Rush-Hour Fees May Be the Key to Smoother Traffic

Think we’ve got it bad with traffic in Orange County? Consider the steps taken to ease gridlock in some foreign countries:

* Automobiles cascading into downtown Singapore during rush hour are required to display a sticker that costs $30 a month, but cars carrying four or more passengers may pass without charge. (And you thought the requirements on our local car-pool lanes were tough!)

* The central business district in Gothenburg, Sweden, has been divided into pie-shaped zones, with cars prohibited from moving directly from one zone to another on local streets. The only access between the various zones is via a peripheral ring road. The whole idea is to increase pedestrian traffic. (This, of course, wouldn’t work here because, as the rock song says, nobody walks in L.A.--or Orange County for that matter.)

* In the Italian cities of Rome and Florence, only buses, delivery trucks and cars belonging to area residents are allowed in town between 7:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. (Sounds like a great excuse for never going into the office.)

* Tokyo residents must show evidence that a permanent parking space has been secured before closing the purchase of a standard-size car. Some residents have gone so far as to construct home garages with special lifts to permit double-deck parking. (I can just see one of those on Lido Island.)

* Hong Kong freeways aren’t so free. Cars have been equipped with electronic sensors that record highway travel and time of day. Motorists are issued a monthly bill, with rush hours the most expensive time to drive. (There goes the VISA bill.)

It all seems sort of far away, doesn’t it? Maybe not. Such tough traffic control measures could be trundling toward a freeway cloverleaf near you.

UC Irvine economist Kenneth A. Small, for instance, has proposed “congestion fees” similar to those imposed on motorists in Hong Kong. The idea, which has also been championed by the Santa Monica-based Reason Foundation, seems the quintessence of capitalism. And what better place to try it out than Orange County, the consumer heartland of America?

Already there are plans for five tollways in Orange County. Three are being planned in South County by a joint consortium of cities and the county. Two more are proposed by Caltrans along the Riverside Freeway and down the Santa Ana River. These would be built by private firms.

There has been some talk about using a pricing scheme so that cars traveling the tollways during hours of peak congestion would have to pay more. The technology already exists to outfit cars with credit card-sized tags containing a microcircuit that can be electronically scanned. A monthly bill is sent out via one’s charge card account.

Charging varied rates on a toll road, of course, is a far cry from turning the existing freeways into fee -ways. It’s unlikely that one will start getting slapped any time soon with a $5 charge for driving 10 miles down the San Diego Freeway at rush hour. Any politician who embraced such a proposal would be greated with a lynch mob’s sympathies.

But that hasn’t kept some advocates from proposing it. In testimony before the California Transportation Commission last September, Reason Foundation President Robert W. Poole Jr. recommended instituting rush-hour fees for use of the freeways “as soon as we possibly can.”

The idea has merit. Consumers using a product--the highway--would be charged according to how much they use it, and pay more during the busiest hours. The concept is hardly unique: Many institutions already dole out their services that way. For example, the telephone company charges its customers for phone calls based on duration and time of day.

But our highways have almost always been an exception. Aside from a few East Coast toll roads and a smattering of pay-to-use bridges, American drivers have been burdened by few restrictions.

Still, one can imagine a future where users will have to pay to travel the freeway. There’s just not enough money to pay for the roads and rail lines we need, let alone maintain the existing network.

Notice that bump, bump, bump as you snake through the potholes marring many of the streets around your house? That’s an example of our crumbling infrastructure. Concrete and asphalt don’t last forever. Most concrete freeways have a life span of 20 years before they have to be repaired. Asphalt typically lasts half as long. As our roads and highways get old and break, the money to fix them often isn’t there. And the pace of that obsolescence is accelerating.

Don’t be fooled by the passage of tax measures such as the recently approved statewide gas tax hike for transportation improvements and Orange County’s own Measure M, which will provide more than $3 billion for various road and rail projects. It just begins to help.

We’ll need even more money in the future for our roads and highways and passenger rail projects. And that’s where the private sector will probably come into play. And the tolls. And the congestion pricing schemes.

Singapore may not seem so far away after all.

Got a road gripe? If you live in the county’s unincorporated territory, you’ve got a new avenue for relief.

The county of Orange has launched a special program to determine which local road improvement projects the public yearns for. During the next month, the county wants to hear suggestions from the area’s residents.

Be it a street strewn with potholes or a troublesome stretch of turn signals, the county wants to know. Viewpoints and ideas for projects on major streets will be analyzed and evaluated for inclusion in the county’s seven-year Capital Improvement Program.

Projects will be selected based on their ability to reduce congestion and improve safety, and their cost effectiveness. The deadline is April 30. Suggestions can be mailed to: Orange County Environmental Management Agency, Attn: Road Programs Engineer, P.O. Box 4048, Santa Ana, Calif. 92702-4048.