The Economics of Driving
An unpopular suggestion: driving is too cheap.
If you underprice something relative to its true cost, people will use too much of it. […] It’s not just that we choose to drive a lot. We make residential and other lifestyle decisions based on an artificially low cost of driving. When someone buys a big-ass house 62 miles from work and nowhere near public transit, they just assume that they can commute every day on a free or cheap road at 8:30 a.m. The reality is that for society at large, that 124-mile round trip commute is anything but free or cheap. […]
Is raising the cost of driving popular? Not so much. I’ve been called a communist for suggesting that Americans should have to pay more to get in their cars. This is a curious epithet given that the communists had exactly the opposite problem: They never let the price system work. When prices were not allowed to rise, the result was long queues for items that had been underpriced. Sounds a lot like I-90 going into Chicago on a Tuesday morning, doesn’t it?
(Thanks, Jimcat!)
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