Why congestion pricing for L.A. will fail.
The 2028 L.A. Olympics will be a congestion disaster unless LA votes out its incompetent crime-and-homeless-enabling leaders and votes back in tough smart new ones.
The residents of Los Angeles, California spend around 100 hours a year stuck in traffic, among the highest rates in the world. No surprise that the LA Times just reported on plans to bring congestion pricing to LA’s notoriously clogged freeways. In its most basic form, congestion pricing refers to the use of electronic tolling to charge vehicles for entering high-traffic zones during peak commuting hours with the goal of reducing congestion and increasing revenue for mass transit.
It’s a heroic idea, though congestion pricing has not empirically achieved much in other major cities, except to anger low-income locals who depend on freeways to get to work, visit an aging parent, or connect with a loved one. Such pricing schemes reduced congestion by at most 10% in London, proving so far that it’s just another big government sop that punishes working persons and yields little public benefit.
What will ultimately solve LA congestion are smart, 360-degree aware self-driving cars, trucks, and busses that don’t make the boneheaded, inefficient driving decisions of your average pot-infused, spaced-out Angeleno. What won’t solve LA congestion are giant congestion pricing boondoggles to finance laughably slow and irregular mass transit that a decreasing number of Angelenos use, and won’t use until crime in the city is brought fully under control, crazy defecating homeless riders are put away, and mass transit penetration reaches Manhattan levels of density. Then and only then will the cost-benefit analysis favor not driving in LA. I suspect that moment will arrive around the time that the futuristic projections in the movie Her, including bullet trains to a snow-covered Mount Pinos, reach fruition––around 2150.
As anyone who has lived in LA knows––I co-wrote a guidebook mostly about the place––residents carefully plan around the traffic or sequester in a single area, from where one eats, sleeps, recreates, walks, and works. For example, I lived and worked for years near L.A.’s lovely Larchmont Boulevard. I had everything I needed within a short 1-2 mile travel radius.
Driving L.A.'s notorious congestion is mostly one-person commuters heading to west-side or downtown jobs from the far corners of the vast smoggy metropolis. They do so, in part, because they have been priced out of LA core real estate. That dynamic changes when the LA real estate market is allowed to correct. That correction happens when federal government spending is brought to heel.
Our current President’s outrageous levels of unnecessary spending have jacked up inflation, causing the Federal Reserve to engage in draconian interest rate hikes, sending mortgage rates to ridiculously high levels, and feeding a dysfunctional dynamic: owners not selling their homes because of the sky-high mortgage rates they’d have to pay on a new home and most prospective buyers not buying the overpriced and limited remaining inventory. Only the extremely rich can now afford real estate in LA’s central core––the 405 to the 5, the 10 to the 101/134––keeping the city’s mostly mediocre housing stock at elevated levels, far beyond the reach of most commuters.
There are many proven solutions to traffic congestion that should first be fully implemented before congestion pricing, including synchronized traffic light management, strong financial incentives to carpool, roundabouts, and smart double-decker freeways. But, ultimately, culture drives success or failure in large cities. And the consistently proven solution to traffic woes––safe, effective, and omnipresent mass transit––will only become popular once the criminal dysfunction in the city that sends commuters to the safe cocoons of their vehicles is brought to heel. Congestion pricing will not force these commuters into a safe, disordered, and unreliable mass transit system no matter what the cost. Only broken windows policing will.
As it stands now, the 2028 L.A. Olympics are going to be a congestion nightmare unless LA votes out its incompetent crime-and-homeless-enabling political leadership and votes back in business-friendly tough-on-crime leaders like the late Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Bill Bratton. Until then, expect the worst, LA. After all, it’s what you’ve done for the last twenty years of Democratic mismanagement.