Free Republic

In 1907, horse-drawn wagons traveled through Manhattan's streets at an average pace of almost 12 miles an hour. A century later, the average vehicle speed at rush hour has dropped to eight miles an hour. The slowdown may have something to do with the 800,000-fold increase, over the intervening 99 years, in the number of motorized vehicles that head each day into Manhattan's central business district. Like Singapore, Stockholm, and Oslo before it, New York is about to enter a debate over a radical solution to its traffic problem: inner-city tolls designed to discourage vehicles from entering Manhattan between 60th...

In a few places around the world--such as downtown London--drivers pay higher tolls for entering city centers at peak rush hour. The idea of "congestion pricing" is to reduce traffic and pollution by giving drivers an incentive to travel at off-peak times. Now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin has shown how a complex extension of this idea could greatly speed up rush-hour traffic flow throughout an entire network of highways and secondary roads in a U.S. metropolitan region. Using a computer model of driver behavior on the freeway system around the cities of Dallas and Fort...