Thanks Tol,
Personally, I’d rather build the lane capacity and let people drive when they want, rather than having the state strongly ‘encourage’ people as to when they SHOULD be driving.
But maybe that’s because I won’t be on the receiving end of the HUGE amount of revenue schemes like this can generate for our government masters.
Do you have any idea what it would cost to build "lane capacity" to meet an unconstrained demand? They actually tried that in Los Angeles. See what that place looks like now.
There are very, very few areas of life where it makes any sense to design something for a peak operating condition that occurs relatively infrequently. A typical city will have peak rush-hour traffic for maybe 4-6 hours in a day. Why would you ever design it for a condition that occurs maybe 16% to 25% of the time, especially considering the enormous cost of adding that one additional lane every time you think you need it?
This isn't unique to transportation infrastructure, either. It's the same rationale that is used in sports. The Yankees could probably sell 200,000 tickets for any game they play against the Red Sox, but it makes no sense for them to build a 200,000-seat stadium when they would draw an average of maybe 40,000-45,000 fans for almost any other game.