like the official one up at their equivalent of a Radio Shack, and be able to use the lane yourself.
So what's going to prevent sticker forgeries? Is a cop going to be able to spot a 3-inch fake while it's moving?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Unless eBay can sort out the massive amount of fraud that's going on right now then I'm never using it again anyway.
There seems to be an absolutely massive problem at the moment with people hijacking eBay accounts and their associated e-mail addresses and eBay don't seem to want to anything about it.
Anyone who uses eBay and has a weak password on their e-mail account (or an obvious answer to their secret question) is vulnerable to having their eBay account taken over (complete with e-mail account and credit card details) and used by a Western Union scammer.
What's a Western Union scammer? Someone who asks to be paid though Western Union (who offer zero buyer protection or tracking of funds) and then simply never ships the item. Western Union seem happy to dish out funds to anyone so the fact that the account is in the wrong name doesn't seem to cause any problems.
eBay should make it so it's impossible to take over an account by changing the password/and/or e-mail address unless you know lots of personal information (D.O.B., mothers maiden name, etc etc).
I'm finding it very difficult to get eBay to reply or for any news agencies to give this any publicity.
Over the weekend I saw about 30 Sony plasma screens advertised (usually "pre-approved bidders only") - almost none of which were legitiate. When you contact the seller - you get a similar message every time - "The item will be shipped from and I would like you to pay though Western Union". They remove them eventually if you complain, but the point is, the fact that more are appearing means that they're still finding it very easy to hijack your account.
Nick...
If we've already decided it's kosher to sell private access to publicly-funded government services, why stop with HOV lanes? There's a lot we could sell to the highest bidder: the right to enroll in a certain school, garbage pickup at the date and time of your choosing, just-around-the-corner police and fire protection, head-of-line privilege at the emergency room, access to your elected representative ...
Oh, wait, we've already implemented that last one.
The reason that the HOV lanes appear not to be working, i.e. traffic is getting worse, is that people are moving further and further out from where they work, and then expecting 'government' to magically come up with money and other resources to provide them with the infrastructure they deserve. Of course some of these people moved out of the city specifically so they would not have to pay for such services. In many places extraordinary amounts of money is being spent providing services for people who think they shouldn't have to pay for them.
In any cases, the main concern should be the present users of the lanes. If the HOV lanes become too crowded, then some drivers may stop using them and we end up with the original pollution and fuel consumption problems.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Because Widening Roads Worsens Traffic Congestion.
Seriously.
Read here and here and here
and see some primary sources here and here and these:
Phil Goodwin, "Empirical Evidence on Induced Traffic," Transportation, Vol. 23, No. 1, Feb. 1996, pp. 35-54. This is in a special issue of the journal Transportation devoted to induced travel. It has several very good articles.
Robert Noland, Relationships Between Highway Capacity and Induced Vehicle Travel, Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting Paper 991069 (www.epa.gov/tp/trb-rn.pdf), January 1999.
Harry Cohen, "Review of Empirical Studies of Induced Traffic," Expanding Metropolitan Highways: Implications for Air Quality and Energy Use, Transportation Research Board, Special Report #345, National Academy Press (Washington DC), 1995, Appendix B, pp. 295-309.
Cairns, Hass-Klau and Goodwin, Traffic Impacts of Highway Capacity Reductions: Assessment of the Evidence, London Transport Planning (London; www.ucl.ac.uk/transport-studies/sc1.htm), 1998.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
It's a lesson in economics, explains Mercer Island's state Rep. Fred Jarrett, No. 2 Republican on the House transportation committee.
Auctioning off a small number of stickers on eBay will tell them nothing about what most people are willing to pay for these kinds of stickers. He can look up in the literature why. Jarrett should have received his economics education in college, not "on the job", playing around with billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Without a plan for new transportation funding, the default is ``apocalypse,'' Jarrett said. ``The system collapses and we have to rebuild it from scratch.''
That's exactly what they should do: housing density in Seattle and surroundings is high enough that it needs a dense system of public transportation. If they want to lead the nation in new ideas, personal rapid transit deployed along existing highways would combine the convenience of the automobile with the speed of unobstructed highways and it would not require any new land.
Building more highways just won't work, and letting people buy preferential access to existing highways does absolutely nothing to improve transportation.
I have a hard time understanding how the Washington Legislature think they can allow single riders when AZ was just threatened by the Feds to have their highway funding pulled for allowing Alternative Fuel vehicles to use their HOV lanes.
The following article was posted in the Arizona Republic back in Jan '03:
Bifuel vehicles seen as illegally hogging HOV lanes in Phoenix.
Source: Arizona Republic [Jan 28, 2003]
As you crawl along at 5 mph in rush-hour traffic, a few drivers zip by in the car-pool lane -
despite having no passengers
You know why: They have the "clean air" license plate, blue with puffy white clouds, identifying vehicles that don't spew out polluting fumes. Under federal law, states may allow alternative-fuel vehicles to use the HOV lane. The idea is that you can cut air pollution, one of the goals of HOV lanes, with clean-running cars, as well as by reducing the number of vehicles on the road. What you don't know is that most of those vehicles shouldn't be there.
Yup.
The state wrongly gives HOV access to cars and trucks that can run on either propane gas or gasoline. (Can we guess which fuel they're really using?) A quick trip to the Federal Highway Administration Web site shows that only vehicles that run exclusively on electricity or natural gas can use the HOV lanes.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
The injury: Arizona shelled out millions of dollars in rebates for buying vehicles equipped or retrofitted to run on natural gas. The deal, which gave buyers as much as 50 percent of the sticker price, including extras, was on the way to bankrupting the state before the plug was pulled.
The insult: Even the most conscientious alt-fuel owners have trouble refilling their natural gas because there's such a tiny network of suppliers.
And thanks to the rebate, people could afford huge trucks and oversized SUVs. So drivers are tooling along in the HOV lane while spewing out even more gunk than the average car. Arizona goofed. To follow federal rules, the state should yank those license plates. To play fair, we should at least require the owners to prove that they're using alternative fuel virtually all the time.
Meanwhile, the feds are denying HOV access to the new breed of hybrid electric cars, like the Prius, that produce so little pollution that they're called "super-ultra low-emissions vehicles." The hybrids don't meet federal requirements because they use electricity only part of the time.
Nine-tenths of a loaf is better than none, especially when fuel access and battery life are discouraging the sales of vehicles that don't run on gasoline.
Federal regulations must be expanded to include the lowest-polluting hybrid vehicles.
It would also make sense to include alt-fuel vehicles - if the owners can prove they're actually using alt fuel.
Otherwise, pull those plates.
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a 3x3" sticker could easily be photocopied even if you DO change the color every month. Try spotting a fake at 70MPH when the fake is almost perfect to begin with.
Even if a sticker was $100/mo (or more), make 8-10 photocopies for your "friends" and it's suddenly only $10/month.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
They can mess around with carpools, whatever... some day people are going to realize that mass transit is really the only viable long-term solution. And I don't mean busses, I mean subways/rail/monorail, something that runs every 10 minutes and doesn't get bogged down in traffic with all the other vehicles.
But people don't realize that until all the companies have left because congestion was too bad, and then there isn't any funding, so... rinse and repeat.
As a resident of the Seattle metro area, I can say that officials around here are notoriously short-sighted, but I think that could also be said of most American government and business -- especially when it comes to our beloved auto-mobiles.
>computing...heheh... meant to say commuting.
:P
You laugh because you accidentally said it... I laugh because I didn't even catch it
One reason Seattle traffic is worse than L.A. is geography. The L.A. Basin has many interconnecting roads and you can make a profession of traffic-listening and choosing the best route.
In Seattle, there's a few routes to a compressed downtown, and being squeezed by hills and water means: if the traffic report says slow, your SOL.
OTOH, that means Seattle is the perfect candidate for mass transit as you have fewer routes to cover.
In fact, you can sell anything on eBay. Really.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I agree here - if they won't abolish HOV lanes they ought to darn well enforce it much better than they do. In LA, the only people who don't get to use the carpool lanes are those who drive alone and who obey the law. Maybe driving alone is a 'bad' thing, but when I see others in the carpool lane who are also alone and willing to take the (very minimal) risk of getting a ticket it ticks me off to no end. Why (for example) can we enforce traffic lights with cameras and not make a better effort to enforce carpool lanes either with manpower or technology? I mean, not only do people abuse them by riding in them when there is only one person in the car, but the designated areas for entering and leaving the lanes are ignored by a lot of these people too.
Why we use taxpayer dollars to build these lanes and then only "allow" certain people to use them is beyond me. If we then sold access to the lanes, I'd say that would amount to a publicly funded toll road, which if not illegal or unconstitutional certainly ought to be. As far as I'm concerned, build the lanes and then let everyone use them. Figure out another way to encourage people to ride together.
I'd also point out that, IMHO, these lanes are unsafe. Usually they are sandwhiched between a concrete barrier on one side and, often, a solid wall of unmoving cars on the other. When the carpool lane is flowing at 50 or 60 mph in such a situation, how does one even have the possibility of swerving safely to avoid an accident?
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
Why don't they just put a frikkin' toll on I-5, I-90, 405, 520. Make it $1.50.
1. I-5's road surface is terrible. Particularly between Tacoma and Seatac. Maybe with that they can afford to maintain the damn road.
2. Pricing it at $1.50 makes it competitive in price with the bus system. Ergo it minimizes the advantage of Single Occupancy vehicles.
3. Might even solve WA State's Budget deficit. Not like anyone here pays state income tax or anything.
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
This has been tried in a number of cities without success. You can move the employment into the suburbs, but then you just wind up with suburb-to-suburb commutes which are even worse than suburb-to-city commutes. Google for "suburb commute" and "suburb-to-suburb commute" for some good articles on the subject.
Consider the simple case of going to work for Bob's Hardware in ThisSuburb. Nice place, great job, I buy a house. But then I get a very nice job offer from Mary's Hardware in ThatSuburb on the other side of TheCity. Do you expect me to sell my house and move to ThatSuburb? Or should I turn down the new job offer? Roll those dice about a million times for everyone in the region and you quickly having everyone commuting all over the place and all your planning is shot.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that almost nothing will fix this problem except for higher population densities. People have to be willing to live very close to each other and not have any land. Then mass transit works pretty well. The American dream is an acre and your own house, so what do you do?
Personally I vote for more money for mass transit every time it comes up on the ballot and I always vote against any road measure that doesn't include more funding for mass transit. But it's just because of a vague feeling that "mass transit is good." I can't myself come up with any way they could possibly deploy it that it would work for me or anyone who lives near me. We're just too spread out on our nice big wooded lots that we love so much. I just would rather throw money away trying to solve the problem than to give up on it. I have this weird fantasy that it bleeds over to a greener attitude from our elected officals, but I'm probably just kidding myself.
They used my tax dollars to build the space shuttle, yet they won't let me take a trip on it.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Rip down that Godawful Alaskan way Viaduct.
Hey, I'd agree to that! I live in the HarborSteps and it would give me a much nicer view >:}
Its a health hazard in the next Major quake.
That it is...
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
The problem is that the roads indeed are a "public good" much like having clean air and water. They are, in economic terms, an "externality" or that which lies outside our capitalistic market economy because it has no pricetag attached to using the resource. Laws of supply and demand do not apply. Price does not rise to demand because it just isnt feasible (in simplified example) to collect $5 from every person who is willing to pay exactly $5 more to have exactly $5-per-person-worth less traffic on the roads. So you can toss those neat theoretical supply/demand graphs right out the window in the case of public goods.
Without a pricetag attached to any "good" people are left to act in their own self interest. Now, dont get me wrong, self interest does not mean self centered. In fact, some people do choose to ride a bike to work just because its better for the environment. But even though most people will agree that public goods are just that, a good thing to have that we should preserve, the fact remains that people need incentives on an individual basis that promote them to act more in accordance with the overall good than they would otherwise. To put it simply, without individual incentives most of us feel like "why should I inconvenience myself if the other 90 thousand people wont?"
I'll argue that carpool lanes are a correct attempt at providing incentives (decreased commute time, decreased costs if you split the cost with your carpool partner, etc) for doing the right thing which is reducing the number of cars on the road, emmissions into the air etc. However, carpool lanes are quite obviously not good enough. Perhaps they work in theory, but not in implementation because they arent enforced well enough, or the fine isnt high enough (or both) to eliminate the incentive to cheat. Carpool lanes also do not encompass the entire spectrum of situations. They do not differentiate between the SUV drivers and the Prius drivers, there are not sufficient carpool lanes to get anyone ALL the way from one place to another, and they dont help the guy who doesnt take the bus because the bus doesnt run where he needs to go, when he needs to go. If you want people to do the right thing with respect to public goods the ONLY way to do it is find a way to attach a pricetag to doing the "bad" thing in direct relation to doing the bad thing and then let people make their own choices based on that incentive.
Seriously, Ebaying a few carpool passes isnt going to have much impact on the lane usage OR the budget. It is a curious study at best, a stab in the dark by clue-free politicians, but nothing drastic enough to get one's panties in a bunch about. I believe the correct answers to the traffic problems in every American city, are to increase the gas taxes til our gas per gallon is as much as Europe or higher, increase parking fees downtown until half of them are empty and the lot owner still makes the same revenue as before, and increase the carpool lane violation fines. Then use those revenues to fund the good things... the mass transit projects, the extra policemen to catch carpool violators, alternative fuel research, tax reduction on purchase of fuel efficient cars etc.
Before anyone gets on the soapbox of "you will hurt the lower income folks that must commute 40 miles one-way to their job," first think of driving a car not as a right, but as an environment-harming convenience. I would also suggest that this not be done overnight, but be a publically announced plan so people have time to adjust. Say, for example raise the gas tax 5 cents per gallon every month over the next 5 years, total raise $3/gallon. People WILL adjust. Some people will move closer to work. Some people will decide its time to trade in that SUV. Some people will keep their SUV but triple their efforts to find carpool partners. Some people will take the bus or perhaps the new light rail more often. Some people will buy a Segway or Prius or Motorcycle... Some people wont adju