Putting a Price on Mobility: Cars and Contradictions in Planning

Private vehicle travel has conferred enormous benefits on many millions of drivers and their passengers, but its rise to dominance has also imposed significant social and environmental costs on society. This has caused a profound ambivalence among many planners over the proper role for automobiles in society, particularly in cities. The results are plans and policies that aim both to facilitate automobile use and to encourage travel by other means, in all cases shielding travelers from paying, or even perceiving, the true cost of their travel. But off-the-shelf technologies now make it easy to price many transportation modes at close to marginal social cost, a change that would improve traffic flow, reduce emissions, and increase walking, biking, carpooling, and transit use in cities. While the political obstacles to better transportation pricing remain daunting, planners today have real opportunities to begin weaving transportation pricing into planning practice.