Ideally, in order to give people another option besides carpooling and transit, you should institute charges that vary with the time of day. This would allow people to save money by shifting their trips to off-peak times, thereby making even better use of limited road space. In fact, the congestion charge should drop to zero at times of day where there is no congestion.

With bridge tolls at their current level, they function more as a tax than a congestion charge, because they are not high enough to ensure a congestion-free commute. As it stands, the tolls cover bridge maintenance and fund transit alternatives. If true congestion charging were instituted, drivers would gain a real time benefit in exchange for their money, and bus riders would also enjoy a speedier commute thanks to reduced congestion.

If the idea of letting the market determine the value of scarce road space is not palatable to people, then do nothing and let the congestion stand as it is. That way people will pay indirectly with their time spent sitting in traffic instead of directly at the (possibly virtual) toll booth.

The biggest waste of all would be to continue spending taxpayer dollars to widen the roads, because this would simply allow growth to push further north until the widened roads clog up again.

The beauty of the congestion charge is that additional growth will never clog the roads; if that starts to happen, the price is simply raised until everything balances out. People will then be forced to weigh the cost of a congestion-free drive-alone commute against the lure of cheap housing in the hinterlands. They can still have those big houses in middle of nowhere, as long as they’re willing to pay. If they choose houses near established bus lines or ferry terminals instead, it will save them money and keep their cars off the roads.

First of all, you need to address the economic fairness argument by allocating the congestion charge money for increased public transit serving the same area, as is being done in London. This guarantees travel options for those unable or unwilling to pay the charge. Once that is in place, you simply keep raising the charge until you eliminate enough congestion to achieve maximum traffic flow. If the roads ever become underutilized, you just lower the charge until the flow is maximized again.

As for the argument about BART, the need for a separate right of way is greatly diminished if the congestion is being managed properly. In that case, the buses will be running in freely flowing traffic, offering commuters a way to avoid the congestion charge without paying a time penalty. This principle has allowed London to relieve overcrowding in its underground rail transit system by shifting some commuters onto buses, which are now able to travel faster despite the fact that they share the streets with cars.

Now that we have the technology to collect congestion charges, the TECHNICAL side of the urban congestion problem is relatively easy to solve. However, the POLITICAL side of the problem is incredibly difficult to solve, because many people seem to believe that their right to drive and park for free is written into the Constitution.

One solution is another problem. It’s exactly the same as fixing “choke points” on highways. You fix one and merely move the “choke point” to a further direction.

Just the same, we may move commuters to transit and their space is taken up by others who don’t care. If it were an easy problem to solve, we would have been there.

Good policy for San Francisco should seek to do some of both. Some revenue should be raised to maintain the pricing system and raise necessary revenue for retrofits, while some people should move to transit as a result of incentives.

It seems to me that this sort of thinking would suggest not only a toll on Doyle Drive, but also on the Downtown exits I-80 in the city and maybe a downtown zone like the London Congestion Charge.

“Still, ordinary logic would seem to dictate that if you want to levy a congestion charge, it ought to be done first on the people who are most likely to avoid the congestion.”

Excuse me. Let’s tax the folks most likely to go away, when we should be taxing the folks most likely to pay or perhaps re-think their commute experience. The ones who go away (either because they can’t afford their job in city or because you have made transit cheap enough to use) are on the edge.

Sorry. This is nonsensical and doesn’t appear to help.

Doubtless there would be more congestion, although since only about 10,000 people use it on a typical day, it might not be that much. The question is how many people be willing to pay enough to get around it to make GGT self-supporting?