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Effective Approaches for Advancing Congestion Pricing in a Metropolitan Region

5. Getting Started

Developing comprehensive regional congestion pricing plans cannot happen overnight and requires considerable effort to gain public and decisionmaker acceptance, develop interagency partnerships, and address other challenges. Fortunately, there are many smaller steps that planners, policymakers, and others can take to start this process.

  • Understand where and what types of congestion pricing strategies make sense. First and foremost, it is important to understand what kinds of congestion pricing strategies will be effective in addressing regional needs and how these strategies can support regional goals. While tolling is often used as a revenue-generating mechanism, congestion pricing works best on corridors, bridges, tunnels, and networks that are severely congested and where a pricing signal can help to shift traffic to alternative modes, times of day, or facilities, or where the public desires a faster travel option. Pricing strategies should be explored with these effects in mind. Congestion pricing could be applied as one component of a broader regional pricing strategy to support investment needs. As a first step, planners can identify what characteristics make congestion pricing feasible in a particular corridor.
  • Begin to educate and inform the public and stakeholders about congestion pricing. Before rolling out alternative strategy proposals, it is important to inform the public about the potential for pricing. This may be a process that involves many steps over time, including meeting forums with key decisionmakers, the business community, and other stakeholders. For instance, in 2003, in the Washington, DC metro area, the MWCOG held its first congestion pricing forum and created a Value Pricing Task Force. Over time, as the region and elected officials have become more comfortable with pricing, project implementation and broader consideration at a regional level are moving forward. For the public, it is important to communicate that the real value of the gas tax has been falling, since it is not indexed to inflation. For elected officials, it can be very beneficial to speak to elected officials in other regions that have implemented congestion pricing and to learn about projects and plans that have been implemented there.
  • Take small steps. Look for ways to take incremental steps and to leverage congestion pricing as a "win-win" solution. An underutilized HOV lane, for instance, could be a good option to consider for conversion to a HOT lane. Support for projects established in this incremental way can lead to broader acceptance of congestion pricing on the roadway network. For instance, the Minneapolis/St. Paul region has accomplished their managed lanes projects through incremental steps: the legislature allowed the MPO to operate bus-only shoulders in collaboration with transit agencies, the DOT, and FTA until initial safety concerns were demonstrated not to be an issue in practice, which opened the door to congestion pricing in the form of priced dynamic shoulder lanes.
  • Explore scenarios. An initial way to start a regional conversation may be by looking at congestion pricing as one scenario within a scenario planning process. By exploring the potential benefits of congestion pricing, decisionmakers can understand the potential impacts on revenues, system performance, and the environment within a neutral context. The congestion pricing scenario may not be selected, but it can help to further a regional conversation about how to move toward congestion pricing on a regional scale. As part of the federally required Congestion Management Process (CMP) in metropolitan areas with populations greater than 200,000, congestion pricing may be considered one part of a toolbox of strategies to manage congestion. In that context, congestion pricing can be explored in combination with a range of strategies on a corridor and regional basis.

Overall, it is important to recognize that congestion pricing is a change in paradigm for many, and that an incremental approach will likely be needed. Planners and their stakeholders should be prepared to learn over time, gain additional data and information, and plan for change as they go through planning update cycles.