The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Congestion and Road Pricing 73
without raising the amounts spent by highway users, excess
demand also can be cured by drawing on the general taxpayer
to increase the supply—as some auto manufacturers and the
American Automobile Association will testify. 38
Oft-times, in addition to calling for increased roadway investments,
specific designs are also advocated. Wohl, for example,
favors building roads to bypass Central Business Districts of
large cities since “through traffic as a proportion of downtown
street traffic . . . usually ranges between 30 and 60 percent.” 39 And
Morris, in a thinly disguised call for an increased roadway supply,
favors “using urban freeway design criteria which give preference
to considerations of peak hour capacity rather than offpeak
travel time.” 40
Although widely praised by economists and virtually viewed
as an axiom of business by much of the transportation community,
this solution has not gone uncriticized. One major criticism
is based on the concept of “traffic equilibrium.” According to this
view, all attempts to solve the congestion crisis by increasing the
supply of roads is doomed to failure—for as soon as a new facility
comes on stream, it attracts riders from other roads, from
other modes (such as mass transportation), and from the pool of
motorists who, in the absence of the new road, traveled at less
convenient nonrush hours. And the process will tend to continue
until the congestion levels on the new installation are indistinguishable
from that on all other avenues. It is then that the system
will have arrived at a new traffic equilibrium. In short, “supply
creates its own demand.”
This view was expressed by Dyckman as follows:
38 O.H. Brownlee and Walter W. Heller, “Highway Development and
Financing,” American Economic Review (May 1956): 235.
39Wohl, “Must Something Be Done About Traffic Congestion?,” pp.
407–08.
40Morris, “Freeways and the Urban Traffic Problem,” p. 523.