Road Pricing: Is It Along America’s Road to the Future?

An Honors Thesis Presented to the Department of City and Regional Planning of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Urban and Regional Studies

My senior undergraduate honors was written during the 2008-2009 academic year at Cornell University about the history of road pricing and its place in the future of American transportation policy under the direction of Professor Ann Forsyth.

In recent years, many cities around the world, including several in the United States, have implemented road pricing schemes as a way to reduce congestion, raise revenue for transportation projects, or a combination of these goals. Road pricing schemes take a variety of forms. The form most commonly found in the United States is
high occupancy toll lanes. The federal government is starting to promote road pricing as sound and reliable transportation policy, but road pricing proposals often elicit the
concern of many stakeholders, and case studies that would allow decision makers to draw upon previous experiences are limited. This paper begins by outlining the history of road pricing, including Columbia University economics professor William Vickrey’s initial proposals on the concept. It then discusses both the arguments in favor of and against road pricing and established best practices with regards to issues such as financing, revenue uses, and equity concerns to provide recommendations on what should be done to further improve road pricing policy and adequately address the concerns that frequently come up when road pricing is proposed. The paper’s ultimate finding is that the established best practices are proving to be sound policy and equity concerns are not as large an issue as many initially fear when a project is proposed. However, additional pilot programs, including a cordon, need to be run before road pricing becomes accepted transportation policy in the United States.

Click here to download the entire thesis (Adobe PDF file, 325 KB) 
Click here to download only the abstract, table of contents, and reference list (Adobe PDF file, 140 KB)