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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I'm a buyer of the congestion demand pricing. There's a very real cost already involved in traffic. Time lost in the car, quality of life, stress. Anybody who lives in the Bay Area, LA, NY, DC understand that timing your entire life around traffic is the regional pastime. So the argument then has to be an incremental one. If we then layer a more direct money tax of some kind on top of all the crap that already exists then that will be the straw that breaks the camels back and gets enough people off the road. Hmm.

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That's a sunk cost though. When someone gets in their car to drive somewhere, they don't think "this trip is going to cost me $7.50" because they pay for their gas at a different time, they pay for their insurance at a different time, they pay for repairs at a different time, and vehicle depreciation is largely invisible. They don't equate time lost to money lost either.

However, if you have a big visual reminder that the road you're driving on will cost you money as soon as you drive on it, then people will be less likely to either take that route or drive altogether.

I hear you but I'm going to respectfully push back. When you live in a congested area you really do plan much of your professional and personal life around traffic. When to start work. When to leave work. When to schedule a meeting. When and where you'll go this weekend/vacation/kids. So this will make it more painful but it's hard to know how much this will be the final tipping point.

We're about to see a large-scale experiment of demand pricing in a major metropolitan area: Dallas, Texas is implementing this very thing as part of the LBJ Express project.[1] It is scheduled to be fully completed by the end of 2015, but portions of it are already open to traffic, with the demand pricing in place.

It will be interesting to see what happens. For the record, I can see the construction from my office window. I've used the express lanes a couple of times now, and traffic has always been clear on it when I did so. Whether this is due to pricing or simply because it is so new I am not sure. Either way, there was no traffic jams for me (during afternoon rush hour, mind) on the occasions I used them.

[1] http://www.lbjexpress.com/FAQs.asp

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