Study: Highway tolls reduce use of cars

SEATTLE – Drivers who paid fake tolls in a government-sponsored study used their cars less and took different routes, researchers said, suggesting that widespread toll roads could cut traffic congestion.

Some policymakers are intrigued by the study’s preliminary results, but others aren’t sure the Puget Sound region is ready for a toll-road system.

“One of the things we have to understand is whether the culture for this exists here,” said state Rep. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, a top lawmaker on transportation issues. “It doesn’t now. I don’t think that’s going to be easy to overcome.”

The study, which lasted about eight months and ended in February, involved people from 275 Seattle-area households. Drivers’ dashboards were fitted with electronic devices that tracked their travel, and they were charged virtual tolls ranging from a nickel to 50 cents a mile, the Seattle Times reported Friday.

Charges were deducted from accounts of between $600 and $3,000 set up for each driver by the study’s researchers. Participants could keep whatever money remained in the account at the end of the experiment.

About 80 percent of participants cut back their driving or changed routes and travel times to avoid the highest tolls, study director Matthew Kitchen said. Participants took 5 percent fewer auto trips and drove 2.5 percent fewer miles each weekday, with more dramatic drops during peak traffic periods, Kitchen said.

The average payout after finishing the study was nearly $700.

Study participant Kathi Hardwick told the Times she started riding the bus to work from her home in Bothell to save money on the virtual tolls.

Hardwick, an executive assistant at a Bellevue bank, said she also began combining errands and driving less on weekends. The changes stuck, even after the experiment ended.

“If I had not participated in this test, I would not have done as much,” she said. “When you see what it costs when you get on the freeway, it really has an impact.”

Kitchen thinks an entire system of actual road tolls could have a larger effect on car traffic, because drivers would be using their own money.

He expects to produce a preliminary report by January for the Federal Highway Administration, which is paying most of the study’s $3.1 million cost. Kitchen and other researchers then plan to spend another year analyzing the study’s results.

State leaders have begun looking to tolls as a potential source of money for maintenance and construction of highways and bridges.

A separate study released to the state Transportation Commission this spring showed grudging public support for tolls to help finance large projects such as replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Lake Washington floating bridge in Seattle.

King County Councilwoman Julia Patterson, a Democrat, told the Times that tolls could also help balance the supply of roads and demand for them.

“There aren’t very many other commodities that are free that we can use whenever we want,” she said.

But Richard Ford, chairman of the state Transportation Commission, said the public doesn’t seem ready for widespread toll roads: “The politics of that is just too tough.”