If you haven’t had the chance to read Freakonomics
, I’d suggest that you add it to your shortlist of ready reading material (there is even a matching blog). What the author does is tie seemingly unrelated events to their effects (exposing hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior). There are lots of examples out there, just waiting to be revealed, and I have a bunch of my own that I’ve noticed over the years. Since people have been picking up on my rant against EZPass (Evils of EZPass and an Alternate Solution), I thought I’d throw another toll road related blog entry out there.
In NJ over the last couple years, there have been a noticeable increase in truck related fatalities on a stretch of road which was once a road seldom used by trucker, Route 31 (which is a north-south highway up the western side of NJ). It was so noticeable that the local towns complain to the state that something had to be done, and they quickly passed thru legislation to expand this former 2 lane rural highway into something that could handle all this truck traffic. The weird thing is that they couldn’t figure out why, seemingly overnight, all this truck traffic showed up using this road.
Well, there were 2 events that caused this. First, Route I-287 was finally completed thru NJ. This road had been around for a long time, but a chunk thru Morris and Passaic Counties was left unfinished for decades. Route I-287 is basically a circle highway around New York City (except that it isn’t a complete circle, since the Atlantic Ocean sort of gets in the way). I-287 and NJ State Highway 31 do not intersect, so most people familiar with one, are not users of the other (plus the western side of NJ is a lot less developed than the area along I-287).
The second event was the dramatic increase in toll rates for truckers on the NJ Turnpike. The increase was so much that the NJ Turnpike, which was designed for trucks, became a road less traveled by trucks. The NJ Turnpike is the road that most people use when traveling between the cities of the southeastern US, and the northeastern cities of New York and Boston. The problem truckers always had with using the NJ Turnpike was that it forced them to travel through the northern part of New York City, which cause significant delays if there final destination was something other then New York City or Long Island. But the alternative of going all the way around NJ via Pennsylvania and upstate New York took more time and cost more in fuel. So most of the truckers decided to use the NJ Turnpike.
Once the new tolls on the NJ Turnpike kicked in, truckers now had an incentive to search out an alternate route, and thanks to the recently finished I-287 they now had one. The problem was that the circle road around Philly (I-295) does not intersect I-287, but the little used NJ Rt. 31 happens to connect I-295 to another Interstate, I-80, which does intersect I-287. This route had a number of benefits, no tolls roads, it could be used to avoid NYC, and actually was faster (in time). Except for the fact that Rt. 31 wasn’t built for heavy truck traffic, this a perfect solution to the truckers’ problem.
So, by making it not cost efficient for truckers to use a highway designed for them, the state government had to spend money on upgrading a road so they could circumvent the toll increase that the state invoked. Now the state loses money in 2 separate cases, one all the expenditures to upgrade and maintain a new truck route, plus a decrease in revenue on the NJ Turnpike. Not to mention all the lives lost on Rt. 31 while the government was trying to figure out how to fix the problem. They could have just rolled back the toll increases, and save lives and money.
Side note: One of my coworkers lost his daughter to a big rig accident on Rt. 31, during this time period. The accident happened in the middle of the night with little non-truck traffic on the road. Which is one of the reasons why I actually became aware of this problem.
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