MOVING FORWARD | The argument that value pricing will make our transportation system less fair and accessible has been debunked
V alue pricing, sometimes referred to as congestion pricing, is charging a fee to use a road or parking facility when it is in highest demand to encourage drivers to switch modes of transportation or travel times. A better-managed road means less congestion and fewer emissions, although other benefits, such as reduced asthma rates among children, tend to follow.
If you drive in Portland, you probably run into forms of value pricing every week. Maybe it’s a parking space with a time limit or a light signal on a highway onramp delaying your trip. In those examples, you’re charged time to make up for a shortage, but more cities are looking at charging users fees to better manage roads and improve their transportation networks.
One of the most common criticisms of value pricing is that it is unfair to low-income people who may struggle to pay fees designed to reflect demand. The idea that value pricing will make our transportation system less fair and less accessible for low-income residents; however, has been repeatedly debunked by economic and transportation systems experts. That includes Associate Professor Michael Manville at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, local economist and City Observatory director Joe Cortright and institutions such as the Bipartisan Policy Center, which noted in a 2010 study that there is an “equity paradox” wherein critics who cry “unfair” at value pricing tend to be the same folks who “disproportion-ately benefit from current finance regimes.”
Not only is value pricing a fair way to approach roads, but reducing congestion would benefit the region’s economy by improving network efficiency for delivery vehicles as well as commuters. It would also reduce emissions by shortening travel times and encouraging alternative travel modes, to the benefit of our lungs and future.
With the effects of climate change and social injustice more visible than ever, and with Portland’s road network seeing some of the worst congestion in the country, the question is not whether Portland should have value pricing, but how do we bring it to the Rose City without further marginalizing those who are least able to pay for it?
It is the right time to ask this question. Three regional transportation agencies are in the process of investigating what value pricing could look like here.
The agency most likely to produce a pricing program in the region is the Oregon Department of Transportation, which published a “Portland Metro Area Value Pricing Feasibility Analysis” two years ago. This analysis evaluated five pricing concepts for Interstates 5 and 205, including one that would charge drivers to use all lanes of either highway between the Columbia River and their junction in Tualatin. ODOT submitted its analysis to the Federal Highway Administration, which gave the go-ahead to start the next step in the process.
Metro, which cannot produce its own program, is completing a study that examines four types of pricing systems, including charging fees to enter a part of a city, a pay-per-mile fee, a fee for driving on a specific road, and parking fees. At the same time, the Portland Bureau of Transportation convened a task force exploring how a pricing system would advance the city’s climate and equity objectives. Metro will likely release its study this spring, and PBOT’s task force will release its final report this summer.
Each study rightfully emphasizes racial equity as a key concern, with Metro’s study acknowledging that historically, the region’s transportation policies “did not consider or prioritize the impact on communities of color,” which is an understatement. For Black and brown Portlanders, who are more likely to have lower incomes than their white neighbors, use mass transit and live near major polluters, a more efficient road network could result in better access to job centers through reduced transit times, as well as reduced health risks from breathing polluted air. However critics, such as U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) , have echoed familiar concerns that value pricing would only make transportation less accessible to residents with lower incomes, while Portlanders who can more easily afford to pay reap the benefits of a less congested road network.
This “Lexus Lane” argument overlooks the fact that the most marginalized road users are mass transit riders, not car commuters from neighboring counties with higher median incomes . It also ignores how bus service improvements as a result of reduced congestion could allow some low-income residents who drive to switch to a mode that would save them on average $7,000 a year, if you compare the cost of an annual TriMet pass to AAA’s estimate of what it costs to own a car in 2017.
That being said, the flawed argument does point to the challenge when pitching value pricing as a tool to create a more equitable road network: There may be already marginalized Portlanders who would struggle to pay to use accurately priced roads, and it is possible that many of them would be unable to give up driving on those roads during rush hours.
In Portland, the most obvious factors that would contribute to someone being in this position are geography and lack of alternatives. Unlike other cities and regions that have embraced value pricing, including London and Stockholm, the Portland metro region is less dense and has a far less developed transit network.
To make things worse, gentrification has displaced many low-income Portlanders — particularly communities of color — away from transit corridors like the MAX Yellow Line on North Interstate and into more auto-reliant neighborhoods along Columbia Boulevard and east of 82nd Avenue. These neighborhoods are underserved by transit and, until recently, did not have BIKETOWN stations.
Metro’s 2016 “snapshot” of where jobs are located in the city shows these neighborhoods also lack the job centers that could reduce the need to commute across town to work. While it is difficult to seriously consider some of the complaints of value pricing being unfair for folks commuting from the suburbs or beyond — having to pay a few bucks to use a less-congested highway does not compare to what Portland’s communities of color endured so we could have highways in the first place — it is clear that there are already marginalized Portlanders who could be unfairly stung by pricing fees while having too few alternatives to driving.
This presents the second question: How do we shift the pricing program from being a sudden, if slight, burden to an enormous benefit for those residents, including low-income drivers, as quickly and dramatically as possible?
Fortunately there are several methods to reduce the burden of value pricing on folks who have less ability to pay.
In London, which has charged drivers to enter the city since 2005, certain commuters, including cab drivers, are allowed to enter the city for less than the standard fee. In Portland, our program might withhold fees for low-income residents. Another group that might be exempt are low-income drivers who have a job that requires driving on main arterials several times a day. There is a downside to this setup: Times change, and in London, the decision to exempt cabdrivers became problematic once Lyft and Uber drivers flooded the streets. While it is unlikely that many people would switch careers to avoid paying a small toll twice a day, creating exemptions can result in a less flexible system down the road.
Another option, suggested during a Zoom call by local economic consultant, Cortright, might be a better fit for Portland: Expand Portland’s Golden Transportation Wallet , which provides holders with free transit passes and credits for BIKETOWN and Spin scooter rides, to include credits for using value-priced roads. In this setup, low-income Portlanders living in areas with limited mass transit and job access would be given a certain amount each month to spend on road user fees.
There are two obvious advantages to this option. First, rather than making people exempt forever, a credit system can be adjusted over time with changes in incomes, transit improvements and congestion levels. Second, a credit system still incentivizes low-income drivers to change travel habits where they can. For example, rather than spend credits needed for commuting on a trip to the grocery store, the driver might choose to shop at a different time or pick a local grocery store. A further advantage in the credit system is that it makes shorter commute times more accessible to low-income drivers, and a 2015 study from Harvard University found that commute times are the strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty.
There are other, more familiar, ways to make value pricing easier for those who might struggle to pay. The Singapore Area Licensing Scheme initially exempted carpoolers from paying the fee to enter the central city. Commuters who carpool along the Northeast Portland segment of Interstate 5 already have the option to shorten travel times via the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes, so the privilege would hardly be a new one.
Closer to home, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority is exploring three congestion pricing scenarios that would all offer discounts for drivers with disabilities, a full exemption for the drivers with the lowest incomes, as well as “different discount levels for other low- and moderate-income drivers.” A version of this setup would make sense for ODOT’s pricing proposals for Interstates 5 and 205 as both travel through the region’s largest concentrations of communities of color in Portland’s east side.
However, the end goal of value pricing should be changing traveler behavior to reduce emissions and increase network efficiency, and providing too many exemptions or credits would defeat that purpose. (Imagine how much harder it would be to find parking downtown if a substantial group of people were totally exempt from all parking fees and time limits.) Even the most equitable value pricing system should still press all road users to drive cars less often, as even electric vehicles take a toll on our planet in their production. Value pricing isn’t just about fairer and more efficient roads for those who drive on them now; it’s also about climate justice for young Portlanders and future generations.
This is why a truly equitable value pricing system must be linked to aggressive transit, housing and transportation policies that will reshape the landscape of the region to reduce our dependence on automobiles.
This mission doesn’t need to be as intimidating as it sounds. Cities using value pricing often reinvest the money gained from fees into improving transit. While it’s unclear whether ODOT’s toll revenue could be reinvested directly into transit service, due to a state constitutional restriction, it may be allowed to invest the revenue into adding bus rapid transit lanes to its roadways across the city.
Should the city of Portland eventually value price more of its property (we already value price parking in the central city, but expanding that map along transit corridors is a logical next step), reinvesting in transit will likely be a top priority. In addition to transit, the promise of e-mobility requires the city of Portland to prioritize bike infrastructure improvements, something the city has decades of nationally renowned experience in.
Of course, there are some trips many Portlanders are required to make on a regular basis that are too long or uncomfortable even for e-bike users. The previous century of single-family zoning and massive government subsidies for highway construction and fossil fuels has resulted in a city landscape that pushed essential destinations — from job centers to grocery stores — away from housing and from each other.
Considering how entrenched those planning decisions are across the country, it is borderline miraculous that at the same time the region is considering value pricing, both the city of Portland and the state of Oregon are moving past exclusive zoning through the Residential Infill Project and H.B. 2001. This means that while the city retools our transportation systems, the region is not as locked into the development patterns that made the automobile essential to experience freedom of movement in this country.
Paving the way for more housing near major job centers and transit hubs in the city is a start to reducing the oversize role we are forced to have cars play in our daily lives. As more housing is introduced in walkable neighborhoods and driving for short trips becomes less desirable, the city should incentivize small businesses to refill underused neighborhood commercial lots that were depopulated after the automobile displaced customers to malls and big-box stores.
Congestion pricing systems and studies from other cities demonstrate that Portland and the region have plenty of options to choose from if regional commuters’ inability to pay for roads priced to reflect their demand becomes a serious concern. Fortunately, modern pricing systems can use dynamic pricing to match traffic flow, so the first option to mitigate high prices is to just lower the price of the road user fee. And when the congestion becomes unbearable, raise it.
Unfortunately, too many critics of value pricing do not seem to be motivated by equity concerns so much as fear of a change that would reflect the true costs of America’s automobile culture. In Portland, they seem less interested in the many residents who already can’t afford to drive in the region but are forced to by design, and more interested in how value pricing makes driving a car feel slightly less ideal than it has been made to appear by automakers for a century.
Paying hard currency for something that used to feel free stings, and perhaps many of us would rather stick with the stings we are accustomed to ignoring — costly congestion, higher rates of asthma among children, world-ending emissions that helped set the West Coast on fire last summer — than adapt to a new one. That doesn’t mean that those stings are more fair or sustainable.
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Henry L. Miller has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from Portland State University and a bachelor’s degree in literary studies: journalism from Eugene Lang College. He has worked as a journalist since 2013, covering transportation planning since 2018. He also co-hosted the “Small Town America” podcast and co-wrote a preparedness guidebook for young Portlanders. Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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