The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

Via Paul Kedrosky, this is a nice piece on traffic by Jonah Lehrer:

A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called "the commuters paradox". They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that the McMansion in the suburbs, with its extra bedroom and sprawling lawn, will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional forty-five minutes to work. It turns out, however, that traffic is torture, and the big house isn't worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. The reason long commutes make us so unhappy is that the flow of traffic is inherently unpredictable. As a result, we never adapt to the suffering of rush hour. (Ironically, if traffic was always bad, and not just usually bad, it would be easier to deal with.) As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes, "Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day."

Of course in some places, traffic is always bad, which might be easier on a tortured soul but is still really inefficient. Not long ago, Chris Bradford (who, like me, is a supporter of congestion pricing) had a good post on the difficulties of using congestion prices in practice. Getting a system to work involves a constant process of monitoring conditions and updating the variable toll, all in enough time and in such a way that drivers get the information while they still have an opportunity to do something with it. It's tricky stuff. Research like the above makes me wonder if it wouldn't be appropriate to simplify the process with a little overkill. With a little experimentation, planners could find rates for peak and off-peak times that would leave roads uncongested about 95% of the time. That scheme would unquestionably lead to tolls above the "efficient" rate, but it would give drivers an idea what to expect everyday.

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